Leadership in partnerships: A missed opportunity

UK partnerships are failing to capitalise on the opportunity to get ahead of the game because they are not focusing sufficiently on developing the capability of their leaders. Marjorie Wright of Kaisen Consulting warns that only very few partners in UK professional firms are really good leaders.

The majority of partners are under-developed as leaders and those that are competent, are only unconsciously so. The professions are full of people who are technically highly able, but it’s leadership capability that makes the difference in helping businesses stay ahead of the game. Few partners have, however, been given the opportunity to develop their people leadership skills.

It’s a real missed opportunity. Some partners don’t think that a lack of real leadership capability is a problem – others don’t want to address the issue. This is often because they think it can’t be developed. Instead, they learn how to compensate and work around the problem. Poor leadership, however, can prevent firms from growing and reaching their full potential.

One classic aspect of poor leadership in partnerships is the time it takes to make decisions. Partnerships typically work in a way where everyone has to be involved – even if there is “corporate” style executive accountability, partners need to feel that they have been consulted. There are huge benefits for partnerships if they can reach decisions quickly and properly. Leaders can help in this process by knowing

how to “read” people and get their buy-in, avoiding blockers and blockages, compressing the time it takes to get from A to Z. This helps achieve things in days that can sometimes take months.

It’s all about psychology

There is often a failure in partnerships to focus on people issues in any depth. They manage the professional dimension well, but the people dimension is afforded a much lower priority – perhaps because it’s less comfortable and partners are less skilled in this area. As a result, firms lose competitive advantage, and fail to fulfill their potential to innovate and develop. For example, many don’t have much of a clue about how to identify, develop and retain their rainmakers. They know they need them, but not how to find them, get the most out of them and keep them motivated. The answer lies in understanding people’s psychology.

Leaders have to recognise that many rainmakers are mavericks and they need to be prepared to give them the space to be creative. The typical processes and systems in partnerships designed to avoid risk and enshrine consistency and fairness may have to be flexed. If you want your partnership to be leading edge and innovative, you have to be prepared to take the lid off a little and understand how processes and controls affect people’s psychology. Having said that, you’ve got to be careful not to alienate the other partners. While many leaders pass up the opportunity to give the rainmakers their full opportunity to succeed, really good leaders get the balance right.

In many quarters, there is also a self-defeating belief that not everyone can be a rainmaker. Of course it’s true that some people in partnerships are more fluent than others in business development – they enjoy generating additional business and work. But there’s not enough emphasis on working with the less skilled partners to advance their talents to develop business. It’s another missed opportunity.

For example, by developing the partners’ emotional intelligence – their ability to tune in to other people when they are in a selling situation, they can have a better understanding of the potential client and how to meet their needs. The result? They increase their chances of winning business.

So, what makes good leadership in a partnership?

Managing partners wouldn’t necessarily recognise themselves as poor leaders because they have well-developed social skills and they’re normally bright. Yet the gap between being adequate and being really able to lead and manage people well is the critical thing. There is a huge amount of potential leverage from releasing the talent of individuals in the partnership and that, of course, translates straight to the bottom line.

So what makes a good people leader? Good and effective managing partners really understand what makes partners and others tick, their individual psychological needs, what will motivate them, in what roles will they excel, in what sectors they would work best and what is their best contribution to the firm.

They’ll therefore be able to have coaching conversations that tap into how to develop those talents and address the weak spots.

Solutions

Very few people are naturally good at leadership. There is a large number of people who need developing in terms of how to interpret why people behave the way they do in certain situations and how to think more creatively about the best ways of getting the best out of those people.

Before worrying about how to influence others, you need to know yourself. You need to understand your own emotional and motivational needs when dealing with others because these typically affect the way you interact with those around you. You also need to be aware of your repertoire of skills – what do you do well and less well? And of course you need to be aware of the implications of the way you are when dealing with other people and how to avoid the worst excesses of your own behaviour.

The next phase is reading others - reading what’s going on with them, their emotional and motivational needs. This means considering more than what's on the surface – it also means understanding what is underlying people’s behaviour. For example, aggression is often the result of insecurity or a failure to match personal psychological needs with the role. Passive resistance is more difficult but critical to spot – this is where people agree to change but ultimately fail to take action. Then there are those who cause analysis paralysis by hunting the flaw, so as to kybosh ideas.

The third part is all about selecting the appropriate behaviour - mapping out the lie of the land, deciding how to tackle the issue, the allegiances, the individuals and using the behaviour most likely to achieve the result.

People leadership skills can be developed by a range of methods including one-to-one coaching or by training and development type events. Take coaching for example. It gives people a framework and the necessary support to be able to read, understand and respond to people's emotional and motivational needs – it’s not just emotional intelligence - it's about how to use it.

Coaching is all about working with the partner to develop their perception and understanding of what’s going on, with the objective of them being self-sustaining. We meet regularly with the partner concerned, talking through what they want to achieve, helping them talk through problem issues, trying to assess situations, sometimes getting directly involved in working out what’s going on.

While effective coaching is primarily achieved through discussion, there are also a range of coaching techniques. These include things like basic psychometrics, 360-degree surveys and measures of team dynamics. It’s all highly tailored to the specific individual, their issues, how best to help them develop in this area and support them in achieving their objectives.

You can certainly improve people’s skills in the area of emotional intelligence - for example, it is possible to develop people’s skills in identifying the different psychological needs than can drive behaviour, understanding how people are affected by culture, noticing when people are exhibiting signs of stress and resistance. Especially in this country, people don’t outwardly show resistance – you have to be good at spotting the clues and knowing how to respond.

We also teach better political awareness – knowing how to understand the kind of things that go on that aren’t necessarily rational is key. As we all know, navigating your way through an organisation’s politics and knowing what to do to influence difficult partners can be problematic.

The ideal managing partner

A model managing partner firstly needs to have a clear sense of direction, in terms of a picture of where they want to take the firm strategically. This is very important as a backdrop – if you want to raise peoples’ game, you need to be doing it in a context that is stretching and challenging for them, otherwise you’re just developing people within the confines of what they already know or are good at. This implies the need for transformation, moving people through some sort of step change.

Ideal managing partners are also very accessible, they do a lot of listening. They’re good at knowing where their own people are, and at listening to the client base and understanding their needs. They really use their emotional intelligence, they watch people, think about what makes them “tick” and they work out how to get them motivated.

Critically, they don’t get bogged down in operational issues. Effective managing partners are good at delegating and concentrating on the areas that are actually going to give their firms their competitive advantage, rather than the things about good husbandry and managing costs. Good ones don’t get bogged down into discussions about buildings, facilities or support staff; they focus on the client base, the offer, pricing and how the offer is delivered. They also have a keen eye on how to attract, retain and deploy talented people.

Majorie Knight is a consultant at Kaisen Consulting. For further information, please contact Caroline Meares at: caroline.meares@paconsulting.com.