Recognizing certain psychological phenomena could help advisors build better client relationships
Any financial advisor worth their salt is likely to have measures in place to deliver the same quality of advice to all their clients; tools like processes, scripts, and forms can be valuable for that purpose. But whether it’s about risk, returns, or other aspects of planning, the conversation can be coloured by three psychological phenomena: transference, countertransference, and triangles.
Transference happens when “people transfer feelings and attitudes, often subconsciously, from a person or situation in their past onto a present person or situation,” according to L. Paul Hood Jr., director of planned giving at The University of Toledo Foundation, in a piece for WealthManagement.com.
The phenomenon often plays out in situations involving people in positions of confidence, such as doctors or advisors; clients usually give out subconscious encouragements for the object of their transference to take on their feelings or beliefs about the situation or person. Hood gave the hypothetical example of a client who looks anxious and keeps checking her watch in a meeting with a new advisor.
“Unbeknownst to you, the client’s last experience with an estate planner went badly due to a misunderstanding about the size of the estate planner’s fees and the hourly rate,” he wrote. While the best advisors can do is usually just to avoid being influenced by negative cues from the client, getting them to open up about the source of their projected feelings could also be critical.
Countertransference, meanwhile, happens when advisors respond to a client’s actions — whether real or perceived — based on their own life experiences and psychological baggage. As Hood explained, countertransference often happens subconsciously, and can be harmful especially when an advisor lets their personal feelings toward a client cloud their judgment. Advisors, for example, may immediately get defensive, condescending, and short with a new client who says they’re an engineer.
“You then think to yourself, ‘engineers are always problem clients because they ask too many questions, reduce everything to black and white and think that they know it all,’” Hood said. Those who are aware of their own tendency toward countertransference and can deal with those feelings — even discussing them with clients appropriately — could build strong planner-client relationships.
Finally, planning discussions that involve families are also prone to “triangles.” The concept, developed by the late psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry Murray Bowen in the 1950s, asserts that three-person relationships are the base building block of human emotional systems.
“[A] two-person system is unstable because it tolerates little tension before one or both participants ‘triangle in’ a third person to reduce their anxiety that the tension between the participants caused,” Hood explained. A typical example in estate planning happens when a husband and wife are deadlocked over which of their children should be the successor executor in an estate plan, and one spouse asks the advisor to provide their opinion to break the tie.
“Advisors needn’t be experts in all aspects of human behavior, but achieving a basic understanding of these three psychological phenomena can help improve client relationships,” Hood concluded.
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