How to Course Correct When Your Staff Is at a Loss

Dear I.E.,

This is an interesting one. Yes, I completely agree: You are doing many things that other partners/leaders are not doing to let your team know you care about them and support them. I teach a grad class on leadership, and one of the lists I like to share is all about how to recognize employees and help them to feel valued. You are hitting many of the important things on the list – free food being one of the top ones! You are also sharing your personal money with groups your team members care about, and you are keeping them together as a team when you take them out once a quarter. On the face of it, all looks pretty textbook to me.

I suspect what might be happening is that as you are growing so significantly and in such a complex way, you are not taking the time to step back and ensure the team is running efficiently and smoothly and that everyone knows what they are doing, when and how. When the partners are running so fast they can’t stop to take a breath, it impacts the people behind them trying desperately to keep up. I see this with many of the top-performing firms and teams I work with.

The numbers are great, the growth is impressive, and the revenue is continuing to increase – all business metrics exceed the norm. At the same time, the people who support this growth are not able to take the time to ensure the processes that support everything are in place and making it easy to execute. This leads to people feeling like they are not doing their best, and to feel undervalued because there is no recognition of the pressures and unreasonable requests being made in order to achieve this level of success.

Even your “A” players, as you describe them, can’t be “A” players if you don’t provide an environment in which they can succeed. It is similar to giving a deeply technical test to your smartest student without giving them a chance to review the material or attend class! As smart as they are, they are going to feel like a failure, because the situation is set up for them to fail.

The other dynamic I observe repeatedly is style differences. Most fast-paced, entrepreneurial high-growth advisors are wired with very little process and rules, which allows them to change quickly and address the needs of complex clients. Conversely, the people who are great at follow-through, details and making sure things are right for clients are slower-paced and need more structure and priorities. These two personality types can complement each other wonderfully and can work well together when they understand each other. However, when they don’t, the differences become stark and there is disagreement on the right way to do things.

Your team is likely seeing all that is going on and probably has many questions. They are possibly wondering how they are ever going to get a handle on everything and get caught up or do things in a systematic way. Both personality types have value, but sitting down together and understanding each point of view is critical.

I recommend you hold what I call an “obstacles session.” This is when you ideally have a third party in to ask your team what success would look like to them, and what obstacles are getting in the way of achieving this success. When you ask people about obstacles it is easier for them to respond rather than if you ask them about issues, problems or concerns. These words can all be interpreted negatively and even if they are stressed, they likely don’t want to be seen as negative. Try showing them you understand there is a lot of pressure and you want to understand where the potholes might be for them. I’m willing to bet if you do this, they will feel acknowledged and understood.

The second most important step is then to do something about the obstacles where you can. Don’t leave them unaddressed or the conversation will be for naught and you’ll be right back where you started!

Dear Bev,

Our RIA firm recently went through a rebrand. We were using a name that belonged to an original founder, and the team wanted a more collaborative name that embraced all of us. It was not inexpensive. We hired a marketing team, redid our website and all of our materials, and had to update everything, including letterhead, business cards and so on. You know what’s involved in a rebrand.

The problem is that some of our older advisors who have been here for a while continue to refer to us as our old name. They believe our founder, who was a very well-known, well-liked person, is part of our brand. and losing the name loses the connection. Those of us who lead the charge on the rebrand believe we can pay tribute to our founder when we describe our background and how we evolved, but that we need to be focused on our new name in everything we do.

I know it’s hard to convince someone to change their habits, but is there anything we can do, except call them out every time we catch them doing this (there are four in this category)?

K.P.

Dear K.P.,

I’m going to guess that, while you wanted to find a name more collaborative and descriptive of who you are today, perhaps not everyone, including your four long-term advisors, were involved enough in the process to “own” the outcome. It sounds like they might have had resistance, either active or passive, to what you were doing, and now they are in disagreement with the new approach. I only suggest this because I see it happen often. When important people are left out of the decisions but then asked to implement them, they will often resist, not believing they had a voice in the process.

The other thing to consider is training. If these four have been around for as long as you suggest, they are used to telling the story in a certain way and talking about the firm with the original name as a connection point. If you haven’t rolled this out so they are comfortable telling the story and adding to that the name change and why it was important, they will revert back to what they have always done. It really isn’t about the inability to change their habits. Rather, they don’t have a new mental model to operate under that is comfortable for them. Be sure you have taken the time to bring them up to speed and give them a chance to try something new in a style that works well for them.

And yes, you could ask them if it would be helpful if you alert them when you catch them using the old names in meetings and internally. It’s quite possible they don’t even realize they are doing it. Human beings are creatures of habit. If you have ever tried to, for example, remove the “um” or “like” from your speech, you will know that we do things by rote and often don’t even know we are doing something. I wouldn’t just start calling them out, but I would ask them if this would be welcome. This will also tell you whether they are doing it deliberately for the above two reasons I laid out, or whether they don’t even think about it.

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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