think of it as an upward spiral.
by martin bissett
passport to partnership
unhappy and difficult clients help our firms to improve our client management skills and present opportunities to refine our leadership skills.
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it is tough for us to build a successful firm without difficult clients or internal personnel issues in order to provide learning experiences for us to build a robust and commercially successful infrastructure.
if we succeed in passing through
- the complaints,
- the breakaway group of professionals who set up in competition,
- the systems failures,
- the increasing legislation and regulation,
- the talented but naive employee who wants everything now,
- the untalented manager who sees the weakness in everyone but themselves,
- the major client leaving due to a lack of “great service”
and do it all with our integrity undiminished, we may expect at the close of each of these issues to feel a measure of increased confidence, competence and enthusiasm about our eventual successful exit from the practice according to our aspirations.
how else would we earn the right to successfully exit the firm as others before us had we not innovated and improved on what was an already firm foundation of processes and values in the organization?
there is no other way in which the managing and senior partners can make professional improvement and be prepared to pass the firm on to the next generation than through the successful handling of these daily challenges.
those daily challenges provide the increase in skill, knowledge and assuredness that allows us to develop new skill sets and new value to benefit ourselves, our senior managers and our clients with.
it could be demonstrated that when all is peaceful and prosperous with strong cash balances and no desire to grow the firm, leaders become indifferent and apathetic. indeed we see that attitudes toward the urgency of developing 21st-century sales and marketing disciplines in-house are hamstrung by the comfort blanket of recurring fees that remove the need to “hunt and kill” each month in order to make rent and payroll, like the clients we profess to advise.
a few of our clients benefit from solid forecastable repeat sales in the way we do, yet we are supposed to be able to advise them on the growth of their business and empathize with their situation in order to build relationships with them and potential other clients.
our need, as counterintuitive as it might appear on the first readthrough, is to constantly be challenging ourselves and evaluating our attitudes toward the issues that might bore us senseless in our practice this morning. what do we believe about ourselves and our abilities in terms of solving problems and progressing the practice? our beliefs govern our behaviors.
when we develop a resolve to continually overcome practice challenges, we demonstrate to our people that we are interested in the success of the organization more than we are interested in self-preservation. this increases loyalty, emotional buy-in and the steadfastness of those who might be funding our retirement in years to come.
as we remain committed, problems, issues and challenges ultimately have a way of identifying their own solutions due to the openness and spirit of those tasked with solving them.
as twee as it sounds, chin up! don’t allow disheartenment to defeat you because your choice to not be defeated guarantees your eventual victory over the issues you face in the first place.
- who is the sort of leader you, yourself would want to be?
- who is the sort of leader those whom you lead would be inspired by?
- what are the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors required to become that leader?
- do you have the desire to go through all that to become that person consistently?
if we can forecast anything in our businesses, we can forecast challenges and the choice of how to react to them. victory over the systems, client issues and internal people issues we face earns us the right to look back on those difficult times and acknowledge that this is when we developed ourselves as leaders the most.
when we contemplate how fortunate we are to have been elevated or to have built ourselves and our firm to the level that we now enjoy, it may be that the journey we’ve been on has not always been the most pleasant with blood pressure heightened, sleep lost and appetite diminished.
how many of us, though, have realized afterward that those circumstances that have been so very unpleasant have often proved of the highest advantage to us and our firm’s improvement?
how far have we advanced, how much knowledge have we obtained and how much more are we able to deal with now both internally and on behalf of our clients now than we were one, two or five years ago?
when we were children, we grew up and got stronger without knowing how it was happening. when we build muscle, we have to expand it and increase the blood flow that we can get through it.
so it is with the developing leader. the sacrifices and difficulties faced with the range of very real and seemingly insurmountable emotions that they present are actually our opportunity to grow and develop.
if the appetite is not there, even grudgingly, to face those challenges head on with the hope of victory beyond the immediate horizon, will the firm grow and bluntly, should you placed be in charge of it?