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,
The leader of our firm is not a nice person. He is successful, charming with clients, an excellent investment professional and has hired good team members. But in every meeting, he finds something harsh to say to one or more of us. He will call us out on something – often in front of clients. He thinks everyone else is his problem, the typical “If only they would….” person.
I have a reasonable relationship with him and have tried to broach his behavior on a couple of occasions, mostly trying to show him that he isn’t going to inspire and motivate team members by berating them. He gets offended and tells me I am making things up or seeing things that aren’t there.
Our turnover in the last five years is abysmal – we have lost over half of our staff. Only the senior advisors stay, because they have some ownership in the firm and they shut their doors and ignore him. I’ve stayed the longest, so I end up training new people and then watch them walk out in less than a year.
I am starting to think I’m the crazy one for staying. I get paid well for the area where our firm is located, and I have four young children. A lot of flexibility is important to me. While my boss is harsh, he is a family-oriented person and does support the need to focus on family. It’s just such a negative environment and there is also the business reality that I feel like I am swimming upstream all the time. Bring someone in, train them, encourage them, partner with them, and then watch them leave.
If my boss can’t hear me, and I can’t replace what’s needed with staff, what do I do to change this situation?
D.T.
Dear D.T.,
The hardest thing is to help someone else look objectively at themselves if they aren’t able to see the behavior on their own. And when someone is highly successful and making lots of money and in charge, helping them see negative ripples from their behavior can be next to impossible. If your boss isn’t feeling any pain, like you are, what is the incentive to change behavior? This is the reality of how things work. If I don’t see it, and it doesn’t impact me, and it isn’t painful to me, why in the world would I step out of my current comfort zone and rock my boat?! Please keep this in mind as you decide what you want to do next with your boss.
All of this said, you are certainly experiencing pain from his actions. You have a choice to make, and I can’t tell you which one is the better one because I don’t know this man and so can’t assume how he will respond. Here are your options:
1. Let him know you are getting to the end of your rope losing good team members, training new ones only to see them walk out the door, and you aren’t sure how much longer you can stay and do this. This approach can be risky, because if he is a person who perceives you as “threatening” him or bluffing, he may only get mad at you and not be willing to take any steps at all. If you decide to pursue this option, you have to be ready to leave. You need to have your resume in order and be looking at job opportunities and potentially networking with people The good news is that the hunt for good talent is very competitive and finding – plus keeping – good people is proving challenging for many firms. Again, I cannot recommend this option in full faith and confidence because it all depends on the audience and how the delivery goes and is received.
2. Compile some statistics on what has been happening in the firm. Show how many people have been hired, how long it takes to train them, what the turnover has been and add up the cost of interviews, onboarding, training and then losing them shortly thereafter. If you can show a financial picture and help him see that culture and treatment of employees might be an underlying factor, he might understand the cost of the issue. I’m assuming from your note you do not have an HR person or department, so this approach can sometimes turn a leader’s head in the right direction to see numbers in black and white and the impact to the bottom line.
3. Actively start looking for another role. I’ve been doing this work a long, long time and in many cases the person with flaws doesn’t see a need to change their behavior and it will continue as is. It sounds like you are at a place where you do fine with your boss and you’ve learned to deal with his style, but it is impacting your ability to do a good job and to enjoy your job. Whenever you get to a place like this in a career journey, sometimes it is time to move on to the next opportunity. Again, I hesitate because I don’t know your financial or career situation, but if it is a feasible option, you might want to consider this.
Dear Bev,
Why do you often recommend understanding your boss and “managing up”? Isn’t it the job of the leader to manage well and understand who we are? I get frustrated reading your responses sometimes because I believe you put the responsibility on the employee and not on the boss. They make a lot more money than we do and have a lot more experience in most cases. Why don’t you force someone who is in charge to take responsibility and make the job easier for the employee?
I find it irritating to think I should manage my boss, or that my team members are responsible for our boss’ failings.
K.L.
Dear K.L.,
I hear your frustration and I certainly own responsibility when I am always telling an employee or lower-level person they need to do a better job of managing up. I don’t believe that to be true, but clearly I have communicated something to have you hear this.
I work with a lot of leaders and very senior executives and in many, many cases they are open to feedback, want to learn how to be better leaders. They take input and guidance very well. It’s only in the cases where someone is frustrated by their leader (such as the reader in this column above) where I might recommend a person takes some steps to see if they can get through to their boss. There is also the reality that if you have a boss who isn’t open-minded and doesn’t have a high Emotional intelligence (EQ) and believes they are doing everything right, it can be an exercise in futility to try and show them the error of their ways. In these cases, you are better off trying to understand your boss and work with his/her/their style. I have found throughout my own career, there is some satisfaction to trying to learn more about the boss and the communication style they prefer and to deliver ideas in a way that fits their style, instead of forcing them to understand and accommodate my style. Learning how to navigate and work with anyone is a great skill to develop and many bosses provide a great learning experience for this!
That said, a good leader is always looking for ways to understand their team members and improve their approach in messaging to their team and willing to find ways to accommodate different styles. I have loads of clients who do exactly this and are open to ideas and ways to develop their leadership skills. It is also much of what I teach in my graduate classes on managerial skills and leading teams. Everyone in a firm has the responsibility to understand their own style, learn about others and modify to be most effective wherever possible.
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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