The influence you’re not inviting
Your advisory board may be missing people who shape your next business opportunity.
Every recordkeeper eventually has the same internal debate: who actually belongs on the advisory board? The obvious answer is producing advisors — the people bringing in business, closest to the RFP. It’s a reasonable starting point. Whether the conversation goes any further than that is the real question, and more firms are pushing past it than used to.
The instinct, when building a board, is almost always to reach for seniority — the most senior advisor, the most visible relationship, the biggest book of business. It feels like a safe choice. It also tends to leave real gaps in the room, the kind that quietly slows momentum long before anyone notices why.
McKinsey’s work on informal influence within organizations offers a useful parallel for advisory-board selection. Studying industries from aerospace to retail to financial services, they found that real influence almost never follows the org chart. It can’t be easily predicted by role or tenure, and relatively few of the employees actually turn to for guidance are senior leaders at all. At one retailer they studied, two store managers tried to guess their most influential people before anyone was surveyed. Between them, they missed almost two-thirds of the actual influencers — including three of the top five in their own stores.
Retirement plan providers can face a similar blind spot when building their advisory boards. Here are some influential roles worth considering beyond the traditional invitation list:
ERISA attorneys — help shape plan design and governance, bringing a perspective that can span multiple advisor and provider relationships.
Former producing intermediaries turned podcasters — bring firsthand experience and a public platform that can shape how advisors view providers, partnerships, and industry practices at a scale no single advisor ever could.
Leaders of industry organizations like SPARK and EBRI — bring research, insights, and industry dialogue that inform decisions and help advance retirement industry practices.
Home office leaders and teams responsible for provider relationships — see how providers perform across the firm, giving them insight into strengths, recurring issues, and gaps between promises and delivery.
Proposal and provider-search managers — help shape which providers are invited to compete and how their capabilities are evaluated, often before finalists conversations begin.
Client service and relationship managers — hear client concerns firsthand and can spot emerging dissatisfaction before it reaches senior leadership.
Their influence isn’t always obvious from their titles. When board invitations follow seniority or production alone, these perspectives can be overlooked.
None of this means cramming every type onto one roster. A board mixing producing advisors with attorneys, home office contacts, and client service managers can create friction as easily as insight — different vocabularies, different stakes, different comfort levels speaking candidly in front of each other.
Some organizations have already found their own answer to this. Separate TPA councils have become common, built on the belief that a TPA’s role is different enough to warrant its own forum. That’s a fair instinct. It’s also worth noticing the same argument could be made about a recordkeeper. Both are administering the plan from a different seat. We’re all in the same business.
The same logic that justified a separate TPA council could justify others: a board built around the attorneys and consultants who shape opinion at scale, or one built around the home office and service roles who see the relationship day to day. The question isn’t only who deserves a seat. It’s whether they need the same seat, or a table of their own.
I once built a board to give underrepresented, high-potential partners a forum of their own. The purpose was to hear perspectives we had been missing and explore how we could work better together. Within 14 months, 86% of participating firms that had never submitted a proposal to us had done so. Those relationships also contributed $800,000 in new annual revenue. The lesson was the value of listening to people we had overlooked and creating space for their participation.
The debate over who belongs should reach beyond seniority and familiarity. It should consider who shapes decisions, whose perspectives are missing, and whether they need a seat at the same table or a table of their own.
Worth asking, the next time this comes up internally: is the gap really about who’s missing from the room — or about needing more than one room?
This is the seventh story in a new series on what makes advisory boards and councils actually work — for the organizations that host them, and the members who serve on them.
Article source: McKinsey Quarterly, Tapping the power of hidden influencers, March 1, 2014.
Originally shared on LinkedIn