Advisory Leadership E-Book

Greg Friedman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 186

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Thrive in a changing industry by putting your people first

Advisory Leadership is a practical and highly executable guide for financial advisors and finance professionals looking to thrive in today's changing financial services industry. Written by a leading financial advisor with practice improvement expertise, this book shows you how to master the art of leadership while remaining agile and adaptable. You'll learn the seven steps you must take to keep pace and thrive amidst the industry's evolution, with clearly articulated explanations and motivational action items. The discussion covers patience, integrity, compassion, respect, consistency, encouragement, and courage—the foundations of success and continued growth—and shows you how to practice what you preach with real strategies for living the vision and being a true leader.

The financial services industry is at a crossroads, between a generation on the cusp of retirement and the new generation stepping in to take its place. This transition has been called a crisis of culture, of values, and of communication, but it's really an opportunity. This book faces the changes head-on, and delivers practical solutions that start and end with your greatest resource—your people.

• Unlock the secrets to a people-first company
• Speak openly, walk the walk, and promote personal growth
• Reward firm-wide collaboration and a team mentality
• Reshape your company's DNA to thrive in today's financial environment

The industry's overarching question is one of differentiation: how can your firm stand out amid the rise of robo-solutions and an unpredictable future? Advisory Leadership shows you how a people-focused company culture can elevate a firm from surviving to thriving.

Leseprobe

Additional Praise forAdvisory Leadership

“In the 20 years that I have known Greg, I have rarely met a more consummate professional; he is a true credit to his profession. The wisdom he shares in his book is not to be missed.”

—Thomas D. Giachetti, Esq., Chairman, Securities Practice Group, Stark & Stark

“If culture is ‘what happens when no one is watching,’ Greg Friedman's book gives the owners and leaders of advisory businesses a detailed and very practical guide to making sure that the right things happen in their firms. The value of the book comes from not just its thorough treatment of the subject but also the practicality of the advice—Greg continues to lead one of the premier firms in the industry and he has the ‘battle scars’ to prove it.”

—Philip Palaveev, CEO, The Ensemble Practice, LLC, and industry consultant

“Advisory Leadership provides great advice with real-life action steps for any business. It is an excellent book for business leaders.”

—Dan Skiles, President, Shareholders Service Group

“Greg is a successful entrepreneur who has been sharing his experiences and offering advice to the advisory industry for many years. As a colleague and friend, I am excited that Greg has formalized his teachings in this amazing book. His straightforward advice is easy to absorb, and each chapter is full of practical strategies and tactics that can be implemented simply and will have an immediate impact on your business.”

—Kelli Cruz, Founder, Cruz Consulting Group

Advisory Leadership

Using the Seven Steps of Heart Culture to Create Lasting Success for Any Wealth Management Firm

Gregory H. Friedman

Cover image: © iStock.com/Rapid Eye Cover design: Wiley

Copyright © 2015 by Gregory H. Friedman, MS, CFP®. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.

ISBN 978-1-119-13608-8 (Hardcover) ISBN 978-1-119-13610-1 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-119-13609-5 (ePub)

This book is dedicated to my mother, Eleanor Duemling, and my father, (the late) C. Hugh Friedman.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Understanding Heart Culture: Making the Change

Chapter 1: Patience: Taking Your Time to Find the Right People

Next Gen Employees: Changing Values, Changing Culture

Taking Your Time during the Hiring Process

Four Steps to Hiring the Right Candidate

Benefits

Chapter 2: Honesty and Integrity: Speaking Openly and Walking the Walk

Overcommunicate Your Values and Philosophy

Considering Your Audience

The 55-38-7 Communication Formula

The Mehrabian Communication Model

What Is the Safe Space?

Resolving Conflict

Walking the Walk

Benefits

Notes

Chapter 3: Compassion: Unlocking the Secret to a People-First Culture

Morale and Profitability

Differentiating “Me” Culture from Heart Culture

Benefits

Notes

Chapter 4: Respect: Promoting Personal Growth, the Key to Inspiring Motivation

Helping Employees Explore What Motivates Them

Keeping Tabs

Benefits

Chapter 5: Persistence and Consistency: Maintaining Employee Relationships

Choose the Right Management Team

Don’t Wait for a Scheduled Meeting to Check In

Empower Individuals Regularly, Giving Them the Tools They Need to Succeed—Delegate

Plan Regular Off-Site Events for Team Building

Benefits

Chapter 6: Encouragement: Rewarding Firm-Wide Collaboration and a Team Mentality

Reiterating Company Values

Creating Individual Opportunities

Rewarding Teamwork through the Compensation Structure

Keeping People Accountable—Even Yourself

Holding a Biannual Retreat

Benefits

Chapter 7: Courage: Reshaping Your Company’s DNA to Establish Heart Culture

Assessing Your Team’s Individual Strengths and Opportunities

Anticipating Growing Pains—Lots of Them

Recognizing Culture Killers and How to Avoid Them

Rolling Up Your Sleeves and Getting Involved

Benefits

Note

Chapter 8: Implementing Heart Culture in Your Firm: Get Started Today, Not Tomorrow

Afterword

References

About the Author

Index

EULA

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Preface

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Foreword

Greg Friedman is one big walking heart. Don’t let that fool you; he successfully leads with it. So many of us in business mistake leadership for power and forcefulness. The very nature of the word conjures up a powerful figure: standing, arms forward, commanding the pack. Greg reminds us it’s possible to lead while standing beside, or even behind, those who look to you for authority and guidance.

One of the great things about aging is that you genuinely can’t remember when you became friends with people, but it often seems like you have known them forever. I don’t know the year that I met Greg, but I vividly remember the circumstances around it. My partner and I had just spent a small fortune paying a programmer to create client relationship management software that we could use to track client-related work and to keep a diary of our relationship with our clients. There was nothing like this on the market and we sorely needed it. Heck, the whole industry needed it. But our results were a disaster.

Then I heard that Greg and his partner, Ken Golding, had just created something that might really work. I picked up the phone to ask him about it. I told him what a mess we’d created. I told him how much money we had thrown away on our project. And I told him that I had no idea where to go next. Greg didn’t wait a heartbeat to offer assistance. “Look,” he said, “we’ve got something we call BAM (basically a monkey can do it). I’ll give it to you. All I ask is that if you have some good suggestions about what we could do to make it better, share them with me.” Greg’s passion for creating a better work product to support all advisors, not just his firm, is definitely leading with heart.

Through the years Greg and I spent many conferences skipping presentations and sitting together to share ideas, experiences, and philosophies. As Greg talked about his family, his clients, and his staff, it was clear that his leadership style rested squarely in creating personal growth and satisfaction for everyone with whom he came in contact. He’s a great listener, and he puts what he hears into positive action. More important, he is very eager to share his cultural leadership tenets of employing patience, honesty, integrity, compassion, respect, persistence, consistency, encouragement, and courage; all of these helped him create success in not just one, but two separate businesses.

I think you’ll find yourself in this book. You’ll recognize some leadership habits you’d like to jettison and discover new ones that feel as comfortable as slipping on an old, well-worn sweater. I know you’ll enjoy Greg’s writing style. It’s relaxed, satisfying, and enjoyable, much like sitting down and having a good conversation with the man himself. You’ll realize how easy it is to adapt your leadership style to your natural tendencies, not just to some “make it so” book that outlines how a great leader should think and act. You’ll walk through his process of cultural transition and change, recognizing how leading with heart promotes a happy, healthy—and yes, profitable—working environment. Enjoy.

Deena Katz, CFP®, LHD Associate Professor, Department of Personal Financial Planning, Texas Tech University; Founding Partner, Evensky & Katz Wealth Management; Author of seven books on financial planning and practice management topics

Preface

What is it worth as a leader to have a successful and thriving company? Does the value of a firm increase with employees who are motivated and inspired, who enjoy working together and who find coming to work every day rewarding and challenging?

What may sound like an unrealistic ideal is actually an attainable feat if you focus on an element of your business that you may have overlooked—your firm’s culture.

Historically leaders have analyzed how they can better engage employees, focusing primarily on the success of the firm. In today’s landscape, truly meaningful leadership must go a step further, flipping yesteryear’s notions of firm first thinking and instead doing something that should come naturally to all of us: Putting people first.

If that sounds precarious, consider the facts about our industry. The wealth management space is on the cusp of monumental change in its life cycle, with a large number of advisors looking ahead at succession planning and retirement. The next generation of advisors—your firm’s successors—have different values and priorities than their predecessors. Your next clients, the Gen X and Gen Y contingent, also have different (and some would argue higher) expectations of their advisors than their parents do. Technology is abundant and data is accessible in one click. Instant gratification is a foregone conclusion. What does this all mean?

The only thing that truly separates and elevates your firm is your people.

In Advisory Leadership, you’ll learn how seven key steps can help you transform your firm’s culture, including, if necessary, how to reverse the course of your current culture to create a dynamic, energetic environment of happy, engaged employees. These seven steps, based on human virtues we all strive to achieve, are the key to unlocking the power of a people-first culture:

Patience.

Slowing down the hiring process to help the firm better choose the right candidate for any role, every time.

Honesty and Integrity.

Leading by example and encouraging open and honest communication.

Compassion.

Acknowledging people for their individual contributions and getting to know them beyond their roles.

Respect.

Empowering employees to make decisions and guiding them in their personal goals for professional achievement.

Persistence and Consistency.

Aligning your management team with your firm’s goals and reiterating your values through various communication channels.

Encouragement.

Promoting and rewarding team collaboration instead of competition.

Courage.

Looking inward before taking those crucial first steps toward change.

This book will cover each of these steps in its own dedicated chapter, and provide actionable tips at the end to help you get started on your own path to creating a healthy and thriving company culture. It will also cover how to make lasting, positive changes that encourage your team to help protect and promote your values.

Along the way, you’ll also find interesting real-world examples of heart culture elevating a firm’s success as well as some pitfalls to sidestep, which are based on my own experiences in the advisory business.

For principals, advisors, and team leaders in the wealth management industry, you’ll recognize many of the common challenges we face in our unique environment. And though the title is Advisory Leadership, many of the principles in this book can be applied to anyone who is trying to run a successful business.

If like me you got into this business to help people, you’ll find that many of the messages in this book will seem like common sense.

Listening.

Being honest.

Caring.

Getting to know people.

Encouraging them to succeed.

We are in the service business, after all, and our job is to learn as much as possible about our clients in order to help them achieve their financial and life goals. We’re good at it. These seven steps succeed in using those same innate skills we have as advisors and as people to help us build a stronger, more cohesive team with shared goals and a shared philosophy of how we work, how we deliver financial advice, and what we want to achieve personally as well as professionally.

Ultimately a leader wants to build a thriving, fulfilling business by using the best tools and resources available to become more profitable and to reach more clients. Consider Advisory Leadership one of those resources: A tool to help you unlock your business’s potential and to cultivate your firm’s most valuable resource—your people.

Acknowledgments

This book was inspired by many people, and without their encouragement and support—and life lessons—it would not have happened. I want to thank in particular Deena Katz for being a relentless advocate for our industry and for her staunch encouragement to write this book.

I am grateful to all of the many people I have worked with over my career—both professionally and personally—who helped shape who I am as a leader, who I’ve learned from, and whom I consider my friends. In particular I want to thank Ken Golding, Dan Skiles, John Shangler, Jim Herrington, Mark Tibergien, Susan Dickson, Tim Welsh, Philip Palaveev, Harold Evensky, Tom Giachetti, Marion Asnes, Jamie Green, Larry Ginsburg, Erin Kincheloe, Colin Drake, Cynthia Greenfield, Jim Placak, Bill Burke, Sharon Hoover, Kerry Elkind, and so many more amazing friends and colleagues in our industry who have taught me valuable lessons and been a tremendous support.

An immense amount of credit is due to the people along the way who helped inspire and educate me over the years, and to them I would like to express my gratitude for their continued support and their friendship. A strong, successful culture begins with relationships and grows as you build trust, encourage growth, and share new ideas. I thank each and every employee I have worked with in the past (and will work with in the future) at Junxure and Private Ocean for working with me to create great things—I believe together we have made a difference!

And of course I am so grateful for my family—my wife, Laurie, and my twins, Andrew and Marissa—who keep me grounded and teach me every day!

IntroductionUnderstanding Heart CultureMaking the Change

All business leaders share a common goal—to inspire their employees and to see profitable results in the business. That inspiration then encourages collaboration, which leads to success. In today’s evolving business environment—and in the financial services industry especially—a successful and balanced corporate culture begins with a leadership mentality that appeals to the heart first and the mind second.

What is heart culture? At its core, heart culture symbolizes how a firm values more than just an employee’s output. That it’s not about the work, but rather, the people who do the work. This may seem like simple human nature, but in the business world, heart culture is a rising movement that is quickly supplanting the cold, hard corporate machine of yesteryear. The truth is, leaders can no longer afford to ignore the shift toward a people-first culture and its direct influence on a healthy, effective work environment. Leaders today need to be flexible, fluid, caring, and individualistic to be competitive in today’s market.

This book was written not just for financial advisors but for any leader looking to make a sea change in his or her company culture. Many of these lessons, which I learned on my own professional journey as both an employee and a leader, have helped shape my views on successful and fulfilling leadership that leads to employee retention and company growth. In fact, another key benefit of creating a heart culture is that you will attract talent.

I have been a financial advisor for more than 25 years and am currently the president and CEO of Private Ocean, a wealth management firm in the San Francisco Bay Area that is the product of a merger of my firm, Friedman & Associates, with Salient Wealth Management. I am also the cofounder and president of Junxure, a technology firm based in Raleigh, North Carolina, that provides customer relationship management (CRM) and office management solutions to financial advisors.

My career—like many of our industry leaders—sprang from humble beginnings. In high school I started working part time for a warehouse retail chain stocking shelves, and after a decade I had worked my way up the ladder of that company while finishing college and graduate school. I did many jobs in that company—from driving a forklift to sales to accounting and purchasing. I learned a lot in those years, including the value of loyalty.

What I also experienced during that time was a spectrum of different kinds of leaders that truly covered a gamut of styles. It helped shape the kind of leader I wanted to be, and I made a conscious effort early on to treat people differently than I was treated on many occasions. I always knew I wanted to have my own business, and that I wanted to do things differently from the norm—certainly differently from what I experienced.

What follows are Seven Steps of Heart Culture—human values—that are vital to making a difference in a firm’s culture and in a leader’s influence within that firm.

These seven steps also represent the life cycle of a healthy relationship between a leader and an employee. From the hiring process—immeasurably important to building a culture—to maintenance and growth, each phase has its own set of challenges and rewards that can either hinder a firm’s growth or help it soar to new levels.

This book focuses on each of these seven key interconnected elements of creating and maintaining a heart culture. I have learned that being good at one or two of the ideas, or focusing on different ones at different times over the year or years, doesn’t lead to a sustainable heart culture. In reality, I have found it’s better to aspire to all seven even if I cannot be great at all of them at any given time!

Over the next seven chapters I will go into detail about each of these steps. I will also share stories of personal successes and missteps in developing the leadership style that has proven very effective in my businesses. At the end of each chapter I have included some practical, real-world tips that you can use to get started on your own path to successful and fulfilling leadership.

Now, as with every journey, we will begin by taking the first step.

Chapter 1PatienceTaking Your Time to Find the Right People

One of the questions I am asked most often in my position is how I manage two companies on two coasts. I always respond in the same way. It’s all about the people around me. I am surrounded by great, quality people who work hard and are as passionate about the work we do as I am. For me, that means working longer hours and racking up lots of frequent flier miles. But the payoff is worth the time and jet lag. Why? Because the culture that’s been established in both companies moves both ships forward and that creates success and growth.

That culture, which is very similar in both companies, is based on caring, respect, empowerment, collaboration, and a powerful sense of team. There is also a clear, and common, sense of purpose and mission in both companies.