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Strategic Learning and Development in Professional Services

Creating competitive advantage

CREATING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE2

3 Executive summary

4 Who should read this series?

5 Why you should read this series?

6 PAPER 1 Designing your firm of the future

8 PAPER 2 Leading strategic change

10 PAPER 3 Early career pathways

13 PAPER 4 Career pathways for senior leaders

15 About us

Terminology and definitions

“The Professions”Our focus is on professional service firms and partnership-based businesses, with the scope and depth of our research drawing especially on our work in the legal, accountancy and financial services sectors.

“Learning and Development” / “L&D”For reasons of consistency and simplicity, throughout the series we use the phrase ‘Learning and Development’ (or ‘L&D’) as a defined term. This definition is intended to encompass any work carried out with the express purpose of developing the skills, capabilities, mind-sets and behaviours of those working in professional firms.

Contents About the authors

Stephen Newton Meridian West, has worked with professional firms and financial services businesses since 2001, advising their leadership teams on effective strategy [email protected]

Dr Nigel SpencerSäid Business School, University of Oxford, is a senior leadership development practitioner with 20 years’ experience in professional [email protected]

3 WWW.SBS.OXFORD.EDU/STRATEGICLEARNING

Executive summary

The business model of professional services firms is rapidly evolving: new technologies, a changing competitive landscape and complex client requirements are just some of the factors that are fundamentally shifting how professional firms do business.

To thrive in this competitive market and successfully respond to change, professional firms will need to foster new skills and capabilities in their people. Change will require strong leadership and the confidence to embrace ambiguity.

Failure to adapt to change will mean that professionals find themselves less relevant in a market where their clients – whether they be multinational corporations or private clients – are better-informed and have access to more choice when assessing how to solve their business and personal challenges.

For the firms on the front foot, strategic learning and development activity will be a critical means to drive competitive advantage, to position a firm as a leading employer brand in the sector, and to attract and retain the most capable talent. In knowledge-based businesses, only by connecting a firm’s strategic ambitions with its organisational-level learning agenda will it be possible to effect change, and to develop the capabilities required to deliver tomorrow’s results.

With this in mind, Oxford Saïd Business School and Meridian West have come together to author a series of research papers aimed at those holding senior leadership positions in professional firms such as Senior and Managing Partners, Practice Group leaders, Heads of Learning and Development (L&D) and HR. Our papers seek to answer some of the most important strategic questions on the agenda for professional firms, including:

• What skills will professionals need to be successful in the future?

• What is the best way to align L&D activity with firm-wide strategy?

• How can L&D professionals help their firms remain agile and responsive to market changes?

• How can professional firms establish attractive career pathways and effective leadership development programmes in light of deep changes to the role of professional advisers?

This series is intended to deliver practical learning based on the real-world experience of individuals currently working in such roles, as well as in-depth research insights from both Oxford Saïd Business School and Meridian West. In this context paper, we provide an overview of some of the key research themes and highlight some of the contributions of our experts. There will be four further papers.

In Designing the Firm of the Future we explore how to future-proof your firm, highlighting how to connect L&D strategies with factors such as the changing expectations of clients, changing economic models and fee pressures, and the impacts of technology on business models and staffing patterns.

Leading Strategic Change examines the practical delivery of firm-level change projects and the value that can be delivered by the strategic involvement and application of L&D expertise at all stages.

In Early Career Pathways we explore how professionals can gain the commercial understanding of business that clients now expect at an early stage in their careers. We highlight innovative models that firms are using to smooth the transition between the world of education and the workplace.

Finally, in Creating Career Pathways for Senior Leaders we look at the contribution L&D can make to support professionals in senior leadership roles, and how best to prepare individuals with the attitudes and aptitudes to be successful leaders and managers of the future.


Senior leadership teams and Learning and Development professionals in professional services firmsIf you are a Managing Partner, Board Member or the Head of Learning and Development in a professional services firm.

UK-based teams in firms with global reachOur primary research has been carried out in UK-based teams of firms with national and international reach. However, our work with professional firms has also spanned North America, continental Europe, as well as Asia-Pacific and Africa. Whilst we do not underestimate the impact of national and regional culture, the principles and recommendations presented in this and subsequent papers are relevant worldwide.

Who should read this series?


Our purpose: Helping firms to align Learning and Development activity with firm strategy and create competitive advantageNumerous articles are written about the pace of change and transformation taking place across the professions, commenting how firms are frequently struggling to remain relevant in a progressively competitive environment. Commentators often talk about how firms must re-define their business models to deliver the best services or products in an efficient, sustainable way, providing real value for money to their customers or clients.

The purpose of this series is to explore an important, related issue, which has yet to be addressed in a holistic way: how a firm’s leaders can partner strategically with their Learning and Development (L&D) functions to create competitive advantage, enabling their people to navigate complex, organisational-level transformations and create the sustainable and successful firms of the future.

Our approachThe series aims to provide insights from successful L&D investment which has impacted significantly on Board-level issues, helping firms to deliver on strategic priorities. We will present these insights through the ‘voices’ of leaders in professional services firms, L&D Heads, clients and also specialists from the worlds of higher and executive education. These voices, combined with our own experience and expertise, will present evidence-based recommendations, success stories, challenges and lessons for the future.

The areas of focus range from managing change at a firm-wide level to how one can build stronger capability at different stages of career paths, helping individuals to succeed at career transition points and maximising engagement and retention.

In addition, throughout the series, we pose a number of questions to enable leaders to benchmark how strategically L&D is used in their firms. In this introductory paper these benchmarking questions are presented as a series of challenges and provocations related to the ‘mapping’ of L&D activity to firm-critical issues, and the level of connectivity between learning initiatives and aspects which materially impact a firm’s bottom line. Our experience is that L&D’s connection in these areas is not strong in many firms. Therefore, we believe leaders could usefully consider how changing their firm’s existing ‘Organisational Learning Maps’ (as we will term them) could increase the creation of competitive advantage, aligning organisational learning activity with the firm’s strategy.

The challenge: A talent agenda evolving rapidly in an increasingly disrupted sectorAt a strategic level, professional services firms face numerous market-wide drivers of rapid change; the impact of technology, client demands for increased value, new entrants to the market with innovative business models, the rise of emerging markets, regulatory pressures, retention of key talent, the uncertainty of Brexit, the list goes on.

Specifically from their clients, firms are being challenged to offer higher quality (and higher value) services and advice which go beyond technical knowledge to strategic, forward-looking insight about their clients’ businesses. Clients are looking for innovative advice that provides an alternative and informed viewpoint, enabling them to be leaders in the marketplace. These changed client demands require new skills, behaviours and mind-sets from professional advisers and therefore have significant implications for the talent and learning agendas in professional services firms. In our view, firms will only be able to deliver on their client demands if they acknowledge the changes in capabilities required and the consequent critical role for L&D to align with – and contribute to – the Board’s strategic ambitions over the long term.

The purpose of this series is, therefore, to guide leaders on how learning can be a strategic lever for delivering competitive advantage through their people, enabling each firm to thrive and achieve business success.

Why you should read this series?


Designing your firm of the future

Utilising L&D to future-proof your firmThis opening paper explores how L&D activity can be a tool to proactively future-proof your firm and enhance its ability to deliver on its business strategy.

Firms are now implementing significant change programmes to re-define their market position and understand their required future skills and capabilities. This presents an ideal opportunity to help create a more strategic partnership between L&D and senior leadership, utilising the L&D function as an ‘Organisational Development’ (OD) unit to drive change.

Proximity of connection between L&D functions and the firm’s leadershipLeadership of your L&D function and the relationship with senior management is a key indicator and determinant of the impact your L&D function can have. In most cases, the Head of L&D is a specialist in the field. In a small number of firms, the role is held by a former fee-earner who has decided to move into a L&D role.

The structure of the L&D function depends on a variety of factors. By structure, we mean not only the number of individuals in the team, but also the position and connectivity of the L&D function within the firm. For example, does the Head of L&D report to the Managing Partner, to the Executive Committee or Board, to the Chief Operating Officer (or equivalent), or through a Business Services functions such as HR or Knowledge Management? The connections implicit in these formal reporting structures, whilst not precluding informal links across function, will often impact the information to which L&D has access and the discussions in which it is regularly involved. For example, is your Head of L&D regularly seeing the Board agenda, inputting into (or shaping) promotion methodologies, reviewing HR data from appraisals highlighting development needs, learning from exit interviews, or hearing graduate recruitment feedback on the skills future joiners need?

The proximity between L&D and the firm’s committees where business strategy is formulated is important to consider because, the greater the distance, the higher the risk L&D will be seen (and used) more at a tactical level rather than as a route to strategic development. At a time of significant change, this places firms at a competitive disadvantage in achieving their business goals.

Strategic Board-level skills auditsAs L&D teams assist with strategic firm-wide activities such as Board-led skills audits, in-house L&D functions can usefully undertake their own skills audit. The results of these audits can help determine what skills development and training is needed for the firm, but also pinpoint what investment should be made in L&D itself to optimise its effectiveness and its ambitions for the future.

In this context, the L&D function can become both a catalyst for change as well as an enabler, typically working closely with the HR function so the knowledge and skills that drive future success can be considered part of the strategic development of the firm.

“The starting point with all L&D should be the firm’s overall strategy, and you must ensure that your L&D function is closely connected to those Board-level strategy conversations. ...to use the famous Olympic rowing analogy, you have to prioritise whatever is going to make your particular ‘boat’ go faster.”

Head of Learning and Development Top 100 UK Law Firm

Building your firm’s ‘Organisational Learning Maps’Q: How are you connecting the agendas of L&D and your Board?

Questions to ask in your firm:

• Are you regularly connecting the L&D team directly with the work of the Board or Executive Committee?

• Have you worked with your L&D Head to understand the skills and capabilities which will be critical to deliver your firm’s strategy?

PAPER 1


Incorporating the client perspective into your firm’s learning strategiesIn light of the huge changes taking place across the professions, our research indicates an increasing interest in strategic reviews grounded in solid evidence (such as client feedback). Some of these are existential in that they seek to identify the purpose of the firm at a deep level, before seeking to consider issues of structure and delivery.

L&D can play a key role in reviewing the implications of the clients’ perspective and in assessing both the likelihood of a strategy’s success and at least some of the potential barriers. There is significant benefit in learning professionals being involved in strategic client reviews, the firm’s on-going work with clients (often led through the Business Development and Marketing functions) and the planning process around strategic change.

Some forward-thinking firms use learning activities as a differentiator with clients, offering bespoke development sessions attended by client teams and key members of the firm who deliver services to them. This creates an environment for the client perspective to connect directly with members of the firm and enables the best practice approach of building deep levels of trust and connection with clients through shared experiences and specifically shared learning.

Defining the skills needed to reach ‘Position B’Periodic or rolling scenario planning can be helpful in defining a future ’Position B’ before the firm begins to work out how it might move from the current A to future B. In addition to understanding and identifying any new technical capabilities needed for future service offerings, the key broader skills likely to be required are those of business management, leadership, openness to change, resilience and adaptability. In order to undertake this complex analysis, a skills audit is required – starting at Board level – to understand and assess the firm’s current capabilities.

Ultimately, strategic L&D initiatives will be a key lever for Managing Partners and Boards to define changes needed and to incubate the future skills that clients really value whilst, at the same time, ensuring employees understand the value of these skills and are engaged in developing them. One key message, then, is that only through effective use of your L&D team will it be possible to design and implement the vision of your future firm.

Mapping’ client interactions to L&D

Building your firm’s ‘Organisational Learning Maps’Q: How closely is L&D connected with your firm’s client interactions?


• Are you connecting L&D with the client-facing intelligence gained by your fee earners and the business development team?

• How often do your L&D and Key Client Account teams sit together and review the skills and capability implications of client feedback for the firm’s L&D agenda?

• Do you utilise your L&D function to create client-facing learning programmes to deepen client relationships?

‘Mapping’ client interactions to L&D

Client feedback report: our L&D Agenda implications

Build more junior capability in…

Work�ows becoming more interna-tional and client feedback of our teams not feeling ‘joined up’: need to build skills in…

Client’s industry being disrupted in-creasingly: our teams need more ca-pability in…

Industry knowledge more key for this client as a di�erentiator for us against other �rms, must increase team’s knowledge in…

Key client: A Half-Year Service Review Report


Leading strategic change

This paper considers the reality of translating your firm’s strategy into action. Developing skills and cultivating mindsets is critical for delivering strategic business change. Bespoke, targeted learning activities can be your strategic change agent for the achievement of the overall business strategy for your firm and growing client relationships.

The challenge of implementationSuccessful strategic change is driven by effective implementation capability across the organisation. Research by McKinsey restates the statistic that 85% of mergers or acquisitions fail to deliver value for shareholders, largely because the ’people’ aspects of the transaction are not properly considered at the outset. A key element of these ’people’ aspects is the ability to manage change. Once again, the necessary skills can be taught but historically have rarely formed part of a conventional organisational learning curriculum and are even more rarely assessed across the fee-earner community.

Fit for purpose L&DAs discussed in Paper 1, you need to understand how your L&D function is structured, how it has operated

historically, how it interacts and connects with the firm, and in which areas it will be critical for L&D to assist in the future. Once you understand these areas and L&D’s current capabilities, two decisions then need to be taken. First, should there be changes in organisational structure to maximise the impact of L&D? Second, is the firm’s level of investment in the L&D team sufficient for it to support the strategy implementation? Developing an appropriately-scaled L&D team intimately linked to strategy discussions of the Board and the Managing Partner is crucial to future success as they will be a driving force of enacting strategic change through your people.

“The big thing that people forget about a strategic plan is it’s nothing without the people. The people are how you deliver it and for that you need an organisational-level learning strategy linked to those ‘change’ plans.”Kimberly Bradshaw Managing Director of HR Consultancy, Buzzacott

PAPER 2

Building your firm’s ‘Organisational Learning Maps’

Board-level imperatives for effecting change successfully*

Questions to consider as you build an ‘Organisational Learning Map’ to maximise your firm’s capability to change

Building momentum for change

Is L&D working with the Board to create the agile mindsets needed to deal with change and ambiguity?

How are you using L&D to understand the ‘emotional structure’ of your firm and its readiness for change?

Creating and communicating the vision

Do your leadership programmes build skills in creating and communicating a compelling vision of the future?

Taking first steps and quick wins

Does L&D work with your Board to define criteria for what success will look like after the change process – and the new skills/behaviours you will see in the firm?

Embedding the change As the change project progresses, are you tasking L&D with considering how to embed new behaviours and skills in updated L&D curricula?

*Adapted from Kotter’s eight-step process to successful change: J. P. Kotter, Leading Change (Harvard 2012).


Building skills to enable successful change and tailoring your L&D curriculumIn considering strategic change, there can be a temptation to undertake it whilst continuing with a full-time day job. Experience indicates that this can lead to burnout of individuals but, of equal importance, to less effective decisions being taken because people involved simply lack the required capacity. The result is typically to slow down or to derail the implementation process. It can also lead to a sharp increase in staff turnover at all levels.

Firms that have had success in designing and implementing strategic change projects usually take individuals out of their day jobs and create a group of internal experts to design what needs to be done by way of implementation. They will then communicate the key ideas to their team and lead the implementation at a tactical level.

The firm will usually need to invest in developing the necessary skills in these individuals and also enable their successful transition back into line roles once the project is completed (a point which we discuss in greater detail in the final paper). Clearly there is a strategic role for the firm’s learning function here, building the skills (especially influencing and communication skills) amongst senior leaders to create momentum for change, and partnering with HR on career planning and development as well as evaluation and reward metrics.

Beyond a small strategic change committee, L&D is also responsible for readying the rest of the firm to embody the firm’s new strategy. The firm’s learning team needs to tailor the development programme with a long-term view, for its employees across the firm, from fee-earners to business support services.

Technology, innovation and alternative resourcing models We also draw out the implications for L&D functions and senior management of advances in technology, innovation and resourcing models as themes in their own right given the serious implications for the industry.

“I think there will be a skill shift, but there are parts of the consulting process that depend on the chemistry between people to get things done. It’s really hard to imagine that a robot could do that.”Fiona Czerniawska Director, Source Global Research

In the not too distant future, technology-driven approaches and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will underpin work in the professions and change the way in which professionals work fundamentally. This may not mean lawyers or accountants need to be experts in coding, but clients will expect sufficient awareness of the possibilities of these tools and an ability to manipulate data sets more efficiently and accurately than is possible from human intervention. The key mind-set in this new world will be to maintain the focus on the client and to show curiosity, coupled with the skill-set for open-ended client conversations: what is the problem we are trying to solve and does technology help the client with their challenge? The organisational learning implications of this AI-enabled environment will therefore be a need for enhanced problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, and we will explore how firms can gain competitive advantage be enhancing these capabilities.

Finally, as firms create their new operating and resourcing models to maintain profitability, we will see increasing importance placed upon part-time, temporary, and freelance employees who are not permanent staff members, but who are equally critical to the delivery of the firm’s services.

Our paper gives examples of how the L&D function can be a strategic partner for senior management as it considers how to build the skill-sets and knowledge needed by these more dispersed elements of a firm’s delivery team, whilst maintaining service quality.


Early career pathways

Papers 3 and 4 explore how to engage and retain professionals by developing earlier their core skills, right through to the transitions that can occur throughout an entire career.

Client-driven changes in early career learning for professionalsHistorically, training in the professions has tended to focus on the development of technical knowledge. Meanwhile, the skills of personal interaction developed through early project leadership opportunities, managing clients and their expectations, was only made available to professionals later on, when individuals were preparing for more senior management positions.Our research indicates that the more successful and forward-thinking firms engage and stretch their entry level professionals by developing these skills from the start of the career journey. To do this, these firms have re-designed early career learning programmes to be more commercially focused and, at the same time, implemented placements at client organisations and other forms of experiential learning to ensure early career professionals ‘learn by doing’ in workplace contexts as soon as possible.

“They want opportunities now, the work to be interesting and meaningful, and they want to be challenged. And they may well be off somewhere else in five years’ time. I think that’s something that many law firms, particularly large firms, are going to find really challenging. Those traditional qualities of loyalty and commitment, which have been so highly prized - and rewarded - may well not have the same currency over the next five to ten years. We need to start earlier in identifying the talent, so that we can develop and, hopefully, retain those individuals by meeting their needs and providing them with a variety of career paths that might work for them.”

Christina Blacklaws Vice President, The Law Society of England and Wales

Evolving education-sector curricula and regulatory changeThis client-driven requirement for more commercial understanding and the ability to demonstrate the development and application of advisory skills (in addition to pure technical knowledge) has significant implications for post-school educational providers delivering either degrees or apprenticeships. Change has been slow in some areas of this provision, but in this paper we give examples where new curricula and educational pathways have been successfully developed and how firms can best partner with these providers to fast-forward the development of their entry-level team members.

Enhancing early workplace experience to boost confidence and engagementA few firms have already begun to introduce tailored programmes which boost the business skills training and workplace opportunities at entry level. However, these examples are still the exception rather than the norm, even though clients have valued highly opportunities to interact with early-stage professionals.

We will also highlight how the results of such innovations are positive from an engagement and on-boarding perspective. Integrating a firm’s future professionals into the business earlier enables them to build a far greater level of confidence that they understand the business of their clients and can offer advice accordingly.

Another development with a significant impact on the strategic use of L&D in firms is a greater number of career path ‘forks’ in the professional firm of the future, with the traditional route from trainee or consultant, via Associate, to Partner no longer necessarily the norm.

The key challenge for Managing Partners and L&D Heads is how best to align curricula with these emerging models, creating an agile curriculum which gives individuals the chance to ‘pivot’ their capabilities towards new opportunities.

PAPER 3


Building your firm’s ‘Organisational Learning Maps’Q: How is your firm’s learning strategy increasing the client-facing ‘speed to experience’ of your teams – enhancing engagement and retention and building client connection?


• Given the need to stretch, develop and engage your early career professionals, which model of early client interaction below is more similar to your own firm?

• When is the first time your new entrants engage on projects about the firm’s business, building commercial awareness of your client base?

Post-recruitment but pre-joining?

Their first month at the firm?

Later?

• When do new entrants first have an opportunity to take leadership responsibility in client-facing situations? How could you make that earlier?

• How could you increase the amount of ‘outside the classroom’ learning in your firm’s L&D portfolio? This ‘learning by doing’ activity enables greater learning transfer and workplace effectiveness.

• How adept are your senior professionals at delegating to their successors to offer earlier client-facing experience?

Building your firm’s ‘Organisational Learning Maps’Q: How is the firm’s L&D strategy supporting the career path plurality?


• Is your L&D strategy aligned to support the old ‘linear’ paths or to support the emerging ‘lattice’ career paths and skills needs?

• As client and market demands change more quickly, does your L&D agenda enable re-training in mid-pathway?

Redrawing your L&D ‘map’ of career paths

Former linear career paths (right) are becoming 'career lattices' (below), with multiple career entry points and complex, widening choices as careers progress.

Traditional career path

Career lattice

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More traditional modelEnhanced model to quicken skills development

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Redrawing your L&D ‘map’ of early client interaction to build skills more quickly

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More traditional modelEnhanced model to quicken skills development

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Redrawing your L&D ‘map’ of early client interaction to build skills more quickly


Enabling successful negotiation of career transition pointsAnother key role for L&D in any firm is helping professionals to negotiate each transition point through their career. Our experience is that it is at these very moments of transition when professionals, often very guarded about their development needs, are most open to accepting support. We give examples of how targeting programmes to ensure success upon promotion is a successful strategy for leaders working with their L&D functions to build a core developmental ‘spine’ throughout the career pathways in their firms.

Focusing L&D support on these ‘stepping up’ moments in careers builds confidence to succeed at the next level of progression and helps to identify high potential leaders at earlier stages in their career. In addition, our experience is that this approach will improve retention to ensure the sustainability of the business.

Corporate universitiesFinally, in this paper we discuss the creation of corporate universities as a focus for L&D activity in their firms. Many of the organisations investing in these institutions are of significant global scale where substantial investment has been made to create a high-profile professional development facility. However, we draw out lessons and benefits which can be applied from such projects to organisational learning strategies in firms where such large-scale projects would not be feasible.

Building your firm’s ‘Organisational Learning Maps’Q: Where will L&D most measurably affect the bottom line by supporting transitions in your firm?


• Have you measured the performance deltas at key transition points (e.g. associate to partner)?

• Do you know at which transition points L&D investment will add most to the firm’s bottom line?

• Do you have a data set of what skills and capabilities must be built in advance of a career transition to maximise success following the transition?

Per

form

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Transition point

Redrawing your firm’s transition ‘map’ with L&D

Transition with L&D support

Cost of underinvestment

Transition withoutL&D support


The fourth paper in our series addresses challenges of career development for professionals at a more senior level. This area is important to discuss because it is one which is rarely spoken about, in particular in terms of the support which L&D can bring to these senior cohorts. Our research indicates that the majority of L&D focus (and budget spend) tends to be on early career development until professionals reach partner level, or for the first five years as a partner to help individuals to transition successfully into the partner role.

Where there has been less discussion of potential learning support is when partners become more senior and reach two transition points or forks in their career path: firstly, the option of taking on management roles and, secondly, the complex transition towards the end of a partner’s time at the firm.

Adopting the approach from earlier papers, we discuss in relation to both these transition points how a firm’s senior leadership can work side-by-side with the L&D function to create developmental options and strategically important outcomes for the firm and the individual.

The challenge of mid-career management pathwaysFirstly, we consider the issue of career paths towards senior management in firms where partners – often in mid-career

– take up management roles, and the challenges inherent in the trend of these leaders becoming more junior.

There are a number of issues to consider in this area. Will firms be able to attract into management individuals whom it would like to hold those roles, especially given the challenges of management roles rarely being permanent? How does one best prepare partners to take on these roles, and what techniques have been most effective for this ‘inbound transition’? Also, during the tenure of the roles, how can one help the partners plan their ‘role exit’ strategy’? In particular, how can partners satisfy the need to nurture in parallel their client relationships so they can transition smoothly back to client-facing roles? Finally, if these roles are to be held for a limited time period, what firm-level process needs to be put in place to create a rolling series of potential future leaders?

“I suppose another trend is the relative youth of current generation management. So in the older days, twenty five years ago, the managing partner, it would probably be their last role before retiring. They would be at least fity something. These days you’ve got plenty of people now who are managing partners in their mid-forties, which is interesting. They have to keep an eye on what do they do after the managing partner role. And if you look at people, there aren’t many managing partners who step down and successfully go back to being a practising lawyer again ater eight years of having given up the client side of things.”

Nick Holt Partner, SR Search

Career pathways for senior leaders

PAPER 4

Per

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Pre-partner ~ 8 years Partner ~ 25+ years

Management focus

Client-delivery focus

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Redrawing your firm’s management career path ‘map’ with L&D


We consider the different approaches firms are taking to managing these senior career paths. We also look at examples of how L&D teams can best align their work with that of the firm’s senior leadership to support not just the careers of current leaders but also put in place best-practice leadership transition strategies to prepare the future generations of management.

Creating effective career pathways for ‘beyond the firm’The second area of senior level career paths which is rarely addressed is that where a PSF’s senior leader population prepare to move ‘beyond the firm’. This is a time where partners may have been in a firm for 25-30 years, and then face the phase in their careers of letting go, handing the baton down to the next generation.

Our experience and research shows the complexity of issues at play in this area mean it is a stage in the career path rarely addressed well – and sometimes avoided – by senior management. L&D can and should address this gap.

For senior management, the first challenge we explore is making retirement or transition ‘an OK subject to talk about’ culturally in a firm, and there can also be significant practical issues in how a firm’s remuneration system can be flexed to the needs of individuals at their career stage.

For individuals, the prospect of transition or retirement is complex psychologically including issues of status, identity, and the handing over of key client relationships. In addition, there is a lack of clarity on how they should raise with the firm other roles in which they are interested or even the important, and practical details around future compensation.

Demographic change means, however, that the need to

address these challenges has become urgent. In many firms, the most senior 20%-25% of the partnership usually hold a disproportionately high percentage of key client relationships amounting to a significant proportion of the firm’s total revenue. Given this threat to imminent loss of business for a firm, there is a very strategic need to partner with L&D and proactively address these issues of succession.

Our paper sets out examples of how L&D has successfully stepped into this challenging area, working with a firm’s Board and senior management to better align the interests of the firm and those of individual senior partners. Experience from various firms is that, by unlocking this conversation on desired future roles, both within the firm and – ultimately – outside, firms have achieved multiple benefits: enhanced motivation from the individual senior partners, a more seamless client experience of relationship transitions (leading to greater retention of business as senior relationship partners depart), and a series of strategically placed alumni.

Building your firm’s ‘Organisational Learning Maps’Q: How is L&D used to manage career transitions to/from management roles?


• As a Board, do you use L&D input to review those with skill-sets best suited for future senior management roles?

• Do you utilise L&D to strategically create future career path options for senior management, focusing on the time after they hold the role?

Building your firm’s ‘Organisational Learning Maps’Q: How is L&D used to manage career transitions to/from management roles and end of career transitions?


• Do you ‘map’ with the Managing Partner the % of those holding the firm’s key revenue relationships who want to transition out of the firm in the next three years?

• Is retiring ‘an OK subject to talk about’ in your firm?

• Are you losing critical senior knowledge and skill-sets in an unmanaged way by end of careers being unplanned?

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Graph 4: Using client relationship ‘maps’ to focus late career L&D support

30 - 4030 - 40 40 - 50 50 - 60 60+

Partner demographic (years of age)

Using client relationship ‘maps’ to focus late career L&D support


About us

Saïd Business School, University of OxfordSaïd Business School blends the best of new and old. We are a vibrant and innovative business school, but yet deeply embedded in an 800 year old world-class university which aims to lead the world in research and education for the benefit of society both in the UK and globally. We create programmes and ideas that have global impact and educate people for successful business careers; as a community we seek to tackle world-scale problems.

We deliver cutting-edge programmes, including the highly regarded MBA, Executive MBA, a number of specialist MScs, a portfolio of custom solutions and open programmes, and accredited diplomas for executives. The School undertakes ground-breaking research that transforms individuals, organisations, business practice, and society.

We are an international and outward looking School with our programme participants coming from more than 50 countries.

Corporate Executive Education at Saïd Business SchoolOur corporate education solutions are designed to effect change by creating a critical mass of new capability within an organisation. Our clients and future clients are seeking a partner who can work with them at scale, over distributed locations around the world, and who can help them to anticipate and meet the challenges and opportunities posed by emergent “big questions” and issues such as digitisation, networked economies, global leadership, purpose, values and ethics, transparency, and adaptive leadership challenges.

To deliver to these needs requires not only the right content, but agile and responsive learning designs and processes that deliver value to our clients, and have impact at the level of the individual, team, organisation, and broader “ecosystem”. Our solutions draw on an increasingly diverse set of capabilities – from research-based insight and practitioner expertise, to effective and engaging in-person, virtual and blended delivery, to learning architectures that can support transformational change.

Meridian WestMeridian West helps professional firms to design and implement client-focused strategies.

We are uniquely positioned to support professional firms to gather the insight needed to understand their client relationships better, to provide the evidence necessary to make informed strategic decisions, and to transform how their people work with each other and with their clients.

Professional firms choose to partner with Meridian West because:We have a deep understanding of the strategic and operational challenges on their agenda. For the last two decades Meridian West has been one of the ‘go-to’ advisers to professional firms, ranging from boutique practices through to global giants. Our team comprises former professionals as well as coaches and consultants with a strong track record advising professional firms.

Innovation is in our DNA. Our in-depth understanding of the industry is matched only by our desire to innovate. We adopt innovative techniques that combine the voice of the client with financial data, segmentation analysis and behavioural science to uncover fresh insights. We choose to collaborate only with the most forward-thinking third parties

– be they executive coaches, software providers or digital agencies – to provide a seamless service to our clients.

We support the client management journey from strategy to implementation. Our range of services and expertise enable us to support all elements of the client management experience, from collecting insight through to delivering lasting organisational change.

We work with, not against, the professional mind-set. Our team of experienced coaches and skills development practitioners are attuned to the professional’s mind-set. This means we understand the most effective ways to work with professionals to create genuine, client-focused behavioural change.

Saïd Business School University of Oxford Park End Street Oxford, OX1 1HP United Kingdom

www.sbs.oxford.edu

MERIDIAN WEST

©Meridian West

+44 (0)20 7261 4700

www.meridianwest.co.uk

© 2018 SAID BUSINESS SCHOOL

strategic learning and development in professional services ......evolving: new technologies, a...

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