Archive

Welcome to the archives. These articles represent many different seasons of my career. You’ll find posts written during my doctoral studies, years of marketing consulting, entrepreneurial experiments, and the occasional reflection on whatever happened to be capturing my attention at the time.

Blogging looked very different when many of these posts were published. Rather than removing them or fixing broken links from now defunct themes, I’ve chosen to preserve them as a snapshot of where I was, what I was learning, and how my thinking has evolved over the years.

Some ideas have stood the test of time. Others reflect the questions I was wrestling with at that particular moment. Either way, they tell part of the story.

New Financial Advisor Success – Time Orientation

by | Feb 2, 2013 | High Attrition, New Financial Advisor

New Financial Advisor Success Tactics

Time Orientation

This is NOT another article on time management.  Far from it.  Instead, this is an article on preventing stress in your new job.

New Financial Advisors have enough to tend with during their first few months — licensing, class room training, computer-based training, filling the calendar with initial appointments — it can be overwhelming at times.   In the midst of this there is one important thing to keep in mind.  What is your time orientation?

Researchers Weeks and Fournier (2010) studied how a person’s time orientation contributed to the stress that a person experiences as a sales person.  The picture below says a thousand words.  There are essentially four major types of time orientation.  A person can naturally fall towards a long-term orientation (LTO) or a short-term orientation (STO).  Meaning a person’s thoughts and actions fall somewhere on the spectrum between short-term and long-term.  There is a second measure that a person needs to consider as well — multitasking.  Some people love it.  Others can’t stand it.  One the graphic you will see the terms polychronic (multitasking) and monochronic (one thing at a time).

Time orientation is important to consider because a sales person who is accustomed to taking a long-term approach to sales will not fit well in an environment that demands short-term focus. The same can be said of task orientation. Some roles demand that the individual focus on many things at once. One could consider a person who does not enjoy multitasking as a poor fit for a job that requires such.

 

Reference

Weeks, W. A., & Fournier, C. (2010). The impact of time congruity on salesperson’s role stress: A person-job fit approach. Journal Of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 30(1), 73-90.