Derrick Kinney

A recent financial advisor I was coaching was buying another advisor’s business. His belief was that finishing the paperwork and getting the deal done would complete the project. However, he was wrong. The real project was making the clients he was purchasing feel comfortable with him and respecting their former advisor for selling to this advisor. The lesson was this: Often times the completed project in a service business is not defined by simply checking boxes on a to-do list. It’s about creating and establishing deeper relationships. Boxes are easily checked. But building trust with the new advisor is the true box that takes time to be checked. Want a completed project with happy clients? Don’t forget: Relationships lead to revenue.

As I consult with financial advisors and other business owners, here’s one of the biggest mistakes they make: thinking a goal is a number they must have absolute certainty that they can reach. They think if they miss that number, it appears to be a failure. Reality: the best teams and the ones that give their best effort are involved in the goal setting process. They have a courageous and visionary leader who sets a big goal in which there is not a clear pathway to achieve it. Then the leader and the team members work together to craft a plan to get there and it stretches all of them. I find that if goals set too low, it can lead to employees who are not motivated and don’t feel challenged and empowered to give their very best.

As the leader, your team is your most valuable asset. While this may be a bit controversial, I believe your team is more highly valued than your clients. Because it’s your team who operate as an extension of you, your values, and your caring to help scale your business. Just like beautiful flowers in a garden that need to be tended to on a regular basis, so you must carefully tend to your team as well. It’s important to have an ongoing open and transparent dialogue with your team. One of the most practical ways to do this is through weekly or biweekly 1:1’s. Ask each team member in a scale of 1-10, how do they feel their worklife balance is. The more they know you care, the more they care about doing good work.

Positivity gets a bad rap. I was coaching an advisor recently who told me she always wanted to be realistic about things. I asked why she hired me. She told me she wanted me to help her grow her business revenue. What is a realistic number I asked her? She gave me a number just slightly higher than where she was right now. I said you’re going to pay me more as your coach, then you will make up in the small increase you are planning on. I am a poor investment for you, unless you’re willing to set an unrealistic, bigger goal. She said she got the point. Positivity is required in the face of setting big goals. It keeps you motivated when things get hard. Overly realistic people rarely achieve unrealistic goals.

One of the best forms of leadership is to state a bold vision. It’s important for your team to not always know exactly how you will concretely achieve a goal. By setting a big goal and then engaging the team to help you come up with a pathway to achieve a profitable outcome, it stretches your team and grows them into owners of the process and the outcome. A fatal mistake leaders make is asking their team and employees to achieve the leader’s goal. Instead, successful and empathetic leaders ask teams to achieve goals they have had input in crafting. Therefore, the ownership from the team is dramatically higher. The secret to a supercharged team is involving them in designing the success strategy. You will have created a caring team.

In my experience, one of the most effective ways to build and lead a team is by demonstrating authentic leadership. The first and most powerful step is by expressing empathy with your team members and the people you are leading to complete a project. Many a leader has experienced failure by failing to see people as humans first and employees second. You might have some quick wins by demanding perfection and excellence. But if you want to build a long-term team that achieves stellar results over a long period of time, they need to know that they are heard, seen, and respected by you as their leader. That creates an engine of productivity that simply cannot be duplicated anywhere else. Plainly stated, empathy leads to higher profitability.