Services - Success Stories

A Professional Partnership in Search of Revitalization

The Situation

In an expanding market, the Partners in a professional services organization realized they were losing their best people along with their reputation as an "employer of choice." As a result, escalating recruitment and training costs were negatively impacting profits and morale was decreasing. They also recognized that their own interactions were increasingly ineffective, hindering the Partners' ability to make key decisions. They decided to re-evaluate their strategy, structure, and roles to reinvigorate the organization, enhance their own team dynamics, and instill measures to maintain sustainable growth for the organization.

What We Did

Using on-site assessment and systems thinking tools, we identified collective as well as individual strengths, challenges, and leadership styles/characteristics of the Partners and unintended consequences of organizational policies and practices:

• Individual team members appeared to have become stuck in comfortable roles such as that of mover, follower, opposer, or observer; there was a pervasive lack of candor and increasing inflexibility in the face of changing circumstances. Many were overly deferential to the CEO and hesitant to challenge his views. Ultimately, decisions had become bottle-necked with the CEO and, over time, all Partners recognized that they had played a contributing role in bringing this about.
• Partner meetings were often closed-door sessions with little or no involvement of next-level leaders. Combined with a lack of formal, objective processes for mentoring and developing and evaluating employees, these actions caused next-level leaders to feel disempowered and expendable with no real voice into the direction and decision-making in the organization and/or opportunities to showcase and develop their capabilities.
• In a negative reinforcing loop, as next-level leaders began increasingly to question their value and contribution to the organization, the Partners questioned these employees' commitment and loyalty, resulting in the most capable individuals seeking more fulfilling and valued roles elsewhere.
• It became clear that the Partners had unconsciously created a closed culture, and as many capable next-level leaders began to depart, development and succession planning at all levels was now identified as one of the most critical components of the organization's continued growth and success.

The Results

• Following team and individual coaching, the Partners demonstrated significant improvement in their interactions with each other and with next-level leaders - their meetings became increasingly inclusive, more often involving next- and second-level leaders, and were focused on the objective of achieving substantive dialogue that fully explored each participant's view.
• Each Partner acknowledged his/her own challenges and implemented individual as well as team plans for development. Partners increasingly took on more flexible roles (initiator, consensus-builder, devil's advocate) or styles as needed to help create a more open and learning-focused style of leadership and began to break down the entrenched "silos."
• The Partners instituted formal processes and guidelines for mentoring, development, and succession planning. In addition, each Partner openly committed to actively mentoring a next-level leader.

The Outcome

As a result of the above changes, within six months the organization began to see significant positive results. Teams at all levels had become more efficient, engaged, and innovative in their interactions and decision-making; valuable ideas from all levels of the organization began to quickly surface and be considered at senior levels; morale organization-wide was significantly improved and there was an almost immediate reduction in turnover. Soon the organization's reputation as an "employer of choice" began to re-emerge as evidenced by the rising quality of the candidate pool.

To obtain these results see our Organizational Effectiveness Services.