Lesson 7 | Most Trusted Advisor (Team Leader Concept) (3:08 minutes)
Most Trusted Advisor
At some point over your career you've heard the concept Most Trusted Advisor or Trusted Advisor. These terms are being thrown around across our industry, across the various disciplines all the time. In 2007 I had the honor of writing a book with my late brother, Scott Fithian, titled The Right Side of the Table: Where Do You Sit in the Minds of the Affluent?
The concept of the metaphor of the book we used as far as the conference room table, the whole fact of the matter was if you're sitting on the client's side of the table you're on the right side of the table. Early on in that work we talked about that as really being the most trusted advisor.
The thing we've come to realize about that is having a business model or even using vernacular of becoming the most trusted advisor can be a risky proposition for you, for your business, for the disciplines around you that you're trying to collaborate and work with. If you intend to be the most trusted advisor of everyone of your relationships I don't know how many relationships I want to introduce you to. I don't know how many I want to collaborate with you on.
We've come to realize that there's a new way to approach it. There's a new way to think about it, and our thinking's evolved on that. We today are more talking about this from a standpoint of a team leader. When you're taking a leadership role in the client's lives and amongst the other advisors, to drive the work together, the collaboration, the planning, to a better desired outcome and result.I had a colleague a number of years ago introduce me to the concept because I'm a big sports guy, of a sports analogy you could really use around this. He talked about the concept of being a captain. And the thing I loved so much about what he was sharing with me was if you think about the role of a captain, the captain is not only chosen by their teammates, but they're also chosen by the coaches.
If you think about that in the context of the work you're doing, what that would mean and what we'd be saying is in collaboration you are the one with the process and the knowledge and the competence around how to help us drive this and how to facilitate this successfully, where the other advisors are seeing that. They want you to be the one to take the leading role in this. They want you to be the one that's going to help make sure this gets navigated successfully.
From the other side, the client would also be saying that we want you to take this leadership role on our team. We want you to bring all of our other advisors together. As you think about as you move forward into this collaboration, think about yourself as a team leader. Think about yourself as a goal of becoming the captain of the team where everybody's appointing you into this position to drive the results forward, to create the best possible outcome for the team and especially for that client.