What wealth firms can do to elevate women in the workplace

With women set to take their place as asset owners and financial decision makers, one C-level leader says it's more than high time for companies to make gender representation an integral part of their workplace and culture.

"I think women bring in unique value every organization, and I think that every firm needs to have gender diversity all throughout the organization," Kristi Vassak, managing partner and chief operating officer at Lenox Advisors, told InvestmentNews.

Just roughly a month since getting elevated to the COO position at Lenox, Vassak has two major priorities: humanizing the workforce and creating standardized processes.

Building a human workplace

Looking back at her early days in the workforce, Vassak recalls her father saying "Business is easy. It's the people that make it hard." Those words, she says, highlight the hard but essential work of making room for people's different perspectives.

"We all may have had a bad day, and we might bring that bad day to a situation. And sometimes in business, it's hard to let our egos not get in the way," she says. "My goal as a leader is to build a culture that assumes everybody there wants to do a good job, and we all just need to take a step back and allow each other to be humans."

Hand-in-hand with that, Vassak is making it a priority to ensure data integrity and standardized processes at Lenox. By creating a shared protocol throughout all facets of the organization, from filling in applications to managing client notes and records, she hopes to give advisors the mental space necessary to be fully engaged and bring their whole selves to client relationships.

"If everybody does that one thing the same way, it creates a language within the organization," she says. "They don't have to deal with the confusion of what to do."

As one of her earlier projects at Lenox, Vassak had a leading role within the team that built its propriety CRM and workflow system in 2010. Over a few years, they worked with several divisions across the organization to integrate seven different systems into one. The human element was also crucial for the firm, she says, as it implemented training and change management to ensure no one was left behind.

"To this day, we enhance [the system]. We train on it," Vassak says. "You can't let anything like that go stale, because so much is changing in this environment that we have to make sure that advisors have the tools to do their best work with their clients."

Letting women's skills shine

Within the world of work, Vassak says women typically shine at relationship building, displaying emotional intelligence, and listening. While all those attributes are assets across industries, she says they're especially valuable in the wealth space, where discussions with clients can be fraught or sensitive.

"It's an incredibly vulnerable conversation when you're talking about your finances and where you might be going wrong, or where you have to pivot," she says. 

The latest numbers from CFP Board showed a 4.5 percent uptick in the number of women CFP professionals – a much-needed step forward in an industry facing risks of women advisors dropping out amid a lack of support. With women representing more than 50 percent of its executive committee, Vassak says her firm and others like it offer a model for the industry to follow.

"There are so many women that feel they have to make a choice between being a caretaker, being a domestic leader, being, you know, a mom, versus being a professional," she says. "When you have people in my position as a leader, being a role model for others that are coming in, it organically happens that other women feel like they don't have to make a choice, and they lean in more."

To help advance women's representation, Vassak encourages organizations to have a mindful strategy around mentorship, matching mentees who have specific goals with supportive mentors. For organizations with a higher ratio of men relative to women as leaders, she says the key is to create sponsorship opportunities, where a male leader is able to select a high-potential female employee to bring to the table, allowing her to showcase her true potential.

"I'm a mom, I'm a wife, and I'm a COO," she says. "And I get to be all three of those things to the best of my potential because of the organization that I work for."