Dissecting a Dissertation: Advisors Are Hurting Too

Part 5/20 of the Dissecting a Dissertation series

Dissecting a Dissertation takes a closer look at the structural tensions within modern wealth management. Based on my doctoral research at SDA Bocconi, it considers why holistic advisory work so often proves difficult to realise.

Chapter 4 examined why families resist integration — how goal diversity, polylemmatic choice, and the Architecture of Avoidance make fragmentation rational, even when families claim to want something different. This chapter turns the lens in the opposite direction. It asks what is happening to the advisor on the other side of that resistance.

The answer, drawn from the knowledgeable agents in my research, is not what I expected when I began the work. I went in expecting to find a skills gap. I came out describing something closer to a wound.

The Story the Industry Tells

The industry’s explanation for why holistic advice rarely arrives is almost always the same. Advisors, it says, need better training in soft skills. They need more continuing education in family dynamics. They need new certifications in behavioural finance, mediation, or communication. The assumption is that the gap between what families need and what advisors deliver is a gap in knowledge — and the solution is to fill it with more learning hours, more designations, more programmes.

This story is comforting because it points to something actionable. A firm can send its advisors on a workshop. A regulator can add a module to the CFP syllabus. A professional body can launch a certification; new CPD courses can be developed. Progress feels visible.

But the story is not quite right and the evidence gathered in my research shows a more nuanced picture: the advisors who are best at holistic work are not the ones with the most certifications or have been on the most workshops. What distinguishes them is something else the industry’s training-gap story cannot see.

What the Research Actually Found

When I interviewed the principal owners of independent advisory practices in the UK and Australia, I expected them to describe skills they wished they had. What they described instead was skills they did have but could not use.

They had learned, through years of exposure to families in crisis, how to read a room. They knew when to press and when to wait. They had developed an instinct for when a client’s stated question was a proxy for something else, and the patience to hold space until the real question surfaced. They had absorbed, through long apprenticeships with experienced colleagues, the kind of tacit knowledge that cannot be written down — what Sandberg and Tsoukas call the “situated practical rationality” that distinguishes an expert practitioner from a competent one.

And then they told me, one after another, that they could not use these capabilities within the institutional boundaries of their role.

The compensation model did not recognise the work. The KPI dashboard did not measure it. The compliance documentation had no field for it. The quarterly review template had no line item for “held space for a grieving founder” or “noticed the unasked question about the younger son.” The regulatory audit would not credit an hour spent listening. The fee structure actively punished time that did not produce a documented deliverable.

They were capable of the work. The system refused to acknowledge the work existed.

The Imposter in Reverse

One advisor described the feeling with a phrase that has stayed with me. They said they felt like an imposter in reverse.

The classic imposter syndrome is the fear of being exposed as unqualified — the dread that someone will finally notice you do not belong where your credentials have placed you. What these advisors described was the opposite. They were not hiding incompetence. They were hiding competence. The capabilities they actually possessed — the relational, emotional, and improvisational capabilities that their clients most needed — were not the capabilities their professional role was built to recognise. So they performed the role the institution rewarded, while doing the real work in the margins, off the books, unbilled, and unnamed.

This framing draws on decades of research in professional identity work. Caza, Vough, and Puranik define identity work as the effort individuals put forth to construct, sustain, repair, and revise their sense of who they are at work — an effort that becomes particularly demanding when the institutional role on offer does not accommodate the self the practitioner has become. Pratt, Rockmann, and Kaufmann studied how medical residents build their professional identities in precisely such conditions. Through a six-year study of residents across three medical specialities, they found that identity construction was triggered by what they called work-identity integrity violations — an experienced mismatch between what physicians actually did and who they understood themselves to be. The residents resolved these violations through what Pratt and his colleagues called identity customisation: enriching an existing identity to include the new work, patching the old identity with new elements, or splinting a provisional identity temporarily while a more durable one was constructed.

Ibarra’s work on provisional selves adds a complementary lens. Studying professionals transitioning to more senior roles in investment banking and management consulting, she described how individuals adapt to new roles by experimenting with provisional selves — trial versions of possible but not yet fully elaborated professional identities, tested through observation of role models, experimentation in practice, and evaluation against internal and external feedback. The advisors in my research had been through a version of this process, but without the institutional scaffolding Ibarra’s subjects enjoyed. They had constructed provisional selves capable of holding space for family grief, mediating between warring siblings, and recognising the unspoken fear beneath a technical question. Over years of practice, these provisional selves hardened into durable capabilities. But the institutional role — the one printed on the business card, the one the fee structure compensates, the one the compliance manual defines — had never been updated to recognise who these practitioners had become. Pratt’s residents had an institutional environment that eventually legitimised their identity customisation. The advisors in my research do not. The customisation is real; the recognition of it is not.

The wound, then, is not a skills deficit. It is a recognition deficit — the quiet exhaustion of spending your working life doing one kind of work while being paid, measured, and regulated as though you were doing another.

Why More Training Cannot Close the Gap

Once the problem is framed this way, the industry’s standard response — more training, more certifications, more continuing education — becomes visibly inadequate. You cannot train your way out of a recognition problem.

Sandberg and Tsoukas made this point about professional learning more generally. They argued that formal education treats theory and practice as if they exist in two separate containers, with knowledge transferring frictionlessly between them. But practice is not the application of abstract knowledge to concrete situations. Practice is a situated, embodied activity in which the practitioner and the world are entwined from the start. Learning, in this view, happens most meaningfully within practice itself, through what Bourdieu called the “feel for the game” — an intuitive grasp of a domain that can only develop through sustained exposure to it.

This is why the best advisors I spoke to could not name a single training programme that had produced their capabilities. Their capabilities had developed through years of mentorship with senior practitioners who modelled the integrated work in real client meetings. Through exposure to the “temporal breakdowns” Sandberg and Tsoukas describe — moments when the script breaks down and the practitioner must improvise. Through the slow absorption of tacit knowledge that cannot be articulated in a curriculum.

None of these conditions are scalable. None of them fit inside a workshop. None of them can be certified. And none of them are protected by an industry that has systematically dismantled the apprenticeship structures that used to produce integrated practitioners, in the name of efficiency, scale, and standardisation.

The advisors who possess the capabilities have them because they were fortunate — they came up through firms or mentors that protected the conditions for situated learning, often despite institutional pressure. The advisors who lack the capabilities lack them because the institutional environment they trained in had already optimised those conditions away. Neither group is well served by being told to take another workshop.

The Structural Consequence

This matters beyond the personal experience of individual advisors. It has a structural consequence that ties directly back to the arguments of the previous chapters.

Chapter 2 described how firms publicly market holistic advice while their operational architecture delivers transactional service. Chapter 3 showed how multi-advisor teams fragment along economic fault lines, producing ceremonial coordination rather than genuine integration. Chapter 4 examined how families actively maintain fragmentation as protection against confronting their own polylemmatic contradictions. Each of these obstacles would be difficult even if the advisor inside the room were fully equipped to handle it.

The advisor inside the room is not fully equipped — not because they lack the capability, but because the institutional role they occupy has been stripped of the recognition, the time, and the compensation that would allow the capability to be used. The firm wants the marketing benefit of holistic advice without paying for the work. The multi-advisor team wants the appearance of integration without investing in practised partnership. The family wants the comfort of compartmentalisation alongside the rhetoric of wanting something more.

And the advisor stands in the middle, possessing the capability everyone claims to want, with nowhere to put it that the system will recognise.

This is the Impossible Professional Profile the dissertation identifies as one of the four structural obstacles to holistic practice. It is not a demand for superhuman skills. It is a demand for the institutional courage to recognise, legitimise, and compensate the work that experienced practitioners are already doing in the shadows.

For the Family: Look for the Unspoken Competence

When you are choosing an advisor for complex, multigenerational work, the credentials on the business card will tell you very little about the capability that actually matters. The technical designations establish a floor. They say nothing about whether the person sitting across from you can navigate the silences, the deflections, and the unspoken concerns that contain the real information about your family.

• Ask about the messy cases, not the clean ones. Any experienced advisor can describe a successful portfolio rebalancing. Ask instead about a situation where the technical answer was clear but the right answer was something else. The ones who have the capability will have stories. The ones who do not will pivot back to technical competence.
• Watch what they do with silence. In your first conversation, leave a gap. Do not fill it. Notice whether the advisor rushes to fill the gap with information, or whether they sit comfortably in the silence and wait. Integrated practitioners know the silence is where the real work happens.
• Ask who mentored them. The advisors with genuine integrated capability almost always learned it from another practitioner, over years, in real client situations. Ask who their mentors were, what they learned from them, and how their practice has changed over time. An advisor who cannot point to a lineage of practice has probably learned only what the training manual specified.
• Pay for the recognition you want. If you expect your advisor to hold space for difficult family conversations, mediate between generations, or absorb the emotional weight of succession anxieties, negotiate a retainer that explicitly compensates that work. An advisor who accepts the work without compensation will eventually be forced by their firm to abandon it. Your willingness to pay for the unrecognised work is part of how the recognition changes.

For the Advisor: Refuse the Imposter Framing

The path through the Impossible Professional Profile is not to acquire more credentials. It is to stop participating in the fiction that the capability you already have does not count.

• Name the work that has no name. The relational, emotional, and improvisational labour you do in client meetings is not “value-add” or “soft skills” or “the relationship side of the business.” It is the work. Find the vocabulary that makes it visible — “legacy architecture,” “family governance facilitation,” “multigenerational alignment work,” whatever lets you describe what is actually happening. Without the language, the work remains invisible, and invisible work cannot be compensated, defended, or passed on.
• Stop apologising for the unbillable hours. The hours you spend holding space, listening beneath the question, and noticing the unspoken concern are not a failure of time management. They are the work your clients actually need. The system that refuses to recognise those hours is inadequate — you are not.
• Protect the conditions that produced you. If you supervise junior advisors, give them exposure to real family meetings, not just product pitches and portfolio reviews. The capability you have developed cannot be transferred through a training module. It can only be transferred through apprenticeship. The next generation of integrated practitioners will exist only if the current generation insists on building the conditions for situated learning into their firms.
• Find your practised partners. Integrated work is too hard to do alone, and too difficult to develop alone. Build long-term relationships with mediators, family therapists, and estate planners who have developed similar capabilities. These are your peers, not your referral network. The apprenticeship continues horizontally throughout a career.
• Price the recognition into the fee structure. If your firm’s compensation model punishes the relational work, the firm’s compensation model is wrong. Argue for retainer structures that separate family governance work from AUM-based portfolio management. Force the institution to put a number on the work it has been accepting for free. The argument will not always win, but making it visible is itself part of the structural change.

The Recognition Question

If the advisors best equipped to do holistic work are hiding that capability inside a transactional role the system still refuses to legitimise, what the industry calls a “training gap” is actually a structural refusal to recognise work the profession is already doing. How much longer can the gap be closed by asking practitioners to learn what many of them already know?

The next article turns to the dimension of this impossibility that affects every relationship regardless of individual capability: the collision of fundamentally incompatible temporalities. Families plan in generations. Firms measure in quarters. Between them sits the three-to-four-year incubation period that trust actually requires — a timeframe no current business model accommodates.

Stay tuned as I continue unpacking the research, and subscribe to our newsletter to follow the full Dissecting a Dissertation series.

References:

Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Caza, B.B., Vough, H. and Puranik, H. (2018) Identity work in organizations and occupations: Definitions, theories, and pathways forward. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(7), pp. 889–910. doi: 10.1002/job.2318.

Ibarra, H. (1999) Provisional selves: Experimenting with image and identity in professional adaptation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), pp. 764–791. doi: 10.2307/2667055.

Pratt, M.G., Rockmann, K.W. and Kaufmann, J.B. (2006) Constructing professional identity: The role of work and identity learning cycles in the customization of identity among medical residents. Academy of Management Journal, 49(2), pp. 235–262. doi: 10.5465/amj.2006.20786060.

Sandberg, J. and Tsoukas, H. (2011) Grasping the logic of practice: Theorizing through practical rationality. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), pp. 338–360. doi: 10.5465/AMR.2011.59330942.