Management guru Peter Drucker coined the phrase "culture eats strategy for breakfast". It's one of those great liners that captures a whole thesis in a few words. Drucker was telling the business world that even the most carefully crafted business plan would fail if its objectives were not aligned to the values, beliefs and behaviour of those entrusted with its execution.

We may be about to witness the veracity of Drucker's maxim once again, this time as the financial advice industry attempts to reinvent itself.

I recently witnessed a senior manager open a professional development day with the words, "We make no apologies. We are a sales business". This mindset is typical of bank channels.

While the Future of Financial Advice legislation may have forced a recalibration of incentive schemes, you can be sure that the key metrics that occupy meeting agendas are not referrals back to bank, team engagement or customer satisfaction stats. No, brows furrow and papers are shifted anxiously when the topic of sales results is discussed. That's where the focus is, that's where the intensity lies and that's what the conversations revolve around.

But is this a bad thing? Are a sales focus and the provision of honest, high-quality advice mutually exclusive? This question hasn't been given the attention it needs. When we do start to seriously reflect, we might discover we have misunderstood the central flaw of the institutionally owned advice business: the corrosive impact a transactional banking mentality has on the culture of a non-transactional, relationship-based advice channel.

Engaged clients

My view is financial advice can never be a 'sales business'. This does not mean advice does not have to be sold. It does. Nor does it mean that licensees and financial planners cannot earn good income from the provision of financial advice. It means that the largest licensees in Australia still fail to understand that the intent with which their people enter into an advice engagement is crucial.

Intent defines priority. Is my intention to sell or to serve? Is it more important to sell advice or is it more important to provide an optimum solution? Do I enter into each engagement looking for an opportunity to replace existing products with the house brand or is my primary concern to leave the client in a materially better position?

A financial planner's intention makes a profound difference. The servant planner – the truly client-centric practitioner – invests a lot of time enabling clients to obtain deeper insights into their circumstances and their objectives.

Fundamentally, those who seek to serve understand that they are problem finders, not solution providers. The key realisation here is that many people don't know what they need when seeking financial advice. This is not meant to be patronising. It's a result of an education system that avoids teaching financial skills at school and a welfare state whose value proposition to its citizens is "don't worry, we have your backs".

Advice wins over sales

The planner who holds an advice mindset understands this. They challenge their clients' perceptions and understanding of the financial landscape. They ask hard and insightful questions that often create discomfort. Contrast this to the planner with the sales mindset. They are happy to accept their client's instructions. The assumption is made that a client should understand what they want to achieve and thus the planner is happy to accept that their client has made an educated request.

In the world of financial advice, the limiting of a conversation to issues raised by the client is called a 'scope limitation'. Limiting the scope is perfectly acceptable where a client understands all the issues and opportunities they face into and selects those for which they want to receive advice. Limiting the scope should be considered unacceptable when this is the planner's call. Advice businesses with a sales mindset are often comfortable with planner-imposed scope limitations. Estate planning, for example, is seldom addressed – it is often scoped out.

Having misdiagnosed the central flaw in their advice model, the solutions being imposed on institutional licensees are doomed to fail. The answer is not higher academic requirements, although this would ensure financial advice is provided by a more informed and educated individual. The answer is not in an improved monitoring of service delivery, although this would ensure clients receive the services they pay for. The answer is not in the rollout of the FoFA legislation and additional red tape because compliant advice does not necessarily mean quality, client-centric advice. And the answer is not to be found in the most recent proposal being bandied about: five hours a year of ethics training.

The solution is more obvious but far less easily implemented. It is to change the sales culture to a service culture. Just like culture ate strategy for breakfast when Peter Drucker's thinking dominated boardrooms, culture will eat ethics for lunch today. Culture dictates planner behaviour. Not education, not compliance, not legislation and not ethics training.

The need for financial advice remains vast. With the social contract reset one should expect the demand for – and respect for – such services to grow. This profession is too important to the financial future of too many Australians to be handicapped by a suboptimal business model. It's time for bold change.

Dani Peer is principal of Danipeer.com