Supernova Advisor Teams

CHAPTER 3Team Effectiveness

“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.”

—Andrew Carnegie

Effective teams operate like a business and incorporate small business owner–like processes.

Some teams may manage up to $500 million or more in assets, and some teams we've worked with have had several billion dollars in assets under management and generated millions of dollars in revenues. For all intents and purposes, they can be characterized as small businesses. If you were running a small business and you wanted to take it to another level, then doing a SWOT analysis (detailed in the SWOT Analysis section; in Figure 3.1 we provide a template for this purpose) makes a lot of sense. It's all a part of creating your team‐based business plan. Sometimes a team comes together with assemblies of people, meaning they come together to form a team, but they still operate independently as individual advisors and they don't get the maximum leverage that we talked about in Chapter 2, “Distinct Types of Teams.” They are moving in many different directions without alignment and a cohesive strategy. These teams seem to struggle with growth initiatives, client acquisition, their service models, and taking a holistic view of a client's needs. The client experience becomes just a commodity experience, and the team doesn't differentiate ...