Making partner is not just another promotion. It’s where you become an owner of the business and your partners’ business partner. It requires a significant mindset shift.
YAre you technically brilliant? Do you consistently smash your targets and deliver great work for clients?
That’s fantastic – but is it enough to make partner? Often, the answer is no.
Many high-performing senior professionals get stalled on their partnership journey because they’re still operating with an ’employee’ mindset, focusing primarily on utilisation and technical delivery. Making partner, however, requires a fundamental shift – thinking, acting, and feeling like a business owner.
In this episode of the How to Make Partner podcast, you’ll hear, arguably, about the most critical mindset shift you need to make.
You’ll hear why partnership isn’t just another promotion and why your partners need more than just another pair of safe hands.
Listen to this episode to discover:
- Why making partner means transitioning from employee to business owner (and what that truly entails).
- The common ’employee mindset’ traps that can sabotage your progression (Are you caught in the Utilisation Trap? Are you Waiting to be Fed work? Are you thinking Technically, Not Commercially?).
- Why partners are looking for commerciality, leverage, and strategic thinking, not just technical excellence.
- 5 Actionable ways you can start thinking and acting more like a partner today, regardless of your current role.
If you’re aiming to progress your career in the professions, understanding and embedding this mindset shift is non-negotiable.
Tune in to learn how to move beyond being a top performer and start demonstrating true partner potential.
Listen to my podcast on The critical mindset shift you need to make if you want to make partner. I’ve put the transcription below if you’d prefer to read the advice.
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Let me paint a picture for you.
Maybe it sounds familiar. There’s a senior associate in a law firm. Let’s call him Alex. Technically brilliant. Absolutely smashes his utilisation, billable, chargeable time, whatever you want to call it, targets year after year. Constantly hitting 100% or over on it. Clients love his work. Surely he’s a shoo-in for partner, right?
Wrong. When Alex put forward his case, highlighting his incredible utilisation, the partners asked him to wait another year. Why? Because his peers, while perhaps less impressive on timesheets, were generating significantly more new work for the firm. Alex was still thinking like a high performing employee, not like a potential business owner.
That transition from seeing yourself as a senior employee doing excellent work to thinking, feeling and acting like a partner, i.e. a business owner, is arguably the biggest mindset shift you need to make on your journey to partner. And if you don’t make it like Alex, you risk getting stuck no matter how good you are technically.
This is the How to Make Partner podcast with me, Heather Townsend, the author of Poised to Partnership and co-author of How to Make Partner & Still Have a Life.
In this podcast, I’ll be highlighting some of the great stuff in our Progress to Partner Academy. New episodes are released weekly, so press subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Right, let’s get down to business. Let’s talk about this crucial mindset shift. I remember talking and I did a keynote speak to a group of senior tax professionals back in 2016. And I talked them through the 12 key indicators to make partner. Then I got a question from the back of the room.
And it’s always the back of the room, isn’t it? Which said, what is the most important key indicator? And it hit me really clearly. It doesn’t matter how much money you could make for the firm. It doesn’t matter how much you’re billing. If you don’t have the right mindset, you probably won’t make partner.
And that’s why the first key indicator is mindset. So what is this partner mindset? At its core, it’s understanding that making partner is not just another promotion. It’s not just the next step up in the ladder. It’s fundamentally different. In most traditional partnerships, you literally resign as an employee and become self-employed.
You buy a slice of equity in the business. Even in firms that are less traditionally structured, maybe an incorporated business like limited, not partnerships, the same principle holds. You move from being managed to being part of the ownership and leadership group of your business. You, in effect, become your partner’s business partner.
Now, just think about that business partner.
Your partners aren’t looking to add another excellent senior associate or manager or director to their ranks. They already have those. They are looking for people who can help them lead and grow a profitable, sustainable business. They need people who think commercially, who can balance multiple demands.
Yes, client work, but also leadership, management, business development, and even contribute to firm strategy. But here’s the kicker. If they can get partner level contribution from someone on a senior associate’s salary, why wouldn’t they? It just makes commercial sense.
Your job is to demonstrate through your mindset and actions that you offer more value as a partner than you do as a top performing employee.
So what are the common employee mindsets that hold people back? There are four of them. Let’s start with the first one, the utilisation trap. Like Alex in our story, many professionals focus excessively on hitting or exceeding chargeable hours targets.
They see it as the primary measure of success. And yeah, you may get a bonus, but that may stop you from moving your career forward. But partners know that consistently maximising out your billable hours… Often means you don’t have time for the other crucial partner level activities like developing business, mentoring juniors or contributing strategically.
In fact, overachieving on your utilisation targets can actually hinder your future promotion prospects. The second thing is this thing about waiting to be fed. And I’m not talking food, I’m talking work. Employees with an employee mindset often involves waiting for work to be allocated for partners.
You know, like that baby bird with their mouth open waiting for the parent to bring them food. If you’re going to think and act like a partner, you need to be thinking every day about how can I actively generate some work, whether that’s building relationships, spotting opportunities, developing your own client base, really being interested in the process of how do I win work? How do I become great at managing clients? How do I win work through my existing clients? And you can’t just rely on work handed down from above if you want to build that partner-sized practice.
The third thing I see that people get wrong is thinking technically, not commercially. So as an employee, your focus is often on delivering technically excellent work. But as a potential partner, you need to think commercially, such as how profitable is this work? Can we deliver it more efficiently? How does this client fit into the overall firm strategy?
Are we building a sustainable practice or just churning hours? And then the last thing is about seeing partnership as just the next step. And I see this far too often, whether it’s actually said or whether you realise that’s the narrative behind it. People believe that it’s a natural progression to make partner based on tenure or technical skill.
You know, well, I’ve been, you know, qualified now, PQE, a lawyer for 10 years. It’s my turn to make partner. I’ve worked for 10 years for this firm. Isn’t it time I was made partner? Well, no. Making partnership is a fundamental shift requiring new skills, responsibility and a business owner’s perspective.
It’s not just about becoming a high performing or a long standing senior associate manager or director. Now, do you recognise any of those mindsets in yourself? And it’s OK if you do. You know, why wouldn’t you believe that? They’re incredibly common unless someone like me comes along and says, oi, think about this.
The key is to now start to consciously shift your mindset. So how can you start thinking and acting like a partner now? I’m going to give you five points. Number one, understand the business. So get curious about how your firm makes money. What are the key profitability drivers? What are the firm’s strategic goals?
How does your work contribute not just to revenue but profit? Secondly, think delegation and leverage. You know, the traditional partnership model and most professional services firms where people sell their time for money, people leverage their time through others, particularly partners and senior fee earners. So how can you delegate more effectively?
And chapter five in points of partnership really goes deep onto this. In fact, systematically delegating is one of the key things that I look for to see whether someone’s demonstrating they’re ready for partnership. You know, but it’s about delegating more effectively to free yourself up for higher value activities.
You know, how can you develop the team beneath you? Third, you need to own your numbers. You know, the most successful people I see that are making partner typically have a spreadsheet where they’re tracking every single piece of work they’ve won, how they’ve won it, how much it was worth, who they won it via, and how much do they get as a result of it.
So don’t just track your time.
You know, understand the financial performance of your matters or clients. Think about recoverability, write-offs and overall profitability.
Just because a firm maybe might not mention profitability and talks about revenue doesn’t mean to say you shouldn’t be interested in how can we do this more efficiently?
How can we minimise the budget we’re going to use? You know, can you proactively suggest ways to improve margins? The fourth point is take initiative on business development. You know, don’t waste to be asked. Start identifying potential opportunities with existing clients.
You know, if still if you’re junior, just be curious about the stuff you’re working on. Ask that extra question. You know, how’s things? It doesn’t need to be anything really technical. Remember to build relationships internally and externally. Treat business development as part of your job now, not something you’ll do when you make partner.
You know, talk about your practice or your business, not just your clients. And the final thing to think about to start to take the right mindset shifts is to be curious and think about the big picture. So when talking with partners, don’t just focus on your current tasks.
Ask about the department or firm strategy, you know, offer up ideas, show that you’re thinking about the bigger picture in the firm’s future, not just your own workload. Now, this mindset shift doesn’t happen overnight. It requires conscious effort and a willingness to step outside the comfort zone of being purely a technical expert.
But adopting this business owner mindset is absolutely fundamental if your goal is to make partner. So let’s summarise now. Making that leap from employee to business owner mindset is one of the biggest and sometimes toughest parts of the journey to partner. It underpins so much of what partners are looking for.
Commerciality, leadership potential, the ability to win work, the ability to contribute to the firm’s growth and success in a meaningful way. Now, if you’re listening and thinking, OK, I see the difference, but I need help making that mindset shift stick. How do I overcome these ingrained employee habits and truly adopt an owner’s perspective?
Then I want to tell you again about something designed for exactly that. If you’re truly committed to progressing your career this year and embedding these crucial mindset shifts, I highly recommend my course, which is in Progress to Partner Academy, How to Truly Commit to Moving Your Career Forward. This course delves deep into identifying and overcoming mindset traps, building the habits to move your career forward and developing the commercial thinking that firms are looking for. It gives you practical tools and strategies to make this vital transition. Now, I’ve dropped a link to buy the How to Truly Commit to Move Your Career Forward course directly in the show notes for the episode.
This course is just one of the 12 plus courses in our Progress to Partner Academy. Also in the show notes, you’ll find links to my book, Poise for Partnership, How to Make Partners Still Have a Life. Today’s episode has been taken from chapter one of Poise for Partnership.
I put the show notes, the links, so you can easily find them on Amazon. And as a thank you for listening, there’s also a link for a 10% discount on annual membership for our Progress to Partner Academy, where we go deep into all aspects of making partner, including cultivating what I’ve been talking about today, the right mindset.
Now that’s all for this episode of the How To Make Partner podcast. Start thinking today, are you operating with an employee mindset or business owner mindset? So what one small change can you make this week to act more like a partner? Remember to hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode. Thanks for listening.
Join my Progress To Partner Academy and access all my courses and use the code PODCASTBP10 to get 10% off 12 months of premium annual membership.
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