Why coaching has profound effects in financial advice

As specialist recruiters in the financial planning industry, Recruit 2 Advice provides professional behavioural profiling in our standard service.

We consider this additional information very valuable. Not only does it reinforce our positive views on candidates, but it is also highly advantageous for the hiring manager to assess future behaviours and team fit.

Psychology services are typically viewed in the context of a remedy for a past event, most often to fix something.

But when embraced in the context of the financial planning industry, they can yield dynamic results for individuals in their personal and professional lives.

Leaders utilising a psychologist in the context of a personal 'coach' can yield powerful individual and business results. If you want a high performance car it takes a high degree of care and regular tuning, a high performance executive or leader can viewed similarly although in this instance the psychologist can assist with the tuning.

Recruit 2 Advice are advocates for busy executives, practice owners and advice managers to engage a professional coach in this manner, and embrace the psychology of behavioural profiling throughout the recruitment and ongoing team building process.

We spoke to the principal of Prova Profiling and trained psychologist Stephen Smith on the benefits of undertaking this approach.

"A relationship with a psychologist coach is unlike any other personal or professional relationship", said Smith.

"Professional coaching is shown to have a powerful, positive impact on self-confidence, wellness, and work performance. This not only benefits the one being coached but has a flow on affect to the employees in a manager's charge which in turn, improves organisational effectiveness. Team members benefit from the mentoring, leadership development, and coaching culture the manager brings back into the organisation," he said.

According to 2015 research by Flip Shutte and Renier Steyn titled The science of building blocks for business coaching, defines "coaching" as participating in the development and learning process of the person in focus.

Smith went on to say that besides professional coaching, when seen as coaches, psychologists can guide individuals through their own personal development journey.

"This will cause the individual to become more self-aware, improving their emotional intelligence and their ability to communicate, inside and outside the workplace," Smith said.

This mode of coaching differs from traditional mentoring which has been seen as hierarchical in nature, whereas coaching is a process in which the coach facilitates the learning.

This establishes a basis to which employees can learn about themselves, not focusing reactively on dysfunctional issues but rather a way to circumvent potential problems, according to a 2001 University of Sydney academic Anthony Grant.

Smith mentions that "when coaching is implemented on a financial planning practice level, the benefits are truly profound".

"When your employees are happy, feel supported and competent, and have a sense of belonging, there are human benefits and bottom-line benefits as well. Productivity and performance go up, as the coaching is not only benefitting the strategic goals of the organisation but the individual themselves has a greater sense of commitment to the organisation, increasing employee performance. When they find meaning in their work and feel a sense of purpose, belonging, satisfaction, and intent to stay all improve," he said.

"It starts with self and team evaluation which provide baseline information about the leaders and staff. It provides invaluable details about personality, leadership styles, interpersonal communication style, strengths, and stage of development. This is used to build all the team to greater levels of success."

These assessments can also be used to recruit your next team member. The team evaluation will help guide what type of personality you should employ next.

"Will it be to fill a gap or to expand on the strengths; and how will they best integrate with your current team?" he asks.

We recently completed a hire with a senior financial planner for a SME integrated financial planning and accounting firm. Standard in our processs, we include behavioural (psychometric) profiling.

Unfamiliar with profiling, once the recruitment hire was finalised the client asked for more information on behavioural profiling and whether they could put their entire team through the process. This is a very common response we have seen over many years.

It is evident that this proactive approach can circumvent a lot of the problems and dysfunction that can so easily arise in the workplace.