What Top-Performing Private Wealth Advisors Have in Common, and Why Selection Matters More Than You Think

In the ultra-high-net-worth private wealth management, success is rarely accidental. Managing complex client relationships, navigating long investment horizons, and operating in highly sophisticated team-based environments requires a very specific blend of traits.  

Recently, Self Management Group conducted a comprehensive assessment and performance study within the private wealth management division of a major international bank serving exclusively ultra high net worth clients. Self Management Group is one of the world’s largest psychometric assessment companies in financial services. The study examined 162 financial advisors with a clear and powerful objective: to identify the traits that truly distinguish top performing advisors from the rest of the field.

What was found has significant implications for how private wealth management recruit, develop, and retain advisory talent.

The Traits That Define Top Performers

Across this global private wealth management platform, the highest-performing financial advisors consistently shared a distinct behavioral and motivational profile.

They were:

• Competitive and highly goal-oriented, with a strong internal drive to perform  

• Naturally adaptable, thriving in change and ambiguity  

• Comfortable operating in fluid, self-managed environments  

• Consultative and patient in their client approach  

• Oriented toward long-term outcomes rather than short-term wins  

• Highly collaborative, valuing teamwork and shared success  

• Receptive to structure within a team-based model, without needing excessive oversight  

This combination is important. While these advisors are competitive and driven, they are not transactional. They are comfortable with long sales cycles, multi-generational planning, and the slow compounding nature of trust-based wealth relationships. Their patience allows them to align with the realities of ultra-high-net-worth clients, where decisions are deliberate, complex, and rarely rushed.

At the same time, they function exceptionally well inside structured teams, partnering with investment specialists, planners, and relationship managers without losing accountability or momentum.

Performance Impact: The Numbers Tell the Story

The performance gap between advisors who possessed these traits and those who did not was substantial.

Advisors aligned with this high-performance profile outproduced their lower-performing peers by approximately 100 percent more Assets Under Management (AUM).

In absolute terms, this represented an additional $3.5 billion in AUM generated by the top-performing group alone.

But the most compelling insight came from a broader modeling exercise.

Had the firm been more selective at the point of hiring, systematically identifying and selecting advisors with these traits, the projected upside was an additional $7 billion in AUM.

This increase was driven purely by selection decisions, not by changes to compensation, product offerings, market conditions, or training programs.

Why Selection Is the Highest-Leverage Decision

In private wealth management, firms often focus on coaching, incentives, and market expansion to drive growth. While all of these matter, this study reinforces a critical truth:

Selection is the highest-leverage decision a firm can make.

When advisors already possess the underlying traits required for success in complex, consultative, long-horizon wealth environments, development efforts compound faster and performance becomes more predictable. When they do not, even the best training and support structures struggle to close the gap.

The ROI of getting selection right, especially in ultra-high-net-worth private banking, is extraordinary.

Why Every Firm Should Audit Its Existing Team

The real opportunity extends beyond hiring to understanding your current advisor population. RAD Potential Advisory’s AdvisorDNA Predictor is a game changer, enabling organizations to clearly establish a benchmark for hiring success.

By auditing your existing advisory team to identify the traits of your top performers, firms can:

• Create a clear performance benchmark grounded in real data  

• Refine hiring criteria to reduce future mis-hires  

• Align coaching and development strategies more effectively  

• Improve succession planning and internal mobility decisions  

• Quantify the financial impact of better selection  

In this case, the return on investment was measured in billions of dollars, driven solely by understanding who succeeds, why they succeed, and selecting accordingly.

Final Thought

In elite private wealth management environments, performance is not random. The most successful advisors share a repeatable and measurable set of traits that align perfectly with the demands of ultra-high-net-worth clients and team-based wealth platforms.

Firms that take the time to identify, measure, and select for these traits gain a powerful competitive advantage, one that compounds year after year through better performance, stronger client relationships, and dramatically higher Assets Under Management.

The data is clear. Selection is not an recruiting decision. It is a growth strategy.