It's a pleasure to introduce you to our next speaker, Daniel Kopp. Kopp is a fee-only financial planner, financial therapist, and founder of Wise Stewardship Financial Planning, where he helps young widows and widowers, as well as military members, organize their financial lives by aligning money with their deeply held values. He leverages his personal experiences as a widower and an Air Force veteran to offer a deeper level of client engagement. Kopp has been a NAPFA member since 2019 and loves helping his fellow members succeed in their life and business. Please help me in welcoming Dan to the front. Thank you so much. It's a privilege to be here. Actually, my very first NAPFA in-person national conference, I joined in 2019. The budget was a little tight that first year, and then, of course, 2020 happened, so I was able to go to a couple of the virtual conferences and some regional symposiums, things like that, so I'm thrilled to actually be with my people here in person, so thank you. I'm excited to share a topic today that is near and dear to my heart, this idea about leadership, okay? So in my firm, I'm a solo in the sense that it's me. I have had a couple of interns over the last couple years, a couple of contractors, but mostly what we're going to talk about today are lessons learned from my almost nine years on active duty as an officer in the Air Force, so the goal today, especially in the case study that we're going to practice, is to actually put some tactics, some of the things we're going to talk about today into practice. I've been to lots and lots of conferences, and one of the challenges, of course, is, well, that was great, really heady, very interesting, and then you leave, walk out the door, and you're like, okay, well, there's no application there, so that's the goal, so by the end of our time today, I want you to have walked away with a couple of key principles as we go throughout, so the learning objectives are, we want to create this leadership model for setting clear expectations. How do you do that? How do you build that into a framework, a five-part framework that any of you can do so you can reimagine leadership, all right? Some of you may have even some of your own notions or preconceived conception based on your own experience or working with others' leadership, even about what that word means, so hopefully by the end of today, you have a different frame of reference. We're going to talk about the idea of implementing ongoing feedback that leads to personal growth for you as potentially that leader or ultimately for those who are working for you, those employees, contractors. Maybe you're not even leading in your business. Maybe you're leading in a nonprofit or another type of organizations. What we're going to talk about today should be broadly applicable across each of those areas, and then lastly, we're going to go through this idea of, okay, so all that's great when everything's going really well. What happens when something goes wrong? Now, especially when we get into this part about learning how to break down a problem, an event, something that happens, review, contributing factors, this is a very specific Air Force debriefing technique. I'll talk about more in detail, but all right, something goes wrong. What do we do? How do we figure it out? Determine the root cause. What was the main thing that caused that issue? And then provide those instructional fixtures. Here's how we don't do this next time. Next time I will do this. That's the DFP, the debrief focus point process. And then we'll have a case study. So please feel free to stop and interrupt me as I go throughout, especially if I use some terminology or slip into acronym E's. The only place that uses more acronyms than financial service is actually the DOD, so I will try not to do that here today. All right, so as a background, I'm an Air Force officer, but this presentation was actually not done alone. Unfortunately, Amy Irvine couldn't be in here this morning. This flowed out of an original conversation that she and I had in the hallway outside of LIS conference earlier this year. About so many of the conversations I've had within our world is people who are a little uncertain. Maybe you're making your first hire or your next hire growing that team. How do we incorporate those principles of leadership? But I did not build this presentation alone, so two of my co-presenters were actually with me at this, when I gave this talk last month at XYPM Live. Pam Bergson up in the top left there, she was an Air Force colonel for about, service about 30 years across the reserves. She runs her own RIA as well, NAFTA member. And then Brian O'Neill also serves as a colonel in the airport. So we built this presentation together. They are very much co-presenters, even though they could not physically be here with us today. Now, maybe you remember those despair demotivational posters way back in the day. I love those things, they're so much fun. All right, so maybe this is you. You're sitting here today, or maybe you even had this feeling in the past, right? Challenges, I expected times like this, but I never thought they'd be so bad, so long, so frequent. All right, moment of honesty, post-lunch here. How many of you maybe felt like that at one point or another in your role as a leadership? Okay, my hand's up. I can't tell you the number of times that I have failed, all right? So we're not talking about perfection. We're not talking about the ability for you to immediately go out and suddenly be somebody different than who you are, okay? How do we get there a little bit better, a little bit more improved, right? There are going to be challenges in leadership. We're dealing with other humans, right? Humans interacting together, and so let's talk about what we do then. So what does that word leadership mean to you? Anyone who wanted to speak up? Being a role model, okay, yeah. Like, see it, show it, right, demonstrate. We often said, show what right looks like in our leadership roles. Anyone else? You still have my next slide here coming up, the Eisenhower quote, yeah. Getting other people to do what you want done because they want to do it, right? How do you bring up that internal motivation of other people, yeah? Over there in the back. Having a vision, yes. Without a vision, the people perish. Yeah, that's a great one. Chief servant, yeah, there's a huge amount of that sometimes in leadership. Ownership, okay, yeah. Not just in the firm, but ownership may be a process or a task. All right, that's great. How many have had a bad leader in the past? I think that was pretty close to universal, right? Yeah, yeah, I could tell you lots and lots of stories. The very short one is, so I was in ROTC at Purdue University for four years, got commissioned at the end. I can blow that up, yeah. So at that point in time, commissioned in 2009, went straight off to the Air Force. That's why I was really glad I had a job in 2009. And I get to my very first training squadron down in Tyndall, Panama City, Florida. And the commander there, well, we're gonna not have any names here, was an interesting guy, all right? Ultimately, he was an 06 select, but he ended up leaving the Air Force as an 04, as a major. So for those who translate what that means is, he was on a fast track for promotion, and then suddenly he left the Air Force with a demotion. That's very rare for officers. Let's just say that there were some very, very bad leadership things that came out of it. I walked away from that experience thinking, wow, this is what the military's gonna be like, then I want nothing to do with it. Thankfully, he was caught doing the shenanigans, and then some of my next leaders were much better. I say all that to say, some of the best lessons that you may have learned personally are from the leadership failures of others, or maybe even if we're being really honest, the leadership failures that you have done, right? Okay, so again, progress, not perfection. Now, one of the things is, the US military puts tens, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people through across a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences, families of origin, things like that. And the military's philosophy is that every single person, regardless of anything about who they are or where they come from, can be a leader, all right? So sometimes in our popular culture, we get this idea that leaders are born, right, they're the intensely charismatic people who just get up and everybody's drawn to them, or maybe they're the people who, like the things you mentioned earlier, like the servant's heart or the vision. But the thing is, any one of those, any one of you in this room can be not just a good leader, but a great leader. It doesn't matter if you're soft-spoken or introverted. It doesn't matter whether you have some unique leadership skills based on your past experiences, or you've had none, all right? The frame we're gonna talk about today can get you to that next level. All right, anybody wanna share challenges with leadership? We may have time for questions later, but I wanted to put this one out there. Like, what you're hoping to maybe even get out of this presentation. All right, think about that one, we'll come back to that. All right, Dwight Eisenhower's quote, right? How do we get people, those other people, to do something you want done, because he, she, they want to be able to do it at that point in time. Now, I have some bad news for you, all right? It may be the fact that your fear about leadership is potentially well-founded, right? Curiosity, some places remain unknown because no one has ventured forth, others remain so because no one has ever come back, right? Maybe you have been so personally burned, either in your firm or board experience or something like that, that you said, okay, we're just not gonna go back there. First, I just wanna say that that's a very understandable, a relatable challenge. But at the same time, there's hope, okay? The other part of this is that perseverance, all right? The courage to ignore the obvious wisdom of turning back, right? Sometimes that is what is going to make the difference here. I have good news and I have bad news for you, okay? When you're the leader of anything, whether that's a small individual task, a small team, things like that. I've led teams as small as one people in my role. Or in the case of a large force exercise, leading several thousand people, things like that. Everything was on me for my specific lane, for my specific role. Everything was always my fault, okay? Now, you may sit here and think, well, that's pretty depressing. Why should I try, right? The whole curiosity, perseverance thing. But at the same time, I want to reframe that for you in the sense of when everything is within your realm of control, there are two things when you're leading people that I want you to understand. A will problem and a skill problem, okay? You're gonna get a chance to, in your leadership roles, work with a lot of different people, potentially, right? Many of those people are gonna come, or especially in an entry level role in their firms, with very little skills. Or maybe some basic skills, right? They maybe took the CFP stuff. So when you're giving them tasks and the ability to do something, right? Do they have the attitude, the will to want to do it? The skills problem follows thereafter, right? What can you do to teach them to be able to do that? But some of the stuff we're gonna talk about here is, right? Everything was within your control as a leader, your zone, right? To set those people up for success. Some people will not step up to the plate, if you will, right? If it's not a skill problem, helping people find maybe the right seat on the right bus, or the right skill set for their things if they haven't been trained. But it may be a will problem, in which case, is your responsibility as a leader to do what's best for the organization. And maybe it means that person doesn't come along. But delineating the problems into one of those two camps, is the person that you're working with having a will problem? That's intrinsic to them, right? You can set them up for success. You can do everything on that end, but it's up to them, right? Individual free will and all that. So we're gonna talk a lot about this skill problem. How do you help them get there? All right, we're gonna build a culture of candor. All right, your firm, your organization, wherever you're leading at, whether you realize it or not, has a culture. The culture that I came from, a leadership culture in the Air Force, was one of what we call radical candor, all right? We'd go into the debriefing room after a mission, all right? No holds barred, no rank. You could be the most senior leader and the youngest airman. In that room, everybody's gonna speak freely and give complete, open, honest feedback. We call it chucking spears. And you were not allowed to take things personally. When you walked out of that room, nothing was personal, okay? Now, you may or may not have a similar culture, but I'm just describing some examples. In your firm, in your roles, in your leadership, is it really a place where people can come to you with problems? If not, some of these other things might be a challenge. But what does the leadership culture of your firm look like, right? This idea of leaders eat last. It's even a book I'll recommend at the end by Simon Sinek. That does not mean that you don't take care of yourself, right? Especially as the owner of a firm or things like that. But it means, how many of you have children, right? They can sniff out inauthenticity, right? That selfish attitude. Your employees can as well, right? Are you all rowing together in the same way? And then, I already mentioned it earlier, but again, everything is always your fault. And that is either both empowering or, in this case, what we're gonna talk about is how do you do that, right? Now, just wanna quickly distinguish between two things. Leadership, what we're talking about today, is more of those soft skills. However, that fits into you, your individual personality, the attitudes, the empathies, the examples. I'll give just a real quick beginning of the story. We'll see if we wrap it up later. At one point, I was a young captain. So I'd been in about five years at this point in time, kind of put into a mid-grade level. I was in charge of a team of about 18 people. And one of my young airmen, young lieutenant, call him Butterbars, been in for not very long, came to me. He'd been experiencing some challenges on the home front. And he started some challenges on the home front, in his home life. And he was experiencing some suicidal ideations. And because of the culture of candor that we'd already been built, and because of some level of institutional trust that was built into the fabric of the airports overall, but in this specific team, that level of expectation was reaching out for help, right? And so we were able to get him all the resources that he was able to need, some mental health support, be able to re-delegate some of the roles and responsibilities. But that goes back to that culture, right? Now, I wasn't the first person to start to build that, nor was I the last. But in your firm, are people able to talk about challenges? Or is it the, nope, everything's perfect here, everything's fine, taboo, right? You have to have a culture of candor. Now, God willing, you're not gonna be dealing with as challenging circumstances as this particular airman. But what does that look like? What does that feel like? And if you feel like you as the leadership may have a pulse on that, one way is you might think about re-evaluating that as like an anonymous employee survey to get some more 360 feedback, right? What does it look like from everybody else's perspective, okay? So that's that ability. Like, can people approach you, that attitude, and you be able to have demonstrated empathy towards them? Versus more the management, we're not really gonna get into that. That's the processes, the checklist, the technical procedures here. All right, so this is probably the most important slide here as far as understanding what does this model look like in reality? I've referenced a few things here, but we're gonna pause and walk through this with a couple of different steps. Number one, expectations. We're gonna begin there, and there's gonna be this continuous loop and flow, all right? Now, when I say the word expectations, what comes to mind? Just shout it out. Boundaries, yes. Goals, okay. Goals, okay, what else? Deadlines, yep. Responsibilities, yep. I'm not hearing policies and procedures, manuals, but I might throw that one in there, yeah. Okay, so this would be expectations. Now, how many have heard the phrase, happiness equals expectations minus reality? Okay, it's one of my favorites, right? Right, happiness equals expectations minus reality. You have really high expectations, right? You think about a family vacation, it's gonna be awesome, the kids are gonna be well behaved, the staff is gonna be courteous, the hotel room's gonna be amazing, the weather's gonna be perfect. Really high expectations, and then the kids aren't, the hotel room's not so great, the weather's bad, right? So when you're talking about leadership here, clear expectations, Whether that's the firm culture, the policies and procedures, here's how we do things, here's what right looks like. Or individually, you're going to go do X, Y, Z, and it needs to be done by such and such date. So, even after knowing this, right, I had my first intern a couple years ago, and she was doing some marketing work for me, and I thought, well this is great, I'll just hand it off all this stuff, it's gonna get done perfectly. So I told her, go do blah, blah, blah. Comes back a couple days later, like, what is this, is this what I asked for? She's like, oh yes, it's blah, blah, blah. Oh, oh, everything was always my fault, right? I did not set clear expectations of what I wanted it to look like, right? Now, granted, there's lots of variations in here, but just because I said something, or wrote it, or communicated, does not mean that the other person interprets it, right? Communication is about me, the speaker, it's about the message, what's going on, and then it's about the receiver, right? And there's all those dynamics at work. I may tell someone in here, you know, it's time to go TDY, we're about to go OCONUS, and we're gonna be ready to go for Operation Green Flag. And you'd be like, I have no idea what you just said. I may well have spoken a foreign language, right? So, I set the expectations, used the leader, set the expectations, and one of the key ways to know, like, well, does the other person know what's expected of them, is say, all right, say that back to me in your own words, or reframe this, what do you think I'm asking you to do? It is not good enough just to, well, I gave the expectations, why didn't they get done? Well, maybe they misinterpret, or maybe, based on something, right, our different pasts and things like that, different work cultures, they didn't arrive at that same conclusion. So, setting expectations, big picture, macro level, it needs to be clear across a variety of fronts, and then down to the individual tasks, here's what I want you to do, here's how I want it done, right? Reinterpret that back to me, right? That is always the beginning. I don't know, say, four out of five times in every leadership experience I've been in, right, when things broke down, it's here. And this also applies to our personal relationships, too, with your spouse, with your kids, right? All right, so, setting expectations, once the expectations are clear, then does this person have the skills to go out and do what they've been told to do? One of my young lieutenants, different one, came to me, brand new, straight out of training squadron, never done anything real world before, and we're sitting here, and I tell him to go do XYZ, turn it in tomorrow. What do you think you're supposed to do? Okay, do XYZ, right? He goes off, I don't see him for half a day, check back in, hey, how's it going? Oh, we haven't done anything. Okay, you know what to do tomorrow, right? Yeah, well, I actually don't know how to do that. Oh, back to that culture of candor, right? He wasn't yet at a place where he could tell me that, but at the same time, right, I told him what to do, the expectation was clear, he understood it, but I had not made sure that he had the skills, the ability to go and do that, whether that's, here's how this software program works, or here's how we do this in our firm, right? This is what this checklist looks like. This is what right looks like, right? Again, you set the expectation as a leader, you make sure that they have the skills. If they don't, right, that's where you get to train them up. Back to that will and skill problem, right? You can set somebody up for success. I recently just had a conversation with another fellow RI owner, who's working with one of their relatively newer employees, and they've been giving a lot of this ongoing feedback, providing extra training opportunities, get this skill set where it needs to be, but this individual, for whatever reason, is not really getting there, despite all the extra training toward those skills there. So at a certain point, right, individual, everybody based on your own team structure, things like that, when all the skills have been provided and extra training and everything like that, but the person's not arriving there, then maybe you gotta go back to, this is a will problem, at which point this becomes a different kind of leadership conversation here. Next step is feedback, and by this, I don't mean the formal six months, 12 month HR cycle. This is, how are you doing? This is a conversation of feedback. This is, here's what I'm seeing from my perspective about how you just did this task, right? This is the client meeting just ended, you had the other person present a small portion of it, and you're like, all right, tell me how you feel. How did that go? What was that like from your, all right, here's what I saw, right? Let's get better at this. Let's give you a chance to practice it before we move on, right? An ongoing, regular part of your interaction with people that you're leading should be this feedback cycle. As a piece of that, then you get to the consequences and rewards. Now consequences sounds very negative, I don't necessarily inherently mean that, but if here's what right looks like, this expectation is made clear, you've given the skills, I've given you feedback, regular, ongoing basis, but you're not getting there. Okay, well, maybe we need to make some changes, and part of that is that as appropriate based on whatever that leadership follower role looks like, carrot and or stick in there, right? That doesn't just mean the annual bonus structure, right? But how are people motivated? How are your employees, the people that you're working with wired, right? Do they need that proverbial pat on the head? Do you know how they are wired? What would be a good reward for them beyond maybe some of the classic or stereotypical answers there? And how can you make that happen for them? And lastly, this leads to growth, right? Both you as the leader and ultimately them as the subordinate, as the follower, as the team member. And this applies big picture on everything that's ongoing in your firm, but also every single little individual task. Clear expectations, provided skills, executed, gave feedback, great job. The reward is you get to do more of this, right? That's leading to growth. Or here's where we as a firm are gonna do this, especially in how we interact with clients or things like that, right? And that ultimately leads to firm growth too. So price macro level, but also at the micro level. Any questions about that? All right. So let's dive in a little bit more about this feedback piece. So I mentioned again, this is not just formal HR. This is setting clear expectations and priorities that are understood, right? Early and often. The least worst time to do feedback is yesterday. The next worst time or least best, however that phrase goes, is today, right? This should be incorporated regularly. And again, it's not just from you, the leader standpoint, but also seeking feedback. Hey, how am I doing as a boss, right? And again, if you don't have a culture where that's easily transmitted because of rank or privileges or however things like that, find a way that you can collect that even if anonymously. There's always gonna be probably something that could be done better, right? But probably even if you look a little hard enough, there's something that you could find positive. We always call this the sandwich method of feedback, right? You did something great, not so great, but hey, keep working on this, you're doing pretty good here, right? Find a way to do this. The other piece of this is, of course, how and when. How many of you heard the phrase, right, praise in public, criticize in private, right? Absolutely, if you want to destroy credibility and trust as a leader, criticize in public all the time, right, call out your people, right? They're not gonna trust you. Certainly not gonna build a culture of candor and that's the regular ongoing practice, right? Find ways to do it at the appropriate time, but at the same time, leverage that praise so that other people can see and hear, right? Engaging and listening. Again, you will not have all the answers as the leader, right, especially if you have some layers of middle management or something in there. Ultimately, right, this goes back to empowering growth. Each of you have the ability to do this in micro actions. How many have heard of the idea of, like in a relationship, say with a spouse or something like that, the love tank, right? My love tank feels a little full today. I feel like I could handle some more ups and downs versus feeling really depleted. Well, think of this as the trust tank instead with your employees, with those you're working with, right? Every little tiny interaction that you have, every time that you set expectations and follow through or demonstrate by your personal example, you're taking a deposit into your trust tank or you're taking a withdrawal, right? At a certain point, based on the collective deposits or withdrawal actions, right, you may buy too many withdrawals, empty that trust tank, and in that case, you're in a very different situation. So every small interaction as a leader, every big interaction as a leader, you're doing something. You're adding to or taking away from that trust tank, and that gives you the opportunity to, again, everything is always your fault, but at the same time, that gives you the power to invest in these relationships for the good of you, them, your firm, et cetera. All right, so hopefully you all know what to do when things are going well, right? Giving that effective praise. What happens when something goes wrong, right? Whether we're talking big or small, all right? That's what we're gonna get into here. All right, what went wrong, how to fix it, the debrief focus process, the DFP process. The idea here is accepting surface level answers is very insufficient, hence my last point there. Tolerance to the discomfort of the process. We call this peeling the onion, asking why, just like your three-year-old. Why? Okay, why? Why? If this is something that you've never done before, it will be uncomfortable for both you as the asker and especially if you're the recipient. So again, remember, the person is not the problem. The problem is the problem. You're both attacking, you're both approaching, you're both examining the problem as the problem. Framing it at that level is extremely important in here. Keep asking why until you start getting some answers about what could have been adding, what contributed to what went wrong. We'll do this with the case study in just a moment. Every time you get some statement out of there, well, why did this happen? Well, I didn't understand what the objective was. Okay, so go back to expectation. That might be a particular contributing factor here. Well, why did the client not get served or callbacked or something like that? Well, the message didn't get passed. Okay, that's a contributing factor, right? You write down all these things. In a minute here, you're gonna list all the contributing factors together, written down somewhere, and then you're gonna look through them, what is the root cause? And what I mean by that is, okay, if we're looking at the effects of an avalanche, right, what was the first snowflake or the first tremor that started the whole process that began? That is the root cause. So we fix that, then that chain of events could have potentially been prevented. And then for every contributing factor, we would apply an instructional fix. All right, let me give you an example. So this is a training scenario, not real, just an example here of what we call an error to error engagement. We've got a 4v2. So there's four blue arrows each representing a particular aircraft in formation fighting against two bad guys represented in red down here, okay? So we're gonna go, we're gonna fly, fight simulated combat, and trade it down. So in this particular scenario here, we've got the debris focus point, because at the end of the scenario here, oh, do I have a laser? Yeah, blue four here died, okay? So at the end of the scenario, we wanna come back, why did blue four die? All blue should have come back, ideally, in this scenario here. So over the course of this mission debrief, we're gonna go back and we're gonna start asking, so why did this happen? Well, let's start rebuilding it. We call replay the tapes. So an EE, an execution error, is that at a certain point, blue two, so there's blue one, two, three, and four in the formation. Because in a radio communication, only one person can be talking at a time, he stepped on somebody else. He talked when he wasn't supposed to, okay? And as a result of this, blue four missed something, because he heard somebody else. And as a result of that, in the formation, he was flying, he lost visual contact with his wingman, number three, okay? Rule number one in aviation, you fly first, then you fight, all right? And make sure you don't run into your own guy. As a result of that, he also did not call it out, that he went blind. He knows he's not supposed to do that, all right? So in this particular case, the root cause of why blue four died is because he didn't follow procedure. He lost sight of his wingman, he didn't voice it. As a result of that, blue three turned around, blue four went straight into the teeth of a fake enemy missile, all right? So the instructional fix in this particular scenario would come back to prioritize the visual. Always fly first, and then stay in your formation, and then use your sensors, the radar, in this particular case. So the lesson learned based on this would be next time blue four would be saying this, next time I will do X, Y, Z, all right? So that is the framework. Now that's probably all really theoretical for you, so let's put it into practice, okay? I'm gonna give you a case study. So this is an amalgamation of a variety of scenarios, no resemblance to any RIA, et cetera, et cetera. All right, during a regular routine audit, the regulator finds a billing error, okay? So in this particular scenario here, a client had begun as an advice-only relationship with this RIA paying a flat annual retainer. At a certain point, this client said, I don't wanna do the investment management anymore, please, RIA, do it for me. So accounts were transferred over, and based on the firm's billing structure, this now switched from a flat annual fee to basically an AUM-tiered structure, okay? So at that point in time, what happened is the firm stopped billing the retainer, started billing the AUM, but the firm did not have the client sign a new agreement agreeing to the, it was verbally talked about, it was mentioned in the notes, it was there, the client had agreed to it, but never officially signed a new planning agreement. But what do you think the regulator did, right? You're writing a multi-thousand dollar check to this client for all these fees that they had not agreed to pay for as a part of this process, right? So what we're gonna have you do here is ask some questions about the relevant fact pattern, make sure everybody's kind of understanding it, and then based on this framework I just showed you, so you're gonna identify why might have this happened, just kind of make it up in your head and then we'll go through it together. What were the contributing factors that you think could have played into such a scenario? And then we'll talk about what might have been the root cause. So before I make you break up into groups two or three with each other, anybody wanna ask any questions about this imaginary case study? All right, talk amongst yourselves. Now I saw that some of you were looking ahead in the slides, so the answers were there. But before we do that, let's just say what some of you might have come up with on your own. What were some of the things that in your imagination here you said could have been contributing factors that were a part of this problem? Right, so the advisor had this conversation, but what happened after that? Where did the process break down? Why was no additional paperwork done? Yep. Anyone else? Yeah, potentially a lack of awareness, right? Did this advisor know and understand that, right? Where was that at as far as the firm training, maybe? Yeah. Exactly, so did the firm even have a procedure for this? Was this the first time that this happened, potentially? Yeah. I saw another one. Yeah, no process, yep. Right, that often happens, right? Sometimes, back to the whole leadership is about progress, not perfection, right? You make some of these mistakes the hard way the first time, and the instructional fix is next time we're not gonna do it that way. Right, and again, back to that idea of authenticity, if you as the leader cannot admit when you make mistakes, then you're never gonna get your subordinates or other people to be able to do that, too. You certainly have to lead from an example in that standpoint. Anyone else? Right, so we talked about the client-facing side, which is what the advisor did, but where's the operations and or back office that says, wait a minute, we've got a mismatch here that says, we're supposed to be getting this, but we're getting this instead. Yeah. Right, how do we go back and redesign our document flow such that this wouldn't be so confusing in the first place, yeah. Now I've mentioned the execution error there. So anytime that you have a contributing factor, that's one of the primary errors there, right? So I told my intern to go do X, Y, and Z, she didn't know how to do it. That was an execution error. Now it may be that there's something called a perception error, right? I tell someone over here, go do X, Y, and Z, and they think they heard A, B, C, right? Something completely different. The message got mistranslated. So there's execution error, there's perception error, and there's also another error that is eluding me at the moment. Cognitive processing error, right? So I know what I'm supposed to do, I know how to do it, I spoke the wrong words, right? Or especially in air-to-air combat, right, you step on the radio at the wrong time, right? You know how to do it, you just did it wrong. All right, so in this particular case, let's run through. So contributing factor number one in this particular scenario, advisor changed the billing methodology on one client but didn't update the agreement with only limited documentation, right? We kind of talked about that. Contributing factor number two, firm did not catch discrepancy between billing and agreement, right? So there was no back office there. Contributing factor number three, CCO did not have an institutional process to review billing, okay? So there wasn't a checks and a balance into the system. Contributing factor number four, no second set of eyes comparing expected revenue versus actual, right? We're supposed to be getting this, according to our last update, but we're getting way more. Hmm, where'd that free money come from, right? Contributing factor number five, policy manual existed. It was there, it was written down, but it got lip service. No one ever came back and looked at it, and there was no regular review in this particular situation. Contributing factor number six here, breakdown of leadership. Firm leadership failed to set expectations and follow through, right? It was not, in this particular case, necessarily just the advisor that was in the one-on-one client relationship. It was bigger, it was broader than that. Okay, so based on these contributing factors here now, we go through and say, all right, now which of these may have been the root cause? Which one of these was the first snowflake, if you will, that landed, that began this cascade of events that ultimately became the avalanche of errors here? And I would argue here that, number one, it comes down to the leadership, right? Everything's always leadership fault, in this case, the CCO's fault, did not have an institutional process to review billing. Because you think about where everything else could have still happened, but it's gotten fixed, right? Advisor had the conversation, advisor switched the client over, right, okay, well, all right, was it his responsibility? Maybe, maybe not, right? But in this particular case, where is the institutional checks and balances that were built into it? So you can apply the same framework here when something goes wrong in your firm, right? Maybe that's you, me, myself, and I, right? We're gonna sit down in the Royal We, and we're gonna look at this problem. Ideally, if you have multiple team members, right, you can get multiple perspectives. And again, the person who made the mistake is not the problem, the problem is the problem. We're gonna objectively look at this, ask why, listing out all of these factors. And then based on that, now once you kind of have the contributing factors listed out, you start saying, okay, which one of these was the primary reason? Like, if we had stopped it here, nothing else would have mattered at that point in time. And that's how you eliminate, and then once you identify the root cause, the instructional fix is, next time we will do this. In this particular case, the CCO sets up an institutional process, there can be multiple checks and balances, multiple people reviewing it, and they're gonna run through it with a regular quarterly audit that has to be signed off, blah, blah, blah, right? Contributing factors lead to root cause, root cause leads to instructional fix, how we're gonna do better next time. Questions on that? Anything that you would have added, changed, clarifying, all right? Create a policy, review billings, ensure accountability, follow through, all right, well, I'm coming to the end of my time here, but we have plenty of time for questions if you wanna ask them. I tried not to fill up this entire page with book recommendations, so I narrowed it down to three, all right, doing you a big favor here, but if this is something that you wanna study a little bit more outside of the Air Force needs that we went through today here, these are high book, three books I can highly recommend if you haven't already taken a look at them. I think you would benefit from any or all of them. For now, for the time that we got left, I'll open it up for questions. Okay, so Jerry Lee by Brennan Brown, awesome book, read it, love it, the part that I struggled with, I love the way that you did it, you did the boundary, like I said earlier, the following one. Ah, boundaries, yes. I struggled with boundaries, I'm always kind of like, yeah, we're gonna have to do that all the time. I struggled with it in my personal life, and that's why I was wondering if you have any insight on how to set effective boundaries, how to experiment over the boundaries and how to hold them. So the question is, based on the idea of boundaries, particularly from the book Dare to Lead by Brennan Brown, how do you do that? How do you set effective, how do you enforce those? Well, let me use the client example, because that's probably the easiest one that comes to mind. I probably do it better there than maybe in personal relationships. So, again, happiness equals expectations minus reality, right, I mentioned that earlier, so at the beginning of every client relationship, I have a two-page client engagement standards. Here's how we do business in my firm. It has things like, if you want replies immediately, then you have to text or call me, I leave urgent up to them to define. Emails are typically responded to within two business days. When I ask for information, you need to provide it in a reasonable amount of time. Here's how often we meet, here's what we do and don't do, all that kind of stuff, right? And so the client agrees to that, and they sign that as a part of our ongoing engagement, but just because they read it once doesn't mean that they're going to come back to it, right? Because, well, why didn't you respond to my email on the same business day? Well, that's not the way we do business around here, right? Here's why. But going back and regularly referring to that, and then expectation creep, right? You give a little bit, right? So you have to think about, like, the kid's book, what's the title? If Everybody Did It, how many of you, is that the title? It's like, if everybody put a smudge on the window, then we'd live in houses that had, you know, completely blacked out windows. Am I the only one who read this as a kid? Oh, man. I mean, the idea of if you give a mouse a cookie, right? So expectation creep, right? It's going to happen, and so how do you hold yourself accountable? You know, that's where you hopefully have other people in your life. Probably not the best of answer, but yeah. Written expectations are going to provide somewhat better framework, and within personal relationships, I don't know, good luck. Yes? Yes. The only thing that controls you. Yeah, the whole lies we tell ourselves all the time, right? So the question is probably boiled down to, like, everything is always your fault. How do you institutionalize that in yourself and others? You know, some kind of a level of extreme accountability, whether that's you having an internal processes day, because the fog of work inhibits all of this. Carl von Clausewitz, one of the most influential military strategists and thinkers, wrote about this, the fog of war, which, you know, in the 1800s was literal gunpowder smoke on the battlefield. Like Napoleon would sit on a hill, and he'd look out there and be like, I can't see where anything's at. So the same thing applies in our firms and our lives. We're so busy in the day-to-day, the fog of work, it's hard to step back to have clarity and distance and guidance. So one of the things I'd say is, like, if you're not doing some level of regular review where you step back, whether that's personal time off or even just, like, a strategic retreat for yourself, even if it's just you, to get away, no distractions. Like, you know, the whole Harvard Business Review research about, like, even the literal presence of your phone on your desk, even when it's off, is still distracting. Get away from technology, no interruptions, and take time to think, ideally outside in nature. There's a lot of research about that as well. And then with a team, right, it takes time to build a culture around that. I'm not an expert in building team culture. I'll defer on that question, but, yeah, those are some things that come to mind. I was just going to comment on clarity. You were talking about, like, you struggle with that a lot too, kind of saying yes to a project, kind of, and it's not a new idea, but I think when someone told me, remember, that's where every time you say yes, you're saying no to something. Yeah, every yes. And so it was like, what do you say no to? Yes, I'll say, well, you didn't work on this project. I thought it was because they really needed it, because it's an emergency event, but it really isn't. Then I'm saying no to maybe my personal health and well-being. Yeah. Or maybe my family, because I've been in this kind of package. Or whatever it is, whenever you say yes, you have to say no to several other things, and just being aware of that sometimes can help that balance, because you're saying, no, I'm not willing to take that away from them, so I have to say no to good instead of bad. Yeah, every yes is a no to something else, and then, as my business coach reminds me, no is a complete sentence. And, like, I'll tie in the life planning work that I'm sure many of you do or are familiar with, right? What are your core values that you have done internally, personally, or for your firm? And those have to kind of be the north star, the guiding light that says we can do this much, and we prioritize them in accordance with these are these personal things that are the most important. Yeah. So what is that whole thing, right? You can have fast, you can have good, and you can have cheap, but you can't have all. You can choose two out of the three, right? Similar principle applies. You've got to move somewhere along there. Again, iteration. You are going to fail. You're going to try to do something else, and it didn't work. Okay, well, have the flexibility in your life or in your firm to pivot. Yeah. So you're building out, this is going to be like a two-person team structure when you give that planner the ability to give feedback directly to the parent planner. So again, not formal HR feedback. This has no bearing on your job or bonus or ability to stay here, but certainly ongoing feedback of like, here's the way I would have done that, or how can you do this better? I would say earlier is sooner than better. And then with that, so I mentioned the debrief tapes, like if you have the ability to record those kind of meetings and interactions for internal use only, to be able to train and go back. I do a lot of public speaking. I was just talking a moment ago, like in the airport, I probably gave conservatively over a thousand briefings, standing up in front of people. And one of the best ways I got good at that early on was just the horrible thing of watching tape of yourself, right? To see all the stuff that you don't catch in real time. And then that might even give the opportunity for some other team members to weigh in later on rather than just based on in the moment kind of feedback, but especially at that initial level of like training one-on-one, I didn't mention it earlier, but one of the leadership things of like expectations provide skills. In that skills component was whenever I would train, I worked in the training squadron quite a bit, teaching students in the Air Force one-on-one how to do their primary job, is I give them an academic lesson, explain the theoretical concepts, here's how it applies, and then we'd actually sit down on what we call scope, and then I would literally demonstrate it. I'd say the words. I'd do the things. I'd walk through it so that they got to watch it. And then I would immediately get out of the seat, put them in the seat. They would go do the whole thing. And I'm standing right behind them, taking notes about the whole thing and or recording it. And then we go back and say, all right, well, you didn't do this. You didn't do this, right? And then we rinse, wash, and repeat over and over again until they're ready to go. I don't know if that's helpful, but that's what came to mind. Anyone else? Ah, yes. Yeah, so the question comes down to, like, how do you not take things personally, how do you help the other person not take things personally, and how do you develop that over time practice, but also, like, especially back to the expectation, right, because some of you have had longstanding firm relationships, leadership positions where you've been in for a very, very long time, right? This is a great opportunity to come back, hey, I was at a conference, I learned some cool stuff. We're going to reset, I find it's this magic word, we're going to reset some expectations and I'm going to need your help to be able to do that, but at a certain level, too, right, there's institutional paths that can't always be ignored. Not that things can't be changed, right, but certainly part of that, everything is on you and you can do it, but at the same time, if there's too much institutional paths that can't get to that level, then maybe it's a chime for a change, whatever that change would look like. Institutional change. Past tense, yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Again, that goes back to the idea that we all have blinders, it's hard for us to see and it's hopefully one of the great reasons we provide great financial planning to help people get out of their own way in some ways. But yeah, it may be a benefit from bringing in some external help. And then I love what you said about getting buy-in from the whole team, right? This is the way we're going to be doing business. You're on board the train or you're not, right? And that goes back to that will and skill problem. Yes, you can't just do this with your peers necessarily, you've got to be the boss. You have to have some level of institutional authority in the firm. You're the owner, you're the boss, etc. Although there's a whole level of peer leadership which we don't have time to talk about today. Inspirational leadership, yeah. All right, we've probably got time for one more. All right, well thank you, this is a pleasure being here, really appreciate it.

Daniel Kopp

financial planner

leadership

expectations

feedback

culture of candor

billing error

case study

responsibility