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.

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