Leadership Challenges
The rewards of leading professionals are undoubtedly immense – but so are the challenges.
Challenging times
Leaders of professional service firms face a number of challenges:
- How do they effectively manage the balance between producing, managing and leading?
- How do they create high levels of engagement and commitment in professionals who are highly motivated by technical expertise and client delivery, enjoy a high degree of autonomy and have a tendency to resent directive leadership?
- How do they cope as firms grow in size and the leadership task becomes more complex?
- How do they develop leadership on multiple levels?
- How, in today’s economic climate in which many leaders have limited experience of such tough markets, do they balance the needs of winning new business, managing the numbers and maintaining engagement and commitment?
Whether it is bringing in more business, improving account management or coping with increasing demands of fee-earners, life for a partner is typically way beyond what they signed up for.
And in today’s challenging environment, the demands placed on partners are greater than ever.
In addition to maintaining their technical prowess, partners also find themselves having to increase their business knowledge to context their professional advice and to respond to the very real challenge emanating from the catastrophic failure of leadership in the investment banks, along with the failure of the professionals in the regulatory bodies to protect the interests of both shareholders and taxpayers.
The challenge for every firm is to up-skill their partners as rapidly and efficiently as possible. This is where we can help with our consulting, research, coaching and mentoring, bespoke and open education programmes for leaders.
Contact us
To find out more about
Leadership challenges in
professional service firms
contact Liz Baltesz or Rob Lees