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Through counseling, planning, or advising services, financial professionals guide clients who are facing high-stakes decisions. According to prevailing standards of ethics and professionalism, these decisions must be aligned with client needs and goals. In the United States, Rule 2111 (the "suitability" rule of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) states that a firm or associated person "must have a reasonable basis to believe that a recommended transaction or investment strategy involving a security or securities is suitable for the customer" (FINRA [2008]).
Therefore, a key activity in ethical, client-centered relationships is discovering the client agenda-eliciting the client's needs and goals prior to addressing them. The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards expresses this as Standard 200-1, "Determining a Client's Personal and Financial Goals, Needs, and Priorities" (CFPBS [2013]) Adherents of related approaches, including financial coaching (Collins and O'Rourke [2012]; Knutsen and Cameron [2012]), financial therapy (Archuleta and Grable [2011]), and financial life planning (Anthes and Lee [2001]; Anthony [2006]; Dubofsky and Sussman [2009]; Kinder and Galvan [2006]; Sussman and Dubofsky [2009]) also emphasize the importance of effective client discovery.
Researchers are beginning to explore the client discovery methods currently in use and to assess whether they are effective in stimulating client disclosure. Thoughtful practitioners and academics have described core practices that are fundamental to discovery, such as asking questions (Knutsen and Cameron [2012]), including open-ended questions (Jaffe and Grubman [2010]); listening actively and reflectively (Grubman and Jaffe [2010]) without interrupting (McGuigan [2011]), avoiding assumptions (Diliberto and Anthony [2002]) and remaining neutral, non-directive, and non-judgmental (McGuigan [2011]) while avoiding nonwords and hedge words (Finder [2012]). Researchers have found positive associations between such discovery practices and client commitment (Bergeron and Laroche [2009] ; Christiansen and DeVaney [1998]; Ramsey and Sohi [1997]; Rossbach [1995]; Sharma and Patterson [1999]; Sharma and Patterson [2000]), using psychometrically validated instruments for client-reported outcomes (Grable et al. [2010]).
Given such evidence of the benefits, practice leaders in the field have advanced protocols to facilitate the acquisition of effective client discovery skills (Finder [2012];Jaffe and Grubman [2010]; Kinder and Galvan [2005]; McGuigan [2011]). However, these practice leaders have not published process evaluations measuring whether financial advisors trained in these protocols subsequently implement them and engage in the aforementioned target behaviors.
In contrast, the medical...