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When Professionals Have to Lead: A New Model for High Performance
For too long, professional services firms have relied on the “producer-manager” model, which works well in uncomplicated business environments. However, today’s managing directors must balance often conflicting roles, more demanding clients, tougher competitors, and associates with higher expectations of partners at all levels.
When Professionals Have to Lead presents an overarching framework better suited to such complexity. It identifies the four critical activities for effective PSF leadership: setting strategic direction, securing commitment to this direction, facilitating execution, and setting a personal example. Through examples from consulting practices, accounting firms, investment banks, and other professional service organizations, industry veterans DeLong, Gabarro, and Lees show how this model works to:
• Align your firm’s culture and key organizational components.
• Satisfy your clients’ needs without sacrificing essential managerial responsibilities.
• Address matters of size, scale, and complexity while maintaining the qualities that make professional services firms unique.
A valuable new resource, this book redefines the role of leadership in professional services firms.
When Professionals Have to Lead presents an overarching framework better suited to such complexity. It identifies the four critical activities for effective PSF leadership: setting strategic direction, securing commitment to this direction, facilitating execution, and setting a personal example. Through examples from consulting practices, accounting firms, investment banks, and other professional service organizations, industry veterans DeLong, Gabarro, and Lees show how this model works to:
• Align your firm’s culture and key organizational components.
• Satisfy your clients’ needs without sacrificing essential managerial responsibilities.
• Address matters of size, scale, and complexity while maintaining the qualities that make professional services firms unique.
A valuable new resource, this book redefines the role of leadership in professional services firms.
- GenresBusiness
256 pages, Hardcover
First published November 12, 2007
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82 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 13, 2017
A very insightful and reasonably well written guide to the management of professional service firms.
The author’s key contention is that the Producer-Manager dilemma is simply intrinsic to such firms and that the way to deal with this is to concentrate on integrated leadership, with the leader’s role to focus on three areas (all of them both at the firm level and at the day to day operational level) and with these three backed up by a fourth area: setting personal example. The three areas are: setting direction, developing and communicating the firm’s strategy and following through consistently in day to day operations; building commitment – at the firm level increasing inclusion and connectedness, carrying out actions which demonstrate that the firm’s values come ahead of short term financials and operationally taking time to give recognition; ensuring execution – by putting the right people and procedures in place and by delivering on client assignments and people development.
The authors set out clearly the key differences between corporates and Professional Service firms which in their view are key to successfully running a Professional Services Firm: the specialisation by practice rather than role, with a number of key functions particularly around business development, client service and execution being highly integrated parts of the roles of senior professionals with any functional specialists acting as more of a service function than the leads in these areas; the integration of management roles with the producer and client handling roles; development primarily on the job; a partnership/ownership style structure even when the firm is legally a corporate. They identify that a key challenge for professional service leaders is the focus on execution (especially operational on the job execution) to the exclusion of the other aspects of the integrated leadership model and especially the importance of relationships and longer term planning.
In a conscious updating of the classic of the area Managing the Professional Services Firm book by David Maister, the authors argue that Maister’s split into Procedural/Grey Hair and Rocket Science needs adjusting due to continuous commoditisation (due to technology, productisation, buyer pressure and increasing transparency) which drives everything to the left (i.e. towards procedural) and has led to a fourth category of customised services: which add some differentiation and value add while drawing on many of the skills need for procedural but with more senior involvement in both selling, crafting and delivering.
The authors consider the marked dominance of the high-need for achievement (rather than affiliation or power) personality type in professional service firms and that unlike with entrepreneurs where this need is also dominant the achievement is task (rather than creation) orientated. They identify the key motivational drivers as: task challenge, being number one, task closure, setting and meeting goals, clear and timely positive and constructively negative feedback, self-calibration, autonomy and control over task parameters. They also set out that to stay motivated professionals need ongoing tactical and periodic developmental feedback, coaching and mentoring, recognition and challenging work. They point out that work which is perhaps overly stretching the first time, is satisfying the second and third time but very unchallenging the tenth time; however many professionals hit “flat spots” in their career where they are seen as more valuable if they repeat the same job. The authors set out the fundamental professional services firm paradox that the identical motivators for leaders means that they are often so task orientated that they completely fail to provide the motivators to their reports.
Finally the authors set out their view that the B-players (the middle 70%) are the often neglected key to the success of many professional service firms who prematurely dismiss them and run the risk of them either leaving or drifting into C-players, rather than recognising their contribution, their often more balance approach to life, loyalty to the firm and institutional knowledge and greater commitment to developing others.
The author’s key contention is that the Producer-Manager dilemma is simply intrinsic to such firms and that the way to deal with this is to concentrate on integrated leadership, with the leader’s role to focus on three areas (all of them both at the firm level and at the day to day operational level) and with these three backed up by a fourth area: setting personal example. The three areas are: setting direction, developing and communicating the firm’s strategy and following through consistently in day to day operations; building commitment – at the firm level increasing inclusion and connectedness, carrying out actions which demonstrate that the firm’s values come ahead of short term financials and operationally taking time to give recognition; ensuring execution – by putting the right people and procedures in place and by delivering on client assignments and people development.
The authors set out clearly the key differences between corporates and Professional Service firms which in their view are key to successfully running a Professional Services Firm: the specialisation by practice rather than role, with a number of key functions particularly around business development, client service and execution being highly integrated parts of the roles of senior professionals with any functional specialists acting as more of a service function than the leads in these areas; the integration of management roles with the producer and client handling roles; development primarily on the job; a partnership/ownership style structure even when the firm is legally a corporate. They identify that a key challenge for professional service leaders is the focus on execution (especially operational on the job execution) to the exclusion of the other aspects of the integrated leadership model and especially the importance of relationships and longer term planning.
In a conscious updating of the classic of the area Managing the Professional Services Firm book by David Maister, the authors argue that Maister’s split into Procedural/Grey Hair and Rocket Science needs adjusting due to continuous commoditisation (due to technology, productisation, buyer pressure and increasing transparency) which drives everything to the left (i.e. towards procedural) and has led to a fourth category of customised services: which add some differentiation and value add while drawing on many of the skills need for procedural but with more senior involvement in both selling, crafting and delivering.
The authors consider the marked dominance of the high-need for achievement (rather than affiliation or power) personality type in professional service firms and that unlike with entrepreneurs where this need is also dominant the achievement is task (rather than creation) orientated. They identify the key motivational drivers as: task challenge, being number one, task closure, setting and meeting goals, clear and timely positive and constructively negative feedback, self-calibration, autonomy and control over task parameters. They also set out that to stay motivated professionals need ongoing tactical and periodic developmental feedback, coaching and mentoring, recognition and challenging work. They point out that work which is perhaps overly stretching the first time, is satisfying the second and third time but very unchallenging the tenth time; however many professionals hit “flat spots” in their career where they are seen as more valuable if they repeat the same job. The authors set out the fundamental professional services firm paradox that the identical motivators for leaders means that they are often so task orientated that they completely fail to provide the motivators to their reports.
Finally the authors set out their view that the B-players (the middle 70%) are the often neglected key to the success of many professional service firms who prematurely dismiss them and run the risk of them either leaving or drifting into C-players, rather than recognising their contribution, their often more balance approach to life, loyalty to the firm and institutional knowledge and greater commitment to developing others.
July 26, 2008
When Professionals Have to Lead: A New Model for High Performance Thomas J. Delong, John J. Gabarro, and Robert J. Lees
Harvard Business School Press
In this volume, Thomas DeLong, John Gabarro, and Robert Lees have devised what they characterize as “an integrated leadership model” that is designed to “stimulate thinking and facilitate changes that high-performing firm leaders want to enact.” Although their focus is on the professional service firm (PSF), all of the information and counsel in this book can also be of substantial value to other kinds of organizations. In fact, decision-makers in those (e.g. manufacturers) must also offer professional service of the highest quality, especially now when competing in what has become, as Thomas Friedman describes it, a “flat world.”
First, DeLong, Gabarro, and Lees introduce their integrated leadership model and explain its background, “how it evolved out of the problems and opportunities that have bedeviled heads of firms in recent years.” In the remaining eight chapters, they respond to questions such as these:
What are the dominant characteristics of the integrated leader?
To what extent are PSFs “a breed apart”?
What unique challenges and opportunities do they offer to their leaders?
What should a firm offer: products, services, or both?
How to define and then measure a PSF’s market?
How to achieve and then sustain strategic differentiation?
To the co-authors’ great credit, after carefully identifying the “what” of effective leadership in personal service firms, they focus most of their attention on how to achieve and then sustain high-impact performance, especially now when leaders in PSFs face unprecedented challenges in a global marketplace and are engaged in a constant battle against disconnection. Integrated leaders are “connectors” who “create a safety net to catch those professionals who may be ready to leave the system or who are not [sufficiently] engaged in the enterprise. The dilemma for most PSFs is that they do not explicitly value or reward those professionals who spend the time and effort focused on the human side of the enterprise. Great PSFs need to confront this deficiency. The time has come to value the professionals who keep the culture dynamic and supportive through their ability to connect people throughout the firm.”
Amen.
Harvard Business School Press
In this volume, Thomas DeLong, John Gabarro, and Robert Lees have devised what they characterize as “an integrated leadership model” that is designed to “stimulate thinking and facilitate changes that high-performing firm leaders want to enact.” Although their focus is on the professional service firm (PSF), all of the information and counsel in this book can also be of substantial value to other kinds of organizations. In fact, decision-makers in those (e.g. manufacturers) must also offer professional service of the highest quality, especially now when competing in what has become, as Thomas Friedman describes it, a “flat world.”
First, DeLong, Gabarro, and Lees introduce their integrated leadership model and explain its background, “how it evolved out of the problems and opportunities that have bedeviled heads of firms in recent years.” In the remaining eight chapters, they respond to questions such as these:
What are the dominant characteristics of the integrated leader?
To what extent are PSFs “a breed apart”?
What unique challenges and opportunities do they offer to their leaders?
What should a firm offer: products, services, or both?
How to define and then measure a PSF’s market?
How to achieve and then sustain strategic differentiation?
To the co-authors’ great credit, after carefully identifying the “what” of effective leadership in personal service firms, they focus most of their attention on how to achieve and then sustain high-impact performance, especially now when leaders in PSFs face unprecedented challenges in a global marketplace and are engaged in a constant battle against disconnection. Integrated leaders are “connectors” who “create a safety net to catch those professionals who may be ready to leave the system or who are not [sufficiently] engaged in the enterprise. The dilemma for most PSFs is that they do not explicitly value or reward those professionals who spend the time and effort focused on the human side of the enterprise. Great PSFs need to confront this deficiency. The time has come to value the professionals who keep the culture dynamic and supportive through their ability to connect people throughout the firm.”
Amen.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews