When considering Fiduciary Responsibility, here are other interesting and important concepts from Firestein’s work that indicate just how complex navigating the mandate of Fiduciary Responsibility can be:
Bribery: “….doing the right thing is not always consistent with a company’s sustainability. Bribery, for example, has been an unavoidable cost of doing business at many times and in many places.” (p. 74).
Core values: “Everyone in an organization must understand what it wants to be known for. Core values lie at the center of this understanding, but they are not the company’s identity. They are, however, the material out of which its identity, and therefore its reputation, are created. And core values, to be worth anything at all, must remain constant regardless of whether a company circumstances are prosperous or difficult.” (p. 127).
Credibility: “Credibility rests on consistency among communications, actions, and results.” (p. 202).
Emotional positioning: “A crisis only becomes a crisis when it begins to damage people or the things they care about. When people see or feel loss, they become emotional…..communication in a crisis must….contain an emotional component-not just facts.” (p. 242).
Ethics: “Value systems and codes of conduct stand on foundations of ethics. The potential damage from unethical conduct is enormous.” (p. 135).
Financial services professionals can mull over these concepts and integrate them into their Gyroscope to insure safe passage through their long journeys.
Acting with Fiduciary Responsibility may not always come naturally or easily. Evolutionary biology would seem to suggest that there is an inherent natural conflict between the FP’s needs and the client’s needs: helping another person to “survive” through achieving prosperity, especially when you are not gaining equally yourself, goes against many of evolutionary biology’s tenets.
Fiduciary Responsibility is a slippery slope that once the FP starts his descent into the abyss, he has a difficult time recovering his integrity. Embracing dishonesty as a business practice, overtly or through omission, means the broker opens himself to feelings of guilt, remorse, suspicion, stress, self-hatred, anxiety, fear and so many other emotionally unsettling issues.
The financial professional may shrug off their moral responsibilities at first, but you can never truly shed them.
They just work their way deeper and deeper into your psyche until the manifest themselves in nasty and unfortunate ways.