About this episode
Whether you’re a team of one, or the one in charge of the whole team, everyone has a stake in career development.
In this episode, we’re joined by Ace Quintana, Head of Organizational & Leadership Development at FS Investments and our in-house expert on the Predictive Index (PI)—the validated workstyle assessment we use to power career development at our firm and one of the key resources we offer advisors through our FS Thrive Value-Add program.
Ace sits down with Ginevra Czech, Director of Client Value Add Programs, to share actionable insights for helping people reach their full potential.
They discuss tools for setting effective career goals, what it means to “focus performance reviews on the future” and how to mobilize the Predictive Index to build successful teams and optimize personal performance.
“People are far more than the outputs of some personality assessment. But a tool like the [Predictive Index] really helps bring to light potential differences between our own preferences and that of the people that we work with. It enables us to think more deeply about why people behave the way they do and why we might need to adjust our approach and really adapt our own behaviors to get the most out of them.”–Ace Quintana
Learn more at www.fsthrive.com.
Transcript excerpt
Ginevra Czech: Welcome back to FS Thrive, a podcast by FS Investments. I am the Director of Client Value-Add Programs, Ginevra Czech, and I am super excited to be here today with Ace Quintana. Ace is the Head of Organizational and Leadership Development at FS Investments, and we have a pretty exciting topic today. We’re gonna be talking about talent optimization, intentional performance management. I know a lot of teams are probably starting to think about year-end reviews or year-end goals. We talked about goal-setting last week. And so Ace has been with our firm for about eight years, has a really pretty impressive resume. I don’t think we’re gonna get a chance to talk through all of Ace’s experience. Ace has a BS in Psychology from Drexel, an MBA from Villanova and a master’s in social organizational psychology from Columbia. And they are our in-house expert on the Predictive Index, which you might be familiar with as one of our value-add programs that we use in-house for hiring, onboarding and development. We’ll definitely get into the PI and how it’s a tool that you can use as our financial advisors, home office contacts, as part of our value-add lineup. But let’s jump into it. Ace, can you just start by telling us a little bit about what you do within the FS organization?
Ace Quintana: Absolutely, and thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here. Basically, my team and I, we try to build and implement processes and programs that really drive organizational effectiveness and empower people to fully realize their potential. So, we’re all about optimizing systems and practices that drive performance, engagement and development, and I specifically focus on enabling leadership and self-development, providing strategic guidance on organizational change efforts and leveraging continuous feedback and people data to ensure that we have a very forward-looking organizational development strategy. And I’m really looking forward to sharing more about some of these topics that are an important part of our own leadership culture here at FS.
Ginevra Czech: That’s awesome. And I think we’ve got the right person for the topic at hand today. So I know there’s a couple themes that we wanted to hit on. We’ll just kind of talk about careers today. There’s, I think, been a bit of a shift in how people think about careers. Over the last couple of years, obviously, the pandemic affected the way people think about their jobs and how they’re spending their day to days. And, you know, I think it’ll be helpful to give a little bit of the background of what FS’ philosophy on careers are, just to have that conversation. We’ll talk a little bit about the role of leaders in optimizing talent. You know, whether you’re a financial advisor leading a team or you’re working in more of a leadership role at one of our partners at a branch organization. Or even if you’re a member of a team member within our organization, you have co-ops that are reporting to you. You know, there’s so many different ways that you can think about being a leader and trying to help people optimize talent. And then obviously we’ll get into the fun part, perhaps, just talking about how do we actually measure performance and how can we think about performance reviews? So I’d love to hear and just understand why you think focusing on employee development is so important, especially in today’s career professional environment.
