Misguided Helpfulness

SUSAN: Hi, and welcome to another great podcast from the Purposeful Planning Institute. I'm Susan Bradley, and I have a great pleasure today to host a conversation with Dr. Moira Somers. Dr. Moira Somers’ recent book, Fault Lines of Finance: Understanding and Preventing Financial Misconduct, is a lovely read. You think it's a pretty heavy-duty book, but it's a book that hits the heart of advice giving. Advice giving around wealth, money, families, etc. And Dr. Moira has been in this space to help us understand the complexities of the work that we do, the kind of work that members of PPI do for a long time. So, Dr. Moira, thanks for being here. It's always fun to have a conversation with you. MOIRA: So looking forward to it, Susan. Thank you. SUSAN: I know this is just your second book, but when you write books, you spend a long time on them. I know. Tell me this this particular topic. How did it come about, and what were some of the big surprises that you found? MOIRA: I was approached by a solicitor from the UK after I spoke at a conference there. She had spent her career suing financial advisors who were embroiled in misconduct, and she had become a financial advisor herself. In fact, was about to become CEO of a financial firm, and so her strong strong motivation to move upstream of misconduct, was to understand and prevent it. So she thought that together we might be able to do some good in the world of financial services by really coming to understand how it happened, because certainly her experience had been that while there were some snakes out there, some people who set out to do harm and really did do a splendid job of just that, the majority of the people that she had become involved with over the years had never set out to do harm. They'd stumbled into it. It had been quite inadvertent, quite unintentional, and indeed, the more that we got into it, Susan, the more we discovered that many of the people actually were victims themselves of bad bosses, bad systems. And so that's what we set out to do: try and get upstream, work with regulators, work with people who wanted, who were just as motivated as we were to try to make this a better place in which to work. SUSAN: I like the idea of going upstream. Usually, it's all about, “These are the rules, and you have to follow them,” and it goes on and on like that. Getting upstream seems like it opens up the capacity for advisors to be helpful, human, heart-centered, but at the same time, not misguided helpers. MOIRA: That's right. SUSAN: Not falling into the part that we're not individually really trained for beyond the scope of the engagement. So you're going to help us understand this topic, not really for the—I think you've used the term—the black-hearted, the bad guys, but the PPI community is essentially heart-centered people doing a range of work. So help us understand how we can, without really intending or even knowing, cross the line. What does that look like? MOIRA: So this was one of the categories that the regulators pretty much begged us to attend to because it was one of the categories of misconduct that was breaking their heart. These are their friends, too, and so this is the category that we call the misguided helpers—the people who really just stumbled into misconduct because of an incredible desire to be useful here. Human beings to their clients. And I think that most people who go into this profession, in addition to wanting to do well for themselves and their families, they also want to do good in the world, and you and I do a lot of work, of course, in the transition space, and boy, is that a time of interpersonal and personal tumult. And so, as advisors of every stripe, when you see people involved in that turmoil, absolutely, the desire to be helpful gets stoked like a fire. Probably one of the biggest factors contributing to misconduct, inadvertent misconduct, is people's dislike of feeling uncomfortable. It can start an awareness that you've made a mistake, and so you quickly rush to cover it up. So that's one way that misconduct can happen. You just like, “Oh my gosh, shouldn't have done that, and so I'm gonna work really hard to cover it up,” instead of making that hard decision to open yourself up to your manager, to compliance, to the client themselves. But another way in which we don't want to feel uncomfortable is bearing witness to our client's discomfort. When you're a highly empathic person, and you see a client in distress because they're going through divorce, because they or a loved one has just received a devastating diagnosis, the impulse to just get in there and make them feel better is at times overpowering, and it can lead to this thing called scope creep, where you just say, “Well, if not me, who? I see that there's a job to be done, and I'm just going to go and do it because it's just more efficient for me to do this thing than to wait for other people to rally the troops and get other people to do it.” So we see this in particular, Susan, in people who might have come to their current job, but they've got other jobs. So maybe they were an attorney before they became a financial advisor, or maybe they were a financial advisor before they became a pastor, and they gave up the licenses associated with those previous domains, but they just decide they're going to jump in because they know a lot, or sometimes they know a lot because they themselves have gone through some of these big transition events. SUSAN: Scope creep is interesting. I know in the financial space, whether you're on the family office side or the investment side, it's the whole landscape. You usually, even if it's an existing client, have to pause because life is so complex and changing fundamentally. So there's usually a pause, and there's a reset, and part of the reset is new agreements because more time, more things need to be done. High consequences, complex, with people. So it's kind of big. So we at the institute work on different kinds of agreements. But I'm thinking scope creep is, and I know that you write about it in the book, but that is really something that could certainly get ignited frequently with transitions because there's a lot of unexpected twists and turns. So you could be in the middle of working with a family and helping them absorb the shock of change and manage the pieces, and something new comes up. So it sounds almost like you need to be ready to revisit that agreement that spells out the scope and say, "This is new. We're going to put it in, or we're not going to put it in, or this is what it would look like." Is that the right action? MOIRA: That can be absolutely part of the action. To just say, "Let's pause for a moment." That's the big step. Let's pause for a moment and think about a few things. And before even discussing it with the client is to sit down with yourself and to say, "Am I truly the best person to be doing this thing? Why do I think that I am? If I do this thing, what can't I be doing? What's the opportunity cost of me saying yes to being helpful in this way? Do I truly have the expertise, but also the objectivity, to be stepping in in this particular way?" SUSAN: It seems like the professionals that I work with have worked with, they're usually full-plate people. They're heart-centered, highly technical. They know what they're doing, but there's a lot. There's always a lot. And then when a situation comes up that is heartbreaking for a family, because not all transitions are good or bad, but there's a lot that goes on, so that whole experience of compassion fatigue seems to seep in. How do people recognize compassion fatigue, which I think lowers your capabilities of being your best self? That's my non-technical way of explaining it. But how do you recognize it, and what do you do about it? MOIRA: I think that compassion fatigue is almost like a whole separate podcast, but I think if we go back to just the boundary problem… SUSAN: Okay. MOIRA: And thinking about what is my empathy leading me to do, or my compassion leading me to do right now that might not be appropriate for me to do? Who might be better suited to be doing this? What is it that I am uniquely suited to be doing for this client? What is it that I've been contracted or hired to do? Because if your objectivity is compromised in some ways, or if you are burned out, used up, that's a problem. Not only are all of your resources being used up by this client in ways that might be violating, going into that territory that we call scope creep? Not only is scope creep a problem because it's leading you to do too much for the one family, but it may, you know, it also depletes your resources for the other clients that you have, and indeed for the other responsibilities that you have in your life. So that's a big part of the problem. The other part of the problem is, of course, that when you're hyper-focused, we know this from the work of Daniel Kahneman. When you're hyper-focused on what's in the spotlight, you don't see what's outside the spotlight, and that is often where the ethical issues arise that can get you. You're not aware that you have inserted yourself inappropriately into families' functioning. I remember years ago reading Courtney Pullen's book about *Intentional Wealth*, and he's got a chapter in there about just this thing for people working in the family office space, reminding people that despite the fact that you are often highly embedded in their lives, you've got to remind yourself constantly that you are not part of the family. And at the end of the day, you have to go home and let them be family over there, while you are family of your own over there. And that was, you know, for me as a newbie in that space, that was so instructive. SUSAN: You give us some hacks in the book, and I think that would be helpful here to understand how to catch ourselves, how to take that pause. I know we talk about the power of a pause. So it's one thing to say, "Let me step back for a minute. This is big. I need to pause. Or why don't we just leave this and go here for a moment?" What are some of the hacks? What can professionals do? MOIRA: One of the big things, as annoying as it is, is just making friends with your own discomfort. It's just like, "Ah, for crying out loud. Okay, what do you got for me?" You know, just where am I feeling it in my body? Where is it? And just letting it speak to you for the minute or so that it's there to say, "Okay, this one's got me. This one's got me. Just let me feel it,” and then saying, "Okay, who do I need? What do I need to do? What needs to be done here?" Recognize that most of the time, when we've got this crazy sense of urgency, that is when we are most likely to be on the verge of making a mistake. SUSAN: Okay. MOIRA: We are not firefighters. We are not called upon to do the transitionist equivalent of CPR. There is time for a breath and a pause to reach out for wise counsel, to figure out what exactly is the issue here. What are the resources available to the family and to me? You know, at the Sudden Money Institute, at the FTI, you do the DFZ. What's now, soon, and later? You do a very deliberate job of slowing down and saying, "It all feels urgent,” And it's not. So let's figure that out, because if you act out of that sense of urgency, that's when things are really likely to steer you wrong. SUSAN: So, would you say that if you catch yourself with everything feeling urgent, or you catch yourself angry at something that's happened, you recognize what it is to be triggered, or maybe you catch yourself feeling so much compassion, empathy, that it's draining you? You can't separate yourself. Those are your red flags, and I guess in a perfect world, you could catch yourself and say, "Oh, sorry, I'm going for a walk," and you go walk it off, and that would be nice. But sometimes you're right there, you're with the family. Maybe you could all go for a walk. I don't know. I was just, I'm just winging it here. You're the professional. MOIRA: I'm thinking, my husband was an airline pilot for years, and they would practice this in a simulator. He used to joke that they would sit there in the simulator with an engine fire and the cockpit filling with smoke and a terrorist outside the door, and they'd be trained to pick a hair out of the head and examine the follicle for 10 seconds and just, "What do we need to do here?" to get our body under control and look at the checklist. Right then, they are trained to not lose their mind in these scenarios. They've got to get themselves under control, and so it's a kind of discipline that we can all start getting. And part of the way to get that discipline is to actually have regular community around us where we ask each other ethical questions on a regular basis. Like, "So what's come up? What are the challenging files? Indeed, what might even be the stinky files, the smelly ones?" And not what makes them hard technically, but what's making them hard emotionally. "Oh yes, we are going to go there," and we're going to push each other to say, "Why does this one have our hearts?" And we're going to create this place of psychological safety where we can surface that with each other, and where we can challenge each other, and say, "Okay, let's get these boundaries back in place. Remember the last time you said yes to that? What happened to you? How did that one end? How is that working for you?" And so to have a kind of community around us where it is not only safe to do so, but it's expected that we'll do so, that's really valuable to have. Another really important thing to be aware of that can be even more upstream than that is the practice of tending to our own lives. Work can easily become an applauded addiction. I can certainly think of times in my own life where work was much more rewarding than family life was. I'm thinking of the teenage years. “Holy cow, that ate my shorts.” Oh, and, unlike my family members, my clients were usually quite grateful, and so it could have become much easier to retreat to work and to retreat into those relationships rather than to attend to my own life. SUSAN: Yeah. MOIRA: And so you just think about that. Those of us who are self-employed, work becomes a way of just making more money. That can become a trap. The more hours you spend, the more you make when you aren't on a salary, and so that too can become an avenue by which you can just work and work and work and get rewarded for it. There are things that we have to do for our personal lives that may not always feel good. More discomfort that I'm talking about, like going to the gym or attending to these medical issues, whereas the puzzle, the intellectual puzzle, or the relational puzzle of work, is a much more comfortable zone for many people. But that willingness to tend to our own lives is part of what helps us avoid scope creep and helps keep us on the side of the regulatory angels in a weird way. The regulators told us that all the time. So many people end up before them because their personal life was just blowing apart, and they turned to their clients for the kind of validation or comfort that they weren't getting in other parts of their lives. SUSAN: Regulatory angels. That's something to take. You don't think of them as angels, but if they keep us safe and keep clients safe, it's not just about our own safety. It's about doing our best service to the people that rely on us, that hire us, that care for us. What are the final things that you would like to say to the PPI community? MOIRA: I’ve attended the conferences. I have benefited from the podcasts. This is a beautiful, beautiful community. I think this is a community that is willing, by and large, to engage in the kind of moral humility that's necessary, and part of that is this willingness to say, "Where are my vulnerabilities?" To be willing to look at that, "What are my non-negotiables?” For as seriously as they take their professional life and want to do well by their clients, they exercise that same level of commitment to their own well-being, recognizing that this is not a nice-to-have. This is what keeps everybody safe and allows people ultimately to slow down long enough to ask, "What are the ethical issues that could be at play here, and what am I willing to do about it?" So that when moral courage is needed, that you can actually reach for it in those moments. SUSAN: And that's the world we want to live in. And with that, I want to thank everyone who has joined us for this podcast. And I would encourage you to read the book, reach out to Moira for more questions on this, and one way or another, continue this conversation. I never thought about moral humility and moral courage, but that's what you're helping us build, and that's a good thing. Thanks for your time and the beautiful contribution to the profession with this book. MOIRA: Thank you so much.