I'm writing a series of e-columns on transition planning, interviewing people who are selling their practice to employees or grooming their business for sale to an outside party. For the past month, I have spoken with more than a dozen advisors about structures, client handoffs, earnouts and delegation issues.

I've also listened as they told me about the dysfunctions that arise when a founder gradually becomes an absentee owner, or when he or she starts milking the firm for maximum profit rather than investing in its future growth. But the more people I talk to, the more I've begun to realize that there's a bigger picture emerging-one that has implications in all areas of an advisor's practice.

CHANGING ROLES

Let's start with the transition issues. Jim Grubman, a psychologist and business consultant who helps owners and staff prepare themselves for the day an owner retires, recently told me that founding advisors, as they approach retirement, need to make a dramatic shift in their role within the firm.

All too often, he says, these advisors have followed the common management advice: They've hired people who have complementary (meaning different) skills. Now as they consider their retirement, they look at their staff and realize that no one is trained to do what they do. Who's going to take over their rainmaking and client-facing (behavior-changing) activities?

Suddenly, advisors approaching retirement begin to feel the burden of having to make every major decision and direct every major activity in the office during the transition period. With a finite number of working days left in their careers, they know that the greatest gift they can give their clients is an entity that will provide ongoing care when they exit the stage.

At the same time, however, retiring advisors' personal sense of importance is tied up in their role in the firm. If you make the firm less dependent on you, then aren't you less important? While this may not always be a conscious concern, it can tug invisibly on the whole transition process, slowing it down and even sabotaging it.

MAKING THE SHIFT

The solution? Grubman encourages founding advisors to start giving up hands-on management and replacing it with a new role that is just as important. Instead of serving as the information-decision bottleneck, they need to become the mentor, teacher and coach who encourages the growth and development of their employees. Instead of telling people what to do, teach them how to do it themselves.

The most essential skills to pass on and keep alive in your firm-the ones that are often handled by the founding advisor and no one else-require a great deal of emotional maturity. In their new role as mentors, advisors can coach the staff on how to listen to clients and what to listen for, how to know when and how to help people change their behavior and how to sit across from a prospect and rearticulate what that person needs and wants in a professional relationship-and then explain how you plan to fill that need so that it exceeds all expectations.

Mentoring in this most important area may not be easy, Grubman says, as most advisors learned to do these things intuitively; it's a little like a fish trying to teach someone how to swim. So, instead, he encourages advisors to do for staff what they've learned to do for clients: Take the time to listen, identify and encourage talent. Help each key staff person set and meet personal goals and offer highly personal recommendations and advice.

Starting to see the bigger picture here? One of the most common complaints I hear at planning conferences is how difficult it is to keep good staff. You hire these people (so goes the complaint) and train them, and then eventually they leave you, maybe taking a few clients with them. So what's the point of hiring them at all?

Mark Tibergien of Pershing Advisor Solutions has suggested for years that advisors view their staff as an investment, rather than a cost. Too many planning professionals consider the people they hire to be cogs in an expensive machine. When he asks whether the advisor would go to his or her staff members for financial planning advice, the answer is often: "Certainly not."

But as advisors begin to consider their own transition planning, as they take on a new mentoring role with their staff, as they pass on the skills they themselves acquired through years of experience, it is easy to see how these perennial staffing issues can suddenly resolve themselves. It's not uncommon, Grubman says, for the firms he consults with to have experienced a sudden spike in staff turnover or for the advisor's new mentoring role, at least in the early stages, to be treated with suspicion. However, if the planner can successfully transition from "boss" to "leader and mentor," loyalty and morale suddenly jump off the charts.