the quick and easy system for measuring top talent.
by ed mendlowitz
202 questions and answers
q: i suspect that my partner has “maxed out” and cannot grow further, which will retard our growth. what can i do or how can i deal with this?
more: how to stop yourself | what good managers know about bad judgment | audit reports without doing the work? | ask these 10 questions before adding financial services | 10 reasons clients don’t pay
exclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.
a: this is a frequent question, and sometimes it is the person asking it who has “maxed out.” but sometimes the partner or a key staff member wants to be made a partner.
i developed a knowledge gap (“kg”) method to provide a way of measuring the difference in growth when you interact with people.
this includes those over you and under you from the same firm, and clients and other professionals and colleagues.
you would “measure” the difference when you first meet or started working with them. over time if the kg narrows, the less knowledgeable is growing faster. if it widens, the more knowledgeable person is growing faster.
if you are mentoring a new employee, the gap should narrow because of the faster rate he would be learning. when you work with a new client, and your knowledge of her business is lower than hers, the kg should narrow as you work with the client. if it widens giving an unfavorable kg, it would indicate your decreasing relevance or importance, or your lack of growth relative to the client.
this measure should be adjusted depending upon the type of interaction you have. for instance, the kg difference is highly relevant if you are functioning as a consultant or advisor to a client and passing on what you know so your clients adopt it. it might not have much importance if you are providing bookkeeping services to a business owner while she is looking to hire a full-time bookkeeper.
with regard to benefits from interactions with specific people, to the extent that they don’t “teach” you anything, the kg would not narrow – and you lose out, and perhaps you need to examine the relationship. another way to look at it is that a person’s kg value would remain high if he is unable to teach or mentor others, which is really his own ineptitude. however, he probably won’t be growing either and the kg should narrow because of your growth from other sources.
it is also possible and likely that there are many different situations where the kg could be measured with the same people. for example, an entry-level accountant would know much less than the person training her in auditing, but might know much more on how to handle data mining or sampling software – which she would have just learned in college.
following are some questions that put the kg to use …
- measure the difference between the total sum of the pertinent knowledge between you and your client.
- has that difference increased or decreased since you started as their accountant?
- now measure the difference between you and your staff (individually).
- has that difference increased or decreased since they came to work in your office?
- now do the same with your partners (individually).
- has that difference increased or decreased since you became partners?
think about your answers.
the following shows how i actually used the kg method to measure my interactions with peter weitsen after we became partners.
initially i knew more than peter in procedures dealing with the irs. he had more knowledge in tax research and i had more knowledge in estate planning (but not much more). as our relationship and partnership grew, peter’s knowledge and skills in dealing with the irs and tax research greatly surpassed mine with a very wide kg in his favor. at some point, i realized that, weaned myself away from those areas, and concentrated my skills in estate planning and greatly increased that kg. being partners, it is not necessary, and is counterproductive, if we have the same strengths. using the kg method enabled each of us to direct our efforts to becoming expert in different areas of the practice.
at the time, the two areas peter was extremely adept in were more important to our practice, while the estate planning was less so. abdicating those two areas to him while not needing as much time in my area freed me up to find other specialties to concentrate on, such as valuations of the gifts made because of the estate planning, enabling our practice to grow further.
the above mentions three specific areas. however, there were much more than these areas between us, and the kg approach provided a means to decide where each of us should focus our efforts.
p.s. the response tells how to “measure” your suspicion. i did not address how to deal with a partner who is not growing. that is a difficult issue and requires an assessment of the total relationship including within and outside the firm. part of the evaluation is their relationship with clients, and while they might have maxed out in professional skills, they might be the one maintaining the client relationships or bringing in new business. i recently heard a speaker say that if you are the smartest person in the room, you have a problem. maxing out is a subjective term defined by one person in the relationship, and not necessarily reality. there are checklists and map programs that define roles of partners and these should be used or attended. also, my ultimate test is whether you are making sufficient income. if so, why upset the apple cart?