Direction – The question no one asks before going for partner

This episode covers the second of the 12 key indicators of partnership readiness: Direction. Using the real story of a lawyer who only discovered the partnership wasn’t right for her when a hard choice forced the question, this episode explores what it means to have genuine clarity about your direction, and why getting this wrong is, as one expert puts it, a fate worse than not making partner at all.

In this episode you will learn:

• Why the culture of professional services firms makes it easy to pursue partnership by default rather than by choice, and the cost of that
• What the three components of Direction are (vision, values and purpose) and why you need all three before you can make an informed decision about partner
• The realities of the partner role that often come as a surprise, and the question you should be asking yourself about each of them
• What due diligence on your firm actually means, and why most people skip it on the day the offer comes through

Take the Partnership Readiness Assessment

Free to complete, 15–20 minutes, and gives you a personalised report across all 12 key indicators: https://www.howtomakepartner.com/partnership-readiness-assessment/

Buy Poised for Partnership – https://amzn.to/3ETEYk3

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 Direction is where you need to focus, you’ll find everything in one place:

Inside the Direction indicator, you’ll find practical support to help you get clear on where you are heading, what matters most now, and how to turn career development into something that actually happens.

You’ll find video webinars on:

• How to get unstuck if you are at a career crossroads
• How to make sure your career development actually happens
• What to do if you’re getting overwhelmed with how to develop your career
• Why goals often don’t work when it comes to progressing your career

You’ll also find the course:

How to Truly Commit to Moving Your Career Forward

This is a foundation course for your career progression. It helps you create the time, space and habits to work on your career consistently, rather than leaving it to chance.

Inside the course, you’ll work through how to:

• Create time each week to focus on your career plan
• Build a career plan you feel motivated and energised to implement
• Create habits that support your progression
• Set your first One Big Focus, so you know exactly what to prioritise over the next 90 days

This course will also help you get more from the rest of the courses, workbooks, short videos.

Use code PODCAST10 for 10% off annual membership: https://www.howtomakepartner.com/get-progress-to-partner/

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

The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charles H. Green and Robert Galford – https://amzn.eu/d/057k24Iq 

You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts

Hello, and welcome!

She was on track to make partner. Technically excellent, well-regarded, the partners were championing her. Then she got pregnant, and her firm gave her an ultimatum: come back full-time after maternity leave and stay on the partner track, or move into a support role part-time. Neither option felt right. So she left.

And here’s the thing. Lindsey didn’t leave because she failed. She left because she had never stopped to ask whether this particular firm, with these particular expectations, was actually what she wanted. She’d been swept along by momentum. And only when a hard choice forced the question did she realise the answer was no.

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. We are working through the 12 key indicators of partnership readiness, and today we are on indicator two: Direction. New episodes are released weekly, so press subscribe so you never miss one.

Right. Let’s talk about why Direction matters, and why it is the indicator most people want to skip.

If you are a typical lawyer, accountant or consultant, you are already tempted to move past this one. You want the practical stuff, the how-to actions, the things you can put in your diary. The inner work feels soft. And I want to push back on that, because in my experience this is not soft at all. It is actually the hardest part. The stuff which, if you choose to avoid it, will trip you up.

Whenever we run a how to make partner programme and ask people to do this inner work on themselves this is where we get the biggest push back. 

Only 44% of the professionals who have completed our Partnership Readiness Assessment have truly considered whether the partner role is right for them and made an informed decision about it. More than half of the people actively pursuing partnership have not seriously asked themselves: do I actually want this?

That is a remarkable statistic. And it makes sense when you understand the culture that produces it. You joined your firm because you were bright, talented and ambitious. The assumption in most professional service firms is that of course someone like you is going for partner. Anything else would be a waste of your potential. The idea that partnership might not be for everyone doesn’t get much airtime. So people keep moving forward, hitting the next target, passing the next milestone, without ever stopping to check whether the destination is one they actually chose.

Charles Green, co-author of The Trusted Advisor, put it bluntly: there is a fate worse than not making partner, and that is making partner and hating it. I think about that a lot. Because I have worked with people who got there and were miserable. And the tragedy is that it was entirely avoidable.

So let’s look at what Direction actually requires you to do.

The first part is understanding what makes you tick. And I mean properly understanding it, not in a vague “I want to help clients and develop people” way. Your Direction is a combination of three things: your vision — what you want to achieve in your lifetime; your values — the principles you choose to live by; and your purpose, your reason for being.

When you are clear on those three things, you can make an informed decision about whether the partner role will actually deliver the life you want. Not the life that looks good on paper. The life you wake up looking forward to. Our How to truly commit to moving your career forward course in our Progress To Partner Academy will take you through 3 exercises in a step by step way that will give you this clarity.

The second part is being honest about what the partner role actually involves. And this is where a lot of people have a gap between expectation and reality.

As a partner, business development is not optional. It is not something you do when client work is quiet. It is part of the job. You will need to motivate a whole team or practice area, not just get yourself to the desk and perform. You will share in the profits rather than receive a salary, which means in a lean year, you might have to put your own money into the firm and forego your drawings. You will sometimes have to make decisions that are not universally popular, including performance managing someone you trained with and consider a friend. The short and long-term health of the firm is now your responsibility.

When you read that list, how many of those things excite you? That’s not a trick question. If the honest answer is: most of them, brilliant, carry on. But if several of them made your stomach drop, that is information worth paying attention to before you are three years into a partner track that ends somewhere you don’t want to be.

The third part of Direction is one that almost nobody thinks about, and it is doing your due diligence on the firm you are joining.

On the day you are admitted to the partnership, you will resign from your firm and become self-employed. You will make a significant capital contribution — effectively buying a slice of equity. You will leave the firm’s pension scheme, lose your employment rights, and tie your personal reputation to the firm’s. And most people sign on the dotted line without reading the small print properly, because they are so pleased to have been offered the partnership that the due diligence feels almost rude. Or, and this is very common, they haven’t been given access to the partnership agreement or firm’s accounts BEFORE they sign. I know, it’s weird isn’t but, but more common than you think.

The people who worked for Arthur Andersen in 2002 or Axiom Ince in 2023 probably didn’t see what was coming either. The capital contributions those partners had been making over the years disappeared when the firm did. The loan they had taken out to fund their buy-in did not.

I am not telling you this to be alarming. I am telling you this because Direction is about choosing consciously. That means understanding what you are committing to, including what happens to your capital if you leave, whether the firm’s values align with yours, and whether you can genuinely see yourself working with these people for the next twenty years. Because that is what you are signing up for.

Direction is the indicator that asks you to do the work before the work. Before the business case, before the business development plan, before any of it — get clear on whether this is what you actually want, in this firm, on these terms.

If you want structured help with this, the best starting point is the Partnership Readiness Assessment, which will show you how you score on Direction alongside all 11 other indicators. The link is in the show notes below.

Inside the Progress to Partner Academy, the resources are curated by key indicator. Under Direction, you will find everything in one place to help you get this clarity.

In our How to truly commit to moving your career forward course you will be guided in module 2 of the course to get clarity on your vision, values and purpose.

As a thank you for listening, there is 10% off annual membership using the code PODCAST10. Link in the show notes.

That’s all for this episode. Your action for this week: ask yourself honestly — if someone removed all the social expectation and assumed momentum around making partner, would you still choose it? And would you choose it in this firm?

If the answer is yes, that clarity is going to sustain you through everything that comes next.

If it’s not a clear yes — that is worth knowing now rather than three years down the line.

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’ll be looking at the third key indicator: Plan.

Thanks for listening!

Links

Complete my FREE Partnership Readiness Assessment – to see where you have gaps in your own development – you’ll get a personalised report with actions for what progress your career forward

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Join Progress To Partner Academy and use the code PODCAST10 to get 10% off 12 months of premium annual membership.

Buy your hard copy of Poised for Partnership or buy the Ebook here

Buy your copy of How To Make Partner And Still Have A Life

Buy your copy of The Go To Expert 

Buy your copy of The Financial Times Guide To Business Networking 

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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