Professional leaders - stop eating your young!

Tough markets hurt

The professions have been through several recessionary cycles and fortunately most firms come out the other end of them relatively intact though bruised. Each profession, each firm and each partner, seems to experience setbacks differently. What separates those that thrive from those that fall back? 

Market volatility and uncertainty place enormous pressure on partners of all colours. It can be bewildering to find that your professional excellence and the business development savvy that used to work, yield grindingly slow results. There is pressure to maintain a certain lifestyle. And there is the pressure to keep the team continuously, intensely employed when future work isn't guaranteed. 

This last can be really tough and can produce a destructive reflex in partners - to protect themselves at the cost of less experienced colleagues.  

Eating your young in order to survive

Lets be clear. You could become a bully simply to keep your own numbers up. Unconsciously you can start to blame your subordinates. You may shift performance pressure onto them without resourcing them. Because you don't have all the answers - and your fellow partners are retreating into their caves - you look to your subordinates for them.

You may be unaware of your impact on vulnerable staff who lack your power. You may feel that you've just been thinking out loud, yet your subordinates may think, 'Well, if the partner's lost what hope is there for me?' They talk like this amongst themselves and seek other options. 

How to share the load wisely.

This moment is an opportunity for leading and for developing leaders in your team. To drop an imponderable issue on someone's desk is not a fruitful process. A dutiful professional will address it as best they can, but probably alone and fail. 

There are alternatives.

1. Lead. Place the problem on the table between you and share it. All of your doubts, their feelings, are natural reactions to uncertainties and threats. Revealed as such, they can be seen and worked with rather than hidden where they gnaw at your effectiveness. This is, after all, reality. Bringing everyone into it creates a composite mind and evokes the strengths available - including innate leadership traits. 
2. Recover. I've never heard of any professional training to address 'recovery' from professional exertion. Recovery isn't simple and it can look like the very opposite of the value of hard relentless application. After the covid lockdowns we're all more aware that recovery needs crafting, most particularly when you are at senior level.
3. Innovate. You may be a brilliant technical innovator in your specialist field. Facing big challenges you need to innovate ON your profession as well as IN it. This means creating a process within the firm to question and reshape the whole system - marketing messages, process design, training, problem identification, mode of engaging clients, documentation, team shaping - whatever can produce new initiatives. Engaging the whole team in the steps from ideation to prototyping to implementation deepens the capability of the whole firm and helps identify future leaders.
4. Synergise. Difference is exacerbated by difficulty and leads to either conflict or synergy. Seek synergy. Use the competitiveness of your colleagues to face outwards together rather than inwards towards each other. This is tough one-to-one, so engage a wise facilitator - who may be the Managing Partner.

Above the issues

Professional setbacks are normal. How we use them can lead to either eating one's young or helping them grow. I've listened to the despair and hopelessness of good professionals who feel buried under the issues. But when they grasp and implement even one initiative, they rise above the issues and are able to work on them. Just that feeling of being able to draw breath is sometimes all it takes to get back in control and stop drowning.

With some wisdom, market difficulty becomes your catalyst to:

• Lead
• Innovate on the high impact issues
• Find great new clients that provide quality profits
• Build market share
• Move in front of the competition when the market improves

In other words, you'll have your team ready rather than broken.