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,
How do I instill strong management skills in my next-level management team?
I have grown my RIA to close to $6 billion, and we have 67 team members. While I am a visionary and a good leader, I lack management skills. I worked with a consultant and created a next layer including a CFO, a COO, a CCO, and a CAO. I hired excellent technicians, but I am now seeing they are not great managers. All have several people reporting directly to them and more underneath them. The next layer is already coming to me to make decisions, to overrule decisions that have been made and to generally coach this relatively new team (I put them all in place starting in June of 2022 and finished by March of this year).
I hired these people because I don’t believe I am an excellent manager. How do I coach them to become managers and take leadership roles? I am not someone with a huge ego, and I don’t pretend to know all the answers. Right now, I have none of the answers.
Anonymous
Dear A,
It’s possible you are asking the wrong question. You start by asking how to instill management skills in your C-level management team. But you end by saying you don’t believe you possess the skills to coach them effectively in this area. I’m wondering if there aren’t a few other areas to examine before assuming they need hands-on management coaching:
- You have a team of close to 70 and over a period of 10 months you instituted four new senior roles. I don’t know who all the 70 were reporting to before, or how you were managing the company, but four new people in significant leadership positions in less than one year is a tremendous amount of change. Have you been clear about each of the roles – what their responsibilities are, how they interact with one another, what boundaries they have in terms of decision-making and who exactly reports to them on the org chart? Being clear who is doing what, with whom, and how is critical when you create new roles, hire new people and change the way a company is managed and run.
- Some subset (or all) of the existing 67 people are comfortable coming to you when they don’t agree with a decision, or want you to “overrule” these C-level team members and expect you to intervene. This sends a message saying you aren’t supporting your C-level management team if you are listening to these original team members and overruling or disagreeing with what they have decided and implemented. If there is a breakdown, bring the four in immediately and find out where it is happening. You can’t appear, to the level underneath them, to not be fully supporting them in their roles.
- You are doubting the capabilities of the people you have hired into these roles. To ask how to improve their management skills when you, admittedly, don’t possess great ones yourself (this is not a criticism; it actually takes tremendous emotional intelligence to admit where we are lacking as seasoned professionals could indicate you don’t trust in their abilities. If you don’t trust them, go back to my second observation; you may be either subtly or not-so-subtly communicating this to the rest of your firm.
Take stock and make sure you believe these are the right people, you have been crystal clear what is expected of them and where they fit in the organization, and you are fully supportive of their endeavors until one of them lets you down and you need to address this.
Dear Bev,
I think I have made a serious error in taking one of my best operations team members and making her director of operations. We lost our previous director, who had been with us 19 years, last month. I wanted to hire someone from the outside to bring fresh ideas. But another person, call her “Jane,” was working under the director and put her hand up and said she’d like to be considered. Jane has been with us for nine years and we didn’t want to lose her. We gave her the position.
We have eight people in our ops group, and it has been a fiasco. Jane does not interact with anyone. She shuts her door now that she has an office. She won’t answer questions or provide direction and the team is unraveling. I suspect she is uncomfortable directing people who were her peers prior to this. But I need her to manage.
Did I make a mistake, and should I cut my losses? Is this normal for a new manager? Does she just need time to settle in?
U.A.
Dear U.A.,
I have been asked several questions this week on how to develop managers. I put two of them into this column because they illustrate how different the scenarios can be even though we bucket it all into “management development.” In this case, I believe Jane most likely needs a coach, and the reasons are as follows:
- It is very difficult for someone to go from peer to manager. It is especially hard when a long-time former boss has recently left. Jane might be flailing trying to figure out how to manage and give feedback to people who up until a month ago were her peers and likely friends. You need to give her the guidance to sit down with each of the team individually and have a conversation about how she wants to be in this role, her expectations for her behavior and the behavior of the individual she is speaking with in that meeting and how she wants to communicate most effectively with them.
- Jane might behaviorally be a very low-influence, low-interactivity person who needs her personal time and space to get her own work done. She might not know or understand how this is impacting the team. Rather than shutting her door to close them out, she might need to close herself in to finish what she needs to do. Bring the outside view to her attention. Help her see how this behavior could be interpreted. See if you can work with her to have periods throughout the day where she interacts with the team and is “seen” amongst the group.
- Jane has never managed before. She is probably technically very competent and could be a great team player. But moving into management requires a different skill set than getting the job done daily. Mangers give people support and direction, implement processes, hold people accountable to those processes, keep track of where people are doing well and where they need to improve and make sure the work gets done. You will likely need to give Jane some guidance on how to do these things. People think you “just manage,” but management requires skills just like any other job.
You could do these things yourself. But I started out by saying you might want to get her a coach because it does take time, commitment and focus to support someone in this manner.
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. The firm has won the Wealthbriefing WealthTech award for Best Training Solution for 2022 and 2023. Beverly is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. She 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. 
