David Maister has an extraordinary long post about the skills needed to be a partner in a US practice today. Over the piece, David concentrates on the developmental and educational skills. It’s certainly inspiring when David discusses accountability:
If someone has accepted a responsibility, and agreed upon a goal, then we should get out of their way and let them do it. None of us should wait to be told what to do, or how to do it. We should expect each of our partners to exercise greater judgment. That doesn’t mean abdication. It means that we should agree on clear goals, and put in place clear accountability (result) tracking systems, and give individuals the freedom and the responsibility to figure out how to get there, giving assistance only when it is asked for. We must not micromanage.
But I question whether partners are as prepared to do as David would like to believe. His response:
Partnership no longer means tenure in most firms in most professions in most countries, except in those few firms that have become so tolerant of each other that everyone’s afraid to point the finger at cruising in case the finger ends up pointing at them.
Is that true for the UK – are partners moving away from an entitlement culture? Yesterday when discussing PM solutions with John Stokdyk I was surprised to find the software vendor community sees the market as flat. That seems odd at a time when practices are experiencing growth in compliance. But then was it ever the case that partners rarely seem able to make time to step back and look at their businesses? Despite espousing solid management techniques to their clients? Doesn’t that sound a tad hypocritical? Should partners not be thinking about the implications of this for the future?
If partners don’t start addressing these issues then it won’t be long before we see the emergence of a new kind of partnership – one where the partners are seriously committed to their clients, specialise and offer unique services that are not easily replicated and which allow the firm to carve out a valuable niche. In other words, we will see the growth of MicroBrands within the profession.
These firms will start with a technology base that sees accounts production, time and expense, document and knowledge management as integrated utilities that are the fundamental tools of the trade without which nothing happens. These tools will, themselves be tied to discoverable content management, calendaring, shared workspaces and communications the include instant messaging, chat, blogs, email, fax and phone. All these tools exist right now – they just haven’t been mashed up together terribly well. That’s the next step. Some of these things you could do right now using modern low cost services.
I was equally surprised to hear so many firms still believe in the golf day out as the way to influence and cross-sell to clients. Does it really take that one day out to communicate? If so then it strikes me as a monumental waste of money and time. What we need is Business 2.0
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