Financial Advisors are Under-Coached

As a leadership tool for elite performers, executive coaching among top executives within Fortune 500 companies is an accepted -- and expected -- best practice. I’ve seen studies that indicate that as much as 40 percent of high-achieving business executives have engaged a coach.

However, it’s my instinct that the more than 300,000 practicing financial advisors are far behind corporate America in this regard. Although I haven’t seen any studies to support this, I estimate that the percentage of financial advisors who use executive coaches is less than 10 percent...maybe even in the low single digits.

If these guesstimates are correct, this is ironic on two fronts:

• Many, if not most, financial advisors have business executives as clients…who are most likely being coached in their own careers and have acquired important coaching tools. (In other words, if you are a financial advisor who does not have a coach, and you have business executives as clients, your clients may possess interpersonal tools and behaviors that you do not have yourself.)
• Given the skills, behaviors and self-awareness that coaching specializes in identifying, learning, and enhancing...financial advisors should be over-coached, certainly not under-coached! Executive coaching is made-to-order for top-performing financial advisors. [Full disclosure: I’m an executive coach who works for a firm that specializes in coaching financial advisors, i.e. there is some self-interest in my assertions.]

More to the point, here are five specific areas where coaching can help transform your practice. From my 30-year experience in the financial services industry, I have observed that the following reasons have unambiguous relevance to financial advisors.

Coaching helps financial advisors:

1. Develop a career -- and life -- game plan.
2. Maintain a healthy work-life balance.
3. Identify, and achieve, pertinent business goals.
4. Become more attuned and self-aware of their behaviors and skills, as well as the opportunities for future personal learning and growth.
5. Recognize and overcome self-imposed hindrances to achieving important goals.

I believe that the financial advisor’s role is pretty close to being a noble calling with respect to the value and importance within the financial lives of their clients. As financial lives become even more complicated, the role of the financial advisor in the context of other trusted advisors will grow in parallel fashion.

While coaching is not a cure-all panacea for all of the opportunities and challenges that a financial advisor will face, coaching is virtually a “must have” tool for those financial advisors who have a need, and a willingness, to grow on a professional and personal level.

For additional thoughts on how you might begin selecting a coach, please see our complimentary ClientWise Learning tool below:

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