One of the things that we have long considered at CoreData-brandmanagement is that financial planners do a really important job, it’s just not the job they think they do.

It’s not that the role isn’t technical; done properly it is. It’s not that the job isn’t hard to master; it literally takes years and lots of facets of intelligence to make a success of this business. And it’s not that success isn’t quantifiable; beyond making people richer we have all the data you would ever need to prove that a good financial plan makes people happier.

Our thesis then is partly this: A good financial planner isn’t just a technician; they are something called a choice architect. That is, they help people make really good choices for their future, in the same way that a doctor, dentist, accountant or a lawyer has the education, training, experience and insight to help people make smart choices.

However, very few financial planners are trained on how to help people make good choices, and the way in which you can get reluctant people to make good choices is of course completely unquantifiable.

Or it was.

We have always been taught that one of the unquantifiable things of business is the effect that personality has on how successful a business or a business person is going to be.

Here is the way that we want things to be: We want success to be determined by a meritocracy, to be a balance of intelligence, hard work, application and putting the interests of the clients and the company first.

Here is the way that it is: Success, it turns out (at least according to some recent research from the venerable Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT)) is largely determined by your charisma, by what the psychologists might call likability. In fact it seems that all other things being equal, if you can be likable – you are five times more likely to be successful.

For a long time this likability bias was something of a black art, something that was talked about but defied all attempts at measurement or understanding – and in a society which treasures proof above all else – it was therefore effectively dismissed.

Now it seems the research is in. Work being done by Alex Pentland, who directs the Human Dynamics Lab at the prestigious MIT social research labs has developed a series of experiments that effectively measure the signals humans send each other and uses them to determine charisma.

What Dr Pentland is looking for are what he calls Honest Signals – it’s a biological term for the non-verbal cues that all social species (like humans) send each other when they are communicating.

Honest Signals are different to what we say because far from being considered and conscious they are hard to mask, impossible to consider and are unconscious and cause a change in the behaviour of the receiver of the signal.

The most common case of this is happiness. If we are happy and bubbly, then it rubs off on all the people around us.

Of course it’s a lot more complex than this but it starts to boil down to a few pretty simple rules.

Success is determined by a few key factors: high energy, how you face people when you talk to them, how close you stand or sit to them and how much you let them talk.

It seems successful people talk more – and they listen more – and while this is counter intuitive, it simply means that they are more engaging, they pick up cues and they draw people out.

So far this sounds like mumbo jumbo, but here is what Dr Pentland and his colleagues did.

They took a group of MIT undergraduates, some 500 of them who were in a business plan competition and then sent them into a series of social situations, miked up and wearing a swathe of devices which measured the verbal and non-verbal cues that they were giving out.

Then, after gathering that data, and without using any other data – or even looking at the business plans or speaking to the contestants -they predicted who they thought would win the competition to be held in two weeks’ time, sealed their predictions and waited.

The outcome? The social data collected predicted the outcome of the competition with 87% accuracy, a frankly staggering result.

Remember, these plans were being judged by venture capitalists who were looking not just for good presentations and showboating enthusiasm but for data as well. But the system worked.

Relate this back then to the role of the financial planner.

For the past six years we have measured quarter on quarter the investment intentions and predictions of financial planners and mass affluent Australians.

Our goal was to try to understand the gap between what people were being advised to do and what they wanted to do, to try to understand that tension.

What we have discovered is that financial planners as a group get investment markets largely right and that mass affluent Australians tend to lag between six and nine months behind this thinking.

They often want to move when opportunities are diminished or market changes have taken place – long after their planner has identified the opportunity.

This research starts to give you the keys to unlock this behaviour, to unbundle this fear and inactivity bias and to help your clients make smarter decisions.

Maybe it’s time to think long and hard about the Honest Signals you are sending and what you want clients to think of you.