what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
by martin bissett
passport to partnership
have you ever wondered what the partners of your firm are looking for from you, beyond your technical abilities?
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for full disclosure, i am not an accountant, but i have spent decades working with accounting firms of all shapes and sizes in the united kingdom, the united states and europe.
i noticed over time that in many firms, partners may often regard one or more of their managers as not being “partner material” because they feel that the manager does not exhibit the traits they are looking for.
in turn, the manager is not aware of the traits being sought after by the partners and whilst some of these “traits” may be just plain common sense, others are not necessarily innate or intrinsic to the individual. that doesn’t mean, however, that an individual is incapable of learning them and should be written off.
i became fascinated by this apparent juxtaposition of the partners not vocalizing what they were looking for in future partners and the managers not asking, despite wanting to reach that very position. in a profession with a supposed succession crisis on the horizon, this apparent standoff struck me as curious.
this led me to personally interview several hundred partners and managers in the u.s., uk and europe to learn
- what the partners are looking for, and
- how the managers see their own future in the firm.
there are, of course, firms who have addressed this issue already, and their initiatives have also been captured by this research.
the results of the research, including both the consensus and the exceptions to the general opinion, are contained in a series of workshops called passport to partnership, which are delivered by my company, the upward spiral partnership.
the “sailing through the seven c’s” program is designed to provide the highlights of each factor employed by the majority of partners interviewed as their criteria for evaluating whether or not someone in their organization can make it to the top.
i hope you’ll join me as we visit each one and i’d be delighted to hear from you if you have further opinion as to anything the conclusions have or haven’t shown up thus far. the research is perpetual, and as new findings are established as consensus they will be published here first.