How to invest in your strengths
Marcus Buckingham, who co-wrote the seminal management book on leadership “Now, Discover your Strength” (Free Press, 2001), recently asked financial advisers who attended the Investment Management Consultants Association's annual conference to imagine what it would be like if their practices were built around the adviser's strengths
Marcus Buckingham, who co-wrote the seminal management book on leadership “Now, Discover your Strength” (Free Press, 2001), recently asked financial advisers who attended the Investment Management Consultants Association’s annual conference to imagine what it would be like if their practices were built around the adviser’s strengths.
His thesis, of course, is that maximizing your strengths is a more effective way of reaching your goals and being successful than focusing on your weaknesses or deficiencies.
That is a simple concept, to be sure, but one that may be more difficult for advisers to put into practice than it would appear. Many advisers and their clients are still reeling from the punishing bear market, recessions and volatility of the past several years.
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer survey of 2011, Americans don’t trust financial institutions.
Forty-six percent said that their trust declined overall from 2008, and of those, 57% said that the drop was due to financial services companies’ acting in a greedy manner. Perhaps even worse, 60% said that they are uncertain of the value that large financial services companies provide.
THUMBS-UP FOR ADVISERS
At the same time, study after study has shown that individual investors, regardless of how much they dislike or distrust financial companies, generally think highly of their adviser. In fact, the more advisers interact with clients through meetings, e-mails, newsletters and other points of contact, the more clients like them.
As advisers’ strengths, in the Buckingham sense, typically involve client interaction and investment advice, why not focus on that? The reason that many advisers find that they don’t or can’t is that the day-to-day running of their business consumes too much time and energy to allow them to focus on their strengths.
Industry research, and our own experience working with thousands of advisers over more than 25 years, has demonstrated that advisers who take the time to systematize their business and then follow the practices and procedures they have established, free themselves to focus on their strengths. As a result, their businesses grow faster, are more productive, provide higher levels of client service and ultimately are more profitable than less organized advisory businesses.
An adviser may well say, “That’s fine for a professional group like IMCA to say, but what do they know about running a business?”
The truth is, we are running what is essentially a small business (one with an $11 million budget with a staff of 26), and we just completed a program to systematize our business so that we can serve our customers — the advisers who hold the certified investment management analyst and certified private wealth adviser designations — more effectively.
CIMA CERTIFICATION
Our efforts focused on earning the American National Standards Institute accreditation of the CIMA certification, which we recently received.
ANSI is a private, nonprofit organization that facilitates standardization activities in the United States. It oversees the creation, promulgation and use of thousands of standards, guidelines and conformance measures that directly affect businesses and consumers in nearly every industry.
ANSI also provides third-party accreditation of organizations which certify that products, processes, personnel, services, systems and certificate programs meet recognized international standards.
Over the past several years, IMCA has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and devoted countless volunteer and staff hours to set transparent standards for registering education providers, modifying our governance structure to address potential conflicts of interest and separating the education program from the actual certification function.
The process of standardizing our procedures was rigorous, just as it would be for advisers who go through the process of standardizing their business. For us, the results have been worth the effort.
As awareness of our ANSI accreditation grows, we think that the value of the CIMA certification will increase, helping us to retain and expand the number of advisers holding the designation.
BEARING FRUIT
Just like a successful advisory practice, what we had before wasn’t broken. In fact, our program was working very well.
But as a result of our past efforts and the effects of achieving ANSI accreditation, we are now seeing a record number of new members and CIMA certificants.
Advisers who go through a standardization program analogous to the one IMCA put itself through are apt to find there are fewer “fires” to put out, fewer exceptional situations that have to be managed and less stress in the daily operations of their business. And just as we can now focus more clearly on serving our certificants, organized advisers can focus their strengths on serving their clients.
In these interesting times in the markets, very few things are predictable. What is predictable, however, is investing in your own business so you can focus on your strengths.
Sean Walters ([email protected]) is chief executive executive director of IMCA.
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