Careers - Partners in weighting

For the consultant who chooses to stay on in a large practice, career progression almost always means taking on more responsibility for the management of the business as well as his or her work with clients. The transition from the “front line” to a management role such as partner is a gradual one, says Duncan Mackison of recruitment consultancy Armadillo.

“Responsibility comes as the years go by, from managing a team at the client’s, to managing projects. They grow into it.”

There are a couple of points, though, at which the transition is more of a step change: the move to partner status, and for a much smaller number, joining the inner management team which runs the practice as a whole.

Andy Bell became a partner in Price Waterhouse’s financial services practice one year ago and is now based in the firm’s Frankfurt office. He says: “The challenge is to remain involved while giving the person in the senior manager role you’ve vacated the chance to add value. Initially it’s difficult – you have to step back and apply some coaching skills.”

Consultants are characteristically doers, and they can find that delegation and administration are less interesting than working for clients.

Consultancy is unusual, however, in that at virtually all levels promotion does not mean the end of being a practitioner. Management and business development take up more time but the most senior consultants prefer to retain hands-on involvement with clients.

One of the key differences between partner/director level and a line consultant is the responsibility for business development. That’s something most consultants are not good at, according to Len Collinson, director of the north-west-based practice Collinson Grant. “The difficulty is in looking outwards and ensuring there is a workflow. It’s actually selling and the vast majority fail at that, because of ego.”

For the practice which is structured as a legal partnership, becoming a partner means a share of the profits and admission into a collegiate inner circle. It can also mean exposure to cash calls and the threat of a professional liability claim which could put all the partners’ assets at risk because of an error made by just one of them. The risk is especially great in an accountancy-based practice, where lawsuits can reach astronomical figures. PW’s Bell admits his move was “a bit of a leap of faith” but says he is confident that the more professional approach to liability exposures being taken by PW and the other Big Six firms makes it “a fairly safe bet”.

The potential risks do not put most people off, according to Ian Thomisson, a specialist in management consultancy recruitment at Douglas Llambias Associates. “To be a partner is the goal. There are people who have told me they are not sure, but when they are tapped on the shoulder they go through with it. They feel they have worked for it.”

To be a partner in the larger firms is still to be a small fish in a big pond though. There are around 3,000 partners in PW worldwide. Partners in consultancy practices tend not to manage very large departments: 10-15 consultants would be a typical team. The strategic management of the practice as a business is in the hands of a much smaller group, usually in single figures even for a large practice. According to Barry Curnow, immediate past president of the Institute of Management Consultants, this marks the real divide between consulting and managing. “People can go on doing professional work for longer than in most occupations, but at the top of a consulting firm there is that shift to administration. It happens later and further up, but it happens.”

Curnow adds: “The consequence is that it is easier for people to rise and be rewarded for client work, but also easier for them to ignore the business issues which the top management must address. It’s hard to groom people for the top job, to give them the experience for it and to interest them in it.”

Peter Copping, a management group member at PA Consulting, says: “Most search consultants say that anyone who has been in consulting for some time isn’t suitable for management elsewhere. People do make that move and succeed in it, but are they brilliant managers or brilliant leaders? I would argue the latter.”

Copping believes that leadership, rather than “management” is the key to running a successful consultancy: leading by staying on top of the marketplace issues which affect clients, and by showing colleagues that you can work for others, not just yourself. He says: “It’s the example that inspires – as opposed to sitting in your office, pulling the strings.”

It is often said that consultants are hard to manage. The phrase “herding cats” neatly sums up the problems of leading a team of highly intelligent individualists. Opinions vary as to whether line management experience elsewhere is any help when it comes to managing in a consultancy context.

Collinson prefers people with management experience from industry to those from the big consulting practices, on the grounds that they understand the clients better. Copping’s experience is that those from industry find the lack of obvious status symbols – a big office, a personal secretary – off-putting, and the project-based approach of a consultancy unsettling: “It is harder to come in as a former line manager than without that baggage.”

Most practices have development programmes aimed at preparing individuals for promotion. But, says Curnow, “Practices often do a good job of training consultants to do everything but run their own firm.”

Of course, the contrasting structure of different firms means that the job of managing them varies a good deal. PA Consulting radically changed its structure after finding that more and more of its top people were being drawn into management at the expense of fee-earning client work.

Copping says: “It nearly led to the demise of PA. I still see it happening in other consultancies.”

Now at PA, senior consultants are rotated into and out of management roles. No director on the company’s board serves for more than two terms and practice heads also change on a regular basis. Copping says: “We don’t regard a management position as something people are vested with for the rest of their career.”

The approach contrasts with KPMG’s UK consulting practice, for example, which is currently headed by Alan Reid, a partner with a background in tax rather than consultancy. More ammunition, perhaps, for those who believe consultants do not make the best managers.

Both PW and PA Consulting have recently taken steps to create more opportunities for skilled consultants who prefer to develop their consultancy rather than become managers. In PW’s case, says Bell, “the firm is simplifying the grade structure but recognising skills and experience in a more complex, flexible way.”

PA’s Copping says: “There is space for ‘gurus’, but the big debate is how you cope with the guru when those characteristics contrast markedly with leadership qualities and teamworking.”

Certainly, in most practices it remains a stigma to be stuck at manager while more recent joiners go on to partner level and beyond. Consultants should be constantly learning, and taking on new challenges. But the high turnover in the profession is expensive in terms of loss of continuity and recruitment/development costs. Until more firms find some way of resolving that dilemma, the ambitious consultant must be prepared to take on a leadership role even if that means doing less of what attracted him or her into the profession in the first place.

Robert Outram is a freelance writer.