Industry Insights On Performance Management From Andrea Schlapi and Jackie Benjamin Hatherley

Andrea Schlapia is the CEO/Founder of Ironstone Business Coaching. She began her career in banking, then rose through the ranks of global investment firms like Dreyfus, Prudential, and Deutsche Bank. In 2008, she launched Ironstone, which specializes in helping financial advisors.

What roles in an independent wealth management practice tend to receive the least performance management or professional development?

AS: "In my experience, the roles that receive the least intentional performance management are often the non-advisor roles that are essential to the client experience: client service associates, operations team members, administrative professionals, paraplanners, and sometimes even emerging next-generation leaders.

These team members are often measured informally by whether things are “getting done” or whether there are client complaints. The challenge is that quiet competence can easily be overlooked. If someone is keeping the business running behind the scenes, owners may not recognize that they still need feedback, growth opportunities, clearer expectations, and a defined career path.

The irony is that these roles frequently have the greatest impact on scalability, morale, client retention, and advisor capacity. When they are not developed, the firm eventually feels it through turnover, bottlenecks, rework, or a lack of bench strength."

What are the common feedback and performance management systems you see in an independent practice, and what is the frequency of each?

AS: "The most common systems I see are:

Informal real-time feedback — This happens daily or weekly, but it is usually reactive. It often addresses what went wrong instead of reinforcing what success looks like.
Weekly team meetings or one-on-ones — Strong firms use these to review priorities, remove obstacles, and create accountability. Weaker firms use them mostly for status updates.
Monthly development days — This is something I recommend to my clients. Once a month, close the doors to clients and dedicate focused time to working “on the business.” This gives the team an opportunity to come together, celebrate wins, address and solve pressing issues, and outline the to-dos for the coming month that align with the firm’s 90-day quarterly initiatives. Peer shout-outs is always a fun activity for feedback from everyone vs. “manager only”. I literally was with a team today (via Zoom) for their monthly development day and they start out with this activity.
Quarterly check-ins — This is where firms can create meaningful traction. Quarterly conversations allow owners and team members to review goals, expectations, capacity, professional development, and whether the person is still in the right seat.
Annual reviews — These are still common, but on their own they are not enough. Annual reviews tend to look backward and often become tied too closely to compensation. They work best when they summarize conversations that have already been happening throughout the year.
Scorecards, role clarity tools, and accountability charts — Firms that run on a more disciplined operating system tend to have clearer expectations and better conversations because everyone knows what they own, what success looks like, and how progress is measured.

The best firms do not rely on one annual event. They create a rhythm: weekly accountability, monthly time to work on the business, quarterly development conversations, and an annual compensation and performance summary."

What advice would you have for wealth management practice owners who feel like they are always in “re-build” mode when building a productive team?

AS: "My advice is to stop rebuilding the team before rebuilding the system around the team.

When owners feel like they are constantly starting over, it is usually a sign that the firm lacks clarity in one or more areas: vision, roles, expectations, process, accountability, hiring standards, or leadership rhythm. You cannot hire your way out of a lack of structure.

Before adding another person, owners should ask:

Do we have the right seats clearly defined?
Does each person know what they own?
Have we documented the key processes that create a consistent client experience?
Are we giving feedback frequently enough that there are no surprises?
Are we hiring for the future firm we are building, or just reacting to today’s pain?
Are we developing people, or simply expecting them to “figure it out”?

A productive team is built through clarity, consistency, and communication. When those three are missing, even talented people can become frustrated or ineffective.

My strongest recommendation is to create a consistent leadership and development rhythm. I like to see firms use monthly development days to step out of the daily client-service demands and focus on the business, the team, the issues, and the priorities for the month ahead. Then, every 90 days, revisit goals, roles, scorecards, capacity, and professional growth.

That rhythm helps owners move from reactive management to intentional leadership — and that is where the team starts to become scalable."

Jackie Benjamin Hatherley is a fractional COO and Operations Consultant with 27 years of in-the-trenches experience inside independent RIA and wealth management firms. She focuses on the human side of ops, helping practice owners build the teams, processes, and infrastructure that support lasting growth.

Learn more at www.ria-ops.com.

What roles in a independent wealth management practice do you see getting the least amount of performance management, and/or professional development?

JBH: "I’ve found that the roles that tend to get overlooked most are client services associates and operations support staff. In most independent practices, the advisors are the rainmakers and get the lion's share of attention, coaching, continuing education, licensing requirements, while the people running the day-to-day workflows quietly hold everything together with very little structured feedback or growth path. There's also a tendency to underinvest in developing senior client associates who have been around long enough that practice owners assume they "already know what they're doing." Longevity gets mistaken for mastery, and those team members can go years without a meaningful performance conversation. Paraplanning roles can fall into this gap, as well. Often technically capable people who have no clear roadmap for what advancement looks like in the practice."

What are the common feedback and performance management systems you see in an independent practice and what is the frequency of each?

JBH: "Honestly, formal systems are rare. What you more commonly see is an annual review that's really just a compensation conversation dressed up as a performance discussion. It happens once a year, often reactively, and rarely ties back to documented goals or KPIs. Some practices do informal check-ins, but the frequency is inconsistent and largely dependent on whether something has gone wrong. A smaller number of more operationally/culturally mature practices have moved toward quarterly goal check-ins, usually driven by someone in an operations or COO-type role who pushed for structure. The practices that do it best tend to have a simple scorecard with a metric tied to each role and reviewed on a predictable cadence. This is an opportunity to have deeper discussions around career paths, professional development and items outside of open tasks. But that's the exception, not the rule. Most independent practices are running on relationship-based management, which works fine until it doesn’t."

What advice would you have for wealth management practice owners who feel like they are always in "rebuild" mode and building a productive team?

JBH: "The rebuild cycle almost always points back to the same root cause; the practice never built the infrastructure that would allow a team member to succeed independently. When there are no documented processes, no clear role expectations, and no onboarding framework, every new hire starts from scratch, and when they leave, they take institutional knowledge with them. The first investment isn't in finding better people; it's in building the systems that make it possible for good people to thrive and stay.

The second thing I'd say is that "rebuild mode" often signals that accountability has been informal for too long. If team members don't know what success looks like in their role, they can't self-correct. Clarity is kindness. Getting explicit about role expectations, even in a simple one-page format per role, changes the dynamic significantly. It doesn't have to be fancy, but it does need to be intentional.

And finally, invest in the people you have before assuming you need different people. Stop throwing more bodies at the deeper issues. In my experience, a lot of turnover in independent practices is preventable with more intentional feedback, a visible development path, and the sense that someone is paying attention to the person, not just the output."