Your Unwritten Standards

Molly recently cared for a client facing an unexpected life-changing decision to move directly from a hospital stay into a nursing home.

Going home was not an option.

It was a challenging situation at the best of times, but in this case, it became heart-rending when her immediate family were too busy to turn up and be there.

After the nursing home had contacted the next of kin and understood no one from the client’s inter-state family could confirm their immediate support, they made contact with Molly’s office.

Molly wasn’t surprised.

She’d met enough apathetic families to know how cruel they can be.

The client is a widow of four years whose only family were these busy step-children.

Molly is driven by immediate care, not immediate income.

That’s her standard.

STANDARDS

Most advisers set themselves extraordinary standards for their advice.

Molly wouldn’t contemplate letting anyone’s selfish behaviour make her client’s difficult path any harder or lonelier.

I often conduct a poll at the beginning of many of my presentations to advisory teams – why do you do what you do?

The popular answer from the wide variety of roles is simple – to help others.

Many advisers are naturally hard-wired to help people, particularly when the need is highest.

Often without much consideration of the cost.

Neither the visible cost of time or the invisible cost of fear.

LOSS AVERSION

It is easy for advisers to be swallowed by the invisible cost of loss aversion.

It is the fear experienced when faced with the threat of loss.

This fear guided our species’ primitive response mechanisms, helping us endure many millennia with an instinctive vigilance to anything that might threaten our well-being.

However, as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky proved in their defining analysis of how humans make decisions when facing unknown risks, the strength of this fear overwhelms our fuel for progress – i.e. our courage.

They proved we are more fearful of our losses than excited by the opportunities provided by our gains.

Uncontrolled, acting like a force of gravity, loss aversion’s influence is ubiquitous for advisory teams, manifesting as the fear of failure, broken promises, non-performance, lost credibility or reputation.

Many advisory teams go to extreme lengths to avoid loss aversion, such as deprioritising their own needs, ambitions, plans, and hopes.

The irony of advisers not taking their own advice results in a reactionary growth model driven not by plans but by a crisis – their own needs often only getting attention when options are few and stress is high.

FORGING STANDARDS

Our standards become the stories that define us, save us, and sometimes stop us.

The standard instinctively driving Molly to care for her abandoned client is prioritising her clients’ wishes above her own wants and needs.

As Molly fails to address the growing challenges she faces purely as a result of being a great adviser, such as an increasing dependency on her time, lowering profitability as costs outrun revenues, a tightening capacity as new team members are not as productive as experienced ones, the standards that define her, may stop her.

Molly would never neglect a needy client as much as she neglects the hard decisions for her own needy firm.

What do you reckon?