With promotion to the team leader role comes greater responsibility. For Professional Paraplanner’s latest parameters survey, we asked team leaders what impact that greater responsibility has had, in particular on their stress levels.
The findings showed that 75% of team leaders had seen their stress levels rise since they became team leader, substantially above the 19% who said their role had not altered the level of stress they face.
There were various driving factors behind this trend, with team leaders identifying the need to appear ‘perfect’, as well as the occurrence of unforeseen tasks and greater responsibility for the actions of others, as key reasons for their higher stress levels.
“As a paraplanner, it was much easier to plan your day and stick to it,” one respondent said. “As a team leader there are many more opportunities for your carefully laid plans to be unexpectedly disrupted.”
Another said: “Taking on more responsibility has naturally led to more stress as I want to get everything right and I have less time to do things now.”
Concerningly for firms, the level of responsibility placed upon team leaders is resulting in many of them failing to fulfil their role. Only one in three (31%) team leaders said they are able to fully achieve the objectives of their role on a day-to-day basis. In contrast, 50% said they were unable to fulfil their objectives, while 19% said they were unsure.
One paraplanner explained to Professional Paraplanner: “On top of managing the team I am also a paraplanner with the same workload as my team.”
Another said mistakes were in danger of being made as a result of too many tasks to juggle.
“Although we have many measures in place, it is impossible to check every report for accuracy and attention to detail, which can lead to mistakes being made,” they said.
Another said it was challenging combining the roles of team leader and paraplanner at the same time.
“Balancing needs large chunks of time dedicated to the report writing function with putting my team leader hat on and having to jump on unforeseen problems and solve them quickly. It’s not easy to combine the two.”
When asked what would help team leaders to ease their stress and make their day-to-day role easier, it was clear that many felt extra time to fulfil their individual responsibilities would be beneficial.
One respondent said there needs to be greater acknowledgement of the time needed for team leaders to be effective in their role and bring on the team as a whole and recognising that as a result, the time spent on paraplanning tasks will reduce accordingly.
“We should not be pressuring individuals to shoehorn two jobs into one working day,” they added.
Others said their job would be made easier by advisers providing better quality information, while others cited the need for technology to reduce the time spent on downloading, uploading and duplicating information.
Not surprisingly, a talent shortage was also identified as a barrier to the success of team leaders.
As one team leader told Professional Paraplanner: “Personally, we are in a period of being understaffed so your attention can be pulled away in different directions – it is easier to meet this objective when you are running a full team.
“I think potentially having another role for managing training and development separately is a good idea – a team leader to deal with the day to day, as paraplanning teams are always busy, and a specific training team leader to deal with bringing paraplanners on could help.”
