Making the effort to adequately train your people managers and leaders is one of the best things you can do for your financial advisory company. If you have effective leadership, you’ll have effective individual contributors.
My name is Wayne Townsend and I am a certified FocalPoint Business and Executive Coach. I work with both small and mid-sized business owners to grow their business and set it up for success for years to come. Prior to becoming a Business and Executive Coach, I worked for a company that specialized in helping financial advisors grow their practices. Now, I offer a wide range of consultation services, one of which is leadership training.
It is my passion to help you training impactful leaders, which is why I’m sharing some advice in this article.
How do I Create Buy-In Around this Training?
One great thing I have learned about managers is that they typically want to do a good job. I find that performance issues are much more common in individual contributors. While not unheard of at the management level, typically those individuals have already done some noticeable good work to get to that position and it holds some importance to them.
Remind your leaders that it is our duty as the world evolves to continuously learn and develop new skills. We need to do this to stay competitive with our clients and competitive in the recruiting marketplace.
What Material Should be Covered?
What material you cover specifically will develop on where you think your team needs the most improvement. A good starting list would include: how to improve communication skills, conflict resolution, how to have hard conversations and give meaningful feedback, change management, and motivating your employees. You can also include trainings on company-specific policies and procedures like how to accurately track time, who to contact for workers’ compensation, etc.
Creating a curriculum can be daunting. I have created a comprehensive leadership training that can help you streamline the process.
Who Should Receive this Type of Training?
It is my view that anyone who is in any type of supervisory role should be included in your leadership training. This is everyone from the C-suite down to your lower managers who may only oversee an employee or two. It is also my suggestion that tenure should not excuse you from this training. It is not uncommon for the person who has been a people manager for 10+ years to need the same amount of education as someone who was newly promoted into the position. This is especially true if your managers/leaders have never received a formal training.
In some cases, it may even be appropriate to include those who lead large projects and work cross functionally, even if they are not people managers.
Want to Learn More?
If you want to learn more about effective leadership training, contact me today. I am always happy to consult and network with professionals. You can call me at 352-816-9642 or email me at wtownsend@foalpointcoaching.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn at: www.linkedin.com/wayne-townsend-aa31b4134
