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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 Readers,
Whether the discussion is about training, coaching, or consulting on roles and responsibilities, the topic of behavioral style – that is, sameness and differences – often gets missed.
You can share the best information, be a phenomenal coach, and construct a great project outline, but if you don’t understand someone’s strengths and their areas of natural ability, often you end up asking them to do something they are incapable of doing.
In today’s column, I will outline the importance of style, and show how you can “people read” to help your team members be more effective and work together more collaboratively.
Breaking down the four “P’s”
To understand a person’s behavioral style, there are four areas I review, which I call the four “P’s”. These are: Problems, People, Pace/Process and Procedures. I look at:
- What is our propensity to jump in and deal with problems and challenges?
- How much energy do we get from being around people and how verbal we are as communicators?
- How defined are the boundaries we need, and how clear are our processes?
- How focused are we on sticking to procedures?
My favored style on each of these scales influences how I will come across in the workplace.
For example, in my corporate career, when I had hundreds of people reporting to me, I was always asking the “why?” questions. Why do we have to do it this way? Why can’t we think outside the box? Being in a large financial organization with lots of rules, this behavior often got me in trouble! I am low on the rules and procedures scale, but the organization that employed me was high on it. This can cause a disconnect and frustration. I could do what was needed, but I didn’t enjoy it!
We often see advisory teams where the leader is strong on the problems scale but low on the process scale. They are more entrepreneurial in approach, and they often hire people around them who are higher on the process scale yet slower to solve for problems. This causes frustration because the leader may think “This team isn’t serious enough or fast enough” while the team is thinking “Why can’t we slow things down a bit to digest what we need to do?”
Finding a healthy balance of behavioral styles
It’s important to align people’s roles with what they do well naturally. I see this a lot with advisors who sought a career in this industry because they like the process and the procedures. They are finance people. They like analysis, rules and spreadsheets! But many firms now ask them to also be salespeople, or to find new opportunities. This is often at odds with the natural skill set of someone comfortable with numbers. It’s not that they can’t do it, but they need to be taught in a manner that fits their style – not just told “Do it!”
In training it’s important to understand behavioral style, because of the perception that the “right” material can be understood and digested by everyone. Yet we know this is not true. If I am leading a session and I deliver material in a style that only works for me, I will lose many of the participants who think and learn differently. They need to hear and practice in a manner that fits their style and their skill set.
Style is innate to us. While of course we can modify it, we can’t change it. In the decades I’ve worked with this material, I have come to know how much style differences can impact the ability of any team to achieve success. By learning about my own style, I can help learn how to view differences more objectively rather than react to them in a way that is negative or off-putting.
I am coaching a team right now with a leader who has been frustrated by the lack of implementation of some new ideas. We ran profiles for everyone and found the three people charged with implementation rate very high on the process scale. Meanwhile, the leader rates low, and thinks that because it has been discussed, everyone on the team knows what to do. Illustrating the different approaches helped to open dialogue and give us a path forward for figuring out the best way to get to the desired end goal.
It sounds simple and in some ways it is, but it is also very powerful in application. If you have someone on your team struggling or your team is seeking ways to coalesce more effectively, consider learning more about style. (This material is from the DISC process – D for Dominance, I for Influencing, S for Steadiness and C for Compliance – and you can find free options online for team members to complete this.)
While you may not learn any “new” facts about yourself or even about your team members, the work can provide a helpful framework that might be missing from your team’s dialogue.
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.
