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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.
Dear Readers,
This semester, I have the honor of teaching four graduate classes on Leadership and Managing Teams. We had a full day, eight-hour class recently for a Leadership Lab. The students inspired me to write my article this week on best practices for engaging and motivating the next generation.
I often hear my clients talk about the struggles with the next generation and how hard it is to work with them. In my experience they are interested, provide insights and ideas, respond well to direction and facilitation and enjoy learning and growing. Here are some of my best tips for how to lead the next generation (or potentially any generation that needs a little boost).
1. Get to know your team members as individuals. Leaders can get lost in meeting goals, organizing the team around what they need to accomplish and pushing them to get results. Teams can be motivated to work together if they see the vision they are striving for. That being said, you will get the best out of each person if you understand who they are as an individual, what they care about, and what motivates or drives them. This takes time and focus but it pays off once you invest in it.
2. Set a clear vision and desired outcome for success. Those of you who read my column often may tire of hearing me say this, but I can’t underscore it enough: When I work with a group of leaders in our industry, and I ask them to take a few minutes to set their desired outcome in writing for the end of the year and into next year, very few can do this easily. When I add the outcome should have both quantitative characteristics and qualitative ones, leaders are often stumped about what exactly they need to focus on.
We often know the revenue goal – and maybe even the budgets and profitability goals – but few leaders take the time to capture the qualitative outcomes they seek. If you can’t easily state it, if you aren’t able to articulate it to your team, and if they don’t clearly see what it is and how they need to get there, they won’t jump on board!
3. Connect team members’ roles and tasks to the vision. Team members need to know that what they are doing is important. They need to be able to see that their day-to-day activities contribute to what the team or firm is trying to do over the longer term. If they can’t see this, they are operating in a vacuum without direction on the “why it matters” question. They won’t often connect on their own, so it is incumbent on the leader to make the connection clear for them.
4. Build up people’s strengths and minimize your desire to “fix” everyone. I see so many leaders in our industry wanting to change the people that work for them, or teach them new skills in order to do a different job from what they might have been hired to do. It’s exhausting for the leader and it’s defeating for the person being “fixed.” Nobody likes to be told they are falling short over and over again.
Recently a coaching client told me that during a review, the leader shared one thing that was working well and about five my client needed to change. My client left the meeting feeling like, “Why should I try?”
It’s daunting to realize you are doing most things wrong and not a lot right! Build up people’s strengths, and if they do have areas for improvement, provide the tools and resources necessary to help them succeed. When there is a question of skill versus will, sometimes it is both. More often than not, however, it’s a skill issue.
I had a boss once who said, “No one looks in the mirror in the morning as they get ready for work and tells themselves ‘I’m going to do everything in my power to mess up today!’” We all want to succeed and be seen as successful. Help your team members do this instead of focusing on their foibles.
5. Make it fun, engaging and interesting. When you think about the number of hours anyone spends at work, it is truly a mind-numbing number! Outside of the rare weeks of vacation, we spend more time working than doing anything else in our lives – including being with our family members. If you are simply asking people to come in, do their job and go home at the end of the day, it isn’t very fulfilling for them.
Many workplaces have cut back and are doing more with less. People are taking on extra work, and there often aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything that’s needed. With that said, how can you possibly work and have fun?
Do small things: take a few minutes in meetings to share personal experiences or talk about something non-work related; have an afternoon you stop working for an hour to bring in food (food is a great motivator!); share ideas for changes via email and make it fun with a reward system for the best idea; put people in groups or on teams to develop new ideas or implement something you’ve been talking about doing for a while; have an offsite; throw a party. There are many ways to engage if you put a focus on it.
As a leader, you might not be someone who likes “fun,” so if you need to delegate the process to someone else, do it. In a previous role, I was dubbed “President of the Sunshine Club” because I spent so much time trying to figure out ways to bring our team together and enjoy working with one another. It wasn’t my boss’s thing, but that was okay because he supported my efforts. If you care about this, you can figure out a way to get it done.
6. Remember, different generations care about different things. One of the teams I coach has a hard time getting everyone to go out for drinks and spend time after work hours. the team is made up of five 20-somethings, seven 30-somethings, two 40-somethings and three 50-somethings. Everyone is at vastly different places in their lives. “Hanging out” after hours is challenging, but this team found carving out times during the week to share ideas and work on an obstacle together works for teambuilding.
They choose a topic, and they then they split up into different combinations to share their thoughts. After that, they present their ideas to the rest of the team in a scheduled meeting. They are learning more about one another, and are enjoying working together without having to force outside time that is uncomfortable for some and difficult for others.
The number one thing is to recognize that, as a leader, while you are likely doing a lot right, there are probably places where you could improve or do more. Consider where your team needs more of you. Where can you facilitate more engagement and offer more direction? Get to know them, and assume the best while you work together so they can bring their best selves to the workplace.
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, 2023 and 2024. 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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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
