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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
Dear Bev,
We have a team member who has been really struggling to step into who she is and what she is capable of doing. She was in our industry for about seven years. She stepped back to have her children and now has returned (12 years later). She is attentive, responsive, smart and eager to contribute. However, I fear she is suffering a lack of confidence after being out of the game for so long.
Most recently, my partners and I asked her to plan our holiday party. Every year we have done a big gala for our team members, and we invite a number of outsiders who work with us – vendors, strategic partners and so on. We typically have about 75 people come, and it is a really nice evening with dinner, often a speaker (last year we had a comedian) and music and dancing.
We have a well-organized way of doing things, but we thought we’d let her run with it this year to give her a chance to shine. It was a disaster. She didn’t want to spend our money, so was very cautious with the budget. She also puttered around with invites for so long that by the time she had approved what needed to be sent, people had made other plans. We had 35 people come, and while everyone likely enjoyed themselves, many commented on “how different” the experience was from our past events. I interpreted this to mean it wasn’t nearly as good. The turnout certainly was disappointing.
I know we should not be upset since we were trying to get her to step up, and she did. However, now we have to give feedback saying how poorly it went when the whole point was to build her confidence. Do we congratulate her anyway? Tell her she can’t do this again? Ask what went wrong?
I admit that the people aspect of this business is challenging for us. We don’t like dealing with tears and upset, so I don’t want to confront her. That said, one of my partners says we will be remiss if we don’t – hence, the note to you.
Anonymous (because I don’t want her to read this and know I wrote in)
Dear Advisor,
Whoa! I know it is the holiday time and good cheer and all that, so I should be very measured and kind in my response. However, I have to start with, “What were you thinking?!” You have someone who has been out of the industry for quite a bit, is feeling a lack of confidence coming back in and you want to build confidence, so you hand off a very important event to her. But it appears from what you have written that you offered no oversight, and after it didn’t go well, you aren’t sure how to express that it didn’t go well? Do I have this right?
And then you go on to say you have an expectation of tears and upset? Has this woman cried on you before, so you know what to expect, or you are just projecting this is what you will get in return for sharing your views on the event?
Wow. I will at least offer credit that you do care about her lack of confidence and you are trying to find ways to bolster this to show her that you believe in her. I respect this effort and this objective very much. Your desired outcome was a positive one, but your implementation plan for getting there was missing some of the pieces needed to reach the desired outcome.
Some thoughts on how to go forward from here:
- It will be important to have a heart-to-heart with this team member. I know you are challenged by the people aspect. However, I think if you could openly discuss your fear about her lack of confidence and how this led to you giving her a task that probably wasn’t fair to entirely delegate, maybe you could both talk about what would be helpful for her and how she can integrate again more fully into the firm. Leaving this as an elephant in the room has caused the problem in the first place.
- You should probably walk through with her what you (or whomever has managed this process in the past) typically have done and what she did differently. From there, you can do a side-by-side comparison. If you handle it this way, it might not feel so personal to her like she didn’t do a good job. See where she was in alignment with what’s been done in the past and where she might have gone a bit off track. It would be especially important to review what happened with the invites, because that’s probably why you got less people this time around.
- Perhaps this is an opportunity to create some sort of template for how this event should be executed. Put together a best practices document; let anyone who has worked on the event in the past contribute to it. This should include timelines, past invitees, examples of the invites, past ideas about speakers and so on. Document what you have done in the past so you don’t have anyone trying to re-create the wheel in the future.
I don’t know if this woman has event-planning experience in her background or what your rationale was for handing this over entirely, but I do know you had good intentions in doing it. Learn from this, and make some changes going forward. You might even want to consider, if you really think this was a bad experience for your clients and others who typically come, holding a New Year’s party and have another go-round doing things as you have done them in the past. I’m not trying to spend your budget, just offering an idea to get it back on track!
Dear Bev,
Over the last few years, my partner and I have given fairly lavish gifts to our team as a thank you for their efforts throughout the year. We typically have a holiday lunch in the office and distribute the gifts. Last year, there was a snafu, and one of our newer team members received a gift that was not appreciated. I can’t go into too much detail, because the person in our office who purchased the gift is no longer here. The incident was part of the reason we ended the relationship.
Fast forward to this year’s holiday lunch, for which my partner and I decided we would buy lunch from the nicest restaurant in our area and take everyone out, then give gift cards for them to buy whatever they would like for themselves. We thought this would obviate anyone feeling a gift was not right, or thinking we were treating someone better than anyone else.
It did not go well. The feedback we received was that team members think we didn’t put effort into anything this year, that we simply did the easy thing by giving gift cards (which were quite generous) and taking them all out.
I feel defeated. The truth is that we don’t have to do anything. Our team is paid well, and they all share in the profits of the firm. We do this because we think it celebrates the end of the year with something more personal. Next year? Do we do nothing, go back to the old gifting approach, or do what we did this year, even though it wasn’t received as well? What do you recommend?
K.C.
Dear K.C.,
A wise mentor of mine once told me, “Businesses would be so easy to run if only there weren’t human beings mucking things up all of the time!” That was tongue-in-cheek, of course, because the business wouldn’t run at all without the people involved, despite the best efforts of tech companies to simulate all of us!
This seems to be a great topic to bring up at a team offsite. If you don’t typically have offsites, perhaps 2025 is the time to start. That way, you could put some team-oriented topics on the table and have everyone weigh in on them. Weighing in on them doesn’t mean they get to make final decisions, of course. As leaders, you will be the ones to do this, but you could at least gain their perspective and find out what works and what doesn’t.
Try talking to your team about what drives you to want to acknowledge them and do something nice for them. Discuss the negative experience and your desire to do something different going forward. Let them know in advance you will be asking these questions so they are ready with some ideas. If you don’t ask them, you will be trying to figure this out based on no real data. Asking is always best, even if you don’t love the answers you might get.
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry, in 1995. The firm also founded and manages the Advisors Sales Academy. The firm has won the Wealthbriefing WealthTech award for Best Training Solution for 2022, 2023 and 2024. Beverly is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. She is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).
She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.
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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.