Robert S. Bailey of the Center for Creative Leadership has developed a framework for guiding manager feedback styles for employees based on their current performance. The framework highlights that the management style most appropriate for underperforming employees is different for moderate-performing employees and again different for high-performing employees.3
The matrix, adapted here from The Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice, is shown in Exhibit 10.3. The distribution of employee performance falls roughly on a normal curve, placing employees in one of four quadrants.
The most appropriate management style for each employee type is outlined in each quadrant.
A final management coaching issue for professional staff to be aware of is the challenges created for staff as they transition from individual producer
Career Tracks, Compensation, and Professional Development 235
Coaching
Encouraging
Appropriate behaviors
Appropriate behaviors
High relation
High relation
Adaptable
High task
Low task
Appreciative
Coaching
Considerate
Energetic
Encouraging
Interactive
Patient
Involving
Supportive
Resourceful
2 3
Understanding
1 4
Appropriate behaviors
Appropriate behaviors
Decisive
Analytical
Directing
Delegating
Determined
Low relation
Low relation
Deliberate
Forceful
High task
Low task
Methodical
Initiating
Organized
Structuring
Delegating
Structuring
Reflective
The arrows and box
numbers 1 through 4
ected
Note: Unless you are
show the progression
xpe
managing in this area
both you and the
b
of task controlling,
jo
employee intend and
you are probably not
hope for. At any time
the
training your successor
f
performance falls
o
—it’s your future
off, drop to the next
%0
competitor, instead!
lower box.
01
Doing
1
Let’s Go
⁄
3
2
⁄4
1
11⁄4
11⁄2
Performance level of the employee
Exhibit 10.3
Manager Feedback Approach Matrix
roles to roles that incorporate management responsibilities. This can be a difficult transition, particularly in professional services firms, which tend to value high levels of output for entry-level and early-career professionals.
These staff tend to fall back on individual producer habits, even after promotion to manager. Eventually, the amount of work required cannot be completed by an individual, making leverage and management expertise critical.
Training and monitoring new managers to learn how to effectively achieve results from their teams is a critical part of helping the new manager to succeed and avoid burnout.
Summary
The professional development mechanism, compensation structure, and career plan for professional and administrative staff are one of the most important
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Attracting and Retaining the Best Professionals
predictors of overall staff satisfaction and retention. These areas, however, often get overlooked in the daily focus on sales, delivery, and firm operations experienced by the growing professional services practice. It requires dedication and long-term planning on the part of the senior management team of the firm to ensure that these areas are properly addressed.
The elements of an effective career plan should include clearly defined levels, responsibilities at each level, and promotion criteria for achieving the next level. Compensation ranges (and components) at each level should be delineated as well. Compensation should be benchmarked periodically against market rates and adjusted accordingly.
The skills required for each level as well as promotion criteria should be consistently ref lected in the appraisal process. The appraisal process itself should take place annually for all professional and administrative staff. New staff should be reviewed at the three- or six-month point as well.
While compensation, benefits, career planning, and professional development are a challenge to manage in the face of urgently competing sales and delivery priorities, the near and long-term benefits of increased staff satisfaction, performance, and retention will reward the attention paid to these topics by the professional services firm.
RESOURCES
David H. Maister, Managing the Professional Services Firm (New York, New York: Free Press, 1993).
NOTES
1. Ruth Benedict, as quoted by Margaret Meade in An Anthropologist at Work, part 1 (1959).
2. Cuba Gooding Jr. as Rod Tidwell in Jerry Maguire, written and directed by Cameron Crowe (1996).
3. Joseph A. Demkin and The American Institute of Architects, The Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2001).
11
Professional Staff
Recruiting and Retention
BRANT C. MARTIN
Professionals, by their very nature, tend to be horrible businesspeople.
—Unknown
Numerous exceptions exist, and you need only to look at the hundreds of firms in all professional industries to see examples of well-run, multijurisdic-tional practices that generate significant profit for their partners and shareholders and staff to see that the old adage does not always hold. But as with many stereotypes, there is perhaps a grain of truth. Attorneys want to practice law, whether in the trial courts or the boardrooms. Accountants want to crunch numbers. Investment bankers want to “do deals.” What they often do not want to do, however, is involve themselves in the messy logistics of hiring employees, leasing office space, buying computers, and the various and sundry other tasks that are necessary to make the business, not just the practice, perform.
Why This Topic Is Important
One of the most time-consuming nonpractice areas for any professional services firm is the hiring and retention of qualified and appropriate professionals. You have to find professionals to practice in the firm for there to be any practice at all. And, for there to be a practice, the professional employed in the firm must deliver. Therefore, the identification, hiring, and maintenance of a qualified staff of professionals is critical to any firm’s success.1
237
238
Attracting and Retaining the Best Professionals
No professional services firm can maintain its reputation merely on the backs of its founders or first generation of employees and partners. First, such a strategy necessitates a small operation, and is difficult if not impossible to scale and grow over time. There is only so much that two, three, or four people can do. Thus, any firm that rests its future only on a “cult of personality” around its founders can be assured of two things: very few clients and a shelf life that expires with the retirement, or simply the aging, of its founders. Speaking strictly from the idea of the future prospects of the firm, there can be no more important function for a firm than recruiting and retention. Simply put, the human capital of a firm must be constantly fed and maintained. Otherwise, the family tree of a firm will wither and die. The professional staff candidate today is the partner of the future.
Furthermore, recruiting and retention are critical not only for the future of a firm but also for its present. Most often, client-switching costs between professional services firms are low. If the firm cannot deliver qualified and professional service, clients will “vote with their feet” and find another service provider that can deliver what their needs entail. If the firm is not constantly delivering (and improving on) the quality of its work product and services, planning for a second generation becomes a moot point. Further, the nature of a professional services firm is that the clients need you because of a specialized body of knowledge that either cannot be performed within the corporation or is not economical to perform in-house. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) does not allow a company to present its own audited numbers. An outside accounting firm must sign off on the company’s financials for a stock to be publicly traded. In the same manner, a corporation may have its own in-house legal team to oversee the various issues that the company faces on day-to-day basis. But any corporation also will be presented with legal issues that it simply does not have the expertise to handle. In that case, outside legal counsel is necessary. And in both of these situations and others, the trust of the client is critical to the success of the project. Whether public issuance of stock or “bet-the-company” litigation, the client must trust its outside vendors with a major project—and law firms, accountants, investment bankers, and others certainly fall into this category. Because of these issues, work product and trust, the professionals delivering the services are the baseline by which the firm will be evaluated. Therefore, every firm must have in place a process by which professionals are identified, recruited, retained, and advanced. And a significant portion of the nonpractice time and effort of any firm must be dedicated to this process. This chapter addresses the recruiting and onboarding of professional staff; Chapter 10 addresses career tracks, compensation, and advancement issues.
Most readers of this book will be familiar with the following categories of professionals in any service organization:
Professional Staff Recruiting and Retention
239
1. Rainmakers
2. Specialists
3. Worker bees
4. Misfits2
Each of these categories is absolutely necessary for the professional services firm (even the “misfits” category—you cannot know what works without knowing what does not work). If the successful firm is to maintain itself, each professional who is brought into employment must already know, or quickly find, his or her proper place in the proper category, which is discussed more thoroughly later.
How does this happen? First, the members of the firm have to be ob-
tained—the process of recruiting. Second, the members of the firm have to be kept where they are, which means that one way or another, they must be kept happy—the process of retention.