Leadership

Our view of leadership

When we work with top teams and emerging leaders, we help them lead in a way that encourages and inspires a strong sense of followership within the firm. We believe that leadership is not a title, but a role in which you have the opportunity to build a strong culture and provide your followers with a sense of purpose.

Ensuring that their partners and senior executives are effective leaders capable of executing winning strategies gives firms a distinct competitive advantage. Given this reality, understanding every partner’s leadership capability is critical – as is knowing how to deal with the results. Getting that initial understanding of capability is the start point. Clients value our Leadership 360 survey because it focuses solely on leadership.

Clients working with us on leadership challenges often work with our group of Client Executives, a carefully selected group of senior clients, available for partners to work with to practice their leadership skills. Their years of experience of working with professional services clients can be relied upon to give insightful and credible feedback.

Success stories from recent programmes include:

• Engaging the partners

The firm’s leadership team was disconnected from the partnership who were being asked to deliver an increasingly different strategy for the firm. We were engaged to create a dialogue programme addressing the questions the MP was concerned about, to provide insights to facilitate the discussion with the partners and to capture their reflections. Seven iterations of this programme ran over four years to engage the whole partnership. The MP was re-elected and used the insights to inform the firm’s refreshed direction and culture. They reported greater integration, energy, commitment and focus.

• Current and future leaders

The MP and SP saw that partners in significant leadership roles were struggling with issues including low confidence, autocratic leadership and little vision. We designed a programme to develop those holding current leadership roles and those with potential to do so in the near future. Using a blend of in-person sessions, online learning, action learning groups and coaching, the programme created the opportunity for the leadership team to build relationships with the participants and ultimately deliver the transformation the firm needed. The programme is about to run for the second time (three years later) with many of the original attendees now holding Board positions and actively sponsoring the work.