Mentoring

There's an interesting discussion this month in the print version of CONSULTING magazine about mentoring programs in consulting firms. What's notable is how diverse the programs are. Some are highly structured, while others are based on encouraging mentees to seek out their own mentors among the senior staff.

One common element is the claim that senior people are evaluated on how well they develop their mentees. I wonder how real this is, and how much is just paying lip-service. I'm sure it's on the list, but I don't know how much weight is actually given to it. After all, senior people have lots of other things they are evaluated on.

Do any of you have experience being effectively mentored inside your firm? What were the key elements that made the mentoring program work well in your organisation?

Technical Excelllence

In many professional businesses, high technical excellence is taken for granted -- we assume that having it is "table stakes" for competing.

However, it's not a trivial issue to ask whether and how a firm goes about ensuring that its employees in fact meet high standards of technical expertise, especially in a world where companies tend to signal that revenue generation is a more pressing (if not more important) topic.

Who is best positioned in a professional organisation to judge an employee's technical quality? I assume that it might be that person's supervisor, but there could be some built-in conflicts: what if the supervisor is under economic pressure to meet group goals and hence compromise (a little) degrees of technical excellence?

I'm curious about your experience as to how your firm or company goes about ensuring technical excellence. Is it some combination of:

1. Training
2. On-the-job supervision
3. Peer Review Processes at the Job Level
4. Annual Performance Appraisals
5. Reward schemes

Or something else?

Believer or Sceptic?

When working with clients on change initiatives, I notice that they have two widely different strategies for appointing the internal person to lead the project. In some cases, they appoint a "true believer" who really wants to see the change happen. In other cases, firms go out of their way to appoint a sceptic, so that only proposals that can overcome the scepticism emerge from the study task-force, and proposals are not made that will not be implemented.

As a consultant, it's easier initially to work with a true believer, but the implementation success may be higher if a sceptic is appointed.

Does anyone have experience with this? if you were a company manager, who would you appoint to lead the charge on new strategic change intiatives?

Another reader question

My question to you and all your website contributors;

What have been people's experiences with the strategy of targeting only working with one client per industry sector and deliberately broadcasting to the market that that is your "modus operandi"? It's a bit clumsy, but, for example -- "We guarantee our clients that we will not work for their competitors, thereby preserving exclusively for our clients, the commercial advantage of partnering with us"

I know the applicability may vary with the type of services one offers, but do others have any thoughts on this approach?

Implementing a Client Service Strategy

One of the most common topics I am asked to advise on is achieving distinctively high levels of client service. I find that many firms underestimate how tough a diet and exercise program (see STRATEGY AND THE FAT SMOKER) it would really take to pull this off.

Among the changes that most firms would need to make are:

1. Adopting a culture that no longer allows people to "opt out" on the topic of client service excellence on the grounds that their skills lie elsewhere. A firm can't get a reputation for something that not everyone does.
2. Finding some way to monitor client feedback in real time (not just once a year) and make it credible to everyone that there will be a follow up for anything less than excellence.
3. Providing training in client counselling skills
4. Providing research support from the marketing department to help service delivery people stay current on client industries
5. Enable sharing of experiences (workshops and workbooks) among practitioners on an ongoing basis to establish a continuous improvement approach to client satisfaction.
6. Implement disciplined project management systems, including mandatory processes for communications strategies with clients mid-process.
7. A systematic program of senior officer visits to clients to "role model" the firm's commitment.

None of these approaches are new or innovative. (I first wrote about them in the 1990s, and I wasn't the originator then.) However, it is still my experience that firms are less than systematic in implementing a client service strategy.

What systems do you think are need to pull this strategy off? What else needs to be in the "change package?"

Managing Professionals in Not-For-Profits

A friend called recently and asked whether I thought the principles of managing professional service organisations applied in the not-for-profit sector.

It's a complex question. Let's start below the level of the organisation and ask whether the principles of managing professionals (not the organisation, but the people) differs between for-profit and not for profit.

I suspect that while the principles are the same (manage people through the opportunity for meaningful, challenging work) the actual practices are very different. The monetary dimension in the for-profit sector is both a blessing and a curse.

The blessing is that the availability of money allows generous rewards to be used to attract, motivate and retain talent. The curse is that financial rewards come to be used exclusively as the means to attract, motivate and retain talent.

In the for-profit sector, managers can "get away" with being poor managers, using money to cover up the absence of hands-on managerial skill. In the not-for-profit sector, the need for people management skills is unavoidable.

That's only one dimension of the not-for-profit difference, but before carrying on with my analysis, let me get yours.

What do the rest of you think? What has your experience been?

Screening for Relationship Attitudes and Skills?

Yesterday's post was about whether relationship skills must be "found" by firms in their hiring process or whether they can be developed.

As I reported, about one-third of a conference of leading management consulting firms felt that these values, attitudes and/or skills are mostly "hired in" rather than developed once people have reached the age and stage of being hired by consulting firms.

Which raises these questions:

1. How can firms screen for and identify relationship values, attitudes and skills?
2. How, in fact, do they screen for them?
3. Do formal testing approaches work?
4. What about "behavioural interviewing" (I'm still not sure what that is!)
5. Do you have to rely on the "take them out for a beer" test?

Developing Relationship Skills

At a conference of leading management consulting firms last week, I led a discussion about the barriers to developing strong, deep relationships with clients -- a "fat smoker" strategy in the sense that we all know we should be good at it, but few of us are.

As we explored the topic, I took a poll on how many people thought relationship skills were "born" and how many thought they could be "made" (i.e. developed.)

(Only) two-thirds of the audience thought they could be developed. However, very few firms said they had formal programs to help their people develop the interpersonal, social, political and emotional skills necessary to be good at relationships. As a rule, they depended either upon people developing these skills for themselves, or (if you were lucky) learning on the job by observing those ahead of you who were good at it.

The challenge was made even more difficult when it was pointed out that -- ultimately -- relationship skills are about values and attitudes, not personality characteristics and skills. If the discussion is about values, then it really is challenging to address the key questions:

1. Are these born or can firms develop them in their people?
2. If they can be developed by the organisation, how?
3. How did you learn to develop your relationship skills?
4. Were you ever given any formal training that helped?
5. What would you advise others that wanted to work at developing these skills?