Focus on Happiness Factors Under Your Control: Start Blogging

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

by Bob Simp­son, Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Consulting

One prob­lem that I per­son­ally expe­ri­enced and have noticed over the past 14 years of work­ing with advi­sors is that the day-to-day grind of being an advi­sor reduces hap­pi­ness and creativity.

Research by pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gists indi­cates that there are three major fac­tors that affect happiness *:

• 50% from genetics
• 10% from envi­ron­men­tal cir­cum­stances, like where you live or how much money we make
• 40% to aspects that are under your con­trol like what we do and how we think

This rein­forces the sports psy­chol­ogy con­cept of “focus on the process and let the score take care of itself”.

By allow­ing your­self to get caught up in the day-to-day activ­i­ties of your busi­ness and focus­ing on rev­enue and assets under man­age­ment, you can lose your hap­pi­ness per­spec­tive.  To build a great busi­ness and live a happy life, you need to pro­tect fac­tors that reduce stress and free your­self up to orga­nize your thoughts.

I use blog­ging as a way to orga­nize new con­cepts that I have been work­ing on.  For exam­ple, right now I am read­ing a book The How of Hap­pi­ness by Sonja Lyubomirsky as a follow-up to The Hap­pi­ness Advan­tage by Shawn Achor.  As I spend more time dri­ving and work­ing out than I have free time for read­ing, I lis­ten to a lot of audio­books.  When I hear an inter­est­ing con­cept, I book­mark it in the Audi​ble​.com iPhone app and then do addi­tional research.  Then, I write a blog about it.  Writ­ing the blog helps me to orga­nize my thoughts and gives me a syn­op­sis to which I can later refer.

It is impor­tant to find the right bal­ance.  Your goal should be to spend 60% of your time in client-facing activ­i­ties (man­ag­ing client rela­tion­ships, doing busi­ness devel­op­ment and solv­ing clients’ finan­cial prob­lems).  Try to use your non-client-facing time to be cre­ative, think and write to keep your cre­ative juices flow­ing and to man­age your hap­pi­ness. For many of you, you are not using this time pro­duc­tively now and con­vert­ing it to pro­duc­tive and hap­pi­ness gen­er­at­ing activ­i­ties can have a major impact on your success.

Blog­ging is a great way to focus on the hap­pi­ness fac­tors that are under your con­trol.  Focus on writ­ing about pos­i­tive things, espe­cially dur­ing times of tur­moil.  By achiev­ing greater hap­pi­ness in your life and busi­ness, you will have a more pos­i­tive effect on clients and other peo­ple you meet.

Focus on what you con­trol.  Hap­pi­ness is con­ta­gious.  Focus on the process of being happy and you will achieve greater results in your busi­ness and life.

*  Source:  http://​pos​i​tivepsych​.webs​.com/​a​b​o​u​t​.​htm

Bob Simp­son is Pres­i­dent of Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Con­sul­tants.  Bob can be reached on his direct line at 905−502−0100, toll free at 866−646−6002 or by e-mail at bob.simpson@synchronicity.ca.

About Bob Simpson

Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Con­sult­ing has been coach­ing finan­cial advi­sors since 1998.

Bob Simp­son, pres­i­dent and founder of Syn­chronic­ity has been involved, directly or indi­rectly in the finan­cial ser­vices indus­try since 1981. He has been a very suc­cess­ful finan­cial advi­sor with Nes­bitt Thom­son Inc., a major Cana­dian finan­cial insti­tu­tion. Between 1981 and 1989, he built a busi­ness with more than $120 mil­lion in assets under man­age­ment, was branch man­ager and SVP National Sales for Mid­land Wal­wyn and has been coach­ing finan­cial advi­sors since 1998.

You can fol­low Bob Simp­son via:

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Tags: Achor, Additional Research, Assets Under Management, Audiobooks, Business Development, Client Relationships, Creative Juices, Creativity Research, Doing Business, Environmental Circumstances, Facing Time, Free Time, Genetics, Happiness, Happy Life, Iphone, Psychologists, Reading A Book, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Sports Psychology
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The Secret to Motivating Your Team

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

Among the issues suc­cess­ful advi­sors grap­ple with is how to get the most out of your team. Many advi­sors strug­gle with staff mem­bers who reg­u­larly fall short in terms of work ethic, atten­tion to detail or own­er­ship for outcomes.

Often, the gut response when deal­ing with these issues is to focus on com­pen­sa­tion; to change the mix of fixed ver­sus vari­able pay, or make the vari­able com­po­nent more directly tied to things

Some­times tweak­ing com­pen­sa­tion works, but more often it fails. Occa­sion­ally the prob­lem is that you sim­ply have the wrong peo­ple. But a recent book sug­gests another expla­na­tion, that you are using a 19^th and early 20^th cen­tury approach to moti­vat­ing your peo­ple rather than one aligned with today’s reality.

Why car­rots and sticks don’t work

The back­bone of man­ag­ing employ­ees since the indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion has been based on car­rots and sticks. His­tor­i­cally, the key to suc­cess was seen as reward­ing the right behav­iour and pun­ish­ing the wrong behaviour.

Psy­chol­o­gists refer to com­pen­sa­tion as an exter­nal or extrin­sic moti­va­tor. It moti­vates us from the out­side rather than from the inside. Research shows that extrin­sic moti­va­tors do in fact work, but only in a sur­pris­ingly lim­ited range of circumstances.

In his book, Drive: The sur­pris­ing truth about what moti­vates us; author Dan Pink describes exper­i­ments on the impact of incentives.

A group of stu­dents were given three lev­els of rewards to com­plete some tasks.

As long as the tasks were rudi­men­tary and mechan­i­cal, the out­come was what you’d expect; the higher the incen­tive, the more pro­duc­tive the students.

When these tasks involved con­cep­tual, more com­plex think­ing, how­ever, unex­pected results were observed. Not only did the higher incen­tives no longer pro­duce bet­ter per­for­mance, but in some sit­u­a­tions, higher incen­tives actu­ally led to worse outcomes.

That doesn’t mean that money doesn’t mat­ter. Rather, what’s been shown is that to be pro­duc­tive peo­ple need to be paid fairly. Once you’re at that thresh­old of fair com­pen­sa­tion, for most peo­ple the incre­men­tal pay­off from higher pay rapidly dimin­ishes. Once peo­ple feel that they’re fairly paid, Pink main­tains that it’s gen­er­ally three other fac­tors that drive out­stand­ing moti­va­tion and per­for­mance. All linked to inter­nal or intrin­sic moti­va­tion rather than exter­nal motivators.

Auton­omy

The first qual­ity that dri­ves moti­va­tion in a job is auton­omy; the abil­ity once a goal has been set to define how to achieve that task.

This flies in the face of tra­di­tional command-and-control approach to man­age­ment. This top down approach does cre­ate com­pli­ance, but what it doesn’t do is cre­ate engage­ment. In fact a Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity study of worker auton­omy at 300 small busi­nesses found that those that offered their employ­ees auton­omy grew four times faster than con­trol ori­ented firms and had one third the turnover.

To cre­ate a high per­for­mance team, the first require­ment is to give the peo­ple you work with the abil­ity to shape their jobs to achieve the goals they’ve been given. This is true for all employ­ees, but it’s espe­cially for today’s younger gen­er­a­tion of work­ers who are look­ing for ful­fill­ment in their work beyond a pay cheque.

So if you aren’t get­ting all the results you’re look­ing for in your team, per­haps start by look­ing in the mir­ror and ask­ing if you’re giv­ing your staff the scope they need to oper­ate to their potential.

Mas­tery

The sec­ond qual­ity that cre­ates moti­vated employ­ees is mas­tery, sur­mount­ing the chal­lenge of becom­ing excel­lent at some­thing that mat­ters. Mas­tery is a mind­set; always seek­ing to become bet­ter at what you do. Achiev­ing com­plex tasks requires an inquir­ing mind and the will­ing­ness to exper­i­ment with bet­ter ways to get­ting a job done.

Fully engaged employ­ees have the tools, the train­ing and the scope to become very good at the tasks that occupy their days. This leads to another key moti­va­tor; a sense of achievement.

A sec­ond ques­tion to con­sider is whether you’re giv­ing your team the man­date and the nec­es­sary sup­port to become out­stand­ing at their work.

Pur­pose

The third intrin­sic moti­va­tor relates to pur­pose; the sense that we’re doing impor­tant work that makes a dif­fer­ence in peo­ples’ lives.

Finan­cial advi­sors are for­tu­nate in this regard. Instill­ing a sense of pur­pose can be very chal­leng­ing if you run a wid­get fac­tory. In con­trast, good finan­cial advi­sors and their teams make a pos­i­tive impact in clients’ lives each and every day.

Ask your­self if you’re tak­ing enough time to talk about the pur­pose of what you and your team do. When you’re hold­ing your monthly staff meet­ings, con­sider adding an agenda item that focuses on one case where a client thanked you for the dif­fer­ence your work made. Shar­ing those sto­ries can help your team rec­og­nize the pur­pose in what you do beyond tak­ing a pay cheque home.

Replac­ing “if then” with “now that”

The research on intrin­sic moti­va­tion obvi­ously has very big impli­ca­tions on how advi­sors should struc­ture their teams.

As an aside, Dan Pink doesn’t advo­cate that vari­able com­pen­sa­tion be elim­i­nated entirely, but does sug­gest that it be restruc­tured. Tra­di­tional incen­tive com­pen­sa­tion works on an “if .. then” model, “If you do this, then you’ll get that.” An exten­sion of the car­rot and stick approach to moti­va­tion, “if … then” com­pen­sa­tion is fine for mechan­i­cal tasks, but can fix­ate peo­ple on the task for which they’re being reward to the point that it destroys cre­ativ­ity. It can also lead peo­ple to look for short­cuts and to essen­tially game the system.

Instead, Pink sug­gests that busi­nesses move to a “Now that …” approach: “Now that you’ve done this, here’s how I’d like to acknowl­edge your efforts and your con­tri­bu­tion.” He also sug­gests that where appro­pri­ate, this be focused at the level of the team rather than the individual.

Does this apply to your team?

One final word of cau­tion: Not every­one responds to intrin­sic moti­va­tion. There is an ele­ment of peo­ple who are pri­mar­ily (some­times exclu­sively) dri­ven by exter­nal moti­va­tors such as com­pen­sa­tion. Wall Street traders are a clas­sic exam­ple of peo­ple who fall into this category.

There are a cou­ple of prob­lems with hav­ing these peo­ple on your team. First, how­ever much you pay them, for peo­ple that are exclu­sively com­pen­sa­tion dri­ven it’s sel­dom enough. And sec­ond, research shows that peo­ple dri­ven by exter­nal rewards are less moti­vated, less engaged and less pro­duc­tive than those who are attracted to their work because of the intrin­sic aspects of their jobs: The oppor­tu­nity to oper­ate autonomously, abil­ity to achieve mas­tery and sense of ful­fill­ment and pur­pose that they gain.

As you think about why the peo­ple on your team aren’t oper­at­ing as effec­tively as you’d like, it’s pos­si­ble that the dif­fi­culty lies in their flaws.

Or per­haps Shake­speare and Al Capp got it right.

In the play Julius Cae­sar, Cas­sius says to Bru­tus “The fault lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.”

And in his clas­sic comic strip Pogo, Al Capp wrote the immor­tal line: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

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Tags: Attention To Detail, Backbone, Carrots, Circumstances, Fact Work, Gut Response, Incentives, Industrial Revolution, Motivating People, Motivator, Pink, Psychologists, Rewards, Staff Members, Struggle, Surprising Truth, Tweaking, Unexpected Results, Variable Component, Work Ethic
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Important new research — Talking to Seniors About Volatility

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Ear­lier this month, new research was released on how to talk to seniors about their investments.

Titled “Behav­ioural finance and the post-retirement cri­sis” and spon­sored by Allianz Insur­ance, this report com­piles find­ings on how older investors per­ceive risk and make finan­cial decisions .

Ten top psy­chol­o­gists, con­sumer behav­iour experts and behav­ioural econ­o­mists con­tributed to this report. Here’s how US advi­sor site Hors­es­mouth sum­ma­rized some of the sug­ges­tions on how to frame con­ver­sa­tions with seniors around risk and investing.

Hyper­aver­sion to loss:
Be very con­scious of the sen­si­tiv­ity to loss. In gen­eral, investors expe­ri­ence the pain of a loss twice as strongly as the ben­e­fit of a gain. For retirees, how­ever, the pain of a loss is five times stronger than the equiv­a­lent gain.

Desire for con­trol: Given their fear, you’d expect retirees to opt for pro­tec­tion and guar­an­tees — but stud­ies show the reverse is true. Many retirees shy away from prod­ucts with guar­an­tees because they don’t want to give up control.

The safety of “monthly income” When pre­sented as pro­vid­ing income, 70% of investors over 50 chose an annu­ity. Only 21% chose the exact same annu­ity when posi­tioned as an invest­ment solu­tion with monthly returns for life.

The impact of infla­tion Unless helped to think this through, there is a ten­dency for many seniors to focus on the nom­i­nal amounts they’ll be receiv­ing and to ignore the impact of inflation.

Get­ting the math You need to be sure that your con­ver­sa­tions are at a level clients can under­stand. Research shows that math abil­ity starts declin­ing at age 53; by 80, almost half of seniors have dif­fi­culty mak­ing sound finan­cial decisions.

Here’s a link to the full research report

http://​www​.allianz​in​vestors​.com/​d​o​c​u​m​e​n​t​L​i​b​r​a​r​y​/​R​F​I​b​e​h​a​v​i​o​r​a​l​F​i​n​a​n​c​e​/​A​l​l​i​a​n​z​_​D​O​L​_​R​F​I​_​R​e​s​p​o​n​s​e​.​pdf

And here’s a check­list from the report on hav­ing effec­tive con­ver­sa­tions around retire­ment income planning:

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Tags: Allianz, Allianz Insurance, Annuity, Consumer Behaviour, Conversations, Dol, Economists, Guarantees, Impact Of Inflation, Investment Solution, Math Ability, Older Investors, Psychologists, Retirement Crisis, Retirement Income, Rfi Response, Seniors, Sound Financial Decisions, Tendency, Volatility
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