Leaders influence behaviours around inclusion.

How building an inclusive organisation not only builds trust internally, but influences business results to capture new markets, and retain existing clients.

In my background in Financial Planning distribution my passion was to increase advice distribution in Australia. Gallup research^[1]) has proven that when employees feel trust, inclusion and purpose, business results improve and therefore distribution.

According to Dr Martin Bolt^[2] people who do feel included feel they are treated with respect, feel valued and therefore feel confident to share ideas. At a team level people report they have higher levels of trust with each other, they are willing to go beyond the expectations of their role, bringing more creative solutions.

Inclusion is looking at the diversity of people working together and how that diversity is supported.

What is involved in building an inclusive workplace

1. Building the right remuneration and Reward

Have you ever waited with anticipation for the Christmas gift you were waiting for to open something entirely different, or received an online order that was nothing like the quality on the post? It’s the disappointment of getting the opposite of what would feel like a reward.

A reward to one employee might be completely different to another. It’s a matter of understanding for what and how your staff might like to be recognised or rewarded. 

2. Understanding work styles

Understanding how your team members work best is to understand individual strengths, values and work styles and preferences.

What leaders need to understand is what they want to be appreciated or recognised for, May not be the same as the people they are leading.

Acknowledging different ways people think, personality preferences, and different ways people work is to benefit from the diversity in your team. Different ideas, creativity and original thought people can offer brings much more to the organisation. In an inclusive environment team members feel enabled to bring their unique contribution to their role, the organisation benefits from:

• diversity of thought
• thinking styles
• experiences
• values
• personality
• work styles.

According to Myers Briggs research the Business Outcomes from encouraging diversity and inclusiveness far outweigh the investment:

• 70% greater growth
• 36% better profitability
• 87% better decisions
• 19% better innovation.

How is a leader not left guessing how best to manage the team and get the most from your team?

Research has found that Inclusive workplaces start with leadership, and leaders influence inclusiveness, according to Gallup, up to 70% of the team and the wider workplace is affected by the manager’s inclusive style. They influence others behaviour around inclusion.

How to establish and build an inclusive workplace

1. Senior Leaders, set tone, agenda and cultural norms around what inclusiveness looks like, it’s not as simple as writing a vision or statement, it has to be what leaders demonstrate and be tangible.

Inclusive leadership needs to be included in development plans at all levels of leadership, to include what does inclusion look like and why is it important.

Front line leaders have the day to day influence on how inclusive the environment is, but they take their cues from their leader.  If a leader demonstrates inclusion, others will demonstrate it.

Leaders need to understand what is it to be an inclusive leader. And how to bring it to life, Myers Briggs have a 8 Core Competencies model for inclusive leadership:

1. humility
2. curiosity – wanting to know more, remaining open to different ideas
3. openness – open to difference
4. leveraging differences
5. empathy – desire and intent to understand where people are coming from
6. courage
7. flexibility
8. self awareness.

It’s important to understand that while Leaders can motivate, they can also demotivate, and the latter may not be intentional. Which is why it’s critical to understand how to manage diversity and inclusiveness.  . Example a team with four different members might want to be recognised differently, and does a manger best achieve inclusion.

1. development plans, regularly updated and documented
2. know your staff (include a tool to uncover staff working styles, decision processes, values and experiences and aspirations)
3. have a regular scheduled feedback sessions for both team and individual.

Leaders influence behaviours around inclusion, when having this conversation, most leaders are concerned about the effort or time that might be required to build a high level of understanding and therefore inclusiveness. The risk of not building an inclusive environment is losing potential business opportunities, not retaining talent and clients.

It can be of value, and wise for organisation to recognise the value  to outsource a service to train leaders, or work with leaders regularly to manage the staff development and inclusive process.

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[1] 2022, Inclusive Leadership & Re-Engaging your People webinar, Dr Martin Bolt Director of Professional Services for Myers Briggs. 17.05.22
[2] Ibid.

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To retain your clients over the long term, you’ll need to retain your client-facing advisers.

As an advice practice, you invest in establishing long-term trusted relationships with clients. In the same way, you need to build enduring relationships with your client-facing advisers. The future viability of your practice depends on it.

There’s a debate over who ‘owns’ the client, is it the practice or the adviser? Nina Witenden, Director of A Perfect Plan, has personally managed more than two hundred advisers and has set up client and adviser processes for more than a dozen dealer groups. She says that “while legally the dealer group and/or the practice owns the client, what’s more important is who the client believes they have a relationship with. The answer? It’s the person they ask for when they call”.

Because the client is in the driver’s seat, practice principals need to consider the issues of client ownership and retention. When an adviser leaves a practice 30% of their clients can go with them, on average. In order to retain a client long-term, practices need to deliver both quality advice and a long-term client-adviser relationship. That’s why you need to retain your advisers.

Hiring advisers is expensive

In raising the bar on the calibre, education and background of financial advisers the financial planning industry is increasingly attracting highly educated, ambitious and expensive people. Because the advice process has a long lead-time, it can take months for a client relationship to come to fruition, and six months before the adviser is starting to cover their costs. According to LinkedIn research, the cost of hiring can represent up to 150% of the first year salary^[1]

How to retain advisers over the long term

So, once hired, you’re going to want to retain your advisers. We set out how.

1. Set up an adviser on-boarding process

Fostering the commitment of your staff is like establishing trust in a new client relationship. In both cases a strong induction process is fundamental. The advisers you employ must feel from day one that they have made the right choice in joining your practice. Similarly, you’re also looking for reassurance that the adviser is the right fit for your practice. Here’s how to best manage adviser on boarding.

• In the same way that clear, concise and documented communication is key when establishing client relationships, you need to get your onboarding communication with your new advisers right.
• Set up agreements between the practice and the adviser about what the adviser will deliver and how the practice will support the adviser over the long-term.
• Back up verbal communication with an employment contact and robust onboarding processes.

2. Provide a personalised employee experience

Get to know your advisers’ personal goals and career objectives and clearly understand how and why they work.

• Use strengths profiling and values identification tools to inform both the adviser and the practice. Understand how each adviser uses their strengths to deliver their best work and how a manager can foster engagement, commitment and high performance. According to Gallup, strengths based training and insight can improve employee productivity by 18% and firm profitability by 23%^[2].
• Take performance reviews seriously. Together with your advisers, set up clear performance objectives that define what success looks like to prevent expensive misunderstandings.
• Tap into external expertise to implement your adviser onboarding and employee experience framework.

The quickest path to success

Wrapping up, to retain your clients over the long term, you’ll need to retain your client-facing advisers. To do this successfully, foster a long term commitment between the practice and the adviser by creating an excellent employee experience. It’s about shared objectives and a dedication to building a future together that will provide the best long-term advice and service to the client. Because the stakes are high, bringing in an expert to help you set up frameworks and processes is the quickest way to achieve success.

By Nina Witenden, Director

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[1] https://learning.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/learning/en-us/pdfs/lil-workbook-calculating-cost-of-employee-attrition-and-disengagement.pdf
[2] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/285674/improve-employee-engagement-workplace.aspx

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