There is a framework for wealth managers who truly aspire to this eminence. Charles Lowenhaupt is chairman and CEO of Lowenhaupt Global Advisors, a St. Louis, Mo.-based advisory to ultra-high-net-worth families, and managing member of the law firm Lowenhaupt & Chasnoff.

You always hear about the skills and talents of the "trusted advisor." But there's little said about how such advisors go about counseling their clients. How does one become a client's "trusted advisor"? What's the process of becoming a counselor of such high order?

I believe we pass through two stages or levels on our way to trusted-advisor status. Until we reach the third level, our capacity to help our clients is limited.

Advisors at the first level can be helpful, but more often they're not. This is the stage at which we impose our own perspectives and values on situations requiring our counsel.

Preachers and empiricists

Suppose, for example, I'm working with a Saudi Arabian patriarch. As a first level advisor, I might let the fact that I have two independent and professionally employed daughters shape my view of his situation. So I might advise him to give his adult female relatives full roles in his family's wealth-management program.

In other words, because the idea that women should be accorded full equality is ingrained in my soul, I advocate something based on my experiences and my values even though my experiences and values -- my culture in fact -- are vastly different from his.

Have I truly helped the client by using my values to advise him on his situation? I think not. When I become judgmental, my service to the client is akin to that of a preacher. And that's not generally what the client is asking for.

The next level of counseling is neutrality. The advisor frames questions and asks the client to reach conclusions within the client's personal framework. |image1|At this level, before I suggest a structure or plan for my Saudi client, I ask him whether he wants to have women treated the same as men. Should women be on the governing counsel? Are wives to be allowed to inherit property? Can women be engaged in the business? I ask the questions, I accept his answers, and then I proceed with the work.

This approach may be more difficult than the first because I have to be "nonjudgmental." I may occasionally conclude that I am sacrificing my values to rules articulated by the client. At the extreme, I may even feel that I am "prostituting" my values. But I am framing the questions objectively and offering advice based on the responses I get.

The last stage

The third level is the advisor's highest achievement. At this stage the counselor views the client's situation through what might be called "conceptual goggles." Goggles, not lenses: you don't merely look through them, you wear them. And each client calls for a different pair.

As a result of having completely absorbed his clients' experiences, beliefs and overall vision, the counselor can actually make the decisions the client would make -- if the client had the counselor's training, insights and professional experience. Reaching this level takes effort and calls for a deep understanding of the client, often acquired over hours -- or more; years sometimes -- of listening to and understanding the client. Putting on "conceptual goggles" requires knowing what the client wants to accomplish and how the client thinks about accomplishing what he wants.

Consider how often you are asked "What do you recommend I decide?" Obviously the recommendation is easy when the matter at hand is black and white.

"Should I stop at red lights?"

But things get thornier when decisions have moral aspects or call into play the client's values.

"Should I encourage my child to build a pre-nuptial settlement?"

In their shoes

The challenge is to help clients make those decisions without personal bias or --even more effectively -- to put on conceptual goggles and explore the issue viewing the world as the client views it.

I have had the children of a terminally ill client come to me to ask what their mother would want with respect to life support, with respect to removal to a care facility, and with respect to division of tangible personal property. They weren't asking me what I would do; they were asking what their mother would do -- and relying on me to think like their mother.

"What would you do if you were me?" a client dealing with a child's divorce recently asked me. He didn't want to know what I would do for my child; he wanted to know what he could reasonably want to do for hischild. The distinction is vital.

So, as I advised the Saudi gentleman, I tried to use conceptual goggles. Building them took time, as we talked at length and I came to understand his aspirations, his perceptions of family, his sense of the purpose of the family business, and his fundamental expectations with respect to women's role in the future of his culture.

Figure it out

At length I could reach the conclusions he should reasonably reach and then guide him through my thought process to confirm that it would be his. His conclusions were radical for his culture: they resulted in his daughters having a more substantial role than his sisters would ever have been given, and in his wife playing a family and a business role. But he was comfortable with his conclusions because they were "his" conclusions I could reach wearing the goggles of his beliefs.

As counselors we can educate, we can serve as sounding boards, we can help organize thoughts and build processes. The ultimate transformation of the counselor into "trusted advisor" occurs when the trusted advisor wears the "goggles" of the client and actually takes responsibility for making decisions as the client would.

Once we have attained the capacity to wear conceptual goggles, we don them over and over and with less and less conscious effort in doing so. We can easily make all sorts of decisions "for" our clients and, particularly with respect to matters they would not consider important, make them independently and without long conversations with the client.

"You know what I am trying to do", said a client to me recently. "Just go ahead and figure it out and do it." -FWR

The illustration for this column is a detail from a Japanese woodblock print in the Charles A. Lowenhaupt Collection.

Contact CHARLES LOWENHAUPT

Purchase reproduction rights to this article.