Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 418th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Stacey McKinnon. Stacey is the chief operating officer of Morton Wealth, an RIA based in Calabasas, California, that oversees approximately $3 billion in assets under management for 1,300 client households.
What’s unique about Stacey, though, is how she has implemented a leadership training program for Morton Wealth to ensure that the firm’s middle managers (many of whom were promoted from “do-er” positions into roles where they have to now manage other do-ers) feel empowered and have the communication and management skills to effectively lead a growing advisory firm team that has expanded from 30 to 60 employees during the past 4 years (far beyond the number of team members that the founders and senior leadership alone could ever manage themselves).
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Stacey identified 3 problematic management avatars (the ‘nice manager’, the ‘technical manager’, and the ‘narcissistic manager’) that can result from promoting working-level employees to managerial roles without giving them the requisite training first, how Stacey had Morton Wealth’s leadership team and managers take the online Admired Leadership Program (which provides training on how to give feedback, how to speak to team members, and what behaviors you have to espouse to actually be seen and respected as an admired leader), and how Stacey implemented lessons from the book “Brave New Work” to promote what she refers to as “continuous participatory change” in her firm by encouraging employees to be active participants in making change happen (rather than being passive recipients of the change happening in the firm around them).
We also talk about how Stacey and other firm leaders handled the growing pains of adapting to remote and then hybrid work environments over the past several years (while growing to a 60-person team) and why they eventually decided to have everyone return to the office (with some flexibility during the week) despite this decision leading to 20% of their staff turning over in just 2 months after the announcement was made, how Stacey and Morton Wealth made the most of this transition by reevaluating its client meeting cadence (moving from a more regimented schedule to a more flexible approach that actually increased the number of client touchpoints in lieu of holding as many meetings), and how Stacey uses a management software tool called WorkBoard to set and track Objectives and Key Results for herself, teams within the organization, and for individual employees, setting goals for where each unit wants to be in 6 months.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Stacey shares why she blocks off 1 hour each morning to focus on her own work because she knows she will have to handle an abundance of team work once she gets to the office, how Stacey has learned leadership lessons from U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team coach Emma Hayes (including the importance of leaders showing team members that they care about them personally, so that any feedback comes from a place of support, even and especially when then challenging them with difficult feedback about how they can step up and do more), and why Stacey views her ultimate success as a leader as empowering her team and allowing them to grow in their own success (to the point where the company could continue to function well without her presence).
So, whether you’re interested in learning about implementing an advisory firm leadership training program, how to diagnose potentially problematic behaviors of new leaders, or how to leverage technology to efficiently track key metrics, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Stacey McKinnon.
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