How Do Top-Performing Advisor Teams Identify and Resolve Conflict?

How do top-performing financial advisors teams resolve especially tricky and challenging issues where interpersonal team dynamics are inextricably involved? One tool is the ClientWise Team Insights 3-6-0. Below is a real-life example, pulled from the ClientWise files (with client approval). To protect the anonymity and confidentiality of the process, the names have been changed.

The Set-Up

After spending a number of years working for a major wirehouse, Sam Nicholas yearned to strike out on his own. Five years ago, he did so, along with 3 additional partners. They joined a large independent broker-dealer and co-founded a team that quickly experienced a great deal of success.

Yet something was amiss. The partnership wasn’t firing on all cylinders, and Sam knew it. He wasn’t completely happy, and he suspected that the other partners weren’t either. Sam attempted to resolve the issues in a number of ways, none of which got to the heart of the matter, until he discovered ClientWise. This is what led Sam and his team to ClientWise Team Insights 3-6-0 and what Sam describes as a “self-improvement adventure”.  

The Team Insights 3-6-0 team assessment is a wide-ranging appraisal of a team that seeks anonymous feedback from multiple sources. In the case of Sam Nicholas and his team, the assessment garnered feedback from of all 9 members of his team including an intern, clients, prospective clients, and vendors. 360-degreee assessments are often used to get to the core truth(s) of problematic situations, where matter-of-fact honesty goes a long way towards revealing the underlying source of a team’s discontent and unhappiness.

In Sam’s case, the Team Insights 3-6-0 team assessment and the resultant coaching, also led to four extraordinary changes in the team’s structure and essential paradigms:

1. A fundamental reformation of the team’s leadership configuration.
2. Re-defining roles and responsibilities of the roles and responsibilities across the practice.
3. A recommitment to improving their communication skills as part of core partnership constructs.
4. A wholesale realignment as to how success was measured among the partners.

How It Worked

The Team Insights 3-6-0 team assessment process for Sam’s team included a number of critical steps:

• Customized interview questions were created and sent to the partners and staff.
• All team members completed the interviews; anonymously, individually, and privately.
• A ClientWise team member conducted phone interviews of clients, prospective clients and vendors.
• All responses were gathered, compiled and organized by ClientWise and presented in a comprehensive summary.
• A ClientWise principal presented the results to Sam’s team in-person, and hosted and facilitated a wide-ranging, organized, direct, and detailed discussion of the assessment’s findings.
• The ClientWise principal facilitates a vigorous discussion that identifies key growth objectives, as well as guiding the team towards agreement on the important areas of focus.

The power of the Team Insights 3-6-0 team assessment is that it goes beyond anecdotal evidence. In Sam’s case, the data was indisputable. Across all spectrums of input—i.e. partners, staff, clients, prospective clients, and vendors—feedback pointed to the irrefutable reality that one of the partners (Partner #4) had significant issues regarding his leadership, management and communication.

What to do? What happened next illustrates how the ClientWise Team Insights 3-6-0 can be a critical tool in identifying and resolving knotty and problematical issues for a team.

We’ll continue this discussion with an upcoming blog post. Please stay tuned.