Soul
Like the best drummers in the best bands, bring soul to your client relationships. Master the soft skills, the people skills, rather than being a human calculator, asset gatherer or portfolio manager, jobs easily programmed and done by machines.
Empathy And Emotional Connection
By definition, a machine cannot make a human emotional connection. Unfortunately, most advisors aren’t very skilled at it either. The good news is that for you, a human, this is a choice and a learnable skill. You can learn to engage with empathy.
You know all that “touchy-feely” crap you’ve been avoiding learning for years? Well, it’s time to get over it, learn how to do it and enjoy it. It is your competitive advantage.
You don’t have to be a therapist, but if you’re not connecting emotionally and visibly demonstrating empathy, why wouldn’t people just work with a machine instead?
So ask better questions, become a great listener, connect emotionally and empathize.
Accountability
Right now, machines very effectively inform, educate, strategize, guide people though the financial planning process, build portfolios, assess risk and even give advice.
But it’s still up to humans to implement. And that’s where we humans are weak. Most of us lack the self-discipline and emotional fortitude to consistently take action. No action. No results. Period.
Like a machine replacing a Navy SEAL, it’s hard to imagine a machine advisor that holds people accountable to do what needs to be done and talks them out of doing what shouldn’t be done. That’s a perfect, and very valuable, job for a human.
Accountability is a learnable skill.
Leadership
It’s reasonable to imagine that one of the last things we humans will be willing to do is follow a machine. We can envision armies of machine troops, but we see them being led by human generals and commanders, right?
There are three forms of leadership to master to maintain a competitive advantage over machines and human financial advisors.
Lead yourself to do the things that need to be done whether you feel like it or not. We all get frustrated when our technology crashes, but the hard truth is that machines crash much less than humans. It may be a while before machines can be programmed to emulate soul, empathy and accountability, but they are already programmed to have a great work ethic. They don’t sleep, eat or need rest.
They don’t hit the snooze button in the morning, they don’t have relationship problems or get emergency calls from their kids’ teachers in the middle of the day. Some machines make hundreds of calls per day and are programmed to sound very human. That telemarketer you were talking to the other night was probably an artificial intelligence programmed to sound like your grandmother and engage you in conversation. Don’t hang up so quickly next time and see if you can figure out if you’re talking to a human or a machine.
Self-discipline is really self-leadership.
Lead your team and harness your resources, both human and machine. Be more effective with your planning software, CRM, account aggregation, performance reporting, coordinating with other subject-matter experts, etc. Everyone has the same tools, but only a small percentage of advisors maximize their effectiveness.
Lead your clients to prioritize and take action. Accountability is an element of leadership. Lead with soul, empathy and accountability to help people achieve their goals for the reasons that are important to them.
No matter how good the machines get, a caring human with great people skills combined with powerful machines with incredible technical skills will be the winning combination. The machine can be programmed to do the technical work, but it’s unlikely the machine will ever genuinely care whether the human clients get out of debt, accumulate adequate emergency reserves, own the right amount of all types of insurance to protect against the inherent risks of life, save and invest enough to achieve their goals, reduce their taxes, and complete their legal docs and estate planning.
Even if technology improves to the point where machines can offer financial advice, there is a big difference between being programmed to emulate compassion and actually being compassionate. The losers will be the technician advisors who try to compete with the machines on their turf instead of further developing a competitive advantage with their people skills.
The beauty of becoming one of the best advisors in the business is that you won’t be outrun by the machines and you’ll easily outrun the other advisors.
To learn more about how Bill and his team can help you be a more direct and candid communicator who helps clients make better decisions, schedule your Business Accelerator Meeting today. 858-558-3200/www.billbachrach.com.