Author Archives: hippotential

Firms Outperform Industry By 22% With Design, Develop Deploy Approach

Would you like for your firm to be a market leader? Who wouldn’t, right? Yet, are the firm leaders willing to do what it takes to distinguish themselves from the crowd? If you are the managing partner, practice group leader, executive committee member, or key client group leader, you set the tone for culture and performance.

McKinsey found in a 2010 study that organizations who rank in the top quintile in talent management outperform their industry by 22%. By talent management, we mean grooming professionals throughout their careers to enhance competency, contribution, and performance–regardless the yardstick. However, traditional talent programs often fall short because they do not incorporate the best practices of organizational development.

Layers for Development

Organizational development components are more holistic and  include organization design, business development, work generation and management, and strategic business model communication.  The OD spectacles view recruitment, nurture, and retention of  legal talent as an expression of firm values, identity, vision, goals, strategy, and essence.  As Jim Collins in Good to Great describes the importance of helping the right people find the right seat on the bus, it is important inside firms to develop a system for aligning talent management with firm management.

The graphic to the right depicts the need for a cascading set of goals whereby organizational goals are broken down to team/practice area/section goals, and further still to individual goals. As firms find a way to chart a career development path that includes a competency model and clear role maps, the members of the firm and the teams on which they serve become more proficient in serving client needs and reaching business objectives.

Clarifying responsibilities for client acquisition, project management, and client retention guides the development of assignments that groom not just the technical, but also the soft skills necessary for achievement.  Competencies such as self awareness, self regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills  can be developed as a vital part of an overall career development plan that intentionally aligns experience, assignments, and mentoring needed with the exigency of getting billable work done.

  • Design your organization for success
  • Develop your people for greatness
  • Deploy human capital to serve meaningful client needs

Senior Night & Going Away Parties

If you are the type person who enjoys college sports, chances are high that you have witnessed a few senior days/nights during your cheering. Those who are finishing out their intercollegiate athletic careers are celebrated, given a chance to be the star, and walk out of the gym/off the field with their heads held high, regardless the outcome. In like fashion, in the business world, we often have going away parties for those moving on to new opportunities.

WHY do we have parties when someone who has been a part of our organization decides that somewhere else will make him/her happier? Unless, as may be the case, you plan to follow the departing, your reaction ought to be one of introspection. What part of the culture where you work is needing improvement so that employee engagement and retention are raised high enough that people wouldn’t think about going anywhere else?

so happy for YOU!

Recently, I had the opportunity to listen to a conference speaker (Michael Lorsch) speak about the need for organizations to be both smart and healthy. Smart is the category where most managers and employees live: services/products, strategy, marketing, finance/operations, and technology. Healthy, however, is characterized by those “soft & fuzzy” difference makers that constitute an organization’s DNA (culture): minimal politics, high morale, high productivity, minimal confusion, and low turnover. So….an organization wherein people would rather leave than stay in not healthy and, therefore, not likely to be as successful in the long run as one that is emotionally healthy.

In order to build health and overcome dysfunction, Pat Lencioni (Lorsch’s boss) recommends five roles for leaders:

  • go first to build trust
  • mine for conflict
  • force clarity & closure
  • confront difficult issues, and
  • focus on collective outcomes

Why not change your culture and make a HUGE deal about new employees? Become more engaging. Mourn when others leave and figure out why so you can work on the business instead of in it!

Content With No Content

Does your professional services firm have a strategy to produce, distribute and repurpose content for multiple market segments? If it does, you are in the minority. Best practices are to create and disseminate content to enhance search engine rankings. Philosophically, billable professionals have insights to share and there are numerous venues for thought leadership to be established. The fact of the matter is, sadly, that the professionals simply are not easily engaged to sit down and generate the content.

The almighty billable hour, the internal metrics, and the likelihood that most would prefer to do the work than to write about it, are all reasons one may choose not to blog, write articles or white papers, or post updates ad tweets. Simply put, very few firms have much experience creating an environment that acknowledges and rewards contributions to thought leadership that do not produce an immediate return. Performance measurement and incentive compensation practices will need to be revised in order to encourage content production as a preferred behavior within the daily, weekly, etc schedule.

If, like other forms of outsourcing, the firm were to contract with a contractor to produce content on behalf of the billable professionals, it would most likely lack the technical acumen and personal passion necessary to be an intriguing, gripping read. However, contract content editors may be a very good idea. Either a staff person or outsider could help to determine themes, subjects, and nuances that would make the content more readable in layman terminology.

Revise & Refine

 

Become discontent with unsatisfactory content–both in terms of volume and quality. Find ways to change the corporate culture to celebrate the content revolution. Articulate the increased stature and visibility that authors enjoy. Recruit firm leaders to demonstrate their personal commitment to writing–even when it produces no immediate revenues. Finally, make writing an assignment. Section/niche leaders should have a scheduled slot for covering their “beats.” Those aspiring to become partners can demonstrate their drive by taking on writing responsibilities. With content editors, these activities can be managed to successfully produce great content, repurpose it for other social media uses, and promote firm expertise.

Ambiguous Marketing Budgets lead to… ambiguous results

Have you ever heard the rant of a financial executive who is fuming because marketing ROI is so hard to define? The lament is usually that “branding” is not enough–that some quantifiable return is desired, but no one really pins it down. Some argue that revenues are the only true barometer. Others feel that smaller yardsticks are better–number of new clients, number of proposals made, number of inbound calls, etc. But…what about % of proposals won, % change in inbound calls, etc to provide comparative data?

Yet…”return” still has to be measured in comparison to investment. In many cases, the investment amount is, to quote Churchill, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Why is this so? In many privately owned businesses, it is because marketing dollars are enshrouded in expense reimbursements, dues and sponsorships. Actual agency costs, advertising spend, etc are sometimes separate line items on the income statement, but are often rolled up into an aggregate. In order to have credibility with the financial (& equity) folks, we as marketers need to ask for more detail. It is in our best interests to know travel & entertainment, training, and similar expenses that are charged by managers/executives and reimbursed but not clearly demarcated as marketing costs. However, because we are not considered part of the brain trust, we can be excluded from such conversations/communications.

What's Your Measurement?

 

Once we are able to acquire access to the true marketing financials, we can perform an ROI analysis more effectively. (I prefer to describe this as an “ROM.”) Then, tradeoffs can be evaluated. There may be some in the organization who are unwise in their expense management to the point that allowing them to ring up reimbursable costs is not an investment at all, but a distraction from effective, accountable marketing.

Having the frank conversation with the top financial executive/business owner(s) can set the stage for your voice to gain credibility. No longer may you be perceived as the “soft and fuzzy” management team member, but rather a strategic contributor to business performance. If you are savvy enough to learn what your industry standards are for marketing as a percentage of costs/revenues, then you can help set the budget requisite to drive growth and carve out better market share.

As the marketing budget becomes a management accountability tool, results are easier to predict. Sensitivity analysis can then yield insights into the levers that drive revenue performance. Congratulations–you are then on your way to concrete rather than ambiguous conversations and may soon find that the frustration of not being heard begins to fade away…!

One-man rule vs. One-man band

Businesses often can be managed by a strong leader who seems to be involved with every significant decision. In some cases, this type of one-man band is almost unavoidable (e.g. a company with less than five employees, four of whom are in support roles.) However, in organizations that have been fortunate to grow, add management teams, and have complex issues, the controlling leader can either be an icon or an albatross. When is it good–and when is it bad–that the proverbial “buck” stops on one person’s desk?

art by Eldon Doty

 

Chief executives who make decisions without the input of colleagues engage in one-man rule. This practice is a two-edged sword. While few will argue that group management can slow progress and that one can move more nimbly than many, there is always the latent risk that decisions that are made lack depth, insight, and the benefit of buy-in. The biggest travesty of the urge to “go it alone” is that it undermines management succession by depriving others from the opportunity to make meaningful choice on behalf of the enterprise.

Management depth is always in the list of prime characteristics of best managed companies. Management change then, by default, becomes a disorderly process, at times exacerbated by recession or prosperity. The entire organization is often thrown into chaotic operation and often requires a turnaround thereafter.

Instead of putting one’s peers–and, perhaps, one’s own retirement via earnout/sale–at risk, better to avoid one-man rule and seek to engage others. This concept holds true in may of the sexy technology start-up models as well, wherein the “one-man” is equivalent to the group of initial founders who can function as to inhibit the contribution of successive hires. Often, these top executives are extremely bright and have a very high IQ, but lack the EQ (emotional quotient = emotional intelligence) to build out the model and achieve the important milestones due to an unwillingness to invite the input of others.

More to come on how to build out the management team and empower them to make meaningful contributions…