Only 31% of professionals pursuing partnership have a career plan that is genuinely guiding their progression. Nearly seven in ten are navigating one of the most important career transitions of their lives on good intentions alone, and then wondering why six months have gone by and nothing has moved.
This episode covers the third of the 12 key indicators of partnership readiness: Plan. It introduces the two tools that make the difference between intending to progress your career and actually doing it: your ONE BIG FOCUS and your Default Diary. And it addresses the “when”. The perfectly reasonable-sounding reason you haven’t started yet, and why it is costing you more than you think.
In this episode you will learn:
- Why treating your career progression as a client, with allocated time and protected diary slots, will unlock your career progression
- How the ONE BIG FOCUS approach works to get traction with your career progression and personal development
- The neuroscience behind small consistent actions work better than trying to do the big things
- What a Default Diary actually looks like and why only 22% of professionals have one in place, and what the other 78% are losing as a result
Take the Partnership Readiness Assessment
Free to complete, 15–20 minutes, and gives you a personalised report across all 12 key indicators, including exactly where to focus your first ONE BIG FOCUS. Take the assessment here.
Download the Plan Chapter from Poised for Partnership for free
Download 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 Plan is where you need to focus, you’ll find everything in one place:
Inside the Plan indicator, you’ll find practical support to help you turn career progression from something you intend to do into something that actually happens.
You’ll find resources to help you build a clear, workable plan, including:
• How to Truly Commit to Moving Your Career Forward
• Default Diary Planner Exercise
• My Perfect Day Exercise
• Partner Track Plan template
These resources will help you:
• Create protected time for your career development
• Identify your ONE BIG FOCUS for the next 90 days
• Build a career plan you are motivated to follow
• Work out what needs to happen weekly, not just eventually
• Turn your career goals into consistent action
If Plan is where you need to focus, this section of the Academy will help you stop relying on good intentions and start building the habits, structure and clarity that move your career forward.
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
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Hello, and welcome!
Only 31% of professionals pursuing partnership have a career plan that is actually guiding their progression.
Let me repeat that for emphasis, only 31% of professionals pursuing partnership have a career plan that is guiding their progression.
That surprised me too. After all this is a population of people who are educated, bright, ambitious and generally informed.
But this means that nearly seven in ten people on the partnership track are navigating one of the most complex career transitions they will ever make without a map. They know roughly where they want to get to. They have good intentions. But they do not have a written plan with clear priorities and time set aside to work on it.
And then they wonder why six months have gone by and nothing has moved.
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 the third: Plan. New episodes are released weekly, so press subscribe so you never miss one.
Right. Let’s talk about what a Partner Track Plan actually is and why most people don’t have one.
The honest answer to why most people don’t have a plan is time. Your diary is full of client work. Partners are asking for things. Deadlines are landing. The career development stuff sits in the background as a good intention. Something you’ll get to when things are quieter. And of course, things never get quieter. So it never gets done.
Here’s a reframe that I find genuinely useful. You already have a number of clients you service consistently and well. You block time for them, you prepare for meetings, you follow up. Now: when did you last treat your own career progression with the same seriousness? Because your career is also a client. It requires time allocation, preparation, and follow-through. The moment you start treating it that way — booking time in your diary and protecting it — the plan stops being a good intention and starts being a real thing.
So what does the plan actually look like? There are two components that work together. The first is your ONE BIG FOCUS. The second is your Default Diary.
Let’s take them in turn.
Your ONE BIG FOCUS is the one thing you want to change or achieve in the next 90 days that will drive your career forward the most.
Not three things. Not five things. Just One.
When you get your Partnership Readiness Assessment back, you will very likely have multiple areas showing amber or red. The temptation is to try to tackle all of them at once. Please don’t. When you try to change too many things simultaneously, your brain gets overwhelmed and nothing gets done. Every time. It is not a discipline problem. It is how the brain works.
Instead, look at your priorities and identify which is the most important one for the next 90 days. Then break it down into what you want to achieve by 30, 60 and 90 days, and translate those into specific actions you can put in your diary each week.
I’ll give you a concrete example of how this works. Say your three priorities are “get more client work,” “release time to work on my career,” and “delegate more.” Only one of those is an Outcome: getting more client work. The other two are Actions — they are the things you need to do in order to create the conditions to win more work. So your ONE BIG FOCUS becomes: win £120k of new work in the next 90 days. And the actions beneath it — delegating more, protecting planning time, calling existing clients — are how you get there.
When you focus on one thing at a time and break it into small weekly actions, something useful happens in your brain. When you anticipate completing a task, you get a hit of dopamine. When you complete it, another hit. When you review your progress, another. That is three doses of positive reinforcement from one small action. This is why small, consistent weekly tasks compound so effectively over time. You are not just making progress. You are building a habit of making progress.
The second component is your Default Diary — and this is the piece that makes the difference between a plan that lives on paper and a plan that actually gets implemented. You may know this as ‘time blocking’.
Only 22% of professionals have put in place the right structure and routine to help them progress their career consistently. The other 78% are letting the urgent crowd out the important, every week, without really noticing it’s happening.
By the way these figures have come from the 1000s of people who have completed our partnership readiness assessment. And these are the people who are motivated to move their career forward!
A Default Diary is your standard weekly structure: the recurring blocks you protect regardless of what else is going on. Business development time. Team check-ins. Planning time. And critically, time to work on your Partner Track Plan. One of our clients blocked every Friday morning for this. Not for client work, not for emails, for her career plan. That protected time was what allowed her to make consistent progress while her peers were spinning.
Now I want to say something directly to the people who are currently sitting with a “when.” As in: I’ll start my plan when my current deal closes. When things calm down after the next review. When I’m in a better position to think about this. I hear this constantly, and I want to name it for what it is: your brain bringing out what I call the Too Hard Box. It is your rational brain, which gets overwhelmed very quickly, steering you back to the familiar and comfortable. The “when” rarely arrives. And even if it does, there will be another “when” right behind it.
The best thing you can do right now is not to wait until you have the perfect plan. It is to take one small action. Book 30 minutes in your diary this week specifically to work on your ONE BIG FOCUS. That’s it. Action creates momentum. Momentum creates more action. It really can start that small.
Mike, a senior associate in a top 50 UK law firm, was in high demand from partners and couldn’t find the time to develop his own client base. He set aside Monday mornings for business development and built a non-negotiable weekly routine around it. His leads and matters originated doubled within six months. Not because he suddenly had more hours in the day. Because he stopped waiting for his workload to drop and put the time in the diary first.
Here’s the thing about a plan. You will tend to overestimate what you can achieve in 90 days and underestimate what you can achieve over two to three years of consistent effort. The Partner Track is a marathon. Pace yourself. One big focus, one 90-day plan, reviewed and reset every quarter. That rhythm, maintained consistently, is what will consistently progress your career. And all the way to partnership if you want.
If you want help building this structure, the Partnership Readiness Assessment is the right starting point. It tells you where your gaps are across all 12 indicators, so you can identify your first ONE BIG FOCUS with confidence. The link is in the show notes below.
Inside the Progress to Partner Academy, the resources under the Plan indicator include everything you need to create your Partner Track Plan and Default Diary and make them stick.
Our How to truly commit to moving your career forward on demand course, plus the default diary planner exercise and the my perfect day exercise in our progress to partner academy will help you with everything you have been learning in this episode.
As a thank you for listening, there is 10% off annual membership using the code PODCAST10.
That’s all for this episode. Your action for this week: identify your ONE BIG FOCUS for the next 90 days. Write it down. Then put one 30-minute block in your diary this week to take the first action on it. Don’t wait for when it gets quieter. It isn’t coming.
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 fourth key indicator: Support Team.
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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