Get Your People on the Path – The Preeminent Financial Advisor Podcast – Episode 62
Most advisory teams want growth, but many of their best people are quietly wondering, “What is my future here?” They show up, work hard and care about clients. But their path forward within the firm is vague, with no clear next role. When that happens, you get disengagement, quiet job searches and rising stars who walk out the door just when you need them most.
Career pathing is how you flip that script. It turns your firm from a place where people have jobs into a place where they build careers. It’s one of the most powerful levers you have for retention, succession and equity value.
Here’s why it’s so important to establish a clear, compelling career path inside your team-based firm—one that designs roles people can grow into, and that develops future leaders from within.
The importance of career pathing
According to Kirk Hulett, CEG Worldwide’s managing principal of team solutions, there are three key reasons why career pathing is crucial to advisory firms’ success:
- Financial. Your biggest line item cost is payroll. The better the ROI you get on every dollar of payroll you spend, the better off your practice will be. It’s helping the people you’re paying develop new skills and abilities that benefit your business.
- Emotional. Most people leave their job because they don’t feel their manager cares about them, and because they don’t feel they have an opportunity to grow and develop. So if you want to retain your best talent, you have to give them development pathways.
When you do give that, they’re much more highly engaged in the job, and more likely to act like owners.
- Freedom. Career pathing makes your life, as the owner, so much easier because your people’s capacities are increasing. They can do more things, so you can delegate more.
Key aspects of career pathing
To set your people up on a career path, you need to take a few key steps:
- Formal training. This is the foundation—the formal training backed up by standard operating procedures, documented workflows and the like.
- Coaching. This involves periodic performance check-ins (30 minutes or so, every two weeks) where you, as a leader, help adjust and nudge a person’s performance. You’re don’t tell them what to do, but instead ask them questions so they can figure out what they should do. When a team member brings you a problem, you say, “Tell me how you would approach solving this.” Doing that mental practice is as effective as doing the actual practice.
- Mentoring. Less formal than coaching, mentoring is more about developing someone long term. Perhaps e a junior advisor struggles with building interpersonal depth with clients. A mentor who’s very skilled at that can watch them, give them advice, challenge them with scenarios and help them work through cases.
- Stretch assignments. These are skill-building tasks you give your people so they can develop and learn. They’re not going to get the job done right every time, and that’s okay.
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Getting started
Want to get the career pathing ball rolling? Sit down with team members once a year for an hour. Ask them what experiences they want to have on the job over the next 12 months, and what new things they’d be interested in doing. Discuss what gives them the most energy in their job day-to-day—and what they like least about their role.
This type of open-ended conversation will reveal their goals as well as hidden or underused talents and skills. Armed with that information, you can better ensure their career goals are aligned with where there are growth opportunities in the business. What’s more, you’ll send the important message that you care about your people and want to see them get what they want out of their career.