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,
We are doing performance reviews over the next two weeks for our team. We’ve got eight people in total and my partner and I do these together. Over the last year plus, our team has gone through significant changes – we lost a long-time person to early retirement due to illness, we brought on extremely complex clients that require a different level of service and my partner and I are partnering together in new ways (better ones, in my opinion).
We want to keep our team motivated and engaged, but we recognize these changes have been hard. What is the best way to go into these discussions so team members share their experiences and are not worried about their futures? From a revenue perspective, we are doing better than ever and everyone on the team is being well compensated as a result.
S.H.
Dear S.H.,
As you enter these conversations, there are a few best practices I’ll suggest and something you can incorporate:
- It sounds as if you have gone through a few different transitions. While change can be good – and often is – it is also fear-inducing for people. The unknown is not safe for many people; the “known” is preferable. This doesn’t mean you don’t make changes – life is a series of changes – it just means you want to understand it disrupts people and can make them feel vulnerable. Because of this, it will be important in each conversation to reinforce where the team is going, what these changes mean for your longer-term goals and, especially, how they fit into the team picture. If you haven’t shared the goals and vision, do this with the whole team before the 1:1 conversations. Even if you have to do it over Zoom, take the time to outline what success will look like over the next five years so they are part of the process.
- Ask each person open-ended questions before you jump into the actual review process. If things have changed, roles and responsibilities have likely changed and you want to find out how each person is feeling and what they are thinking about their situation. Ask them questions such as: What has been the most positive experience for you? What would you change right now if you could? What questions do you have about your role and area of focus? What should we know about how things are working in the team now that (person’s name) has retired and we are bringing on more complex clients? You have to be ready to get answers that might be unsettling to you when you do this. But you will learn what each person is experiencing, and this can help to manage them more effectively.
- Talk about the new dynamic between your partner and you and how you are working together in new ways. You don’t say if you are doing these meetings together with your partner (I strongly recommend you do, given the changes you are implementing), but you can share your experiences with change and how it has impacted you. You never want to get too personal or share something that your team doesn’t need to know (i.e. how compensation works between you and your partner or your personal feelings about your partner). But do talk about impact and that you are also having to navigate in new ways.
- Be extremely clear with each team member about where they fit now and as the team grows and changes. People are often most concerned about “what will be the impact on me?” Jobs and careers mean everything from how someone will take care of their family, to their identity to their personal growth. I find leaders underestimate the emotional connection people have to their jobs. Give your team members the gift of understanding how important they are but specifically what will be required of them and how they will be measured as the team changes and evolves.
Dear Bev,
We are about to have our annual holiday dinner. Our team is tight, and we enjoy and like each other very much. These dinners are always meant to celebrate another year in the books and look forward to the next year. No pressures and no requirements. Is there anything I should do to make this more of a “look forward” experience for the team?
D.V.
Dear D.V.,
Without knowing much about how you communicate generally with your team, I’ll make a simple suggestion that it could be nice to kick off the evening by sharing some of the successes from the past year. Recognize one thing each person on the team did to contribute to bringing in a new client, serving an existing client well or working in collaboration with other team members. Often leaders just say an overall “thank you,” but people need to be recognized personally and by name with specifics about what they’ve done.
Talk about what you are seeing for the future. Where the team is headed and how you think you can all get there, together. You don’t have to make it heavy with slides and graphs, but talk overall about your vision for the future. Even if they have heard it before, it often bears repeating.
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. 