Lesson 1 | Who Runs the Meeting? (1:58 minutes)
Who Runs the Meeting?
Okay, now we are at the fifth of our five best practices for collaboration, and that is the client recommendation meeting. The first thing you might ask is, who's going to run this meeting on our core team? Who's going to run it? I think the answer to that is, whoever initiated the collaboration process, and that can be you and probably is you. I would think of yourself in the role of running this meeting, except I might want to think about a different term than running the meeting. For example, I think it might be better to think of yourself as facilitating the meeting or moderating the meeting. You're not really going to run the meeting. You want all the other advisors to have an equal part based upon their area of expertise in this meeting. This is much more of a peer meeting than a leader running the meeting.
You want to let each advisor share topics in the area of their expertise. For example, the lawyer may share about certain trust issues. The insurance advisor may share about insurance issues. The tax advisor, the accountant, may share about certain tax aspects of some of these strategies. Some strategy may require the participation of multiple advisors to get the point across. You want to moderate that and bring the other advisors in, at the appropriate times. Now of course you need to meet in advance with your collaborative team to get on the same page as to how this is going to go. By now, you have developed some kind of client deliverable. You're going to give a report to the client in this meeting and hopefully you've all worked together to create that report as a team. You'll have that report in front of you and you can use that as a guide to figure out who's going to talk on which pages throughout that report. The ultimate goal is just help the client make decisions with confidence.