What Will Your Random Act Of Kindness Be This Month?

No fooling here on April Fool’s Day at Paragon Resources and Know No Bounds! We wanted to share a fun calendar from the great organization, Random Acts of Kindness, to challenge you to a different kindness goal throughout the month. In these challenging times, one of the best currencies in life is kindness. Random Acts of Kindness is an amazing organization that helps you to incorporate kindness into your daily lives. Check it out for more ideas. Please click on the image below to download the calendar.

Please let us know how these daily kindness challenges impact your life and know that we are here to help you get through this time!

Take care, be healthy, and be kind to yourself and those around you!

A Message From Paragon Resources

We are sure that you are receiving dozens of emails from companies that want you to know their response to Coronavirus. We wanted to take a few minutes of your time to let you know what we are doing and to let you know that we are here for you!

We know many are being impacted by this unprecedented time in history. We remain forward thinking and are living by the belief that this too shall pass, and we must be in it together. First and foremost, we are taking the precautionary measures that health professionals advise and making sure we Keep Calm and Carry On! For us, that means fulfilling our purpose of helping others uncover and capitalize on their talents!

We’ve been working remotely for the last two decades, so we are well-equipped to answer your calls and fulfill your assessment and training needs, Monday-Friday 8-5 Eastern.

We may not be traveling to a training program for a while, so we will continue to offer our telephone consulting and ramp up our live, virtual Zoom training to foster personal and professional development.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate with your teams, departments, customers, and throughout your organizations. We are doing a morning and afternoon remote “huddle” to keep in constant communication and recommend the same to you.

We aren’t caring for any kids at home, so we empathize with all of those parents who are trying to keep their families busy in this uncertain time! Want to help your kids build self-awareness and uncover their talents? We offer our online Indigo DISC and Motivators Student Reports. This is a great tool to help facilitate a conversation about their future studies and career decisions.

You know how much we love small businesses, so we are shopping local to support them at this time.

While we are forgoing the gym right now, we are putting our favorite music on as loud as possible and dancing for exercise. Laughter ensues, and we all know that is the BEST medicine! We prescribe the same to you!

Please let us know how we can help. We are here for you!

The Essential Ingredient to Success: The Team Communication Plan

Please enjoy our blog post from the Journal of Financial Planning – The Essential Ingredient to Success: The Team Communication Plan. We are honored to be selected as thought leaders in Team Development for the new Financial Planning Association Coaches Corner. The FPA Coaches Corner, a one-stop shop for content, tools, and insights from some of the most recognized business coaches in the profession, will provide association members with a vast library of business-building content in core practice management areas. We continue our commitment to help more financial professionals reap the rewards of ROP…Return on People. It is your people who make or break the success of your business.

The Essential Ingredient to Success: The Team Communication Plan

In our Know Service book, we show how to create a client communication plan that leads to loyal clients. Clients expect constant communication from their financial professional to make sure that they are on track with meeting their goals and that you are doing your job. Teams are no different. Whether your team is made up of two or ten individuals, a team communication plan engages staff and is vital to the success of your business. As the leader of the business, you must articulate the vision for the enterprise, keep team members focused on the right results and solicit their feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Team Communication Plan: The Why?

Consistent, ongoing and intentional team communication provides many benefits, including the following:

• It ensures that all team members are on the same page and understand the current state of the business in regard to its goals.
• It provides an opportunity for the professionals and staff to share the client relationship responsibilities.
• It minimizes the frustrations and disconnected feelings that individuals may have, and it strengthens the cohesiveness of the team.
• It gives all team members the knowledge and comfort level to exchange ideas, challenges and solutions.
• It ensures that you build regular review or evaluation time into your team’s business plan.
• It helps your business plan become an action-based document that includes everyone’s participation rather than being a dust-gatherer.
• It helps uncover challenges before they become major problems that can weigh the business down.
• It increases everyone’s accountability and reminds you of how important it is to reward yourselves and celebrate successes when you reach certain benchmarks.
• It helps you know when the team needs to make changes.
• It helps you stick to a disciplined approach, but allows for flexibility and adaptations when needed.


When team communication begins to fall apart, many challenges ensue. Efficiencies decrease and errors increase, which can lead to a stressful environment where team members are disengaged.

Team communication is the foundation for the success of your overall goals. So, ask yourself, do you have and consistently execute a team communication plan? Below we provide some ideas to help you personalize a team communication plan for your business.

Please visit https://practicemanagementblog.onefpa.org/2018/04/24/5313/ to read the rest of the post.

What Is The #1 Thing That Millennials Don’t Want At Work?

Last week, Pew Research determined the definition of the Millennial Generation to be those born between 1981 and 1996, and those born after this time to be, for now, defined as the Post-Millennial Generation. During recent years, our clients have asked us to work with their offspring to help these generations better understand their place in the world. We have enjoyed helping them build self-awareness through our assessments. With the realization of who they are, they take action by having stronger conviction in the decisions that they make regarding their college major and career path, and they have more fulfilling relationships with their parents and others. For us, having what we do daily in the financial services industry now being applied more to the personal development of youths has been some of the most rewarding work that we have done in the last two decades.

We have also had the opportunity to assess 132 students for a Business Communications Class at a community college. This class is one of the foundational courses necessary to obtain a major in the fields of Accounting, Economics, Finance, Management, Hospitality Management, and Marketing at this institution. We asked our post-millennial intern to take the lead in understanding the results and she wrote an insightful report on the drivers to fulfillment for these students. Understanding an individual’s motivators can provide important insights into why he or she acts a certain way. Motivators are described as the driving forces behind a person’s behavior, and they can be helpful in identifying a person’s passions as well as the lens that they use to view the world. Understanding a person’s motivators helps you understand how THEY uniquely define success, which often is not the same as how their parents or siblings may define it.

The highly researched and validated model that we use describes six different motivators that are present in everyone with varying degrees of intensity. The more intense the motivator, the more influential it will be for that individual. The top three motivators reflect a person’s interests; these motivators must be satisfied for one to feel fully engaged and fulfilled at this point in time. The bottom three motivators represent things that an individual may avoid or look down upon. MapMyStrengths.com identifies these six motivators as:

• Economic – Utility & Efficiency Goal
• Conceptual – Knowledge & Discovery Goal
• Power – Authority & Responsibility Goal
• Aesthetic – Harmony & Creative Expression Goal
• Regulatory – Principle & Purpose Goal
• Humanitarian – Altruism & Generosity Goal

What We Learned
These students placed an increased emphasis on the three individually oriented motivators: Economic, Conceptual, and Power. More than twice as many students reported having one of these motivators in their top three in comparison to one of the group-oriented motivators (Aesthetic, Regulatory, and Humanitarian). This indicates that as a whole, students in this class are more focused on achieving their own goals than working together to further the entire group. The results of these assessments can help to shed some light on many characteristics of millennials that may perplex members of other generations.

Out of all six motivators, Regulatory was the least likely to be seen in the top three. This indicates that these millennials place less of an emphasis on the traditional way of doing things in comparison to older generations. This can help to explain why millennials are more likely to reject a structured 9-5 cubicle job in favor of one that provides them with the flexibility to express themselves in more creative manners. Most millennials crave some sort of creative and unique work environment. Something as simple as trading in the cubicles for a more open and communal office layout can significantly increase a millennial’s mood and productivity. Their lower Regulatory levels may indicate that these individuals may not feel as obligated to stay with one company. Another possibility is that millennials may be frustrated with the lack of responsibilities that they are given as new hires. This may be the reason that this generation has been known to switch jobs every couple of years. This trend came as a shock to older members of the workforce because baby boomers and Generation Xers have been known to stay with one company for decades at a time. While it is easy to write millennials off as being impatient and fickle, a look into their motivators offers another explanation. The most commonly valued motivator among these millennials was Economic, indicating that the generation’s frequent job changes could also be motivated by a desire for increased financial security and benefits.

The Answer to Our Question
We have learned from our research and our numerous personal discussions that these two generations, more than any other, do NOT want to be JUDGED using the same standards as the past! No one likes to be put in a box, but they REALLY don’t like it. This also is reinforced by the low emphasis result of their Regulatory Motivator.

It is evident that millennials differ from older members of the workforce in a number of ways, but a simple look at their motivators may be all it takes to solve the mystery behind the generations. Motivator analysis is essential to developing a management approach that can be effectively tailored to individual employees. Passionate and enthusiastic people are not hard to find as long as one takes the time to understand the things that fulfill THEM!