Leading Achievement: Five Insights to Empower Advisor Success

Achievement is the completion of a desired outcome—a sale made, a customer paying for their trip, or a transaction completed. Achievement involves planning, doing, and measuring. Whether an advisor’s goal is to sell their first river cruise or reach a million dollars, success results in both a happy advisor and a bank account that reflects it.

While it is easy to focus on achievement as a result, true success is won or lost along the way.
I love this quote from a friend and mentor, Dr. Richard Young, Olympic Medalist and High-Performance expert.

“Medals are awarded on the day but earned on the days, months, and years prior.”

The reason that leading achievement is hard is that the road to achievement is full of obstacles and setbacks. The odds of us achieving goals can be daunting. Here are just a few key facts on why struggle to achieve goals:

• 71% abandon their goals within three to four weeks because they don’t see results soon enough (Journal of Applied Psychology).
• Only 3% write down their goals—despite this increasing the likelihood of success by 42% (Harvard study).
• Goals motivated by extrinsic factors have a 50% higher failure rate compared to intrinsic motivation (Journal of Social Psychology).
• 50% abandon long-term goals due to competing commitments to do other things (Kegan and Lahey).
• Less than 10% of leaders use effective accountability systems, despite a 95% boost in goal attainment with accountability.

Understanding why achievement is often challenging allows us to refocus on what we can do to turn the odds in our team’s favor. The first step towards ensuring success is to establish realistic, fully expressed, deeply meaningful goals.

1. Set Realistic, Fully Articulated Goals

Goal setting is more important than goal setting because it gets to the heart of why an advisor is on this journey. Here are some suggested thought-provoking questions:
• What is your big goal?
• Why does it matter to you?
• Who will you celebrate with?
• What will get in your way?
• What do you need to improve?

Setting goals is only the beginning. To sustain motivation, we must honor the human side of goal attainment as a need not a want, and recognize the role emotions play in success.

2. Embrace the Human Need to Achieve

The biggest mistake we make in goal setting is to make it all about the numbers, without placing value on what achieving does to our quality of life. Like an athlete deprived of food, without embracing the meaning behind the goal, the desire to keep going, to be our best, and to deliver high performance comes to a halt.

It is a basic human need to achieve and develop. When we empower intrinsic motivations, we fan the natural flame of goal attainment. Studies show that goals motivated by intrinsic factors have a significantly higher success rate compared to extrinsically motivated ones.

“The most powerful way to sustain motivation is through the satisfaction of doing something inherently interesting, challenging, and personally meaningful.”
– Edward Deci, Self-Determination Theory

While embracing the humanity behind goals is vital, writing down goals bridges the gap between aspiration and action.

3. Write Goals Down and Catch Advisors in the Act of Achievement

Writing down goals dramatically improves our chances of achieving them—by as much as 42%. It helps us visualize, builds motivation, and makes it easier to break goals into bite-sized pieces.

Yet, so few leaders have a written copy of their advisors’ goals—from the advisor’s perspective. Metrics and sales benchmarks matter, but having an advisor’s written goal plan allows us to truly understand the meaning behind the goals. The more we know their goals, the better we can recognize their efforts—providing the most personalized recognition possible.

Once goals are articulated and documented, it’s critical to engage in their efforts. We want to catch them in the act of doing, recognizing effort, even when the results aren’t immediately visible.

4. Uncover Fears and Mitigate the Risk

We often fail to achieve because of fear—fear of failure and even fear of success. We fear what people will think or say. The leader’s role is to gently and consistently work to uncover these fears.

Tim Ferris’ Fear Setting TED Talk suggests using two questions to uncover fears:

1. What is the worst thing that could happen?

2. What would you do if that did happen?

Addressing fears helps remove significant barriers to progress, but maintaining progress requires ongoing support. By reframing accountability as an act of service, we can ensure that advisors feel empowered rather than judged.

5. Change Accountability to an Act of Service

A 95% increase in odds of achievement—who wouldn’t take those odds?

According to Harvard Business Review, less than 10% of leaders create accountability. Accountability often fails because it feels judgmental. The best leaders ask for permission to hold others accountable, shifting the tone from judging to empowering.

For example, at the end of each coaching session, I ask: “What was your key takeaway, what action will you take, and how would you like me to hold you accountable?” I send a reminder five days later to make sure they are on track. It says, “I see you, your success matters to me, and I am here if you need more help.”

With effective accountability in place, the likelihood of achieving goals dramatically increases. Ultimately, the journey of leading achievement is about believing in others and helping them see what they’re truly capable of—something that may be the most rewarding work of all.

Leading achievement is challenging but vital. Helping one person achieve what they once thought impossible—because they borrowed your belief—might be the most important thing you do today.
Lead on!

Geraldine Ree helps Travel Agency Owners grow their business and engage high-performing teams. Learn more here, discover more here, and Find out more here.