importance for firms to hire and grow professionals cannot be emphasized enough. This includes not only professionals they need now or next year, but also professionals they will need in the next 5 or 10 years. A mature professional needs 10 to 15 years of training and development. This means that firms that want to have highly productive G2 advisors who are ready to contribute next year should have hired those professionals 10 years ago. While this may seem like a very long‐term perspective, it is the only reliable way of creating an ample supply of future professionals.
What G2 Professionals Need
For G2 professionals to become the future of a firm, they will need experience, training, and opportunities to apply their training. While firms have become quite adept at imparting professional knowledge and training on client service processes, that alone is not enough to turn G2 professionals into true future drivers of a firm. For that to happen, firms need to train on additional types of skills and provide experiences that G2 professionals don't currently receive.
G2s Need a Chance to Drive the Car
I grew up in Eastern Europe, where young people very rarely had a car or ready access to one. We grew up riding buses and trains. That said, we all went to driving school and got licenses. So when I bought my first car at the age of 25, I had had a license for seven years but had no idea how to drive. Just as you can't learn how to drive a car by watching your dad, G2 professionals are not going to learn how to be leaders by watching the founders. They need opportunities to “drive the car” on their own.
If leadership consists of difficult decisions, then G2 professionals need to be in positions where they can make such decisions and be responsible for the results without being overseen or “saved” by the founders. They must have the opportunity to take on the challenges inherent to leadership:
• Leading a client service team, including staffing, managing. and training that team
• Managing employees, delivering performance evaluations, and being responsible for employee contributions and overall development
• Leading a committee and being responsible for the execution of all plans made by that committee, ideally in the context of a firm‐wide business plan
• Championing a new market and paving the way for the firm to grow and expand into that market, including responsibility for the results of that initiative (or lack thereof)
• Implementing a new service or new process, including training others on using that process
• Researching and championing a new technology that can be used across the firm
• Driving a marketing initiative and becoming responsible for its results
There are many other examples possible, and they all share a common characteristic: They offer G2 professionals the opportunity to take ownership of an initiative that is important to the firm. Side projects with little at stake for the firm don't create real opportunities to learn or contribute. Real opportunities come when there is real responsibility.
Another characteristic inherent in these opportunities is the ability to involve others. Projects that can be accomplished by one person are important, but they teach little in terms of motivating and organizing a team. In fact, they often teach professionals to be too self‐reliant, since they suggest that individuals can be successful on their own. This notion can be damaging to professionals later in their careers, when they will likely come to the realization that doing everything on your own is very limiting.
Finally, and very importantly, G2 professionals need to be responsible for the results of these leadership opportunities. They need to be recognized for successes, but also held responsible for failures.
G2s Need the Opportunity to Fail
You will never learn to box by punching the heavy bag. You need someone who can punch back. Similarly, you will never learn to lead without being responsible for the lack of success. Projects that fail are very important: They tell us what not to do. They help us learn about ourselves and our reactions, motivations, and ability to persevere. They tell us about our ability to lead others. It is very easy hosting a party if you don't have to pay the bar tab. The cost of failures is what keeps leaders honest and what makes leaders accepted. We learn whom we can trust when things go wrong.
Founders often struggle with letting their best people fail. Parents are very familiar with this feeling. It is like watching your child learn how to ride a bike. Training wheels can't stay on forever. At some point, you must run along with your child, holding the bike and catching her when she falls. But you can't do that forever. Eventually you have to let go of the bike and watch your child wobble around, milliseconds away from disaster. In fact, you know your child will sooner or later show up crying with a bloody knee or elbow. Unfortunately, there is no other way to learn to ride a bike.
For a firm to truly give G2 professionals a chance to lead, it has to be willing to let them fail. Yes, this could mean losing some clients and perhaps upsetting people (founders included), but the learning process is not complete until we know what it feels like to fail.
G2s Need to Take Over Client Relationships
Everything in professional services, and particularly in personal financial advice, begins with being able to impress clients and earn their trust. That trusted relationship is the building block of a professional career. Trust translates into growth through referrals. Trust allows a professional to build and maintain a team. Trust facilitates the ability of a professional to establish himself as a manager and leader internally. If G2 professionals can't earn the trust of their clients, they can't progress past the second‐tier position in their firms.
As obvious as this sequence may be, many professional careers stop at the second chair because firms are not giving young advisors enough opportunities to step forward and earn the trust and respect of clients. Firms heavily prioritize client retention and are unwilling to risk changing the lead advisor on a relationship. This stunts the development of younger advisors, who seem to always be supporting but never leading.
At some point, a firm must realize that the career of a talented professional is much more important to the future of the firm than the relationship with any single client. A good professional will typically manage $1 million or more in revenue, lead a team, and contribute to growth. Very few clients can have the same impact. This is not to suggest that firms should sacrifice client service or experiment on clients. It simply means that firms should systematically give their best G2 people the chance to shine in front of clients. It also means that firms should prepare clients for these coming changes so that they are supportive and encouraging of the process.
G2s Need to Become Better Business Developers
Business development (i.e., sales) is the Achilles' heel of independent advisory firms. Built on a foundation of client service and retention, firms are often concerned that a sales focus will undermine the culture of the firm and focus professionals on the wrong agenda. Giving in to these fears results in a firm that is overdependent on the founders or a few select rainmakers. Younger professionals in these firms never receive training in business development and are often quickly labeled as “not entrepreneurial.” In the 2016 Financial Performance Study, only 25 percent of firms report that they provide any business development training to their professionals.
As with most of the challenges faced by G2s, often all that is needed to overcome the obstacle is some training, some encouragement, and some patience. Behind the success story of every good business developer is usually a patient mentor who helped frame sales in the right way: meeting needs and creating solutions rather than pushing unnecessary and unwanted products. Mentors serve as an example and explicitly or implicitly provide young professionals with a process for identifying needs and communicating solutions.
G2 professionals are usually the victims of this cultural dysfunction: They are trained to focus only on service and stay away from sales, and then they are blamed for not contributing to growth. Every professional can learn to be a competent business developer. Firms simply need to incorporate growth into their values, provide the training, and coach patiently.
G2s Need to Learn