In her roles of Chartered Financial Planner, founder of Moran Wealth Management, and partner of St James’s Place, Nicola Crosbie changes the lives of her clients - and of others in the advising industry - every week.
Here, she shares how crucial Emotional Intelligence (or EQ) is helpful to separate good financial advisers from the rest, and the soft skills involved every day in helping both her clients and her team navigate tough times.
There are a few lingering stereotypes about people who work in financial advice: that we are number crunchers at heart, only good at hard skills like investing, simultaneously over cautious and overly pushy, and even condescending and elitist.
While I do agree we are great with numbers, these hard skills always need to be tempered with soft skills to ensure that our clients receive the best possible experience and outcome. This is especially true when navigating difficult circumstances, such as the death of a loved one, illness or divorce.
In my experience, most successful financial advisers know and draw satisfaction from utilising their emotional intelligence, or their “EQ,” to help their clients, colleagues and community. Counterpart to IQ, EQ should never be underrated for a career in financial advice. These skills will help create a large book of client business and a track record of performance and good service.
As a financial adviser, you need to have the skills to manage yourself and your team, to drive the best results for your clients. You can categorise EQ into four key buckets—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management—which are all as critical as hard skills.
The best financial advisers are self-aware
It’s important for financial advisers to remain optimistic, confident and reassuring in client meetings. Self-awareness helps financial advisers give the best advice to their clients. Additionally, successful financial advisers prioritise clients during meetings. We need to mask our own feelings and moods to ensure that the client feels at the centre of everything, and that they are our focus.
It’s important you’re aware of your body language and tone of voice when speaking to colleagues and clients, and you’re conscious of your own emotional responses and energy levels during your work.
Financial planning & self-management
In turn, having strong self-awareness allows you to have good self-management.
There are days which can be emotionally draining and challenging when you’re helping clients who are going through tough times, like ill-health or loss, and you must learn to decompress, essentially helping yourself to help them, so that you can put energy into meaningful financial planning strategies.
This is when hobbies, family-time and self-care outside of work play their part. It’s when we feel drained that we lose motivation and the drive to achieve excellence for ourselves and our clients (this is known as achievement orientation). It's crucial for a financial adviser to stay curious about their clients.
Self-management is not only about managing your emotions, but also your time. Continually learning and adapting to new information and industry developments is crucial. There are lots of different kinds of tasks involved in financial advice—meetings, admin, networking—having a structured plan is essential to manage these tasks, achieve goals and develop the best financial plans you can.
Techniques that help me personally are keeping Monday and Friday meeting-free. Mondays allow me to focus on the week ahead, and Fridays allow me to reflect and assess the team’s progress across the previous week. Both are motivating activities that are positive for my mental health—thinking about the short-term and long-term goals of the company.
Another tool that helps me is flexible working. For example, I recently worked from a friend’s house in Cheltenham, and I enjoyed the peace and quiet of being away from the office and home. It allowed me to tick off some longstanding admin tasks, which I’d had to push pause on while focusing on creating meaningful financial planning meetings for my clients.
I generally feel a great deal of satisfaction and adrenalin when I complete important tasks for clients, and through self-management I can hold onto these positive feelings. This makes it easier to retain emotional self-control, maintain a positive outlook, and give my best to my clients and their financial goals.
Successful financial advisers are socially aware
In a broad sense, social awareness means having an awareness and an understanding of the world around us. This can be from taking note of people’s nonverbal cues or understanding the societal barriers that certain groups face when making a financial plan or seeking financial advice.
Financial planning and wealth management are not areas that a lot of people feel confident in — they need the right financial adviser who can confidently convey expertise in a way that doesn’t overwhelm, and that helps them in their individual situation.
Empathy, especially with clients who are experiencing tough times, is a crucial skill for a financial adviser. Having social awareness helps financial advisers understand their clients' financial planning needs, ensuring they can provide tailored investment advice that truly benefits the individual.
For example, I volunteer for the Help For Heroes’ Recovery College, to provide financial education to the forces. Both of my uncles, and ex-husband, were part of the forces and through knowing them it became apparent to me that life and money skills are lacking in this group.
Our aim is to demystify the financial world and simplify finance for veterans, so they feel empowered with knowledge and finance makes more sense. By delivering five weekly financial education sessions to the forces, I feel I am helping to build financial literacy and their confidence in money.
One of my long-term clients, Gerry, is gay and we enjoy a professional friendship. Research shows that the LGBTQ+ community are more likely to feel stress or anxiety about money, and they also face societal barriers like discrimination when it comes to financial inclusion. It's clear that this community could benefit from our passion for financial planning.
Gerry has always welcomed our deeper connection and my empathetic approach to financial advice. He is now retired and is enjoying a slower pace of life after living many lives as an art teacher, social butterfly and adoptive father. He welcomes my counsel on bigger decisions and the practicality of them. The depth of our relationship allows us to talk freely.
People come from a variety of backgrounds and have a variety of life experiences—no two people are the same. Understanding these differences is one of the characteristics that separates good financial advisers from great ones! Through empathy and social awareness, you can meet your clients and colleagues where they are and ensure mutual understanding and trust. This makes a real difference in people’s lives.
Relationship management is key to clients’ interests
All these skills we’ve discussed so far contribute to overall positive relationships with clients, but the last step is relationship management, which is relevant for both colleagues, clients and mentees as you give back to the sector.
It’s important that you demonstrate to your colleagues that you appreciate them, and that you care about their wellbeing. They are instrumental in ensuring your client service is top quality. Therefore, you want to ensure they are happy and allowed to flourish.
Being able to be supportive and transparent with colleagues is also important, while using EQ skills to manage your own reactivity, to develop comfortable and impactful relationships.
This empathetic but transparent communication style is also helpful when navigating difficult situations with a client. As a financial adviser, it is sometimes tempting to tell clients what they want to hear to keep them happy, but it’s crucial to build trust with a client so that you can speak transparently — telling them what they need to hear in a way that they can manage. Putting a client's interests first is essential in building this trust and fostering long-term relationships.
For example, I recently helped a client who had experienced lifelong health difficulties and wanted to ensure that he and his family would be taken care of in the future. A large part of the call focused on his mental health, and the impact years of ongoing treatment has had on him. This deepened the conversation and meant that the call could be honest and frank around his financial goals and the likelihood of getting the cover he wants, at a cost he can afford with a young family.
Taking the time for these empathetic conversations during client meetings builds a deeper and more trusting relationship with the client, and deeper sense of satisfaction for yourself and indeed passion for the subject. Building this rapport and trust over a long period of time allows you to speak freely, giving them the security and transparency they deserve. It has been true throughout my career that clients appreciate this approach.
Eventually as an experienced financial adviser you can take on mentoring and support other people into the sector. I am a mentor with the CII (Chartered Insurance Institute) Mentor programme, which supports women in their financial planning career.
During a mentoring session, we usually discuss the last four weeks: both challenges and things that went well. We also look at the month ahead and the quarter and we think about the mentee’s long-term goals and ambitions. Mentoring brings me a lot of satisfaction, and I enjoy being able to offer support that wasn’t there when I started over twenty years ago.
For me, mentoring and interacting with colleagues is an important part of my role as a business leader in financial advice. All of which contribute to the overall success of my team. By helping people and giving back, you really do change people’s lives and push the profession in a positive direction, as well as feeling the value that giving back brings to your own mental health.
All these skills under the overall umbrella of EQ are invaluable elements of what makes a good financial adviser, allowing you to make an impact on clients, colleagues, future finance professionals and most importantly, yourself.
Traits of successful financial advisers include empathy, transparency, and a client-first approach. By taking excellent care of yourself and others, you will feel greater confidence in your abilities, and satisfaction in your career.
Find out more about why you should become a financial adviser here.