Great teams need great players

In our coaching work, we always do an assessment of the roles that each team member plays within a financial advisory firm. After looking at the strengths and weaknesses of a team member, we are able to evaluate how well suited that individual is for their respective role.

To illustrate this more clearly, let’s use an analogy of a basketball team. Typically, there are three or four roles that individual team members need to fill. For example, a point guard is a role filled by a player who can bring the ball up the court, call plays and find an open shooter. They are often referred to as the play-maker and many point guards possess such skills as being quick, adept at passing and very good ball handlers.

If a basketball team only has a bunch of point guards, they are not going to be very successful because the team also needs players who can shoot the ball and individuals who can rebound the ball. The point is that great teams have a well balanced mix of players with versatile and complementary skills.

Now, coming back to the financial services practice, we also need different roles and skill sets.

One required role is that of an assistant who provides customer service and administers business processes. This role requires the assistant to be detail oriented, organized and have good people skills.

When we ask our clients for job descriptions (role descriptions) of each team member, we are looking to ensure that the job descriptions deliver on the checklist of items that we know successful financial advisory firms provide to their clients.

At this point, you might be asking how you go about doing job descriptions if you don’t already have them. Typically, those that are successful in building strong teams have already defined those roles/job descriptions prior to actually hiring any new team members. Like the basketball analogy, if you’ve determined your need on the team is for a point guard, then you are going to have a job description in place that describes that role.

If, on the other hand, you’ve already got your team in place and you do not have job descriptions, it is a good idea to have each team member write down all of the things they do. Once this is completed, have the entire team get together and compare roles with particular attention to any potential overlap. At the same time, identify strategies and tactics that are not being addressed by the job descriptions.

Once you have roles in place, ensure you line up the appropriate skill set with each role. To that end, we recently did some work for a client who needed to fill a role that required high attention to detail. Unfortunately, when we did our assessment of the person hired for that role, we found that their attention to detail was poor and the job was not a good fit for her skill set.

Always remember to hire a person for a role who possesses the right skills for it. If you practice this with everyone in your firm, you will be well on your way to being a winning team.

Art Schooley is a personal coach based in Kitchener-Waterloo and Kim Poulin is a personal coach based in Montreal. They both provide one-on-one customized coaching to financial advisors, helping them to achieve greater confidence, focus and freedom.