A financial planning associate named Marina is brilliant. The financial advisor in training tackled any administrative task, drafted marketing materials, demonstrated amazing writing ability and much more. Yet, Marina was not as well-matched with her role as she seemed until Cecilia Tsang, CFP, B Com, a nine-year MDRT member, paired each staff member with a coach.

“We found out she thrives on social interaction and wasn’t getting much of that,” said Tsang, whose coach used testing that identifies people’s underlying personality traits and how they align with their work. “She started sitting in on meetings with me and loved it, and she did so well that she started doing her own meetings with my smaller clients.

“When people love what they’re doing it shows, and they shine. So, when you have every team member shining and doing their absolute best because they’re happy and love coming and doing the work, it really grows the team.”

The benefits of coaching aren’t new to most advisors. But there’s actionable wisdom in seeing how MDRT members embrace additional input and education to help their practice, and the employees who run it, reach higher.

Unity and growth

George T. Morris, CFP, MBA, has a similar viewpoint. It’s not just that the 13-year MDRT member took his entire team to an investment conference last year where everyone attended various sessions to gather takeaways, or that he subscribes to 15 newsletters so he and everyone in his office can have regular opportunities to learn.

It’s that he has seen how training can create consistency across a practice, including in areas that some might overlook. For example: He enrolled his entire team (now consisting of Morris; four full-time staff handling marketing, financial planning, investments and insurance; a full-time, versatile admin employee Morris calls a “utility outfielder”; and a couple of interns) in Sandler sales training so that everyone would use that same language, no matter their role.

“Even if they weren’t involved in the sales cycle, when someone on the team said, ‘Stay behind the pendulum,’ we all knew what that meant,” said Morris, who serves about 140 pre-retirement clients and is responsible for a block of 3,500 clients, which he is whittling down.

It’s not just about internal language. Morris’ philosophy on training extends to client interactions as well, impacting the business in both the short and long term. Putting everyone on the team through the same training assures continuity in the practice’s established three- to six-month fee-based financial planning engagement cycle, something Morris wants both now and for the three people he has tapped as successors.

“If somebody is in an always-be-closing mindset and they go into the third meeting out of the series of eight trying to close, that’s going to be problematic from a client perspective,” said Morris, noting that the sales training wasn’t done to fix a problem but to ensure uniformity.

Similarly, he says, an admin person benefits from sales training because sales is about eliminating friction, but administrative tasks sometimes can spark stress. So, when a staff member recently sent an email to a long-term client asking for a ton of information, it seemed to go against the practice’s stated mission of being the “easy button” for clients.

“The reality is that we need it, but we already had a lot of it, and it’s a question of adding friction to the ongoing sales cycle vs. greasing the skids,” he said, adding that he is proud of the team’s sturdy approach to over-explain the challenges clients could face regarding anything they buy. That has resulted in seven years without a lapsed policy. “That isn’t clear if you don’t have the sales training to understand that.”

Coaching capabilities

Tsang can relate to that desire for ease and positivity. She also engaged a second coach who focused on ensuring all team members — a full-time financial planning associate, a full-time admin employee and a few part-timers handling 350 pre-retirement households — exemplified the vision and emotion Tsang wanted her clients to experience in the practice.

So, when Tsang’s assistant was a multitasking champion but struggled to communicate with the warmth that Tsang wanted, the coach, who worked individually with each team member for nine months, helped the assistant identify how her processes and language could better match up with Tsang’s vision for the client experience.

“They worked on the nitty-gritty things,” Tsang said. “Even her presence in greeting clients, including eye contact and smiling and how you show warmth, so a client feels comfortable right away. She was very introverted and less confident before, and her confidence grew from practicing the greeting and stretching out of her comfort zone.”

Tsang already had worked with that coach individually for seven years when the coach suggested in 2020 that it might be worthwhile to do the team coaching. It wasn’t a stretch to consider; after all, Tsang says she is always looking to improve however she can and sees the team as an extension of what she does.

“We’re a team and we have to work really well together to get really good results,” she said. “So, I was definitely willing to put in the investment in my team receiving coaching as well.”

In fact, Tsang’s company encourages advisors to have a coach, even incentivizing it with a separate budget and an established belief that coaching leads to faster growth. In total, Tsang has worked with four coaches in the last 14 years (one standout lesson: moving from meeting clients five days per week to blocking two days per week for no meetings and time to do other work), and the continued development of her team is a major outcome.

For a long time, Tsang was reluctant to hire anyone else and wanted to maintain the dynamics and efficiency of a team she saw as a well-oiled machine. She despised the HR work involved when a new employee isn’t the right fit, as had happened with numerous assistants and other team members. But with her bandwidth so limited, and Tsang struggling to decrease clients — she has asked people not to refer her — she knew she and the team were headed toward burnout.

“At this moment, I do have capacity to hire two additional people and continue to grow,” Tsang said. “I was always against having a bigger team, but coaching helped me deal with this emotionally and strengthen the team as well.”

Ongoing education

Clearly, the impulse to learn never stops.

Consider the approach in Morris’ office. During weekly meetings, each staff member has five minutes to share something they learned that week that’s relevant to the business, and one person has an hour to go deeper and teach the rest of the group. Even if it turns out that, say, a newer employee is teaching something that others already know (as has happened during a presentation about the underwriting process), the education and support gained by the presenter still fits with the goal of team development and growth.

That environment is great for retention and security. Not just for stimulating the staff but empowering them to speak up when they aren’t able to take on the education that Morris suggests. It’s fitting that he paraphrases Virgin Group co-founder Richard Branson’s quote about training people well enough so they can leave and treating them so well that they don’t want to.

“Whether the education is really grand or relatively simple,” Morris said, “it’s all about fostering a constantly improving environment.”