FSLedNet Curriculum eBrochure

The Science of Management and Art of Leadership

The FSLEdNet Curriculum is designed to give you a quick overview of some of the sessions and subject matter that you will find on this platform.  This is a new platform, and we will be continuously adding new courses and sessions over the weeks and months to come.  We will be also constantly updating our existing material, while still developing new content.  Our “Show Me” video vignettes have generated much excitement, and we will be adding many of these throughout the year.  We welcome your comments and suggestions for session topics you would find helpful and beneficial.

The Leader’s Philosophy — Most successful leaders have a philosophy of success embedded in them. The Leader’s Philosophy is designed to share many philosophies of the financial services industry’s top leaders.  The growth and success of a leader can very often be tied to their philosophy. Regardless of one’s level of experience, this element’s course curriculum is designed to help them think at a higher level of leadership. This philosophy may challenge some existing paradigms of how to build others with encouragement and enthusiasm.  A Leader’s Philosophy will share the importance of creating core values, mission statements and the power of encouragement.  The culture of any organization comes from the leader’s philosophy, so it’s critically important for us to understand the leader’s mindset.

The Foundational Principles of Leadership – Foundational Principles of Leadership is designed to teach all levels of leaders in the financial services industry-specific ideas, systems and techniques to implement their vision.

Many of these principles will create an environment in which star performers can be recruited and developed. These principles will become the cornerstones of the systems and processes you build your organization, sales unit or sales team with.

It includes specific advice on how to set up an office in order to make it a better environment to recruit and how to help your associates create an environment which will cultivate improved sales results. Foundational Principles also has insight on how to build a winning culture that will not only improve productivity but will reduce turnover of both staff and associates. This area will show a leader how to implement systems that will help get extraordinary results from your people. Leaders will build and refine their systems and processes in order to build their practice.

Foundational Principles of Leadership will give a leader the tools and resources that they need to build a solid foundation and create an organization that enables others to achieve their success to its fullest potential.

The Recruiting Process – Let’s face it – recruiting top talent is probably the most important and challenging job as a leader. In The Recruiting Process, we will examine the three phases of recruiting. Too often, we think of recruiting as finding a candidate and getting them to simply join the organization.  The process a leader follows in recruiting will have the largest impact on the success or failure of a potential candidate. If you want to improve your retention numbers, then fix your recruiting and accountability processes.

Finding the appropriate candidate that meets your ideal candidate profile is the first stage. Having an extensive, detailed selection process with no exceptions is the next stage. The final stage is having a momentum building process. This is where most recruiting programs fail. We often focus on the wrong things in our pre-hire training, and it can overwhelm them.

We’ll also give some innovative and exciting insight on how to recruit experienced or independent associates to your firm.  These ideas will not only help you jump-start your recruiting activity, but it will also show you how to get more production faster by learning how to focus on recruiting people that can make a bigger impact on your goals to current production. You’ll also hear industry-leading ideas on how to keep your prospecting pipeline and reservoir full of people since that will also be the catalyst for future growth. These ideas will show you how to attain and sustain new production growth.

The Development Process – Building a world class financial services firm requires that firm leaders recruit and retain the best talent, turning them into top performers for the firm. Many organizations are so focused on recruiting, they fail to develop the talent they recruit. In this section, you will get on how to develop your associates to their fullest potential.  This section will go into detail on specifics of team selling, mentoring relationships, how to get better results through consistent training and how to develop great producers through some fun events that make learning and training fun. Our goal is to make sure that you develop a specific process of consistent training and education that can attract new performers to your firm, rather than a more common approach that is inconsistent and often ineffective.

The Accountability Process – Accountability is when you inspect what you expect in business. In this element, we’ll look at how you conduct meetings with associates, both housed and detached, as well as staff, specialists and other managers, or field leaders, to ensure that they are doing the activities necessary to achieve their objective and to exceed their goals. Too often, these meetings become either a ‘let’s not hurt any feelings’ event or a ‘get in your face’ meeting.  In reality, most of the accountability meetings do not actually happen at all, which is the worst solution. All levels of associates not only need but want these accountability sessions. Many firms are not having the necessary one-on-one consultations, or team meetings, that allow their leader to see their progress and assure the associates that they really care about them.

Accountability is the management tool which ensures that the great people on your team are consistently growing and adding new experiences and results to their years of success. If not for accountability, they would be repeating the same activity and having the same experience over and over throughout their career. See how to make sure the members of your team are progressing toward the goals that you helped them set. These sessions will show that these meetings will vary based on the experience of the associate and what their role on the team of leaders is.

Alternative Distribution Series – In today’s challenging marketplace, creating new distribution opportunities to expand a firm’s marketing footprint, is becoming a major priority within most distribution channels. With the aging of our field force and new regulations, finding additional revenue sources from the sales of our products is key to not only our success but in some cases, our survival.

This series is divided into three separate and distinct parts, focusing on alternative distribution opportunities.  Banks have been an opportunity that has been well positioned to help their clients with various protection and financial services products and programs. However, many organizations struggle with understanding how to build a relationship with their local banks, as well as how to avoid the pitfalls of that relationship.

Property and Casualty firms are always in search of additional revenue while seeking to find new marketing opportunities that would benefit their client base. But, the ability to position an opportunity which would benefit a P&C firm, without causing any issues with their clients and other associates, have eluded many firms.  In this series, we will address an understanding of the opportunity, and how to not only position it but to deliver upon it.

Finally, we will focus on the changing world of wholesaling, and what wholesalers need to do to maintain the value proposition independent producers seek and hope to keep. With the aging of the independent producers, and affiliated organizations bringing in-house alternative products and companies for their field forces, the independent brokerage firms are facing new, unprecedented challenges.