An old post of Dr. Travis Bradberry popped up on my timeline recently. It was entitled 9 things which will kill your career. It is definitely worth a read in my opinion. It made me think about what will slowly but surely kill your career in professional services. How much of these will match up with Dr Travis Bradberry list.
Here are my thoughts on what will kill your career in professional services. How many of these do you agree with?
1. Poor Reputation
A poor reputation is a killer in a law, accountancy or consultancy firm. Develop a poor or negative reputation and you won’t get booked out on jobs or get introduced to clients, by internal or external introducers, who may need your services. Your reputation is not the main driver of your internal market value, but probably has the biggest impact on your career in your law, accountancy or consultancy firm. Fail to manage your reputation or nip any problems quickly in the bud and you will be left with no choice but to change firms to reignite your career in a professional services firm.
2. Non-existent Network
Your internal firm and external network are the oxygen which will keep the heart of your career beating. Fail to realise that partnerships run on relationships rather than alignment to an over-arching corporate strategy, and you will fail to thrive within a partnership environment. It’s always ‘who you know’ which helps your career move forward, but in a professional services firm it really is ‘who you know’.
3. Overly focusing on hitting your billable hour targets
Too many lawyers, accountants and consultants just focus on achieving their billable hour targets. In time this focus will steadily but surely kill your career. The professions don’t want people who are just work horses. They need people to develop and acquire new skills. Without this upward flow of talented people, firms get left with concrete layers of management who stifle the career aspirations of the younger talent in the firm.
Take a step forwards to working on your own career development and sign up to my weekly tips here and you’ll find out what you need to be working on in your career development (and how to make the time for your career development) to progress your career in your firm.
4. Delegation
Or should I say lack of delegation. The more senior you get in a firm, the greater the need to delegate for a multitude of reasons. If you don’t delegate, you stop the following happening:
- freeing up your time for more higher value activities, e.g. business development
- generating a good profit margin for the work you are doing
- developing people more junior to you
If you hang on to the work you are given (see point number 3) rather than always looking to delegate everything you can do down, you’ll slowly but surely kill your career. If you can’t be replaced, you also can’t be promoted…
There’s a great course waiting for you in my Progress to Partner Academy called How to Delegate Like a Pro. The course will help you delegate your work to others to free yourself up to focus on more valuable or important things to spend your time on.
5. Lacking a strong personal brand
In your early career it paid to be multi-skilled. That way it was easier for you to get booked out onto jobs and you got to see a variety of clients and industries. That was then, and this is now. If you carry on with the mentality of wanting to be a generalist, your career will start to come to a screeching halt the further up the firm you go. Clients normally don’t want to work with a generalist.
They want to work with someone who has a great understanding of their industry and the world in which they operate in. A jack-of-all-trades just won’t cut it. I’ve never read a business case for partnership in a Big 4 or large law firm which is based upon being a flexible generalist. It’s always based upon being an in demand Go-To Expert for something very specific.
6. Not having Advocates, mentors and sponsors
As I mentioned in point number 2, professional services is all about ‘who knows you’. If you don’t have someone at a senior level watching your back and opening doors to opportunities for you, then your career will struggle. You can’t get to the top on your own in a professional services firm. Everyone needs a helping hand now and then. Those people who don’t get the helping hands will find that their career will come to a juddering full stop.
One of our most sought-after courses in my Progress to Partner Academhy is called “How to Build a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner”. We think it’s a must-have in your arsenal of tools and guidance to help with your career progression. There is also a section on the Partnership Admissions process with guides and recordings to help you find your way through the system. Check it out!
7. Not seeing the bigger picture
It’s all too easy in the professions to get stuck into the details of what you are doing. Whether that’s because you love your subject so much or for other reasons. However, if you can’t see the bigger picture your career will stop. That’s because you need to always be:
- Thinking about your career strategically. What set of skills will be in demand in the next 5-10 years?
- Thinking commercially about the work you are doing. How is the best way to use the budget on the job?
- Holding the clients’ agenda high in your thoughts rather than pursuing your own agenda for a piece of work.
Take a step forwards to working on your own career development and sign up to my weekly tips here and you’ll find out what you need to be working on in your career development (and how to make the time for your career development) to progress your career in your firm.
Having a successful career in professional services is so much more than just being a good technician. Fail to address any of these 7 things and you will kill your career in professional services.
You put in long hours at the office, take work home and spend too many weekends catching up or getting ahead – often at the expense of time with friends and family.
You attend as many networking events as you can, get on well with your colleagues and managers and your reviews are positive – you’re a well-liked and respected member of the team.
You get the work done, your clients are happy and the partners are pleased – you consistently meet or exceed your billable hours targets.
Silently hoping…
- Your hard work will get you on the partners’ radar…
- Your partnership potential is obvious – surely they must see it…
- And any day now, that long-awaited tap on the shoulder will come…
Except …
These traits make you valuable as “a safe pair of hands”. They’re not what make you stand out as a future partner. Positioning yourself for partnership is what gets you promoted.
The problem?
No-one’s told you what the partnership in your firm is really looking for (because the criteria are often vague, unspoken or constantly shifting).
So, it’s easy to think you’re positioning yourself to make partner in the next 10 years, but actually you’re veering off-track, focusing on the wrong things.
Good news… Progress to Partner Academy has videos, exercises and guidance to get the confidence, the skills AND the time to focus on the right things and move your career forward. Start here!
