Only 43% of professionals on the partnership track talk about having a practice or a business, rather than a client portfolio.
This episode covers the ninth of the 12 key indicators of partnership readiness: Personal Case. This is where you demonstrate that you are already working at the level expected of a partner, before anyone hands you the title. It covers what your partners are actually looking for, how gravitas is built and undermined, and why the strongest cases are built on strengths rather than on patched gaps.
In this episode you will learn:
- Why tenure and high billing do not make a Personal Case, and what your partners are assessing instead
- The questions to run yourself through to work out whether you are acting, thinking and feeling like a partner
- What Ding Dong and Bing Bong words are, and how the language you use every day is either building or eroding your gravitas
- How Ewan turned the style that made him seem to lack presence into the reason clients trusted him
- Why your partners are not looking for the perfect candidate, and what to do with the strengths you already have
Take the Partnership Readiness Assessment
Free to complete, 10 to 15 minutes, and gives you a personalised report across all 12 key indicators. Take the assessment here.
Buy Poised for Partnership
To buy a copy of Poised for Partnership, click here.
What help is out there for you to progress your career in the professions?
The Progress to Partner Academy is curated by key indicator. If Personal Case is where you need to focus, you’ll find everything in one place.
You’ll find resources to help you strengthen your Personal Case, including:
- How to Be on Your A-Game Every Day
- Leading Yourself and Others Through Change
- How to Excel as a Line Manager
- The Difference Between Your Business Case and Personal Case
- How to Find Out What Is Expected of a Future Partner
- How to Take Responsibility for Your Career
- How to Get Clients to Treat You Like a Partner
- How to Build Authority and Gravitas
- How to Build Your Profile Across the Partnership
- How to Be Seen as the Next Partner
These resources will help you:
- Understand what your partners expect from someone ready for partnership
- Take greater ownership of your career and professional development
- Build the authority, presence and credibility expected of a partner
- Show that you can lead yourself, support others and manage change
- Raise your profile with the people involved in partnership decisions
- Help clients and colleagues see you as someone already operating at the next level
If Personal Case is where you need to focus, this section of Progress to Partner will help you build a stronger case for partnership by showing your partners that you are ready before the title is formally given to you.
Use code PODCAST10 for 10% off annual membership. Click here to join.
Books mentioned
Poised for Partnership by Heather Townsend – https://amzn.to/3ETEYk3
How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life by Heather Townsend and Jo Larbie – https://amzn.to/4iLxugM
Also mentioned
Susan Heaton-Wright, founder of Superstar Communicator, on Ding Dong and Bing Bong words
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Hello, and welcome!
Michaela was a company commercial lawyer. Her clients sent her most of their contract work. When she asked her partners what she needed to do to make partner, they told her to go after the big ticket mergers and acquisitions work.
So she tried to win this work. But despite her efforts the M&A work kept going to people who already had partner on their business card. The ones with both the title and the long standing relationships in the marketplace.
So she stopped chasing it. She carried on doing the work she was good at, and her client base grew. When she pitched her Business Case, she did not apologise for the absence of M&A. She talked about the predictability of her billing. The reliability of her cash flow. The work her client relationships were referring into the rest of the firm.
Her partners made her up to partner. Even better, they praised her for her commerciality. In fact, they loved her commerciality so much that she became the finance partner for her part of the firm.
This is the How to Make Partner podcast with me, Heather Townsend, author of Poised for Partnership and co-author of How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life.
This is episode nine in our series on the 12 key indicators of partnership readiness.
Today we are talking about your Personal Case.
New episodes are released weekly, so press subscribe so you never miss one.
Right. Let’s start with what your Personal Case actually is, because it gets confused with your Business Case all the time. After all, some firms call it your Personal Business Case… so which is it?
Your Business Case is the commercial argument. Why the firm needs a new partner, and what that partner will deliver. I.e. what is the commercial benefit for your firm to make you up to partner. How much more profit will they make in the medium to long term as a result of making you up.
We cover this in the podcast episode released a fortnight after this.
Your Personal Case is the argument for you. It is where you show that you are already working at the level expected of a partner in your firm.
It splits into two parts. The rational part: are you doing what a partner does? That is today. The emotional part: do your partners trust you and like you enough to let you buy equity in their business? That is next week, and it is called Member of the Club.
Here is where the rational part gets missed. Many senior fee earners see themselves as a strong candidate because of how many years PQE they are, or their length of time with a firm and billing. Long service, high numbers, good clients. But no firm will risk its long-term future by making up a partner with a weak Personal Case, however much money that person is bringing in. In fact I’ve seen this happen. Where directors, engagement managers and senior associates are told that the firm really rates their technical expertise. That they are a highly valuable member of the firm BUT… and the BUT is important. They don’t think that they have what it takes to make partner.
You see this where firms create a separate track to partner track and may call it executive director, legal director, principal, lead counsel, but explicitly state this is a dead end for the person’s career. But then again I have seen people in these ‘dead end’ roles still make it up to partner. Firms just love breaking their own rules when it comes to career progression.
Only 43% of the professionals who have completed our Partnership Readiness Assessment talk about having a practice or a business, rather than a client portfolio or a collection of clients. It is a small change in language. But It tells your partners a great deal about how you see your role. And whether you are using the language that shows your partners that your role has now become growing a business rather than winning and servicing clients.
And 56% routinely look at how they could deliver a piece of work better, simpler or cheaper for the firm. That is the thinking of someone who is responsible for the profit, not just the delivery. But what about the remaining 34%?
So. Are you acting, thinking and feeling like a partner?
Nobody expects you to do the whole partner role, and achieve the same revenue won figures as an established junior partner, while you are still carrying a fee earner’s chargeable target. That is not realistic, and your partners know it. But the more you can show that you are already thinking as if you were a partner, the stronger your case gets.
Run yourself through these:
- Are you helping the people in your team develop?
- Do you and your team hit your billing and cash collection targets?
- Do the partners in your part of the practice come to you for your opinion?
- Have you found ways to be more involved in leading and managing your part of the practice?
- Do you have your key achievements, and your progress against your plans, at your fingertips?
- Do you talk about your business, or about a collection of clients?
- And if a partner stopped you tomorrow and asked about your Business Plan, could you talk them through it in two minutes?
If you hesitated on any of these questions, this suggests that you need to work on your personal case.
Your Personal Case is not only about the responsibilities you take on. It is also about how you are seen, inside the firm and outside it. Which brings us to gravitas.
Your partners want to be proud when they introduce you as one of their partners. Gravitas, or executive presence, is a large part of what that means in practice.
Some of it is physical. How you hold yourself. Whether you fidget with a pen or bounce a leg. Whether you take your time over your words, or rush to fill the silence.
A lot of it is language.
Susan Heaton-Wright, who founded Superstar Communicator, talks about Ding Dong words and Bing Bong words. Ding Dong words reduce your authority. I just think. I’m no expert at this, but. I guess. Maybe if I. Am I making sense?
Bing Bong words do the opposite. It seems to me. To my mind. It is my belief that. What is your stand on this?
This could be the same person, with hte same expertise, but having a completely different impact to others by the choice of words.
Jargon works against you in the same way. Using a lot of it suggests you are trying to prove your expertise rather than demonstrate it. Real authority tends to leave other people feeling smarter, not smaller.
Take Ewan. He was a programme director, highly regarded once you had worked with him. But clients meeting him for the first time hesitated to trust him with their large projects. His style was to listen carefully, take his time, and respond deliberately. In a first sales meeting, that read as an absence of presence.
He did not change who he was. He started explaining his approach at the top of a first meeting, which took the pressure off responding at speed. And he practised summarising the discussion as it went, which bought him thinking time and made him look more engaged, not less.
He became a rainmaker for his consultancy firm.
If you have ever been given feedback that you need to be more confident, or have more authority in meetings, pushing yourself to think faster on your feet is rarely the answer. It usually produces mumbling. Prepare instead. Work out what the people in the room want to hear. Anticipate the questions and write down your answers.
One last thing
Your partners are not expecting you to have every competency signed off. They expect you to have most of them, and to show you could reach the rest inside twelve to eighteen months. There is no such thing as a perfect partner.
Simon was an auditor with an excellent eye for detail. That same eye for detail meant he could never review a job inside the time allowed. His strength had become his weakness. Once he saw it, he got a member of his team to review the audit report first and did a quick pass over the top himself. Less time on review. Still caught what everyone else had missed.
Anju was the natural successor to a retiring partner in her private client department. Her gift was seeing what was not working and fixing it. Her gap was strategy. So her coach suggested she build the three-year strategy out of the things she could see were broken. Bottom up, rather than top down. She still works that way now, as the partner in charge.
And Michaela did the same. Everyone told her the ticket to partnership was M&A. Her ticket was the deep strong relationships she built with clients that spent £50-150k each year with her on their contracts.
The strongest Personal Cases are not built by people patching their gaps. They are built by people who know exactly what they are good at, and build a narrative about this.
That’s all for this episode. Your action for this week: go back through those questions about acting, thinking and feeling like a partner. Find the one where you hesitated longest. That is your starting point.
If you have enjoyed this episode please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or give us a comment on Substack. It helps us reach more people who need this. Remember to hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode, where we will be covering the tenth key indicator: Member of the Club.
If you want to understand how you score on Personal Case, and where you sit across all 12 key indicators, the Partnership Readiness Assessment is the place to begin. It takes 10 to 15 minutes and gives you a personalised report. The link is in the show notes.
Inside our Progress to Partner Academy, the resources are curated by key indicator. If Personal Case is where you need to focus, everything relevant is in one place.
You’ll find resources to help you strengthen your Personal Case, including:
- How to Be on Your A-Game Every Day
- Leading Yourself and Others Through Change
- How to Excel as a Line Manager
- The Difference Between Your Business Case and Personal Case
- How to Find Out What Is Expected of a Future Partner
- How to Take Responsibility for Your Career
- How to Get Clients to Treat You Like a Partner
- How to Build Authority and Gravitas
- How to Build Your Profile Across the Partnership
- How to Be Seen as the Next Partner
These resources will help you:
- Understand what your partners expect from someone ready for partnership
- Take greater ownership of your career and professional development
- Build the authority, presence and credibility expected of a partner
- Show that you can lead yourself, support others and manage change
- Raise your profile with the people involved in partnership decisions
- Help clients and colleagues see you as someone already operating at the next level
If Personal Case is where you need to focus, this section of Progress to Partner will help you build a stronger case for partnership by showing your partners that you are ready before the title is formally given to you.
Use code PODCAST10 for 10% off annual membership: https://www.howtomakepartner.com/get-progress-to-partner/
Thanks for listening!
I’m Heather Townsend, author of Poised for Partnership and co-author of How to Make Partner & Still Have a Life. I’m the leading global expert in what it takes to move from senior fee earner to partner – and when you get there, stay there. Here are 5 ways to work with me.
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