Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
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Dear Bev,
Our team is doing a Zoom-based offsite when we return to the office after January 1. We have done this every year, in person, in November. But people didn’t want to be on screen to do this along with all of the demands of clients.
As we plan for this I want to make sure we have a clear agenda and a set of talking points. I read your column and have a good structure to use. But I need more in terms of practical ideas. What things should we be considering? What is enough without being too little or too much? How do I make sure everyone is engaged and involved?
We have a great team of 27 people and we have stayed well-engaged throughout these virtual times. Organizing this meeting well will set the tone for our new year together. Thank you for any ideas.
J.K.
Dear J.K.,
I’m always pleased to hear of advisory teams taking a formalized approach to planning, whether to end the year and review what’s happening, start the year and plan for what’s next, or simply check-in throughout the year to see how things are going and what might need to be shifted. And your concerns about making it high-impact are warranted. There is nothing worse than gathering people together and having an ineffective discussion or worse, no follow-up or next steps come out of it.
A few ideas to ensure you have a strong, productive meeting:
- Solicit input from team members on the agenda. You don’t want to wind up with a laundry list of unorganized things to discuss. Ask two important questions (and this was part of the SHIFT® article I wrote): What will success look like to you personally in 2021 and to the firm, and what are the three biggest obstacles you expect to encounter? Then have someone organize these responses. Look for themes or where people have strong differences of opinion. The themes give you a basis for an agenda if people are in alignment, or if there is dissension in ideas, you can start an agenda with why the opinions are so different. People think there are dozens of things to talk about, and therefore many agendas wind up looking like a grocery list instead of being organized. In fact, there are often just a handful of underlying objectives and obstacles. Organizing these helps to create focus.
- Assign areas of input for each person. Or, with 27 people, better yet, put them in teams of three to gather information and insight. Once you have your topic areas, have three people research background such as what’s happening in the industry and what other advisory firms are doing. Have a team or two brainstorm together on ideas and bring suggestions or alternatives to consider. If you know your goals, have another team solidify language around them and how and when they will be measured. If you have each team member within a smaller pod (no more than three people or it is easy for someone to sit back and let others do the work) then it is hard for them to disengage. They have a part to play and their contribution will make it more likely they will listen to others to ensure what they have done is in context with the rest of the group.
- Assign a note taker who is responsible at points throughout the meeting for relaying back what has been discussed and either agreed to or left as an open item. You can insert time checks for this, or simply do it after each section of conversation. This will ensure everyone hears the same things about what’s happening real-time and what’s next so that by the time you get to the end of the meeting, there are no surprises. With 27 people, it will be difficult to keep track of the significant portions of the dialogue and not capture everything that is being said. Be sure to elect the right person to do this, or even consider having a couple of people work together on this.
- When you agree on next steps and begin to close the meeting, assign people to responsibilities and timelines but, very importantly, get clarity across the team on what the expected deliverable is. For example, if a team is responsible to, “find a better way to onboard clients by May 31,” what does this mean? Are they to scope out an onboarding chart with steps? Are they there to identify new technology to make onboarding easier? Are they planning to have anything piloted for testing? Push yourselves to establish specifics and don’t leave anything open-ended so that expectations are not met.
- Lastly, make this fun. When offsites are done in person, assuming the group gets along well as it sounds like yours does, part of the enjoyment is the camaraderie of being together. You didn’t mention how long you were planning to do this. I recommend keeping people online for no more than two to three hours with breaks, but insert some fun things into your agenda. Have people share the best holiday or birthday gift they ever received and why. Or, have them talk about the worst gift they got and what they did with it. Ask people to share their best stress reliever idea during COVID times, or their best health/wellness idea. These are just ideas. You can come up with something that is germane to your group and how they interact together. Whatever it is, just break up the seriousness of planning with a bit of fun.
Best of luck to you for the meeting, and as you enter 2021. It’s sure to be an interesting year in the financial advisory business!
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry in 1995. The firm also founded and manages the Advisors Sales Academy. She is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. Beverly is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).
She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.
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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here. 