Is Your Team Clear About Their Roles? Are You Sure? – The Preeminent Financial Advisor Podcast – Episode 58
As your team grows, defining the roles and responsibilities your team members have is more than just helpful—it’s crucial to be able to maximize the success of your practice. But how you do define the right roles for each member of your team and ensure those team members have excellent clarity about their roles?
For answers, we reached out to Kirk Hulett, CEG Worldwide’s managing principal of team solutions. For more than three decades, Kirk has guided elite financial professionals to transform advisory teams into high-performance engines.
Here’s what he had to say about getting the right people in the right seats so they can help drive your practice to new heights.
Here’s what he had to say about getting the right people in the right seats so they can help drive your practice to new heights.
The trouble with poor role clarity
Hulett highlights a few big red flags that indicate a firm probably is suffering from poor role clarity:
- Confusion or conflict over who on the team owns key tasks or key decisions.
- Duplicated efforts that aren’t needed and result in conflicts.
- An overall lack of accountability in the business—multiple tasks falling through the cracks and service levels not being met.
- A general sense of frustration because people don’t feel they’re being set up to win.
Proactive moves
Clearly, you don’t want your business to exhibit those red flags. Consider four action steps to proactively define (and redefine, when needed) key team roles.
- Look for major inflection points. Significant growth is one example. When you reach a point where you need to start adding more capacity or capabilities, you want to think carefully about roles.
- Read the room. If your team members are saying they’re overwhelmed or burnt out—or if it’s clear to you that they are—it’s probably time to redefine roles.
- Listen to feedback. If team members feel they’re not being utilized to their fullest extent or are telling you they think could do more, it’s a great opportunity to examine and redefine roles.
- Assess your results. If you’re not hitting business goals and key performance indicators, it’s a sure sign that it’s time to step back and redefine.
Lead with functions
To define and redefine roles in your practice, Hulett recommends starting with a functional accountability map—a visual tool that lays out:
- All the primary business functions in the practice.
- The three to five most important core activities under each of those functions.
- The primary owner for each function—the person who does it every day.
- The secondary owner for each function—the backup.
These functions should drive the people you hire and the roles they fill. In nearly all advisory practices, those functions are:
- Growth and marketing roles. A successful business has to be really good at marketing, prospecting and referrals—so you need to have specific roles and ownership around those responsibilities or they won’t get done.
- Roles around advice and investment management. That can be both development and delivery. Sometimes the same role develops the advice or the investment management plan and delivers it. Other times there are investment management professionals or para-planners creating the advice and the investment management plan and an advisor is delivering it.
- Client service and relationship management. This is the primary client-facing job handling client inquiries that come in, as well as maintaining strong relationships.
- Operations and logistics roles. This involves addressing all the paperwork, compliance, risk management and technology application required in the business. Sometimes the client service role and the operations roles are merged or shared, sometimes not.
Revisit the map
Also, develop a systematic cadence of reviewing that accountability map—perhaps quarterly or twice a year, and certainly whenever a new person is brought in because you’ve added a role or someone’s been replaced. Sit down together as a team and ask “What’s changed? What’s not changed? How do we need to adjust the map?”
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