Talking Points: How firms manage their staff
The following is excerpted from the webcast “Managing Staff Growth: When and How to Make the Next Hire,”…
The following is excerpted from the webcast “Managing Staff Growth: When and How to Make the Next Hire,” which was sponsored by Pershing Advisor Solutions LLC and moderated by Kelli Cruz, director of research and consulting at IN Adviser Solutions. To listen to the full webcast, click here.
Armond Dinverno, co-chief executive officer and president of Balasa Dinverno Foltz; Linda Lubitz Boone, president and founder of The Lubitz Financial Group, and Jon Yankee, partner and chief financial officer of Fox Joss & Yankee spoke to Ms. Cruz about how their firms have created a human capital strategy.
Building career advancement
Armond Dinverno: We do reviews twice a year and so we need to make sure that we’re giving our people the right experience and the right exposure, that we’ve got them on the right team, with the right number of clients, and they are doing the right kind of work. So we are just constantly reviewing the experience that our people are having inside BDF to make sure that we’re allowing them to advance their career.
People come to all of our firms for advancement. They want to learn and grow and be challenged. And so to be an employer or a company that people want to come to, you have to have a strategy for that. So just about everything that we do here involves our people and how we’re advancing them.
Communication is key
Joe Yankee: I think communication with our existing employees is probably the most important part of that process — doing that through our performance evaluations but also just through regular in-the-hall chats. When we have younger advisers taking on more and more responsibilities, yes, that creates leverage for the more senior advisers.
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But at some point, those younger advisors are going to be tapped out at their own capacity level. Communicating with them and making sure that they are able to leverage their own time to go above and beyond is critical to allowing them to move up their own career path in the firm.
Recognizing what your staff wants to do
Linda Lubitz Boone: One of my biggest challenges in trying to plan and be strategic is to honor and recognize what the staff wants to do. And frankly, that’s been one of my biggest challenges because I am discovering that a lot of my staff does not want to get involved in business development. They want to be the technical people. They want to be the planners.
So I have an interesting dilemma because I’m basically the rainmaker. How do I make enough rain to support the staff? We do have performance reviews. We are quite open. Everybody here knows what everybody else wants to do and helps, but at some point as we grow, we will need to have a much more formal business and staff planning strategy.
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