Issue 25 – Winter 2010

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Leadership Lessons

Enhancing Partner Performance through Accountability

Accountability, or “count-on-ability,” is a personal and cultural way of being that enables colleagues to trust the words, commitments, and actions of each other.  It enables us to know that we can rely on each other to follow through on commitments and do what’s necessary to ensure team success. At ConvergenceCoaching, LLC, accountability is one of our core values. For nearly eleven years, we have studied, practiced, written about, and coached on its core principles. 

In this down economy, firms are abuzz with the discussion of partner accountability, and we have been blessed with the opportunity to share our partner performance and accountability model with many firms in the hopes that it will help improve firm performance by making its top tier of leaders more accountable to themselves, each other, and to their teams. This Leadership Lessons article is intended to provide you with an overview of our partner performance and accountability model and outline a few ideas within each element to help you identify areas where you can improve performance – both personally and within your partner team. In Practice Perspectives, we’ll drill down into partner compensation, which is the process of rewarding performance, once the rest of the partner performance and accountability model is in place.

The foundation of partner performance and accountability is leadership unity around your firm’s strategy. Your strategy includes:

  • You firm’s mission (or reason for being) and core values
  • Your leadership vision for the future – which addresses the following:
    • What do you want to be known for?
    • Where are you headed in terms of:
      • Firm size (revenues, staff size, number of offices)
      • Product/service mix
      • Ideal target client profile by product/service
      • Leadership and governance model
      • Succession
  • Your three to five core initiatives this year that will support your firm’s movement toward the agreed upon vision, including the “difficult moves” that will contribute to your success

We could write an entire article around the concept of gaining partner unity – and it is never “perfect” unity. That said, your partner team must get at least a super-majority of its members to agree to the verbally discussed, and then carefully documented strategy for your firm and require that those who do not agree either submit to the will of the group (and behave and contribute accordingly) or pursue opportunities elsewhere.
 
Once you’ve developed unity around your firm’s strategy, you’ll define performance expectations for each key member of the leadership team (and then for all others in the firm). Work with your partners to develop clarity about which partners are responsible for each functional area in your firm, such as business processes (human resources, marketing, internal IT, and accounting/bookkeeping) and initiatives or service lines that you offer (audit, tax, SALT, business valuation, and accounting services, for example). Depending on your firm’s size, you may also need to assign ownership for divisions or geographic locations.  Every department, initiative, and location in your firm should have one single owner responsible for driving performance in that area.

Once you have assigned ownership for the functional areas of your firm, develop or refine your partner role definitions. These role definitions should be “one-size-fits-one” and tie directly to the firm’s goals and each partner’s departmental, initiative, and/or location goals. Ideally, each role definition will include:

  • The position objective
  • Its reporting structure (who does this partner report to for performance)
  • The primary duties and responsibilities including areas within the firm for which the partner has ownership accountability. When considering these, be sure to include:
    • Leadership and management responsibilities
    • People development expectations
    • Business development duties
    • Technical and client service responsibilities
    • Administrative expectations
  • The goals or measures of success for each partner

When establishing goals for each partner, be sure that the goals relate to partner achievements that will drive either current production or future capacity (or both) and tie to the firm’s agreed upon strategy.  The goals will include some that are financial in nature and others that are specific to business, people, or market development activities you might expect from that partner. For more information on goals and how they tie to compensation, read this issue’s Practice Perspectives.

Once goals are established and partners are clear on both the strategy and their role in achieving it, you’ll drive performance by regularly checking in to return and report your status, share roadblocks and breakthroughs, and communicate both appreciation and disappointment.  Partners should share their status against their goals with their direct reporting partner (often the CEO, managing partner, or department head) and with each other in departmental, office, or firm-wide partner meetings.  These check-ins should occur no less than quarterly.  When partners are asked to report on their status regularly, they are more likely to show up with progress having been made. And, if performance falls off track, more frequent check in meetings make it easier to course correct.

Another key element to drive partner performance is evaluating and discussing overall performance. Firms have a variety of methods for approaching this, from partners being “above being reviewed” (a philosophy that flies in the face of both great leadership and performance) to partners receiving 360 degree input on their performance from subordinates, peers, their reporting partner, and even clients. We believe that at a minimum, each partner should receive (and will benefit from) an annual review of their contributions to the firm and their performance against their goals so that they know where they stand, can share their successes and failures, and explore what’s next for them in the coming year.

The last element of the partner performance and accountability model is rewarding performance (good and bad). When partners achieve their goals and contribute to the unified strategy of the firm, they should be rewarded, and when they do not contribute as expected and needed, they should not earn as much as those who did. 

Your firm’s development of a clear partner reward system is a critical element of your overall success, however, it is something that must be done after the elements of unity around strategy, definition of expectations, and mechanisms for monitoring, evaluating, and discussing partner performance have been put in place. To learn about an approach to partner compensation that we’ve seen drive performance, read our Practice Perspectives article.

The wonderful result of your firm’s investment in these five important partner performance and accountability elements will be the ability to trust each other to do what’s needed and that your processes for assigning responsibility and ownership, defining expectations and goals, and evaluating and rewarding performance are fair and that they contribute to you firm’s success – now and in the future.  And, as Carl S. Avery says, “Trust enables you to put your deepest feelings and fears in the palm of your partner's hand, knowing they will be handled with care."  How great would it be to know you could do this?  Implement this model and find out!

For more information on our firm’s partner performance and accountability services, contact Jennifer Wilson at jen@convergencecoaching.com or (402) 933-2900.