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In this Swift Chat conversation, Marie Swift speaks with Steve Atkinson, Speaker, Leadership Coach, and Growth Expert with Admired Leadership. The conversation delves into the realm of leadership and its practical applications in the financial advisory world. Steve shares insights and anecdotes that shed light on what it means to be an effective leader. He emphasizes the idea that leadership is not merely a title or a position but rather a set of behaviors and choices that anyone can adopt.
Throughout the discussion, Steve highlights the importance of credibility, feedback, and the creation of a team of leaders. He illustrates how admired leaders, identified through years of study, excel not only in achieving results but also in fostering strong relationships and followership. By focusing on character, competence, and the ability to give impactful feedback, advisors can enhance their leadership skills and ultimately make a positive impact on their clients and teams.
Learn more at https://www.AdmiredLeadership.com Transcript of the Conversation
Marie Swift: Hey, everybody, and welcome back to another great Swift Chat. I'm really excited today, genuinely excited, because I have an old friend, Steve Atkinson here. Steve and I go way back. Some of you may already know him because he's so well known in the advisor community. Steve, you've done such great work over, like, 25 or 30 years, helping advisors grow their businesses, serve their clients better and you've had a long and illustrious history, so I think it would be better from you. Tell us how we know each other and how you got started. Just give us your backstory. Steve Atkinson: Happy to Marie, great to be here, and thanks for that nice intro. I'll walk it back a little bit and say I've been trying to make an impact over the years. I guess the answer is in the eye of the beholder and the advisors that I've working with. To your point, I believe it's 27 years going on now. I was trying to think back to how long we've known each other. It's got to be close to 14, maybe 15 years now. Back when I was at Loring Ward and you used to come to our conferences. There are a few things that happen in life that you'll never forget, and you and I are kind of linked that way. I don't know if you remember, I shared at one of our national conferences that I had just gotten bitten by a rattlesnake a couple of days prior. You and your team followed up and sent me a nice little, I don't know if it's a gag gift or something to make it memorable, and I still have that, actually, to this day. So, when you get bit by a rattlesnake, you don't forget those things. You've been linked to me to that moment because it just crystallized it. Unfortunately, that was a rough couple of days during that time period. But, going back to the lowering ward days from a business standpoint, I started, actually, prior to Loring Ward with a firm in 1996 by the name of Cl's investments. That firm today is Orion, when I started in 1996, it was a little tamp out of Omaha, Nebraska. Turnkey asset management provider for advisors, helped a lot of advisors in the early days, had that conversation with their clients about moving from commission to fee-based and how it's a better overall relationship for clients, better business model, etcetera, and that little tamp out of Omaha grew into what is now Orion, $4 trillion under administration. I mean, it's a heck of a success story, but I left there in 2005 and ended up joining Loring Ward in 2005 and was there until last September. Along that journey, Laurie Ward merged with Buckingham Strategic Partners. So to your point, I've been blessed to work with and be in the offices or in client seminars for advisors well over, I mean, thousands of advisors I've worked with, and I've always had this passion to help make the advisors better with their clients. A lot of people focus on the products and the processes. I learned early on, you can have that, but if you're not great at relationships, you're not doing the right things to actually engage the actual people. Because I do believe we're in the people business, not the money business, not the tech business. We are in the people business. So I've just been obsessed with trying to find ways that universally help anybody who wants to adopt behaviors and ways to engage people better. Swift: Yeah, you've been steeped in this, just observing advisors and providing solutions and support. Anything that stands out about the journey, something memorable about a conference or a tool or just thinking about what's been helpful over the years and how we've come to this point. It really is a profession now where it used to be an industry, right? Atkinson: Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Well, there's probably a handful of key moments over the years that stand out, but maybe I'll start big picture and something that struck me early on was just how many different investment solutions are out there. I mean, there are tens of thousands of ETF's or mutual funds or models, etcetera. I remember early on, I thought you just had to find the right one that worked and then you realized a lot of them kind of work over time, and a lot of them don't look like they work in a short period of time. The key thing I found, is you just have to have an investment philosophy as an advisor, because if you don't have an investment philosophy and you're always looking for something different, always changing strategies, it just takes your eye off the ultimate game, and that is helping the client make better decisions and plan for the unexpected. Keeping up to date on all the regulation changes that ultimately drive things that you can actually quantify value add for the clients, whereas picking investments, you don't know if you make a change today in the next year is going to be a better option than what you left. You just don't know because you're trying to pick the future in that example. That's one big one. I think the other thing that really stood out to me was, and again, this may not be a popular take, but either hosting conferences, which I planned a lot of conferences over the years, and I attended a lot of industry conferences, you tend to see a lot of the same speakers go to these conferences. You even see the conferences go to the same locations. It's almost like everyone's got an inner circle of, all right, use this hotel, we'll get a group discount. Use this speaker, we'll get a group discount, and a lot of these speakers that you go to are big names, you know, we all could rattle off names, but I'll protect the innocent here, but they go to all these conferences and people get fired up. As I would follow up with advisors afterward, very few actionable ideas. It's a lot of motivation, and inspiration, but they really couldn't do anything with it and as I started looking at things, I got more and more skeptical of high-profile names, people who were focused more on making a brand out of themselves to speak rather than finding content that actually could be used and implemented. Part of it was, you see a lot of just guru speakers, like I was the big advisor and I'm going to teach you how to do it. What we always overlook is all of the unique circumstances that happened in that person's city market, if they had a niche market, etcetera. There are a lot of things that you cannot replicate and people get enthralled with these big ideas and successful people. But I just started telling people, don't focus on the person. It's easy to get consumed in the excitement and the glamour of the person, but instead, focus on what they do and can you take anything away that you can do today based on what they do? You change your lens to that, and all of a sudden ideas get really small. You don't get a whole lot. I get sick and tired of seeing people go to conferences, get fired up, and then get home and back to the practice, and they couldn't do anything. I mean, the reality is, if these speakers that hit all the circuits and all the conferences had good content, they wouldn't need to speak again because people would actually implement and see better results. Swift: You know, it's funny that you say this, because I was just on the phone with one of my big RA clients, and he's a next-gen advisor. He's not yet 40. He's one of the fastest-growing RIAs, if not the fastest-growing RIA in the country, and he just been to, I will not name it a conference. He said the same thing to me, he said, Marie, I'm not going to keep going to these conferences because what got us to this place in the profession the past 25 years is not going to move us forward and why are they having these same speakers? Kind of like has beens. That's not his word, but you know what I'm saying, and that's what you're saying, too, He challenged me to help conference planners to think that through better. So, if any conference planners are listening to this today, you could call me and pick my brain. Steve, I imagine you'd be an asset to them as well. Atkinson: Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned, I plan a lot of conferences, and I always try to find under-the-radar people that didn't have high profiles, didn't have what I call a lot of vanity, but just had great messages. One that really jumps out at me was, and this person's no longer with us, but there was a Texas Longhorn baseball coach by the name of Augie Garrido, one of the best college baseball coaches in history. I had him speak at an event, and I took some flak for it initially, and people were like, why do we have a sports person speaking at our conference? I don't do sports, I'm not into sports and you're putting a sports person up there. I just said, give me the feedback after you hear him. Auggie's message was that he was not in the baseball business. He was actually in the business of creating young men. His whole story was how he focused on the individuals, and that ultimately led to better people, and better players, and they won a handful of national championships in the collegiate game to do so. Some of those same advisors that gave me flak early on afterward said, and by the way, Augie got a standing ovation after his talk, but that this one advisor that really gave me some flak said, I misjudged this person. It wasn't a sports story. It was actually a human being story and I'm glad you had him. Swift: I remember so many great speakers, particularly at those Loring Ward conferences, I think those were the national education conferences in Monterey. I was privileged to go there with my then partner Leslie Swid, who's now retired, and I was always wowed by the speakers and just the fresh insights. A couple that I remember now that we're kind of thinking to the way back is you had a Berkeley professor, and I don't know if you remember him, but he was talking about behavioral finance, and this was before it was on everybody's tip of their tongues. Right? Do you remember that one? Atkinson: It might have been Stanford. Swift: Stanford, okay. Atkinson: His name is dropping me, but I do remember that. He talked a lot about stress, I believe in behavioral finance and stress. We obviously had Mayor Stapman a lot, who is from Santa Clara. I'm trying to think if there was a Berkeley one, but the one that jumps out right away that I think you're referring to from the NEC was someone from Stanford. Swift: I also remember, I forget her name, but is it Allen Funt's daughter? She talked about creating white space and instead of filling up every moment of your life as an executive or a leader, how you can use those moments in the shopping line or on the airplane instead of looking at your phone to create white space where you can actually be and think and just breathe. Atkinson: Yeah. Juliet Funt. Allen Funt's daughter. But you're right, she had a great message back then, and now you see, white space language used a lot, that term. But I think we had Juliet, it was probably 2009 or 2010 and that really wasn't a household term with white space. But you're right, without that white space of having nothing to do, you don't have that room to create creativity and think outside the box. Great memory. Swift: Yeah. One more that I can't resist saying, because I think Lauren Ward wrote a book or a paper on this. It was a panel discussion. I think his name is Michael Maslansky, and you guys helped him bring in a panel of everyday consumers, and they were pretty high net worth, but they said with those little centers, dial boxes, and some advisors were brave enough in the room to stand up and say what their elevator pitch was and then they got the sentiment dial. We can see on the screen in real-time what these consumers were thinking about hearing the words fiduciary or fee only. Do you remember that one? Atkinson: Oh, again, that's one of those pivotal moments in my career where the light bulb went on. So at the time, the name of that company was Lunson Maslansky. So Frank Lunson and Mike Maslansky. You see them during election cycles, they do this all the time with people in the dials, and they're listening to the message of a candidate. In this case, as you pointed out, it's the clients collectively asking the question, for example, what do you charge, and then we had three or four different advisors who were taught by different coaches, and this goes back to that guru thing, in addition to the client one. I'm not sure if you were there, but we did another one that was all COIs. We had attorneys, CPAs, the typical people that an advisor should be collaborating with on behalf of the client. But in both situations, whether it's clients or COIs, what was amazing, and this is the big light bulb, was some of the biggest coaching names, guru coaches in our space. Their disciples performed the worst. Their messages did not go over well with the COIs and the clients. Yet those advisors that took more of a client first approach used more plain-spoken language, they resonated off the charts with both panels. That was a moment where I realized we got to look at somewhere other than the top producers historically in the industry for the ideas. Swift: Yeah, yeah. It's so interesting to study. The evolution of the industry has now become more of a financial planning financial advisor profession. Bob Veras and I talk about this quite a bit, and Bob is an advocate for that. This has become a profession much like being a CPA or a doctor and there are credentials now, and there are career paths. So it's not really advisors building a practice so much as a business, at least in my world, where we work with independent advisors who are business owners. Atkinson: Yeah, you know, you say that, and it's like, God, I hope so. We're talking about people's lives and their retirements and their families and the impact they want to make. I mean, this should not be a practice. Gone should be the days of representing a company's products and selling that story to clients. We should be selling the story of the clients to all the solutions that can help build that story for the client and those solutions, obviously are the products. Flip it upside down on its head. Swift: There's been some healthy conversations and some great progress. We have more to go. There's a lot of focus on DEIB, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, and next-gen and building businesses that will last through generations for financial advisory firms and so many good-hearted people and enterprises who are working to help those independent advisors and lift them up. You know, one of the things that I'm particularly interested in now at this point in my career, and you are too, is leadership. On your LinkedIn page, you have a banner and it's a beautiful image and it says leadership is what you do. Let's talk about leadership, because some people, I think, might be thinking, yeah, leadership schmeidership, right, but what is a leader? How do we distinguish ourselves as leaders? Maybe we could also talk about the difference between a leader and a thought leader. Atkinson: Yeah, so referring to Admired Leadership, which I'm kind of under their umbrella working as a consultant and a speaker with various companies and advisors. Our viewpoint is leadership, to your point, is what you do. It's not status, it's not a position, and I think there’s a lot of historical research in the area of leadership is psychologically based. We've all probably taken some sort of profile test that tells us this is who you are. We've all done that, there's plenty of psychological tests out there. Then you read your profile and you're like, oh, that's why I don't do those things. That's fine because that's just who I am. Well, Admired Leadership is a body of work that spans over 35 years asking a different question and that is, what if leadership isn't ingrained in this and it's not a position, it's not a status, it's not psychological, but instead it's something you can choose to do. So, it's asking a question of, if you were to identify what an admired leader is like, what are they doing differently than you and I? When you ask that question you learn behaviors, and you see things and you figure out things. In those situations, they choose to do this. This is who they choose to be, which changes the paradigm of taking a psychological test where your answer is, well, I'm just not going to be charismatic because that's not who I am. You can now say, you know what, this situation calls for charisma and I'm going to choose to be more charismatic right now to help the person or to better the situation for those around me. We all have a choice and so our viewpoint is leadership is not, again, it's not a status, it's not a position, it's what you do. One of the simplest examples I'll share with you, I live on a ski resort in Colorado so I get out skiing quite a bit and a couple of weeks ago, I'm going down a ski run and there was a 60-something-year-old person who caughes an edge, falls down, pole goes, skis go. This person slides 20, 30, 40 yards and I'm a little distance away but right away I go to stop and help this person, pick up their skis and poles, but before I could get there, a twelve or a 13-year-old girl does it instead, picks up the polls, ask the person if they're okay, and they gather themselves on their way. In that moment, that twelve or a 13-year-old chose to lead. She had no status, no position. She was 40 years the junior of this person, but she chose to make that situation better for the person who needed the support. We all can do that every day in our lives. There are tons of opportunities where you can see a situation and you can make a decision. I want to choose to lead here because leadership in our viewpoint is helping people get better or situations get better. Swift: It's so fascinating. You know, I remember a time when I was on the speaker circuit with Marian Asnes, who was then the Editor-in-Chief of Financial Planning magazine. We talked a lot about this thing called the three L's, looks language, and leadership, and the leadership part of it is the manifestation of what you do in the world. It's not just how you look or what you say, that language. All of it is important, but it's that gravitas, that charisma, and I think it's an intentional choice to do that, to show up as your best self every day. That takes leadership. Atkinson: Yeah, and to make people better. When you take that lens and you think of the profession of being an advisor and you're in the people business, you have tons of opportunities to make people better or their situations better, and again, our body of work over 35 years has been studying what we call admired leaders. There are about 2000 admired leaders that have been identified. If I could real quickly define what that means. Typically, when we think of leaders, we put them in two camps, results-based leaders. As you think about a results-based leader, I'm sure a handful of people come to mind. These are people who are so fixated on the outcome, and they traditionally get results, whether it's different industries, different companies, or different market cycles, they just get results. There are a lot of sports leaders you can think of that they're fixated on the results. They always win. They have championship teams. But it's also the same case in the business world. The other type of leader we typically think of is those that we say have followership. People want to work with them, people want to follow them, people want to be around them. They don't typically get high results, but they have great followership. Results-based leaders, a lot of the time, the people who work with them really don't care for them, because they're so fixated on the outcome of the goal. They don't have great people skills. On the flip side, followership-based leaders are so fixated on the people, culture, and community that they typically get subpar results. Every now and then, you find results-based leaders who also have followership, huge followership, and we call those admired leaders. Again, there's about 2000 we've identified over 35, 37 years of studying and then trying to identify them and so they're rare, but when you do identify them and you start to see what they do differently, and then you start developing patterns like, oh my gosh, all of these people that have results based and followership give feedback this way, right? Now we've got close to 500 behaviors that we've identified and when I was at Loring Ward, I actually got exposed to this firm. We became clients of this firm to learn what admired leaders do, and can we teach some of these things to advisors to make them better with their clients and their situations? We started this retreat called the Admired Advisor Retreat, and 15 advisors came a year. Marie, I'm not making any of this up. I can tell you, after the first one we did, went around the room after three days. These were three-day retreats, no PowerPoints, no handouts, just a blank notebook. What you wrote down is what you took away. At the end of it, we asked the participants in the first one and said, so what did you think, because it's hard to explain what it is upfront, and it gets to this one advisor, he's a tough cookie. He doesn't give praise, doesn't give good comments well, it's got to be really good. I was kind of bracing like we're going to get hammered and when it got to him, he said, yeah, here's what I want you to do. Don't do any more of these events. We’re like, oh boy why, and he goes, I feel like I finally have an edge. I don't want anybody else to know this body of work. When we heard things like that and we continue to hear this over and over again, for example, when I decided to align with Admired Leadership to kind of launch my consulting and coaching and speaking endeavor here, I had a lot of previous advisors that I used to work with that I used this Admired Leadership content in study groups, reached out to me and said, I want to thank you for introducing me to this. I wish I knew this stuff 25 or 30 years ago. Again, this is research that you can actually apply and make your own habits day in and day out, which will better the people around you or the situations that you find yourselves in. Swift: That's so interesting. I'm just thinking about some tips that you might have, some practical tips or insights for our audience today that would help them hone their skills and abilities as leaders. Atkinson: Yeah, I'm not going to give any real content away here, I'm going to keep this big picture because again, we got a whole business around helping people do these things and what we found is when you just mention it people go, that's great, but they don't take action. So, if any of this resonates, I'd suggest reaching out and having a conversation with myself or one of my colleagues over here at Admired Leadership. But I'll leave you with three things as you think about, leadership is what you do. From an advisor standpoint, I think three things that you've got to really nail and work on, the first one is credibility, you have to think about your credibility. This isn't a knock on saying you're not credible or not, but if you think of credibility going all the way back to Aristotle, it is made up of character and competence. Are you demonstrating through your actions day in and day out, strong character and strong competence? There are ways to do that. Some ways admired leaders do that day in and day out and impact those around them to a higher magnitude than maybe a lot of the stuff we do day to day that we already know about. The second one is in the area of feedback. Every advisor gives their clients feedback. You give your staff feedback. You’re giving your clients counsel or advice, that's just what we do. I can tell you that there are ways that we violate this over and over again and the admired leaders handle feedback and give advice and counsel in a way that has a greater impact on those around them, and gets them to take action. So, credibility, feedback, and the third one I'll leave you with is this idea of how can you create a team of leaders. When you think of the word team, you're probably thinking of staff. I think advisors need to think of their team in a broader sense, and that is that it would include staff, of course, but I think your clients are on your team, I think your COIs are on your team, and how can you form a team of leaders, including all those people that impact your company and drive the success of what it's going to do long term to help those people that you serve. So, thinking about your credibility and how you demonstrate that, how you give feedback, and how you think about building a team of leaders from a broader sense, I think are three critical things that advisors should be thinking about today from a business standpoint. Swift: For listeners or viewers who are interested in learning more, they would go to your website or your LinkedIn? Tell us how to find you. Atkinson: Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, Steven Atkinson, or you can go to AdmiredLeadership.com and there's a team profile in there. I'm in there and you just find Steve Atkinson, but that's the easiest way. You can email me at [email protected]. A lot of this is just getting engaged in a conversation, whether it's one-on-one, small group, or even speaking engagements, either of the methods is a way to give you ideas and take your next step forward. I'll give one last gift to everybody, a free gift. If you do go to AdmiredLeadership.com, there is a tab called field notes, I would recommend that you sign up for field notes, if you do, you will get an email every morning, It's about a minute read that'll get you thinking differently about leadership and ways to make an impact with those around you. I think we're at a little over a thousand straight days of those field notes, and it's no cost and you'll get great insights. Start your day on a positive note every time. Swift: I love it. I'm also reading the morning notes from an advisor named Justin Castelli, they're quick reads and I love it. I'm going to add these field notes to my morning reading. I would love to come and be a part of one of your groups. I don't know if you have any open enrollments or what's going to happen, since I think you're just pretty early in starting your own consultancy, right? Atkinson: I am, but the firm has been around a while. We have an event coming up on the morning of April 3rd in Scottsdale. I don't have all the details, but it's on the website. It's no cost, couple-hour deal in the morning and we're actually talking about the concept of fanness, and that is, what does it mean to be a fan? I think all your clients would want you to be their fan, but how are you demonstrating and how many different ways are you showing your fannes for your clients? That's in Scottsdale on April 3rd. Swift: I love it. Well, we could go on and on, and I'm sure this will be the first of many great conversations, but Steve thank you so much. What a gift to have you here today. Thank you for everything you've shared. Atkinson: Thank you, Marie. 
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