Teamwork is the secret that makes common people achieve uncommon results. —Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, before a game the Philadelphia Eagles were getting ready to play, “an NFL Films camera caught Chip Kelly [head coach of the Eagles] at a moment of candor and insight. … Kelly tossed two sentences to a practice-squad player that were anything but throwaway lines. They cut to the core of his approach as head coach. ‘Culture wins football,’ he said. ‘Culture will beat scheme every day.’” [My emphasis.] The article went on, “If Kelly’s still-brief time in the NFL has done nothing else, it has shown how closely he follows that precept and how important the distinction between culture and scheme is. Kelly put it in football-specific terms, but what he said could as easily apply to the head of a corporation, or the principal of a school, or an editor overseeing a newsroom.” And, I would add, a successful financial life planning practice.

To apply Kelly’s philosophy for winning to a financial planning practice, perhaps we could substitute the word “scheme” with “systems.” Of course, I’m not suggesting that developing efficient systems is unimportant any more than the coach would ignore the schemes he creates to produce a winning football team. On the contrary, it may be crucial. However, the greatest systems imaginable will be almost useless if they are not implemented properly and in the context of the culture you have created.

In my opinion, there are several elements that go into building and maintaining a winning financial life planning team. Not surprisingly, it starts with hiring the right people. As you might expect, we have made our share of mistakes over the years. But we believe we learned from them and have developed a hiring strategy that results in people who are highly likely to adopt and thrive in the culture of our firm. With some notable exceptions, we only hire people that we have been able to observe in their roles before making a final decision. One may ask, how can we do that? If we have an opening for someone in our administrative department, we get them from a temporary/employment agency.

After describing the type of person we need, the agency sends who they believe is a good candidate. If, after observing these potential employees in a work environment, we believe they do not possess the necessary skills and/or attitudes to thrive in our environment, we simply have the agency send someone else. If that person seems like someone we would like to have on board, we continue to pay the agency for her services before putting her on the payroll. If we keep this person for 90 days, the agency waives the placement fee.

We believe this creates a win-win situation for our firm, the agency and, most important, the employee. In this manner, we have an opportunity to evaluate this person for a long period of time before making a final commitment. This has resulted in outstanding employees who share our culture and are likely to flourish in our environment. So if a “mistake” is made, we are not put in the uncomfortable position of terminating an employee. We simply ask the agency to send someone else.

Every summer, we hire one or two interns to work in our financial life planning department. Two of our key professionals (our director of investments and a competent financial planner) started as summer interns. An intern from last summer who will be graduating this year has been offered and accepted a full-time position after he graduates.

Once again, observing how these potential planners respond to real-life planning projects and how they interact with other associates as well as clients enables us to choose people who will become an integral part of our culture. Of course, we have hired other professionals who were not interns. But our selection process includes interviews with most of the key people in the firm. It is important that we are all extremely comfortable with our new hires before making final decisions. The above two systems for hiring have virtually eliminated the mistakes we used to make.

However, hiring good people will not necessarily guarantee that they will be successful. Obviously, there’s much more to ensuring that they embody your culture and are motivated to help your firm succeed. Some of these are obvious and most firms probably do them, such as providing adequate training (including cross-training), paying a reasonable salary for the work performed, recognizing and rewarding people who do exceptional work, etc.

But based on our observation, there are two other strategies that some managers ignore. One of the core values of our firm is, “Treat everyone with dignity and respect.” Anytime I am treated poorly by an employee of a firm with which I am doing business, I always assume that somewhere in that firm is a manager who does not treat his employees with dignity and respect. On the other hand, customer service representatives who are courteous, attentive and respectful probably work in an environment where employees are respected.

My wife and I recently had an experience at a restaurant where we were stopping for lunch. It took someone a fairly long time to recognize that we were there but when he saw us he approached us to show us to a table. Unfortunately, he never got to do that because the owner of the restaurant took him aside and yelled at him for being inefficient and letting customers wait too long. Of course, it was loud enough for us to hear and while this was going on these customers (us) continued to wait until the tirade was over.

We decided to leave and on the way out a waitress approached us to see if she could help. When we told her our story, she said, “Tell me about it. The turnover here is incredible and I intend to leave next week.” Perhaps it is unfair to compare restaurant owners to managers in financial planning practices. Unfortunately, we interviewed a person for an associate planner position in our firm who had recently left another planning firm in our area. We asked him why he left, and he said, “I was tired of getting yelled at.”

Also, when employees are part of the decision-making process, it will result in a strong buy-in to your culture. One way to do this is by getting anonymous feedback when possible. For example, we decided that we would revisit our core values, vision and mission statement. I suppose we could have appointed a committee of some shareholders and perhaps an employee or two to participate in this, but we all know that they will be a hierarchy and that some people’s opinions may be valued more than others’.

A way around that is by involving everyone in the firm by using a program such as the Survey Monkey. This is the way it works. To adopt our core values, we asked everyone in the firm to list what they believe should be our core values. We used the Survey Monkey, and all answers were anonymous. In this manner, every person in the firm had an equal opportunity to share their views. There was no hierarchy here. After the first round, all of the answers were shared with everyone in the firm and they were asked to write their core values (once again, anonymously) after reading everyone’s input. This was done several times until a consensus was developed and our core values (“Client interests always come first; Integrity and honesty; Stewardship; Competence and continuing education; Treating everyone with dignity and respect; Having fun”) were adopted.

As Patrick Lencioni has written, “It’s as simple as this. When people don’t unload their opinions and feel like they’ve been listened to, they won’t really get on board.” Since everyone had equal input and a consensus was developed, these values have formed the culture that everyone in our firm has adopted and lives by.

We are not coaching a football team, but we are grateful to Chip Kelly for reminding all of us how important culture is to developing a solid winning team. And as Helen Keller has written, “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

Roy Diliberto is the chairman and founder of RTD Financial Advisors Inc. in Philadelphia.