A Sane-Making Approach to Financial Services

Speaker A My name is Norm Trainer and I'm the CEO of the Covenant Group. Our objective is to be an international leader in the field of training and development. The Covenant Group's mission is to educate and coach financial advisors, owner managers of small and medium sized enterprises and professional advisors such as accountants, lawyers and consultants and provide them with business tools to enhance their performance. The common denominator in all three of those groups is that they are entrepreneurs who get paid for results. And one of our differentiators is that while many people in the education and training field focus on motivation, the willingness of individuals to perform in a role, we concentrate on ability and willingness. And Requisite organization provides the perfect framework to focus on capability, capability at an individual level and at an organizational level. My interest in requisite organization goes back over 20 years and it really came about as a result of my relationship with Dr. Herb Cofford. Herb is both a friend, a mentor and a colleague. And Herb has been a disciple of Elliot Jacks for a number of years. Herb introduced me to the concept of requisite and I felt that it was a tremendously valuable tool for me. I've been involved in four different businesses, the Covenant Group that has been in existence for twelve years. And from the very beginning we decided that we would integrate requisite into everything that we do from an educational and coaching perspective. And so Herb has played an important role in the development of our business. Herb has taught me that when we start a business or when we're in a business, there are two key questions we have to answer what role do we want to play and how big do we want to become? And for me personally, one of the things that Herb has helped to clarify is the role that I play within my business and how big a rock I want to push. And that's been tremendously valuable for me. Red wisdom's changed me personally in a couple of different ways. One is surprisingly, it's made me more courageous. I have always struggled with the issue of how big a rock do I want to push or am I able to push? And the understanding of requisite really helped me come to terms with becoming as much as I can be. So that was tremendously valuable. It's also been valuable in terms of the strategic aspect of my work, the time I spend working on the business as well as working in it, and the degree to which we teach the importance of working on and working in, in terms of how I manage differently. It has made a profound difference in how I select people, the commitment I have to training and developing them, the way I compensate them and the career pathing and talent pool development over time. Like many entrepreneurs, I hired based on relationship and dealt with all the problems inherent in that. I've learned to hire much more based upon capability to build in an understanding of stratum in a selection of people in terms of career pathing, talent, approval, development, to look at what is the outside reach of an individual and to be able to help them extend that reach in our work. One of the biggest benefits that participants in our programs derive is that most of them are working well below their Stratum capability. And when they gain an awareness of Stratum and their own unrealized potential it has a significant impact on their performance. We see increases of 50% to 200% in the growth trajectory of businesses when people work at the highest level of their capability. If I could take financial services as an example the degree of complexity required to function in a financial advisory role has increased dramatically over the last ten to 20 years. And one manifestation of that is that 20 years ago you could be effective as a financial advisor at Stratum One or Stratum Two. Today, to be effective in the role you have to be, at a minimum, Stratum Two ideally, stratums Three through five. And we work with advisors who earn a six figure, a seven figure, and an eight figure income. And for those, particularly at the higher levels what we find is that their capability is in most instances, it's Stratum Four, five, and Six. And often they are underperforming relative to their ability and they're underperforming in terms of their own potential and the structure within which they're working. So you have a Stratum Five advisor who has a structure where there's only Stratum One and Two capable people and as a consequence, they're being pulled down all the time. When they gain insight into the power of having Stratum applied to the build out of their structure it has an enormous impact on their performance. One of the most successful advisors that I've worked with in the last probably 25 years has a net worth of over $50 million has built a $15 million business over the last number of years. When I started working with him, he was Stratum Five capable. In his early forty s. Today, in his 60s, he's probably Stratum Seven capable. And Stratum has made an enormous difference in his ability to build out his organization and realize the fullness of his potential. The greatest value I've derived from requisite organization is that I believe it's one of the most same making approaches to individual and organizational development. My experience is that the more our map fits our territory the more that our understanding of our capability is aligned with our true potential the greater the likelihood that we're going to be satisfied and fulfilled in the work we do. And there's something very same making about knowing what your Stratum capability is about knowing the type of organization the type of structure you need to be fully deployed in your role and to push the biggest rock that you can. It is a tremendously freeing system.