Services - Success Stories

A Professional Services Firm Transitions to a New Leadership Model

The Situation

A professional services firm was emerging from an extended market decline. Faced with new market pressures and challenges, the Partners realized that leadership and organizational changes would be required for continued success and growth. They asked for help identifying the skills and competencies needed to chart a new strategic course for the firm.

What We Did

Through group meetings, on-site observations, and individual interviews, we conducted a comprehensive organizational assessment of the firm, identifying its strengths, challenges, and cultural characteristics, framed within the context of current market conditions. Our assessment revealed:

• The Partners were committed to the success of the firm and were all willing to address development issues at both the individual and group level.
• The Partners consistently expressed a mutual respect for each other's experience and skills, providing a solid foundation for continued learning and development.
• The Partners shared many strengths and had leveraged these well to the firm's benefit to date; however, there was a tendency to overvalue similarities and overlook the benefits of creating a group with diverse and complementary capabilities.
• The firm's current leadership model was ill-suited to implementing the chosen vision and strategy.
• Personality and style differences were limiting the group's efforts to achieve skillful dialogue - the open expression and full exploration of each other's ideas to surface the best thinking of the group.

The Results

As a result of our findings, we partnered with the firm to:

• Present the CEO and Partners with alternative leadership models and their business implications for their consideration
• Provide facilitation skills to co-create a "migration" plan and process to achieve a new leadership structure that was better matched to the new vision and strategy
• Assist the Managing Partner in creating a strategic action plan to build/enhance the capabilities of all Partners in areas critically linked to the firm's new strategy
• Facilitate group sessions focused on building team effectiveness, using an "action learning" approach - a hands-on process that builds capabilities within a framework of addressing a current, strategic issue for the firm
• Conduct one-to-one coaching with individual Partners in specifically identified/targeted areas

Over the course of our engagement, the Partners:

• Demonstrated significant improvements in communication effectiveness - more consistent achievement of skillful discussion and dialogue - both individually and collectively; consequently, they became more skilled at reaching true consensus on key issues
• Committed themselves fully to a new leadership model for the firm - with a three-year "migration" plan to achieve it
• All achieved measurable progress on individual development goals and committed to ongoing development of their leadership skills over a one- to three-year time frame
• Established a new organizational goal and launched processes focused on building organization capabilities at the next lower level, (e.g., instituting mentoring and key talent development programs)

The Outcome

As a result the firm moved toward a more distributed leadership model with greater individual ownership and accountability and was able to build organizational capability to meet growth objectives.

To obtain these results see our Partner Coaching and Organizational Effectiveness Services.