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When it comes to connecting with strangers in a new relationship, our minds often jump to associating them with a friend or family member who we know well (“you remind me of so-and-so!”)… something we do without even realizing it. The tendency to do this is part of our brain’s natural shortcuts to making sense of the world; if we can associate someone new as being ‘similar’ to someone we already know, it becomes easier to figure out how to interact with and relate to them. Yet while this is often helpful and poses no problems, in some cases our tendency to substitute in another existing relationship can be counterproductive, blinding us to really taking the time to understand the person in front of us, or even causing adverse reactions when it turns out the person we’re actually relating to is not like the one our brains are associating them with!  And this is especially relevant for financial advisors and their clients, where failing to really understand the person in front of us can impair the relationship between the advisor and client, and undermine the open lines of communication that are so important to ensure that the advisor is able to obtain the information needed to provide the necessary advice (and deliver it in a way that the client will actually implement it!).

Drawing from the world of therapy and mental health, this phenomenon of a patient projecting the values and characteristics of someone with whom they are very familiar onto the professional they have engaged, but don’t yet know very well, is referred to as “transference”. Similarly, the professional projecting values of someone else onto their patient is referred to as “counter-transference.”  For example, a therapist may remind a new patient of the patient’s own brother.  If the patient has had a supportive and caring relationship with their brother, they may immediately feel an unfounded trust for their new therapist, based on how the patient feels about the brother. Alternately, if a patient reminds their therapist of an intensely disliked relative with whom they are always fighting, they may experience counter-transference issues and may find it difficult to empathize with compassion toward their patient. And, like therapists and their patients, financial advisors and their clients are just as prone to engaging in transference and counter-transference behaviors during their relationship.

For instance, when difficult relationships (not with the advisor) in a client’s life remind the client of their advisor, unhealthy transference tendencies can cause the client to have trouble communicating openly with their advisor about important financial affairs, or make them unwilling to accept the advisor’s advice. Similarly, problems can arise for advisors if a client were to remind them subconsciously of a person with whom the advisor has an unhealthy relationship, such as the advisor who struggles to give hard advice to an elderly client that reminds them of their own mother. This difficulty to communicate becomes problematic, not only because it can prevent information crucial to the financial planning engagement from being shared, but can also eventually lead to feelings of frustration and burnout – for both advisor and client.

To address the situation and prevent counter-transference-based tendencies from harming relationships with clients, advisors can use various techniques to practice awareness of any counter-transference behaviors they may be impacted by. As a first step, advisors can identify any of their own personal triggers that may be impacting their client relationships. Recognizing and understanding the differences between the client and the other person being mentally associated with the client, who may be the actual cause of the advisor’s personal triggers, can be helpful for the advisor to see the client clearly as the unique individual that they are. A self-analysis tool that can be helpful for the advisor to work through counter-transference issues is the Money Script Inventory, which helps to identify subconscious beliefs about money (which can itself be a springboard for further investigation into the actual causes of those beliefs, which can often provide clues to identify counter-transference causes). Another technique is for the advisor to assess their own money history by reflecting on their own personal relationship with money and the challenges they have faced around money.

While self-analysis can be sufficient for some advisors to work through counter-transference issues, others may prefer the support and guidance of a mental health professional themselves. Therapists understand and know how to help their patients work through transference issues, and are themselves trained to work through their own counter-transference habits.

Ultimately, the key point is that advisors have access to tools that can help them recognize their own counter-transference tendencies, which can help them maintain healthy relationships with their clients, and that are key to open communication and good financial planning!

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Many advisory firms are building advisory teams with the hopes of sharing the workload and increasing client satisfaction. However, there are inherent challenges faced by teams, which consist of a group of "Many Minds" whose conversational mechanics are increasingly complicated by the growing number of participants, specifically when it comes to effective team communication. In fact, Harvard researchers studying how communication changed between two-person ‘dyad’ conversations and multi-person group conversations found that group communication is inherently more complex (and more problematic, as expected) because of two primary issues:  1) the ambiguity that arises regarding how and when to talk or listen, and 2) what to say (or not to say) when it is a person’s turn to speak.

When it comes to assessing how and when to talk and listen in a group conversation, there are three important considerations that will help an advisory team successfully communicate with clients: airtime (i.e., the time a person is given to speak during the meeting) is shared, typically unequally, among the meeting participants; taking turns to speak can be much more confusing in groups than between two people, as whose turn it is to speak when someone else is finished talking can often be very ambiguous; and back-channel feedback provides cues – both non-verbal (e.g., head nods, hand gestures, etc.) and verbal (e.g., saying 'yes', 'mmm-hmm', 'oh', etc.) – from listeners that let the speaker (and other participants) know they are being heard, but it is typically more limited in group conversations (as we may engage less like a participant and more like a staid audience).

Deciding what to say and how much information to offer to an advisory team can be an especially difficult process for a client, who must evaluate whether and how much to disclose personal and sensitive information… the specific type of information required during a financial planning meeting. The situation can be worse, too, if the client prefers working with a single advisor and is not yet comfortable sharing sensitive personal details with their entire advisory team.

Some tools that advisory teams can consider to optimize client communication and to develop trust include preparing agendas for all meetings that are sent to participants in advance with the aim to encourage thoughtful discussion by all who attend; setting clear expectations to facilitate a better balance between the client and advisory team members with respect to distributing conversation airtime; using active listening techniques that involve fully concentrating, understanding, and responding to what the person they’re talking to says; and organizing role-playing exercises for team members to practice communicating and focusing on the dynamics between participants.

Ultimately, while advisory teams are commonly faced with "Many Minds" issues that can make it difficult to communicate effectively with clients (and to keep them happy!), there are several tools (using meeting agendas proactively to spark engagement and develop rapport, setting clear expectations, active listening, and role-playing activities for advisory team members) that can help to overcome these challenges. Because despite the challenges that all teams face in working to communicate better, the benefits of working in a well-developed and well-trained team can far outweigh the drawbacks as, in the end, team members can work to keep clients happy while supporting each other in the process!

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