You’re the CEO of a successful RIA. You’ve grown the business from a fledgling operation to a thriving firm with a talented team of skilled planning and investment professionals serving hundreds of clients and managing hundreds of millions (or in some instances billions) in assets. So, why in the world would you possibly need to engage a professional coach?
Have you ever wondered why most Fortune 500 CEOs have an executive leadership coach? The answer is perhaps best summarized by Jack Welch’s oft-cited quote: “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”
With the onset of COVID-19, we’ve entered truly uncharted waters. Given the ongoing disruption to your business, how are you altering the ways in which you actively develop people? How are you building and managing interdependent accountability structures such as OKRs?
As the owner of an advisory firm, your most important job is to cultivate relationships with clients. But right after that, is your responsibility to develop the people on your team. Unfortunately, however, there’s no formal education that really teaches you how to do the latter.
The case for coaching
If you’re not proactive about continuing to learn, develop and grow, you quickly begin to get stale. A professional, credentialed coach provides you with a sounding board and collaborator to help you think through, prioritize and develop your own leadership skills – so you, in turn, can help develop the leadership skills of others in your firm.
In many ways, the benefits of working with a professional coach are closely aligned with the benefits you bring to your client relationships. Even though most clients are extremely intelligent and accomplished professionals, it’s often helpful for them to have a dispassionate third party who can act as a guide and a sounding board. Shouldn’t the same principal hold true for you?
Take a look at the following International Coach Federation (ICF) core competencies. As you read through them, ask yourself whether they resonate as skills that you, as a financial advisor, would seek to strengthen and hone to better develop your team and serve your current and future clients:
Effective coaching can not only help you grow, streamline and improve the profitability of your business, it can be an invaluable tool in helping you prepare the next generation to one day take the reins and lead your firm into the future.
Coaching Questions from this article:
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