11 tests to measure the health of your firm’s partner group.
by Robert J. Lees and August J. Aquila
NEW RESEARCH REPORT, INSTANT DOWNLOAD: Leadership at Its Best: What Successful Managing Partners Do (PDF, 17 pages)
Partners are the culture in a professional service firm – what they believe, what they reward, what they do and how they do it determines what and how things get done. But, one of the problems we consistently hear about is the lack of clarity in what being a partner means. And, in the absence of clarity the partners typically fill the gap by doing what they think it means, with all of the differences of thought and behavior that inevitably brings. It’s these differences in behavior that result in firms failing to maximize their potential.
So, how do firms overcome this lack of clarity and ensure the partner group set the right example and consistently deliver the performance the firm needs to be successful?
In our over twenty years working with professional service firms, we have seen many attempts to provide greater clarity from sophisticated competency frameworks through balanced scorecards to highly personalized objective-based compensation systems. The problem is that none of them (or even all of them together) ever works well enough without the critical link between partner behavior and what the firm is trying to achieve and what the partners have to do to deliver it. Only when that overt linkage exists and becomes part of every partner’s DNA do any other initiatives have a chance of working.
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