How to Celebrate Success and Plan for 2024

Dear L.A.,

I wish all the senior leaders I deal with wanted to ensure they share vision and set goals with their teams. I appreciate your request to avoid seeming like you are asking for what’s next and what else they can do for you. But people know that when one year closes out, while we can all enjoy some holiday cheer and hopefully a bit of downtime, it isn’t long before we’ve geared up for the new year. As soon as we’ve sung Auld Lang Syne, it’s already week two in January and we’re focused on what we need to do for the next great year! This isn’t about not celebrating and respecting what your team has done – and what the firm has accomplished – it’s just the reality of how every business continues to thrive and grow!

Consider a couple of things if you haven’t already. You don’t mention if you have had year-end celebrations before, or what your team might be expecting, so forgive me if I cover ideas you have already considered.

1. Separate the two occasions. One is a holiday celebration and year-end “thank you!” to everyone, and one is a planning meeting where you look ahead and think about what you need to consider. Have the first one as a dinner, a party in your office or an outing somewhere fun (bowling alley, pool hall etc., depending on what is in your local area), and during the celebration thank everyone for their contributions, share a bit about how well the firm did (whatever numbers you reached, or new clients you brought on, or client satisfaction survey results you might have) and focus on letting your team know how much you appreciate them and how fun it is to be on top. At the beginning of the day or evening, let them know the next step is that you will be reaching out to schedule a planning meeting for next year. Tell them you want to keep the momentum going.

2. Schedule a more formal, professional meeting focused on the goals you have set and how you can best reach them. If you read my articles, you might have read about my firm’s SHIFT model, which is a great outline for planning meetings like this. You start by specifying the desired outcome and getting clear on the quantitative and qualitative goals for 2024. Then you highlight obstacles and categorize them. This gives your team a chance to look back at what they would have wanted to do differently and what they may face as obstacles in 2024. Identify the human factor, where you ensure roles and responsibilities are clear. Identify any gaps in talent and strengths you need going into the new year or to accomplish your goals. “F” is for find alternatives, where you consider your options as a team and commit to those you want to follow through on. The last step, take disciplined action, is where you create a series of specific steps to enter the new year including what you need to do, who will do it, when and with what budget. This process typically engages people and allows them to share concerns but also focuses them on what’s next.

3. Before you start the meeting to connect the first event (the celebration) to the second (the planning), go around the room and ask everyone to share one thing they are especially proud of doing in 2023. This could carry the good feelings of success into the planning and motivate people to want to continue their successes into 2024.

Start the planning meeting by outlining your vision, being clear about what is meaningful to you and your partners, and what you believe the firm stands for. You may want to surface this as part of the “S” (specifying the desired outcome). Sometimes leaders have a viewpoint and teams want to understand and be part of it. Sometimes leaders want to know what their teams consider the vision to be. Neither is right or wrong, but be clear at the outset which makes the most sense for your team.

Dear Bev,

Our team has had several fits and starts this year on many things that were meaningful to me, as director of operations, but were never implemented by our senior advisors. We need to get to a place of repeatable processes and define our client onboarding and ongoing experience. But as many times as we have talked about what to do and how to do it, our senior advisor (who has self-proclaimed ADHD) throws it all up into the air. It’s like watching a bouncing ball skip across our firm day after day with no end to the chaos.

I don’t know if I can do another year like this. But how do I get my point across without threatening to quit? He doesn’t do well with threats. I’m not that type of person anyway. If I get tired of this, I’ll find another job. I want to show him the pain this causes me and my team of five people. But he always wants to slough things off because “process isn’t his thing,” as he tells us time and time again.

I don’t need rigorous, non-flexible process, but I can’t continue to work in chaos with promises of change that are never fulfilled.

H.D.

Dear H.D.,

Your dilemma is one I see quite a bit. I do a lot of work with behavioral styles, and you are talking about significant behavioral differences between you, your team and your senior advisor. Many advisors who run businesses or teams got there because they are wired as entrepreneurs – they can flex, like to implement change and don’t care much about the “rules” of engagement. People who are excellent at getting the work done, however, especially in an operational capacity are often wired for process. It’s not that they don’t like change and can’t deal with it, but they do want some guardrails and some ground rules for engagement. It becomes frustrating for both parties. The senior advisor wants to know why you can’t just roll with it, and you can’t see why he doesn’t understand the constant change and chaos is debilitating for you to be able to manage the team and get the work done.

If you have the budget and can do it, ask him if the team can run behavioral profiles – either DISC, which is about style preferences, or Kolbe, which is about what we do and our conative approach. These are both reasonably inexpensive and clear in their findings. This could allow you to show him – more objectively – the differences and what you need to be successful.

Short of this, propose a middle ground. What processes would be enough for your team to function more effectively, but not have him feeling choked and so structured he can’t do what he is good at? Propose a way to meet in the middle so he sees you are not ignoring his requests but you are striving to find a place where you, too, can be comfortable.

Set this as a goal for 2024. Be clear from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective what success will look like for your team. Present this to him so he sees the time and energy you have put into thinking about what you do.

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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