I saw a presentation from Major General Jim Molan yesterday about ethical leadership. Amongst many other things, Jim Molan was the Chief of Operations for the multinational Forces in Iraq in 2004. As you can imagine, leading forces in Iraq posed many management and ethical issues.

One of his key statements was that for ethical conduct to be assured, an ethical view must be held by both the organisation and the individuals within it. If either fail, the outcome will be compromised.

From a financial planning point of view I take two things from this:

1.       The importance of our organisation being actively and visibly ethical to ensure the people within it can and will act in our clients’ best interests at all times, and

2.       That regardless of how dedicated and pure of heart an individual planner is, if they work for an organisation that rewards bad behaviour in order to achieve it's own goals, that is what you are going get.

As a privately owned financial planning company, we tend to go on and on about being ‘non-conflicted’. This means we are one of the 15% of financial planners in Australia (and Bathurst) that aren’t controlled by the big four banks or AMP. This means we don’t have sales targets, we don’t share ownership with any fund managers, platform providers or insurance companies. We don’t have a share price to think about and no-one exerts any pressure on us in terms of volume or revenue. We answer to no-one but our clients. This makes an enormous difference in the advice we give.

Thanks Jim!