Читать книгу Never Say Sell - Tom McMakin - Страница 21

Firms often struggle with how to bring up junior partners. “I worry about where our next generation of rainmakers will come from,” says a partner at a leading HR consultancy.

There are a variety of training programs and distinct steps that firms employ to prepare their newer hires to one day land and expand work on their own. Ashley Horne at Womble Bond Dickinson describes her law firm's learning and development program. “We provide a lot of training and upskilling for our attorneys. We have a Leadership Womble program that's directed at our partners. It allows them to get a kind of mini-MBA in which they really dig into a business development issue the firm is grappling with and help develop solutions. We also have a Getting to Equity program for counsel where they learn about relationship management, how to look for triggering issues that are good from a BD perspective, and how to drive the growth of their books of business. They meet with various sides of our firm (both operationally and Client Development – focused) to better inform their efforts.”

That said, although some firms have a curriculum and “universities” focused on helping senior managers make this leap to becoming a “finder,” the rule is still that most young professionals learn business development by osmosis with partners proactively deciding to bring someone along in apprenticeship – not by structured or systematic training.

They surely didn't learn it at their professional schools. Says Cole Silver, chief client officer at Blank Rome, “Law schools are missing the boat. You know, they teach us how to be really good lawyers and tacticians, but they don't really teach us anything about the business of law, about getting clients, about managing other lawyers, or about taking care of clients in a service-oriented way. I even, actually, approached the dean of the law school once to teach a class on marketing and business development for the law school, and they said, ‘Well, we can't get accreditation through the ABA, so we can't do it.'”

Leading firms often try to combine the best of both worlds, creating structured programs that bring high potential professionals together in a peer-learning setting and rotate them between accomplished partners to give the future finders exposure to a variety of rainmaking styles, and a culture of best practices emerges, where these managers share their lessons and various approaches with one another.

Firms ignore this kind of intentional training at their peril. As Trey Cox, partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, says, “[We] went to law school. We spent our time there learning the law. No one taught us this stuff. It is neither natural nor instinctive.”