Creating Accountability Charts That Support Exceptional Service

By Charesse Spiller

Most financial planners enter the field because they’re passionate about helping their clients. However, being a business owner means wearing many hats. Part of growing a sustainable business that continues to serve clients well is learning to hire and grow an effective team. Firm owners may feel uncertain about what their servicing team should accomplish and how to track members’ growth or success in their roles. This problem can be solved by creating accountability charts for your servicing team, structuring your servicing team for increased efficiency, and tracking success.

Why Create Accountability Charts?

Accountability charts summarize clearly defined roles and responsibilities that are performed within your firm. They help employees stay organized and give managers a snapshot of what’s expected. This level of organization also makes it easy to bring on board new team members and fosters a deeper understanding among existing members of how their individual roles affect the firm’s unique client experience.

Developing accountability charts for your firm provides you with five benefits.

1. You start to focus on positions, not people. Relying on “Jack” or “Jill” to accomplish specific tasks in the day-to-day may make sense, but what happens if that person leaves the firm? Or if they get promoted? Accountability charts allow you to analyze a role and identify what it needs to accomplish to move the needle forward for the organization. It helps you to create scalable processes and a consistent client experience.

2. Career paths become clearer. Accountability charts help to clarify career paths by providing a visual representation of the chain of command and the responsibilities associated with each role within a firm. This allows team members to understand what they need to achieve in order to advance within the organization and to identify areas for personal and professional growth. 

3. Team morale improves. Every team member can see that their efforts matter. Non-advisors, because they work behind the scenes, may feel less valuable than others—and advisors may perpetuate that feeling unknowingly. Accountability charts help everyone to see how their work is interconnected, so it builds a solid culture and team approach.

4. Hiring is easier. Whether someone leaves the firm or you promote an employee, you have a ready-made list of responsibilities you’re hiring for. You don’t start from scratch in creating a job ad or description. 

5. You can focus your efforts where you shine. Advisors can be excellent practitioners, and it’s perfectly acceptable for them to take on other responsibilities in addition to their practitioner role within the business. If there are many more responsibilities that need to be handled, accountability charts help to delegate these responsibilities to your team so you can focus on what you do best! 

Before You Start

Ready to dive into creating your own accountability charts? First, it’s wise to take a step back and think at a high level.

Ask yourself: What are your firm’s goals?

You may be looking to create accountability charts to:

• Clearly define roles
• Check to see if you are over- or understaffed
• Change responsibilities
• Redefine the roles of the owner or partner of the firm
• Start outsourcing a component of the business

Once you define what you’re looking to accomplish with your accountability charts, you can start to evaluate your current team roles and their corresponding responsibilities. Start with a survey of all existing team members. This can help you to identify gaps and highlight skills you may not have been aware were necessary for a specific role. Questions in your survey might include

• What does your typical workday look like?
• How are tasks usually delegated to you?
• Are there communication or operational areas you’d like to see improved?
• How do you feel about and/or use the firm’s systems and technology?

As you collect responses, you can go through the process of organizing your servicing team based on the tiers of service they support. For example, if you split your servicing team by different service offerings (financial planning, investment management, etc.), their roles may look different across the firm.

Building Your Client Servicing Team from the Ground Up

Remember to focus on positions, not people. In that sense, you’re truly building your servicing team from the ground up. You can place team members in their appropriate roles when you’ve completed the process.

Advice and Expertise

Your “advice and expertise” team members provide expertise on financial planning topics. These should be team members licensed to give advice—senior advisors, for example. People in these roles often also take on some leadership or team management duties. This could include overseeing plan implementation, monitoring, delegating tasks to relevant team members, etc.

It’s helpful to view the “advice and expertise” role in two buckets:

1. Behind-the-scenes work. This could be a behind-the-scenes expert, like a paraplanner who makes recommendations and prepares a client’s plan. It could also be an enrolled agent who prepares tax projections. Keep in mind that some of these behind-the-scenes roles may be a hybrid of operations and administration if you have a small firm.
2. Client-facing work. This could be a lead financial advisor, firm founder, or associate advisor who coordinates client communications and develops relationships with clients through meetings and presenting their plans.

Responsibilities might include:

• Delegating plan management
• Delegating paraplanning
• Plan review, analysis, and running scenarios before client meetings
• Implementation of a financial plan (or overseeing implementation)
• Areas of focus or specialty (for example, junior advisors who are licensed may prepare recommendations, but the lead advisor approves the plan)
• Client relationship management via email and meetings

Operations

Your operations team’s primary goal is to execute the client service calendar. Their role responsibilities may include:

• Managing execution of client service calendar
• Managing and Evaluating the tech stack 
• Focusing on new tech integrations to streamline processes
• Monitoring key performance indicators and overall firm performance
• Making recommendations on areas of improvement
• Ensuring the firm is compliant
• Managing of team members (by higher-level operations professionals)
• Training and onboarding new team members
• Spearheading hiring or growth initiatives

Administration

Your administration team focuses on the details of your client service calendar and execution. Their responsibilities might include:

• Answering client service requests
• Coordinating with other professionals or outside agencies (think: marketing, paraplanners, operations professionals, estate planning attorneys, CPAs, etc.)
• Managing the client support role and gathering appropriate data to execute an exceptional final presentation to the client (whatever that may entail)
• Handling paperwork and account management

How Do You Measure Success in Each Role?

It goes without saying that you’ll expect each person on your team to execute their job function—and execute it well—to continue to grow in your firm. But what does it look like to have a team member who is fully ready to level up and move forward in their career path?

You can use the accountability chart to hold team members accountable to their standard job functions, but you can also include “WOW” factors that each role is responsible for. These can be a way for team members to show they’re ready to take on new and exciting challenges and responsibilities within the firm.

Here are some examples.

Advice and expertise: Personalizing client experiences for this role is key. These experiences can encompass small details, such as commemorating significant milestones with your clients (such as purchasing a house or retirement), as well as more extensive personalization, such as designing a scalable communication and education plan for both team members and clients as the company expands.

Operations: Operations professionals should focus on consistency and execution of service, as well as technology, as their WOW factors. This could mean auditing the firm’s processes and tech stack for inefficiencies, researching technology integrations, and eliminating unnecessary steps through automation.

Administration: Administrators on your team should focus on presentation and follow-through as their WOW factors. This could mean organizing brand deliverables and making them accessible to team members and clients. It could also include consistently auditing the to-do list of the firm to ensure that tasks are accomplished and that clients move through the service calendar seamlessly.

What If Your Firm Has a Role That Does Double Duty?

Many firms have a small but mighty team where team members wear multiple hats. That’s okay! Roles don’t have to be siloed. You may have an advisor who also acts as the lead operations manager or an operations professional who runs the ops side of the business and also executes administrative client service work.

If this is the case, it’s important to still define each role in your firm and if one team member is doing double duty. You can even audit how many hours the team member spends on each aspect of their job role. This can help you if the team member moves on, or gets promoted, to know what to hire for (even if it’s a part-time position to fill the responsibilities they’re leaving behind).

Get Ready to Implement

Remember, accountability charts often mean shifts in job roles and how your service calendar is executed. So take your time when going through implementation. Give your team members and your legacy clients plenty of notice if changes are happening. Communicate proactively so that everyone is on the same page and is clear on who is taking on which position in the firm. It’s important that a strong facilitator spearheads this project to ensure that communication stays consistent and that both internal and external to-do tasks are executed well.

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Charesse is founder and principal consultant for Level Best, a virtual operations and process strategy consulting firm. Her firm serves as an outsourced provider, building and implementing systems to streamline and automate financial advisory firms, enabling them to run efficiently on their own. 

image credit: istock.com/cagkansayin