Working With ‘Misengaged Couples’: Ways To Engage Both Parties In Planning Conversations

Shownotes:

• Sydney Squires: LinkedIn
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• Fix, Fine, Flourish: A Framework To Take Clients From (Just) "Fine" Stagnancy To Being Engaged Again

Full Transcript:

Adam: Hello, and welcome back to the "Financial Advisor Technician" podcast. I'm your host, Adam Van Deusen. On today's episode, we're going to discuss a common issue for financial advisors working with client couples, which is what happens when each member of the couple isn't exactly on the same wavelength when it comes to engagement or communication with the advisor or with each other. For instance, one member might be the so-called family financial officer, while the other is deferential when it comes to making financial decisions. Or perhaps one member of the couple speaks openly during meetings with the advisor, while the other is more quiet. While it's rare for client couples to be equally engaged and share similar communication styles, when a couple is particularly misengaged, it can be challenging for both the advisor, who might wonder whether they are truly serving the needs of both partners, and the clients themselves, as one partner's goals or interests might dominate, perhaps creating strain in the relationship.

To help us dig deeper into this topic, I'm joined today by Sydney Squires, a senior financial planning nerd here at Kitces.com, to discuss a framework advisors can use to identify different types of client-couple decision-making styles, the consequences of different types of mismatched engagement styles, and concrete tactics advisors can use to ensure that everyone is heard. Welcome, Sydney, and thanks for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Technician" podcast.

Sydney: Hi, Adam. I'm super excited to be here.

Identifying "Misengaged Couples" [1:49]

Adam: Great. Well, so to start, perhaps you could begin by talking about exactly what you mean when you use the term misengaged couple, and what it means in the financial advisory context.

Sydney: Yeah. So I'll start with a term that I think people are going to be most familiar with, which is the disengaged client. So, often when you're serving a client-couple, there's, so to speak, often the person who's really the driver, probably the person who contacted the financial advisor. And then there's a person who is kind of less into the financial planning process, whether they just kind of show up and they're out of it, whether they don't show up at all, whether they don't participate. And I think that's a framework that many advisors see.

I do think that that's important. That's something that we'll discuss more in this, but I think that what might be a more productive framework that doesn't necessarily put the whole onus on the part of the couple that's less into finances is to kind of broaden this scale of engagement. Because really, if both members of the couple were kind of not into finances, right, or financial planning, the advisor could adapt their style pretty easily to match both of them. Likewise, if both members of the couple were super into all the financial details and financial planning, then the advisor could adapt to both of them. So this is kind of what I've started calling misengagement and misengaged couples, which is that the couple is operating on a different wavelength, and they're struggling to work cooperatively together. And I think there are other examples of this…from one member of the couple is, for example, overassertive in a meeting. I would argue that couples fighting in a meeting is a symptom of this misengagement. Where it's just kind of they're not operating in the same style, and that kind of poses a challenge to the financial advisor because you're kind of trying to operate on two frameworks at the same time to speak to both clients, which is just very challenging to run a meeting that engages both people well that way.

Adam: Yeah, and so it sounds like, I think, the key point here is that there's just different styles of misengagement. Perhaps one of them, again, as you said, is sort of the disengagement. One member of the client is always the one who's speaking more in meetings. Maybe the other partner just doesn't even show up to the meetings. That can happen sometimes. But even when both clients are in the meeting, they might be on different wavelengths in terms of how much they're engaging on the financial situation, in terms of their priorities, I would imagine as well. One client is very concerned about cash flow issues, while maybe one is concerned about retirement planning issues. So it sounds like the key here is that there's different ways to be misengaged. As we'll get into, as an advisor, it could be quite valuable not only to diagnose these, but also sort of find ways to bring each of those partners together.

Sydney: Yeah, and I think the big thing with it is it's no one's at fault when it comes to misengagement. It's actually just, I think, in many ways, a symptom of how many couples operate over time. Because modern life demands so many different skills, I think it's very normal for couples to end up with some areas of specialty. One example is, in my own household, I'm much more of a financial specialist. And if you asked me one question about our cars, I would have literally no information to say. And I don't think that's a bad thing. It's just that I personally don't have time to care about both the finances and the cars, and vice versa for my husband. And so it's not a bad thing, but when you multiply that by five years, 10 years, 15 years and all of that, you end up with one member of the client couple who's very concerned with and has mastery of a certain skill set and another member of the couple who is at this point kind of used to taking, if not the back seat, then at least the passenger seat and just letting the other member of the couple drive a little bit.

A Framework To Identify The Different Types Of Misengaged Couples [6:05]

Adam: Yeah. And so I think that's actually a really great segue because we really like to get nerdy here at Kitces and on the "Financial Advisor Technician" podcast. So I understand that we could talk, perhaps, about a framework that you discuss in an article that you've written on this topic to sort of help advisors identify the different types of client relationships that they might encounter when they're dealing with a misengaged couple.

Sydney: Yeah. Within the financial planning meeting itself, I think that there's kind of a framework that can help it feel a little more practical than all the different areas of role specialization and all of that. And this was written about by Sarah Asebedo and Emily Purdon, and they kind of adapted this from prior research. Basically, imagine a kind of two-way spectrum of assertiveness and cooperativeness, and basically low to high on each of those.

So, for example, if someone is low cooperativeness and low assertiveness in the meeting, that's called avoidance within this framework. So that's someone in the couple is absent, whether in practice or in actuality, right? Just like, I'm not in the meeting, or I'm in the meeting, but I'm super checked out. If someone is low cooperativeness, so they're not necessarily wanting to work together with the other person in the couple, but is very competitive, that basically means, "Hey, whatever my partner says in the meeting, I don't know if I'm really going to be agreeing. I don't really want them to get any ground," right? And so you almost approach the meetings like it's a competition a bit, and you end up in this framework of, "I win, and you lose," or at least in a winners and losers framework.

On the other side of the spectrum is what I'll call the high cooperativeness side, so you're willing to work with your spouse. But if you're very cooperative and not very assertive, that's called accommodation. And it's pretty much just, "I'm going to yield on all of these different points and I will just kind of let my partner drive, let my partner win," even, right? It may be something is not worth the fight. It may be that I don't feel like I know enough about something. And so I'm just going to accommodate like, "Whatever you guys say is fine. That sounds good with me."

And then, kind of the high assertiveness and high cooperativeness is collaboration. Basically, you end up where both of us win and all that. And then kind of in the middle of it all is compromise, which I think is a more realistic corner that stuff ends in, where most people are giving up a little bit. There's a little bit of just scarcity, and that there's a fixed amount of resources. So it's unrealistic. We can do everything that's important to all of us all the time. And so, kind of areas of collaboration and compromise are ideally where you want a couple to settle in. But again, in this assertiveness to cooperativeness scale, you kind of need both parties to show up in a high assertiveness, high cooperativeness area of things.

If one couple shows up and they're completely avoidant, or one couple shows up and they're being very competitive in a meeting, the other spouse might be trying to be that blend of assertive and cooperative, and they may be trying to find a compromise. But it's really hard if the other person in the couple is not necessarily in that same headspace.

Adam: Thanks for running down each of those. So sort of just to summarize, we're looking at the two axes here. So we have assertiveness, cooperativeness. So perhaps in an ideal world, as you mentioned, it's a compromise where both sides are willing to yield or perhaps collaborating where both sides or both partners are extremely engaged, but are really willing to work with each other. When we're talking about misengaged couples, so it sounds like we're working in the other three boxes. So competing where both people are assertive in the meeting, and they're not particularly cooperating with each other, avoiding where one partner is just totally absent and the other person is totally deciding, and then accommodating where one partner is actively sort of deferential to the other partner, is willing to sort of cede the decision making. And as you said, there's potential problem areas in each of these in terms of both partners being able to explain and reach their financial goals here.

The Consequences Of Client "Misengagement" For Advisors And Their Clients [10:33]

Adam: So Sydney, I think we're in a good place right here. So now we sort of understand what it means by misengaged couple. We have some of the sort of archetypes of what different types of misengaged couples look like. But for advisors out there, what are some of the consequences of couples who are misengaged, both perhaps for the couples themselves, but also for the advisor in their business?

Sydney: Yeah. In the very short term, I think it's kind of unpleasant, and I think that's worth just kind of addressing on its face. I think most advisors in an ideal world, you really want to feel like you're the person who can help both parts of the couple feel heard. You want to really help them get engaged and get excited, especially if it's a corner of their lives they haven't felt excited about in the past. And so, if you are managing a whole meeting and you're trying to get one member of this partnership to speak more or speak less and all of that, that's a different area of meeting management. And that can sometimes feel very frustrating.

But separate from the short-term stuff, I think that there are kind of two corners of these long-term consequences that advisors are concerned about. I think that the first is just I really like the Dick Wagner quote of, "Money skills are life skills." And just that I think advisors are aware that in the long term, if the part of the couple who's been like the family financial officer, right, the person driving all these financial situations, if they are either incapacitated for the short or long term, if they pass away first, then the other member of the couple that's declared themselves to not be the financial person can kind of end up in a really tough spot really quickly. And hopefully, the advisor can guide them through that, but that learning curve is a lot easier if it's happened over five years in the financial planning relationship and not when everything's kind of in a state of emergency.

And then the other outcome of that is that I think a lot of advisors worry a little bit about client couple retention, either in the short term, where that member of the couple is like, "You know what, I'm actually not feeling heard." But also in the event that one client passes away, that the widowed person may then be trying to move on to someone else, ironically, right when they might need the advisor the most. So there's that short-term end of it's unpleasant in the short term, but then also this pattern kind of perpetuates...it can lead to dysfunction or, again, just the relationship ending in the long term.

Adam: Yeah. And I think one key point here, though, is that sometimes with a misengaged couple, let's take the example of one of the partners is very engaged with the advisor and the other one isn't, sort of an easier path perhaps is to engage with that more active person. They're responding to the emails, they're coming to the client meetings. It might be simpler than doing sort of this active outreach to the other partner who's maybe less communicative in the meetings. But as you're saying, there are consequences to that, whether it is, as you said, in the near term, you're not necessarily being aware of the goals of both partners in the couple. One might not really be so approving or engaged with the advisor themselves, which could have consequences, as you said, for the long run. Let's say the one partner passes away or is incapacitated, as you said, they might not know exactly what's in their financial plan, and they might go looking for a different advisor if they felt like the advisor that they had been working with hadn't been actively reaching out to them. So it sounds like what you're saying is that it's important for the advisors to sort of be proactive in this realm.

Sydney: Yeah. There's a lot for just...if you're goal setting, then often making really big financial decisions and half of the couple, for all sorts of different reasons, may not feel heard. That has really long consequences, both for the couple and also for the advisor. But yeah, it's a tough dynamic to manage when you're trying to get someone to speak up in a corner of their relationship where they've been very used to being in that avoidance, accommodation corner of things. And yeah, just have a lot of empathy for the advisor who is balancing these dynamics. It's certainly not easy.

How Advisors Can Support Misengaged Couples [15:19]

Adam: So we've discussed sort of the issue with misengaged couples, helping to identify the different types of them and why it can be valuable for advisors to address this issue. Let's move on to potential tactics to help address this issue. So I would imagine with a misengaged couple, early identification and perhaps finding ways to address the issue very early on in the advisor-client relationship would be helpful. What's something that an advisor could do early on, whether it's identify or help bring in both partners into the conversation?

Sydney: Yeah. The very easiest thing is to try, in every way, just start with setting that as the expectation. I think many clients, whether this is the first financial advisor they've ever worked with or they've worked with a financial advisor in the past, when it's a new relationship, the client is trying to figure out what the advisor expects of them and vice versa. And so whether it's when meetings are first scheduled, putting something explicitly of like, "Hey, if you're married or in a committed relationship, we really want to have both parties there."

And I think doing a little bit of... I'll say, I think that for the four areas of misengagement, it can be very helpful to send things like meeting agendas in advance. If you're working with someone who's kind of on that lower assertive end and lower cooperative ends of things, that's where that member of the couple would probably really benefit by having a written agenda of here's exactly what we're going to talk over, particularly if the financial advisor does much more on the behavioral finance side. In some ways, that can be a nice way to affirm, "Yeah, we're going to talk through the finance stuff," right? "We're going to talk through a lot of this. And also, I just really want to hear about your goals." A lot of clients may not have realized that that's a dynamic that even can happen in a financial planning meeting. And so there's a point to which it's like, if you're talking about more things than just the hard numbers and you're trying to give a big picture of the goals, letting the clients know up front might actually help make the couple, as a whole, more interested and can also help dial down people's expectations if someone is wanting to come and only discuss the hard numbers or if someone is only coming just to make their partner happy or something. So that can be a good way to kind of thread that line.

The other thing is, if the advisor has the capacity for it up front, I personally am always a proponent of doing personality assessments. I think that where personality assessments can be very helpful is just to capture patterns. People are always more complex than any full assessment can show, but it can be a helpful really big-picture thing of how people like to show up. In particular, when it comes to how people tend to show up within meetings, relationships, and stuff, I personally really like the DISC profile, which kind of shows things from, literally, dominance is one of them to cooperativeness. And it will kind of rate people to have either really high or extremely low areas of that. So if you send clients that in advance as a part of the onboarding process, you can kind of see, "Oh, client A is very high in dominance, and client B is really low in dominance." And it can be really helpful just to know that going into a meeting that you will probably have to work a little more proactively with client B to get them to kind of speak up while also kind of doing a little bit of management of client A. And again, this is all pre-meeting stuff that can actually help the meeting itself go a lot more smoothly.

Adam: Yeah, that's a really good point. I was going to say, so it sounds like the first item is sort of for the advisors, literally, setting the agenda, letting the clients know what's going to be discussed. And again, perhaps giving both clients an idea of what to expect. So if someone, for example, doesn't enjoy speaking extemporaneously quite as much, maybe they can gather their thoughts in advance and perhaps be more engaged during the meeting.

And then the second item, it sounds like what you said was sort of digging in, whether it's using a formal personality assessment or otherwise, to better get to know each of the clients. And I'm assuming in this case that each member of the couple is taking this assessment separately. So perhaps it's teaching them something about themselves, but as the advisor, really letting you know how each of the members of the couple are coming to the table sort of separately. Is that right?

Sydney: Yes. Be sure to test both of them separately because of that dynamic. If you send one DISC profile assessment or even one risk tolerance assessment to the client couple, honestly, the odds that the couple sits down and takes it together is, A, pretty unlikely, right, within a family financial officer and partner dynamic. But also, B, getting the aggregate average of how both clients tend to show up is not always the most helpful thing. Looping back to the DISC profile example, if one member of the client couple is very, very assertive and the other is very not assertive, and they're trying to answer in the middle ground, and you end up with just a moderate dominance score, then that's actually not informative to how either client is going to show up in the meeting. So just anything that can be done, when possible, to capture that data separately is very helpful. And I think that the scale of that and the spot where advisors will need to be discerning is just being mindful, particularly for the less engaged spouse or the spouse who isn't traditionally as into finance, that really the number of things you can ask them to do, especially in the early relationship is going to be pretty limited. So try to keep it to one or two specific things that you are really asking them for, and be really specific about the why and why it matters. So do what you can to capture good data, but just be very mindful of the pacing at which you send it so that you're not affirming to the spouse that wasn't that into finance that this is still going to be a lot of work, so to speak.

Adam: Right, right. And client onboarding, always a lot of paperwork, a lot of homework that advisors are asking. So this could be very useful, but as you mentioned, maybe one more thing that's on the list to do. So preparation seems to be a big part of this. But let's say that we're now in the meeting with clients, whether it's a newer client or perhaps an established client. I'm sure a lot of advisors out there listening right now can think of some of the clients that they have where this sort of misengaged status might apply. So what are some tactics that advisors can use during the meeting itself to sort of address the misengaged client issue?

Sydney: Yeah. Just for established clients, Dr. Meghaan Lurtz has this really excellent article about reengagement meetings about kind of either things have changed, or stuff's been going around for a while where she basically talks through holding a new engagement meeting. And so for established clients and for new clients, I think that there's always a power in explicitly setting the stage and just asking good questions to help everyone just put expectations out into the open and to even just explicitly call out dynamics. And I think that when advisors can do that with both some level of sensitivity as well as, honestly, a little bit of humor can go a really long way. If the advisor calls out, what would a really successful financial advising meeting look like? And also, what would it look like if this thing were fun? And I think you can sort of be a little playful with it, calling out some areas of misengagement.

But I think that some things that can be very helpful is, if the advisor has capacity for it, getting some baseline of how would each member of the client couple really prefer to be contacted, communicated with, and all of that. If the advisor kind of has their set touch points or methods of communication, it may be helpful just to start with listing what their options are so that people know, but even just asking both members of the couple that. I think it's helpful to ask both members of the couple about their main goals and just what's important to them. And if the advisor can spot a dynamic where one couple is much more accommodating or much less assertive, it's usually helpful to start with that person. And if that person is kind of struggling to come up with things, that's where it may be helpful to just list a few examples. Just things that, again, help lower the stakes for them. I think on the other end, with the partner that's kind of more assertive and is more enthusiastic, that's where the advisor will want to use just some blend of really reflective language and really cooperation-focused language to just help resetting that person towards that main goal. One member of the couple may feel that the other is "spoiling the kids," right? And trying to reroute that towards, okay, what's actually the shared problem here? What's that deeper concern? And pulling that away from that partner, I think, can help ease things in the short term and can also help in the long term, kind of set an implicit expectation of, "Hey, don't triangulate me between you two," which can also be very helpful.

Adam: Yeah. And I think advisors would prefer to avoid that kind of awkward situation there. So, yeah, a lot of good things that you mentioned there. So it sounds like first off is setting the table and letting each of the partners explain how they prefer to communicate and what's the best way to get their goals across. So I can imagine one partner might prefer to send their questions in advance or be able to write it down in an email in advance, whereas the other partner might be willing to go off on a 20-minute monologue at the start of the meeting talking about their concerns. So using different types of modes of communication. And as you mentioned, letting the clients know what types of communication are available because they might assume that what's discussed at the meeting itself is the only place to discuss issues, whereas the advisor might be open to receiving it via email or other fora. That's great.

The other key point I think I got from you there is a lot of the focus here sometimes could be on trying to get perhaps a lesser engaged partner to be more engaged. So we've talked a lot about the questions and the tactics to do that. But as you mentioned, there's also an element here for the more engaged partner or a more assertive partner in the sense that if they are the one who's speaking for almost the entire meeting, they could really drown out the other partner, and perhaps, unintentionally, they might not realize that they're doing it. But if that happens, it might leave very little room for the other partner to get a word in, their goals explained, or any questions or concerns addressed. So you mentioned, I think, which is a great tactic, which is the first thing to do from the advisor's end is speaking to, perhaps if they've identified them, the lesser engaged partner, letting them get sort of the first word in to make sure that they can explain or discuss the issues that they want to before perhaps the more assertive partner does more in the conversation. So I think those are really, really great questions, great tactics for advisors to consider.

One Key Takeaway For Advisors [27:32]

Adam: So as we come to the end of our time today, we've covered a lot of ground, but we always like to leave our listeners as the final question with one key takeaway that you think they should get from this conversation. So from your end, Sydney, what would that be for our listeners?

Sydney: I think that the really big takeaway is thinking about this engagement dynamic as a spectrum, just because that then enables the advisor to not just be thinking about the less engaged client, but then also the more engaged and more assertive member of the couple. And I think that when the advisor can ideally start with the explicit idea that both people are heard, but then genuinely use communication tactics in the meeting as well as outside of it to really back that up, then they can help the couple understand, maybe for the first time in a very long relationship, how to show up cooperatively in a financial discussion and the way that both of their dreams and long term ambitions and goals can actually play out in this financial planning relationship. I think there's a degree to which clients might not know what is possible because they may have had prior experience with financial advisors, this may be their first time, this is probably a decades-old relationship. And so I think that advisors who can, particularly early in the financial planning relationship, just set a really good groundwork for their expectations just may be surprised at how those dynamics can change in the long term.

Adam: Yeah, I think that's a really great way to wrap up. So well, thank you so much again for joining us today on the "Financial Advisor Technician" podcast, Sydney.

Sydney: Thank you, Adam.