Matthew Esler is passionate about using technology to enhance strategy advice. But the secret sauce he emphasises with his team is effective communication. He shares his insights on the soft skills that help paraplanners engage positively with financial planners and with each other.

 Matthew founded financial advice technology firm Padua in 2014 with his sister Anne-Marie Esler CFP^® to provide financial planners with SaaS as well as paraplanning and transition management tech-enabled services. They brought together two disciplines – paraplanning advice generation and technology expertise, says Matthew, who was previously a founding executive director of Midwinter Financial Services and has been at the forefront of financial technology for more than 10 years.

Now employing some 55 paraplanners within a team of 90, Matthew has spent a lot of time considering the critical skills a successful paraplanner needs to have. And he believes soft skills are almost as necessary as technical proficiency for a paraplanner.

With this strong emphasis on soft skills, a crucial success factor for Padua when finding new team members, such as paraplanners, is how well they align with the business’s vision and core values.

“We’ve spent a lot of time on culture and really trying to embed a culture that we believe in and that we want to lead by example with,” he says.

Their employees have helped them choose four crucial values. These are:

• Accountability – owning it;
• Innovation – any change that adds value;
• Collaboration – or collab-ing as the younger team members call it; and
• Quality – striving to be better than average.

“All of those values have soft skills at the core. We have spent a lot of time working out how to get the right people and how we get the right interactions with the staff that we already have,” says Matthew.

The management team put a lot of work into embedding the values into the paraplanners and helping them develop the soft skills they need to be effective in their roles.

The focuses for Padua’s paraplanners are:

• internal and external communication
• their leadership skills,
• how well they deal with stress, and
• their ability to solve problems.

“These soft skills are important from a paraplanner’s point of view,” says Matthew.

Uncomfortable feedback

The way the team and workflows are structured requires a high level of emotional intelligence and excellent communication skills.

The potentially challenging part is that every paraplanning assignment within Padua is peer-reviewed before going through to the quality control manager and back to the client.

“It’s interesting to see the interactions that take place. Imagine having a peer critically analyse all your work. How do you deal with that feedback? What’s your relationship with that person like afterwards?”

Part of the solution is what Matthew calls organisational physics. It’s a concept adopted from US thought leader Lex Sisney, who has described four personality traits and how they interact inside an organisation. Understanding each personality trait, including your own dominant trait(s), enables you to adapt to communicate more effectively with people who are strong in each of the four categories, says Matthew.

The four personality types are:

• The Producer
• The Stabiliser
• The Innovator; and
• The Unifier.

The Padua team go through a program to help them better understand themselves and their colleagues. This enables the people who are reviewing each other’s work to have constructive and empowering conversations.

“You start developing this real understanding and knowledge about people who are very different to you. Being able to understand how your behaviour is affecting other people is extremely important.”

Matthew uses an analogy of how different people behave differently under the same circumstances, for example, getting into a rowboat.

“If you think about a Producer, he’ll get in the rowboat and just start rowing.

“A Stabiliser will get in the rowboat and say, ‘Okay, so we’re going to which location?’ And they’ll have a plan for where they’re going, how much water they’re taking, what food and supplies they should bring, what the prevailing wind and weather conditions are.

“The Innovator gets there and goes, ‘Are you serious? We’re rowing? I think there’s an engine down at the marina. I’ll be back in five minutes.’

“The Unifier gets to the boat and goes, ‘I’ve got to row by myself? Can’t I bring my friends?’

“It’s really classic when you think about it like that. You can see those sorts of personalities in most people.”

The firm does a personality test on every new staff member. Matthew enjoys seeing them engaging and understanding what personality type they are, and then how to adjust their communication style according to the personality type of the other person.

Challenging dance

One of the most significant issues paraplanners have with their financial planner clients is what Matthew describes as a “back and forth dance”.

He says it’s challenging to get all the required input from the financial planner in the first instance.

“The first thing that we do is communicate back to the financial planner what they have just verbalised to us. It’s called a confirmation of strategy.”

The value of this is that it shows the financial planner that they have been heard and allows them to fill in any gaps.

Matthew says verbal and written communication are equally important. It includes listening, empathising, and precisely understanding what the financial planner is trying to do for a particular client.

A challenge for the paraplanner is that they need to be able to critically analyse what the financial planner is looking for. But they also need the skill to challenge their hypothesis and investment approach in a supportive and constructive way.

“The skill in being able to listen, empathise and understand exactly what the financial planner is trying to do for a particular client. There’s a lot of empathy going on there. You need to also be able to critically analyse exactly what the financial planner is looking for, and also have that skill to be able to challenge the financial planner, being able to say: ‘Have you thought about doing it this way or have you thought about doing it that way?’

“That’s an interesting communication skill in the sense that you’re almost negotiating or persuading the financial planner in certain instances. That verbal part of the engagement’s really important,” says Matthew.

But in the end, it comes down to culture, says Matthew.

“It’s really funny because I used to think that the culture stuff was just all a bit of rah-rah,” says Matthew. That was until he saw the impact of a healthy culture. Now he knows that a positive culture can completely change an organisation’s attitude, mood and productivity.

Work ethic

Work ethic is another crucial quality Matthew sees as a soft skill, but not in an obvious way.

He asks every new employee to share their definition of work ethic and receives a fantastic variety of answers. “Funnily enough, the best answer is it’s a balance. It’s working hard and ensuring that I’m having a bit of time off to ensure that I can recharge and regenerate. Encouraging that in the workspace is so important. Quite often, financial planners say: ‘I need this, and I need this yesterday’.”

Often the demand isn’t realistic, and paraplanners need the soft skills to negotiate and ensure the financial planner understands what’s reasonable from a work-quality point of view.

Another Padua innovation is a star system that financial planners and paraplanners use to rate each other.

At first, the financial planners’ ratings were at the extreme ends of the spectrum – with everyone either a hero or zero. But this all-or-nothing feedback wasn’t very helpful for the paraplanners, so management flipped the rating system around and enabled the paraplanners to start scoring the financial planners as well.

“It was phenomenal how different the financial planners’ behaviour became,” says Matthew. The typical scores became three-and-a-half or four, and the financial planners started taking the time to explain to the paraplanners why they didn’t achieve a five.

“The star system was one of the smartest yet simplest things we’ve done,” says Matthew.

Words of advice

Matthew ends off with a few words of advice for paraplanners. Technical capability and knowledge are crucial. But alongside them come soft skills. The first is communication, both verbal and written.

He encourages people to do courses and whatever else they can do to improve their written and verbal communication. “That is critical.”

Then there’s engagement. “Really understand why people behave the way they do. Understand how your behaviour is affecting other people. That’s the coup de grâce.”

And soft skills are the great enabler. Those personality traits that give us the power to communicate effectively, solve problems cooperatively and work as a team.