Making Strategy Work in Professional Service Firms

Firm Culture As a Critical Driver of PSF Performance: Our Firm’s Point of View

In all types of organizations, not just PSFs, culture is almost always an under-rated/-utilized driver of organizational performance. Yet, if a PSF wants to attract the best and the brightest; groom them to their full potential; and retain them, then firm leadership will miss a huge opportunity if they’re not dialed into the extraordinary impact a well designed culture has on talent management and organizational performance.

Here’s a telling thought experiment. Can you design an unattractive and demotivating culture? Absolutely! Here are some of the key ingredients:

1. Focus solely on budgets
2. Set murky expectations and goals
3. Prize activity over purpose and contribution
4. Rule by rules
5. Criticize and play politics
6. Exhibit behaviors and attitudes that are more indicative of an entitlement-based or a seniority-based culture than of a meritocratic one.

Just add water, stir, warm and, voila, you’ve got an culture tuned for under-performance and turnover. This is a surefire way to create plenty of disillusioned professionals, morale problems, and program breakdowns.

Now, after that thought experiment, it’s less difficult to visualize the winning PSF culture:

1. Infuse the culture with an inspiring mission and strategy.
2. Cultivate a strong institutional identity.
3. Walk the talk of best-in-class client service (with an emphasis on service).
4. Pay tribute to strong team play and downplay stardom.
5. Honor a strong work ethic, solving substantive problems, and delivering real value to clients.
6. Invest in your balance sheet, in your people.

Because PSFs are only as successful as the quality of their intellectual capital, they rise and fall on how astutely they manage their talent, their people. The simplest version of the math goes something like this: A firm’s growth and profitability are about performance, and performance is about people, one person at a time and collectively. In its work with professional service firms, tGCP brings solutions to bear that focus on people and the firm cultures in which they perform.

We like the 25-year track record our talent management and organizational performance solutions have in professional service firms. If we can assist, we’d like to.