Not long after I began consulting to professional services firms (eighteen years ago now) my focus coalesced around two important (and even existential) questions: 1.) Who will get the work for us today? and 2.) Who will lead the firm tomorrow? In my view, these two questions precluded most everything else (nominally) important to the business.
Growth and leadership.
I still believe this today.
But the truth is, today you can’t get many to focus on the first question. With strong client demand, talent in short supply, a heated economy, and record backlogs – there just isn’t much interest in improving business development. I believe this thinking is fundamentally wrong – and rather shortsighted (note that 50% of staff today weren’t around for the last recession) – but this is an issue for another post.
The second question – one of leadership development, succession, and transition – is indeed on the minds of most executives now. In fact, information shared by my friend Kevin McMahon at a recent conference (Kevin is himself a former engineering firm CEO) – revealed leadership (and more broadly talent) as overwhelmingly the largest issue in the organization. [This information squares directly with our own experience working with clients on strategic growth planning]. Some of this is the ongoing effort and anxiety around talent acquisition and retention – not a trivial matter for anyone. But the real issue (we believe) is beyond simply building out the team – to exactly what to do (developmentally) with all of this valuable, in-demand, technical and professional talent.
| From A Recent Informal Poll of AEC Leaders: |
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Over the last nearly twenty years, I’ve led more than one hundred strategic client engagements – with 75% of those focused on strategic planning. And 80% of those planning engagements themselves included a specific focus on leadership development. Still, and despite the best of intentions, many of those clients struggled to make much headway in leveling up their leadership development.
In 2018 we set out to address this opportunity head-on – determined to offer the market a real solution (and real progress) with leadership development. At first our work centered on providing full, turnkey solutions for somewhat smaller firms (50-150 people) lacking existing infrastructure. Over time, our business shifted, and today (we still offer comprehensive solutions for organizations of all sizes) we’re involved more and more with larger firms, working to level up existing efforts, and to build lasting sustainability and scale into leadership systems.
We see this effort – creating a deep, comprehensive, sustainable, and competitive advantaged-based leadership system (and answering the question of who will run the firm tomorrow) as perhaps the most important to be done in business today.
This. Stuff. Really. Matters.
With much, much more to say, here are three quick ideas: recommended, impactful, and strategic actions to consider right now (and for firms of all sizes):
- Deploy a system: Choose and get going with comprehensive, non-technical, skills-based training and development for professionals all across the firm. The firm isn’t just a practice (it’s a business) – what’s on offer is the commercialization of technical talent. Business development, business acumen, management and leadership, and basic social and people skills … yes, yes, yes.
- Rethink the team: The organization should be viewed as one composed mostly of leaders, not one mostly of followers. Truth is, an extraordinary professional firm is full of extraordinary leaders – at all levels (from one to one, to project teams, departments and divisions, and the enterprise as a whole). Leadership development ought not be focused only on the top 2-3 %, but on (at least) the top 10-15% – and ideally more. Of course, there are questions and challenges: approach, logistics, cost, sustainability. All the more reason to get busy – now.
- Reinvent the corporation: Stop thinking only about clients! Focus much, much more on developing extraordinary professionals. Push past simple skills-based training, and past opening up the experience to a few more professionals. Ultimately, what’s required is a radical reconsideration of the why of the firm – and a much longer-term view of the future and future goals ahead. Focusing on optimizing the company’s projected leadership team a decade or two into the future will force a lot of new (and different) questions.
“Who will run the firm tomorrow?” and then “what must we do with this group today – to radically improve their chance of success – when they get their turn tomorrow?”
Big issue, and big opportunity – right now.
