Practice Group Leaders Need Your Feedback

Posted on 10 September 2013 by tonyreiss

It’s hard being a leader of a practice group. Usually they have no more actual power or authority than the other partners – often they are not even the most senior partners.

Then they often get what they see as a paltry budget of around 50-100 hours a year to carry out their leadership role.

Many firms don’t even offer them any effective training in leadership and only in a few firms are they offered an executive coach to support them in their role.

Yet, in my experience having an effective practice group leader probably makes the biggest difference to the performance of a team.

So here’s my suggestion – to organise the teams to offer their practice leaders some constructive feedback. Why don’t you tell them what they’re doing well and what you’d like them to do more of and less of?

The feedback can be compiled by someone in HR so it can be anonymised. Several firms are doing this now and the results can be very positive.

To help you on your way, I offer a questionnaire as a starting point. It is available to download below.

180 Degree Feedback for Practice Group Leaders

Posted in Coaching and Training, Leadership and Management, Managing Change | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Improving Profitability Using a Simple Diagnostic Tool

Posted on 10 September 2013 by tonyreiss

With the economic downturn, most practice groups are finding it harder to maintain margins, let alone increase them. Firms seem to be a bit stuck, not knowing what to do to tackle the problem.

Part of the reason this can be challenging is that the position across a typical firm can be complicated. For example, the levers to pull to improve the financial performance of a general commercial group where there’s high leverage might well be different to those for the high level specialists.

So here’s a proposed solution designed to help partners in each practice group agree the best way forward. It’s a diagnostic checklist combined with a ranking in terms of:

  • How easy would it be to implement the change – partners would be asked to score from ‘very easy’ to ‘very difficult’
  • What impact would the change have – partners would score from ‘big impact’ to ‘little impact’

To use this tool successfully, I would encourage firms to work with their in-house finance specialists. I see this topic as one of the useful agenda items you could have at a team meeting. The sharing of views that partners have could also provide a greater sense of teamwork.

Download the diagnostic proforma below.

Download button

 

 

For more on this subject, read https://tonyreiss.com/2013/03/12/matter-profitability-plugging-that-leaking-sieve/

Posted in Business Development and Selling, Leadership and Management | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Getting the Best Out of External Trainers

Posted on 9 September 2013 by tonyreiss
External trainers needs to be a safe pair of hands

External trainers need to be a safe pair of hands

There are many good reasons for using an external training firm:

  • a search for objectivity,
  • fresh ideas or a different style,
  • the need for skills and experience you don’t have,
  • or simply, the need for an extra pair of hands.

If you get the brief right and choose the right consultants, marvellous things can happen. Otherwise, as we all know, projects can go disastrously wrong.

But how do you make the best use of a training consultancy?

Here are some thoughts based on my experience of working on both sides of the fence.

1. Be clear on the purpose, objectives and success measures

If you don’t know where you are going, any path will take you there! Be clear on the purpose, scope and objectives of the project you want the consultancy to work on. The sign of a good consultancy is an enthusiasm to help you clearly define the scope of your task, while placing your interests ahead of its’ own. Beware the consultancy offering off-the-shelf packages.

Be clear in your own mind how you will judge the success of the project and of your consultant’s work. This will help you think through what results you are looking for and allow you to share a common understanding with your consultant. As a result, the trainer is much more likely to deliver what you want and when you want it.

2. Invite the consultant to offer a proposed approach

Try to avoid getting an external trainer to deliver something you’ve designed. They won’t own it. Experienced trainers will have evolved a series of tried and tested approaches which allow them to deliver value. A good consultancy will always tailor its services to meet your requirements. Very often, a good approach will be for the external trainer to work with the client to deliver programmes – that way, you can be assured that messages will be fully aligned with your systems and processes.

3. Provide lots of feedback

All consultants should be focused on client satisfaction. A good trainer should ask for feedback, but do let them know what they are doing well and what they can improve on. This feedback will help ensure they deliver what you want and, in the longer term, will help them adapt to serve you better in the future. It is useful to have contact with a senior person in the consulting company to help handle any sensitive issues which may arise.

4. Develop a long-term relationship with your trainers

The more you work with the same training companies and their people, the more they learn about your organisation and culture. In addition, they will take a personal interest in your success. This relationship will benefit both parties in many ways. Consider starting a ‘faculty’ where trainers can be updated on your strategy and any important data about where your firm is going and why. The more you put into these relationships, the more you’ll get out!

The only aspect you need to be careful about is the relationship becoming complacent!

Posted in Coaching and Training | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Stop Chasing Clients – Get Them to Come to You

Posted on 2 September 2013 by tonyreiss
A team developing new products

A team developing new products

Are you fed up calling and trying to get appointments to win new clients? Is all that rejection affecting your self-esteem?

How about a world where prospective clients beat a path to your door? Wouldn’t that be great?

But how can we make this happen? The answer is…to be seen as the ‘go to’ person – the person who has the insights into the things that clients are concerned about.

This in turn requires two things:

  1. For you to know what clients are concerned about
  2. For you to have something insightful, intelligent, useful to say about how to address these concerns.

Finding out about client concerns

There are two ways to do this:

  1. Using desk research to uncover events going on in their industry sector and in their company. Are there regulatory issues? Are there rationalizations, with mergers and divestments taking place?
  2. Asking them about future strategies and plans – many of which won’t be in the press reports or on their website. They’ll be in their heads. By asking the right questions, you’ll be getting insights which will put you ahead of the competition.

Having something insightful to say

In other industries (eg banking, insurance etc), these might be called ‘products’. In the management consulting world I’m from they are sometimes called ‘formats’.

To get genuinely useful insights you need a team. We used to get teams of people together, usually with different perspectives, to brainstorm models and develop methodologies. These were usually colourful diagrams with backup checklists and flowcharts.

These workshops helped us understand the complexity of the client situation, but also provided a convincing routemap for going forward. The team aspect is important. A partner by themselves is unlikely to crack this.

Clients liked the outputs from these product development workshops. The output showed we understood their situation (which gave us rapport) and it showed we could steer them through the risks (which gave us credibility). This combination of credibility with rapport is key to business development.

By publicizing our ‘products’, we found that clients beat a path to our door. But even if they didn’t, we found it was much easier to make appointments, which didn’t get cancelled, because we had something useful to say.

How much team-based R&D is your firm doing?

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Got that Summer Over and Back-to-Work Feeling? Same old, same old?

Posted on 27 August 2013 by tonyreiss
Beach

left the beach – back in the office!

If you’re not finding your work a positive experience, full of personal growth, read on…..

An important aspect of our approach to work is what we might call our attitude. You can describe this as how we choose to see things and how we choose to react to situations and people.

The choices made by many people leave them feeling somewhat flat, pessimistic, anxious or simply too burdened to be really happy in their roles.

You might argue that these feelings are realistic and normal. After all, there’s all that pressure to hit targets, all that responsibility and all those decisions that have to be taken without enough information. Then there’s so little feedback on your performance – that’s bound to lead to some anxiety.

But I sense that many executives spend too much of their time thinking about negative things – about all the things that are going wrong, such as a star associate leaving, a client making you re-tender for the work. Then there’s all the things that could go wrong – that’s an endless list!

In my one-to-one coaching work I find it helpful to think about each person as two people. There’s the person and there’s the voice in their head!

The voice in their head says things like:

  • “The other managers are better at me at X, Y, Z”
  • “I should be more knowledgeable or skilled to do this work better”
  • “I ought to get more profitable clients, otherwise my position in the firm will be weakened”
  • “I might mess this transaction up and get blamed”

If you’re wondering what I mean about the voice in the head – it‘s that voice!

All these oughts /shoulds and focus on blame and faults create a negative spiral. It takes the spring out of your step. Frankly it can make you less fun to be around! And much less of a successful entrepreneur.

So what is the alternative? Here are some suggestions – all of which have made a huge difference to people I have worked with.

  1. It’s to see the glass being at least half full – not half empty! Focus on what’s good and on your strengths.
  2. It’s to take yourself less seriously. When you hear that inner voice whispering in your ear, don’t beat yourself up, but have a little chuckle to yourself.
  3. It’s to see all that wonderful potential in your associates. Praise people whenever you can. Say ‘well done’ to yourself. As Michelangelo said: ‘Inside the slab of marble is a beautiful statue – my job is simply to chip away all the unwanted stone’.
  4. It’s to lead by example. If the senior managers are going around being miserable, it’ll be contagious. The whole firm will become infected
  5. Challenge all the assumptions you’ve made about who is good and who isn’t – about who likes you and who doesn’t. Most of these assumptions are likely to be stories you initially made up and have sought to reinforce. Be open to the possibilities that there is more good and more potential out there.
  6. Have a vision for your team. Everybody wants to know where you’re sailing the ship – particularly those more junior than you working in the equivalent of the engine room.

As Ben Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, says about teaching: ‘If the eyes of your students aren’t shining, as yourself the question – how am I being that stops their eyes shining?’

Finally, remember that you do have a choice!

Here’s to a better, more rewarding, more positive, more fulfilling and uplifting time in the office with many more possibilities!

Changing How We Think, Feel, Behave to be More Effective – the art of cutting a new groove

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Why it Takes Three Years to Win Serious Work from New Clients

Posted on 19 August 2013 by tonyreiss

Sales pipelineMost professionals enjoy doing the work but don’t like the act of getting it. When they’re busy on chargeable work, they tend to do very little business development. And they have the perfect excuse – trying to ensure the current work gets done effectively.

How long does it take for your firm to win new clients?  Research I carried out for one firm showed it took, on average, three years for them to win substantial new work from new clients. One of the accounting firms used to have a five year campaign to win a new audit.

Here’s a typical story about winning a new client. One partner met a general counsel at a conference. He then visited them at their US headquarters later that year. Another partner in the same firm met the head lawyers at their European office and sent them regular newsletters on competition matters. The firm kept in touch and invited the prospective new client to seminars. Finally a magic circle firm couldn’t act for the client on a major acquisition due to a conflict and the our firm received an opportunity to pitch. They got it – some concerted effort and a bit of luck. That’s often how it goes.

Some analysis for another firm showed that it took roughly 20 speculative ‘sales’ meetings to generate 5 proposals to win one mandate. Many commentators talk about a sales funnel rather than a pipeline.

So let’s look at this pipeline and what lawyers and accountants need to do to turn the TAP ON.

Here are the stages:

T – Target: Partners need to review their contact lists and produce a list of A, B & C clients, with the A’s being their top priority target clients. It will help if there’s a sector approach where clients might be facing similar issues. Too many partners have too disparate an approach. Partners need to find good reasons to build their relationships over time and should expect to have four BD connections (such as a meeting, coffee etc) a year.

A – Attract: Picking up the phone can be the hardest thing. Try leveraging off an existing relationship. This enables you to say ‘George has suggested I get in touch…’. The important thing to think through is what’s in it for George to give you the referral and then what’s in it for the target contact to give up time to meet you. Do your research and try to have five topics up your sleeve that might be relevant. You’ll be unlucky if none of them connect.

P – Pitch: Once you’ve had your initial meeting, you are likely to need to meet other key stakeholders at the client and establish their needs. There will be needs both for the business and, often more importantly, personal needs such as reducing hassle or looking good in front of colleagues or meeting specific targets to get their bonus etc. You should then be in a position to ask for an invitation to pitch for the work. Don’t pitch too soon – you’ll be more likely to get objections. My new book called Pitch Perfect provides the best approach to pitching.

O – Operate: Having won a mandate, the focus should be on delivering excellent quality work. It helps if you’ve avoided over-promising. Also, make sure you know what’s particularly important to the client. What’s important to you might not be what’s important to the client. Are there any really tight deadlines? Are detailed reports important or would the client prefer just the big picture.  How do they like their invoices laid out?

N – Nurture: Once the first project has finished, the new firm should review how it went with the client. What did they like about how you worked? What would they have liked to have been done differently? The act of asking these questions demonstrates that you care about this stuff.

Relationships with the new client are still likely to be relatively superficial and need deepening and broadening. Some firms have found it useful to measure the strength of relationships with key individuals – they score 3 out of 10 if they’ve given you their business card, 6 out of 10 if they’ve initiated a contact with you and 10 out of 10 if they refer you to other clients. Partners work on plans to raise the scores with key contacts.

Are your partners engaged sufficiently with their sales pipelines? If not, what can you do to turn their TAP ON?

Other related blog articles:

Developing a Compelling Sales Pitch – start with a rigorous process to ascertain the client needs

Selling Strategies for Mid-Size Firms

Posted in Business Development and Selling | 1 Comment

Why Leadership Training Typically Fails

Posted on 13 August 2013 by tonyreiss
Learning about leadership from a maestro

Learning about leadership from a maestro

Let’s face it, you can’t really teach leadership in a classroom. Yet loads of partners go off to business schools such as Harvard, INSEAD, LBS where they review case studies and learn about techniques such as Porter’s 5 Forces and De Bono’s coloured hats. They come back and their team think they behave a bit strangely for a few days but after a while they’re back to normal again and everybody is relieved. Money well spent? I’m not sure.

How else do firms try to teach leadership? Many firms run in-house programmes where budding leaders have to work together in teams to build a contraption or work out exercises to find the best route to a factory. They’ll probably be asked to do a diagnostic test which shows they’re a ‘purple’ or a ‘team player’ or an ENTP. Many do find these programmes fun and interesting but, on their own, they rarely achieve significant and sustainable changes.

Rather than look in more details at how leadership programmes can be made more effective (through introducing elements such as proper sponsorship, coaching, mentoring, developing accountability for specific projects, introducing appropriate measurement and reward processes etc), I’d like to offer an alternative approach for consideration – experiential leadership programmes.

I believe effective leadership is developed more through deeper interventions that change people’s mental models of themselves and others. One way of doing this is through experiential programmes. Perhaps surprisingly, such programmes involve little recognizable teaching. There are no group exercises or case studies. You are simply put into a different environment where there are transferable lessons. You sit and watch and listen and then talk about your experience afterwards, typically as a group, with a facilitator.

Here are a few examples of these sort of leadership programmes:

  1. Support call centres – a group of directors sit in a support call centre (similar to The Samaritans). They learn more powerfully than any training programme they’d been on how hard it is to listen really well and hard it is for them not to give advice. Exercises can then be designed to help teach these skills.
  2. Drama workshops – another group watch drama students in action and are encouraged to join in to express the state of disempowerment. The participants learn about how the junior members of the office teams feel. A discussion is held to consider better ways of empowering staff.
  3. Turnaround school – one group visits a turnaround school and talks to the head, the staff and the pupils. They learn about the importance of having an inspiring vision and the importance of boundaries and zero tolerance to misdemeanors. Discussions look at ways of adopting these approaches in an appropriate way in the office.
  4. Choir/orchestra – a group of leadership coaches attend a rehearsal of a world-leading choir to see how the Musical Director develops an enhanced performance from the choir members. The importance of clearly communicating through words and body language what is required and an effective coaching style are clearly appreciated. The facilitator helps participants model this leadership approach back in the office.

The benefits of experiential leadership programmes are as follows:

  • The importance of various leadership attributes can be appreciated more clearly by choosing the right kind of environments
  • Leadership attributes are felt somatically (ie more deeply) rather than just cognitively (in the head), helping participants model the leadership attributes in the work place
  • Transferable lessons are taken on board from all these experiences

I believe we all need to consider alternatives to classroom experiences to help develop leadership talent.

For more information about learning from a world-leading choir about leadership, please contact me.

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Selling Strategies for Mid-Size Firms

Posted on 5 August 2013 by tonyreiss

Traffic Sign "Marketing Strategy"Are the global elite firms unstoppable? What should mid-size firms do to compete, other than merge to get bigger or get taken over?

I believe there are several attractive value propositions for mid-size firms, but they need to be sold well and with confidence.

Taking the confidence issue first – partners in mid-size firms too easily see themselves losing work to the bigger firms because they can seem inferior in terms of any of the following:

  • Size of teams
  • Brand reputation (position in league tables in legal directories, such as Chambers)
  • Global presence (ie number of offices in different jurisdictions)

They can easily see themselves losing work to the smaller niche firms because they can seem inferior in terms of:

  • Commitment to specialising in a sector (eg construction, employment etc)
  • Expense (higher costs for running the firm, so higher charge out rates)

Mid-size firms can easily be seen as neither one thing nor the other. So what should they do to compete?

  1. Compete for the right type of work. To build a sustainable practice, mid-size firms need to find the type of work that they are best suited for.  This is an obvious point but many firms get distracted and tempted to go for an unsustainable stream of work from flagship or trophy clients. The focus for mid-size firms should be
  • Second string work for large companies
  • The main advisers to mid-size corporates
  • Larger local businesses

2. Focus more of your selling efforts on assessing the criteria the prospective client is using to select their advisers. There might be several individuals who might have a say about the appointment. Try not to ignore any of them.

If you don’t know the criteria – and many clients might not know their criteria consciously, they just know what’s right when they see it – you’ll need to ask them. Ask them what’s important to them. It might help to ask them what isn’t important to them. Try to establish any weighting for the factors – what might be more important than other factors. Some things might be essential. Other things might just be ‘nice to have’.

3. Honestly appraise your standing vs the rival firms. If you don’t know who you’re up against, assume it’s the worst case scenario – the firm you wouldn’t want to be competing against. Simply score yourself H, M or L (for High, Medium, Low) against each criterion.

Global elite firms tend to be graded high on reputation but potentially lower on cost and partner attention. Niche firms tend to score well on industry knowledge and value-for-money, but might be seen as weak on breadth of services (eg can they provide pension advice if needed?).

4. Now you have two choices:

  • Influence the client to change their criteria – this sounds tricky, but it’s highly appropriate, particularly when clients might not know what they need as well as you do. After all, you do this work for a living and have probably completed several similar transactions.
  • Influence the client to change their perception of your firm’s standing. For example, you may have more relevant experience in a related field than they realise.

Case study

Here’s an example of how this approach can work. I worked on a pitch for a mid-size firm competing for the legal work on a finance and construction project on a private motorway in a particular Central Europe jurisdiction. The client seemed to want firms who had experience in private motorways and who had an office in the particular jurisdiction.

It seemed a tall order to win this work – we didn’t have an office there and had zero experience in private motorway projects. Yet we won the work. How? We convinced the client of two things:

  1. That our extensive experience in other major infrastructure projects (eg ports, bridges etc) in other Central Europe jurisdictions was useful and relevant
  2. That by not having an office in the jurisdiction but a relationship with the best local firm, the client would have advantages in dealing with local regulatory and planning aspects.

Another example was when I pitched for a project and boldly asserted that I hadn’t done the kind of project before – the benefit to the client (who had used experienced consultants before and failed) was that they’d get a fresh and creative approach. They chose me!

The other advantage that mid-size firms have and many clients want, is the combination of talent and experience with a passion for striving to provide excellent client service. Having fewer big clients than the global elite firms, a mid-size firm should be making each of them feel loved. And if you can find a way to communicate this better, client instructions will follow.

Posted in Business Development and Selling, Coaching and Training, Leadership and Management, Managing Change | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Powerful Selling Questions – Here’s a Hierarchy

Posted on 4 August 2013 by tonyreiss
English: Cover of Dickens serial, "Oliver...

If only Oliver Twist knew about asking powerful questions!

Eric Vogt, a strategy and leadership consultant, has considered how to phrase powerful questions and has spotted some fascinating patterns. Those of us needing to be better at selling could learn a lot from his analysis.

The Linguistic Architecture of Questions

One dimension of power in questions clearly comes from the linguistic architecture. We know, for instance, that sales people observed decades ago that open questions were much more powerful for stimulating a sales dialogue than closed questions.

“Do you have any problems with your external counsel?” tends to yield fewer selling opportunities than “What problems have you ever experienced with external counsel?”

There are of course exceptions to every rule – closed questions such as “Can I start drafting the agreement?” work better at the close of a sales meeting.

This open/closed distinction can be expanded into a richer hierarchy of powerful questions. Vogt asked participants to grade questions and the following hierarchy was established:

Most powerful: Why?

How?…What?

Which?…Where?

Least powerful: Closed question (eg one which invites yes/no/one word answers)?

The general thesis is that virtually any question can be converted into a more powerful question by moving up the list. As an example, consider the following sequence:

Are you feeling okay?

Where does it hurt?

How are you feeling in general?

Why do you suppose you aren’t feeling well?

As we move from the simple yes/no question towards the why question, you probably notice that the questions tend to motivate more reflective thinking, and might be considered more powerful.

There are refinements within this dimension of linguistic architecture. For instance, using the conditional tense rather than the present tense will often invite greater reflective speculation:

What can we do?

seems to offer fewer possibilities than…

What could we do?

However, other factors are also at play when we consider the relative power of the following two questions:

Why is George not in the office today?

Where can we improve efficiencies?

This is an instance where most people would say that the “where” question has somewhat greater power than the “why” question.

After reflection, Vogt hypothesized that there were probably two additional dimensions which define a powerful question:

  • Scope
  • Meaning/Context

The Scope Dimension of Questions

The scope dimension suggests that questions which encompass more people, more volume, more time, or more concerns have greater scope, and tend to be more powerful questions. An example might be the following contrast:

How should we manage George?

How should we manage the firm?

In this example, the question increases in scope and the implied “we” increases in scope as the object changes from George to the firm.

The Meaning/Context Dimension of Questions

The meaning/context dimension is a more complex, subtle aspect of questioning.

Vogt believes that an understanding of the nature of the interaction between questions and assumptions is critical to a full appreciation of powerful questions. Understanding the role of assumptions in questioning may be, in particular, a key to gaining greater insight into the meaning/context dimension of powerful questions.

Vogt observed that questions which challenge or alter assumptions have the power to shift context and change mindsets. Compare the two questions:

How can we compete with the Chinese?

How can we collaborate with the Chinese?

The second question shifts the context and opens up a different exploration and a different set of subsequent questions.

Vogt decided that questions may have one of the following four impacts upon assumptions:

Create – Reinforce –  Alter –  Destroy

The order of these verbs may reflect the power of the question. For instance, it is much easier to reinforce someone’s prevailing assumption than it is to alter it.

Similarly, it is generally easier to create a new assumption than destroy an existing one. Therefore, as we explore the nature of powerful questions, we might ask, “How does this question interact with the listeners’ assumptions?”

Final Thoughts

  1. Clearly some questions can be too robust given the existing relationship. Good incisive questions may require a good deal of rapport before they will be received well and accepted. Part of the skill involves us judging how powerful to make the question given the existing relationship.
  2. Having said that, my experience working with those in the professions is that the questions are typically not powerful enough!
  3. Though schools don’t focus so much on teaching us questioning skills, might these skills be learnt on-the-job?

How powerful a question is that last one?

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Value Propositions by Numbers

Posted on 26 July 2013 by tonyreiss

Unicorn paint by numbers

Many people find it hard to articulate exactly what they’re offering to clients and to do this in a persuasive way. In essence we all need to get better at explaining why others should buy our product or service.

Originally seen as a sales tool, HR functions have now started to appreciate the importance of value propositions to attract and motivate staff.

So whether you’re selling to clients or employees here’s a way of drafting a value proposition that you might find helpful. All you have to do is fill in the blanks:

First sentence

This is designed to provide the big picture, build rapport and grab their attention, as follows:

For [specify the target types of clients (eg Retailers, CFO’s, SME’s, companies interested in investing in Africa etc)]
Who [provide a statement that specifies their need (eg to mitigate risks, have more information about regulatory issues, reduce spending on litigation etc)
Our [specify your product or service]
Delivers [specify the benefit your product or service provides]

Second sentence

Having got their attention, this sentence provides more information and drives home the selling messages, as follows:

Unlike [primary types of competitors]
Our product [specify how your product or service is different, without denigrating the competitors]
Because [provide proof that your benefit can be delivered]

Finally…

The killer blow is then to say…

Let me tell give you an example of how this has worked…

Practical example

For a business such as ours offering training and coaching to law firms, the value proposition might be as follows:

For law firms interested in developing the skills of their lawyers, we offer bespoke programmes that make a measurable difference. Unlike other providers, we design interventions in which participants work on real and practical issues and we ensure follow up coaching is provided, either by ourselves or others in the firm.

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