Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
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Dear Bev,
I have a partner who I often have to run meetings with because she is technically the senior person and provides a level of oversight. I am still in the learning phase. I can prepare for meetings, engage with clients well and I am often the only one doing the follow up. It is my meeting, but I get why I have to have her accompany me.
The issue is that she doesn’t listen. She interrupts clients. She doesn’t hear what they are saying. She will answer something by presenting information, but it often isn’t tied to what they said. I’m placed in an awkward spot because she is very senior to me. I cannot correct her or redirect her. In a meeting last week, I tried to ask the client if we had answered their question and before the client could respond my partner jumped in and said, “Of course we’ve answered, let’s move on to the next agenda item.”
She is very successful – makes many millions of dollars each year – and doesn’t take feedback very well. I don’t know if clients notice her approach, but it grates on me every time I have to meet with her. Say something? Do nothing? What’s the best approach?
F.M.
Dear F.M.,
I’ve always said it is not all that challenging to teach advisors how to ask good open-ended, consultative questions. The challenge lies in helping them learn to listen attentively for what a client is saying underneath their answers.
There are many reasons people don’t listen well. It can be a function of behavioral style – some people’s brains are on overdrive, they are moving a mile a minute and slowing down to listen and focus is hard for them. It can be self-orientation, where the person is so focused on what they want to say, and how they want to respond and the point they want to make that they cease to hear what the other party is sharing. It can be an advisor wanting to hear something that will help their business, or their product and service, so they listen with anticipation and once they hear a word or phrase, they jump on it because they have been waiting for it. It can be nerves, fear, disinterest and an inability to give someone full attention.
The list of why listening is challenging for many advisors is long; the shorter list is what you can do to fix it.
While I am a big fan of feedback and sharing insights after a client meeting, I don’t know that career-wise it is in your best interest to tell her you observe her not listening, but you could implement a questioning approach. “What do you think the client would have answered when I asked if we had clearly covered their question? It seemed we moved on to other things and I’m wondering if you had an idea of what they might have said?” Start by picking up on one or two things during a meeting like this and in the vein of a debrief after the meeting, ask her in an open-ended fashion for her thoughts. Sometimes this helps a person review their own actions a bit differently.
Start being a bit bolder in the meeting. “I wanted to go back once again to your original question Mr. or Ms. Client, what else could we share in response to your inquiry?” Or, “Client, it seems you had another thought you wanted to bring forward when we were speaking about X, please give us some insight about what you were thinking there.” This takes away the process from your partner and brings it back to the client. It will also likely open some new information you need to have from that client.
Share an interesting article on active and reflective listening with your partner. Pass it along to a few people in the firm saying, “I read something interesting and thought we could all use a refresher on the importance of this.” Sometimes people just need to be reminded of something and they start behaving differently. She is likely a smart, successful woman who gets things done and plows ahead sometimes without pausing to listen and consider what she has heard. Maybe a reminder or refresher could help. Here is one that ran in Advisor Perspectives last year that could be useful and one I had posted on LinkedIn. I’m sure if you Google you can find more.
Dear Bev,
What do you do when you have given feedback to a senior leader, but they don’t listen to it? Our senior team wants to know what is broken and needs to be fixed. They have implemented technology that bogs us down and hampers our ability to be more efficient and effective. We’ve told them this, but the response is, “We’ve invested a lot in that technology. Over time it will be fine.”
Really? Why do senior leaders ask the question if they have no intention nor interest in fixing anything?
K.P.
Dear K.P.,
Oh boy, that is the $1 million question, isn’t it? Why do human beings do anything that isn’t really in our best interest, but do it anyway and wonder why things aren’t working as well as they could or should for us?
The senior leaders are telling you the truth. They want to fix whatever might be wrong, and yet they invested a great deal of money into a system that isn’t working for the team. But they can’t rip it out and start over. This happens in many organizations, and it doesn’t mean the senior leaders are nefarious or out of touch, it means they are limited in the choices they have and what they can do to “fix” something.
Stop talking about the one obstacle they likely cannot control. See if there are other areas where you could use their support and they could influence a positive outcome. Focus them on where they have a chance to do something, not where they keep feeling and thinking they have failed – or that their team doesn’t recognize the financial sacrifice they made to get a better system in place.
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. She is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. Beverly 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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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
