Art's principles

50 years of hard-learned lessons in building a world-class professional services firm

Arthur Gensler, Michael Lindenmayer, Doug Wittnebel

• Publisher: Wilson Lafferty
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780986106910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Art's Principles reveals the blueprint behind one of the most successful professional services firms, giving career-minded individuals the tools they need to excel in business. The book covers the essentials of leadership, talent acquisition and operations, while outlining the creative strategies that propelled a small business into one of the largest and most admired in its industry. This guidebook is full of well-tested ideas that are applicable to someone running a small, medium or large a professional firm-or running any project where people, profit and customers matter.

Talent

20

Hire the Best

The Power of Hiring

Hiring the right people is one of the most important skills you need as a business owner or leader. When you get the right person for the right position at the right time, it creates an ability to thrive. Professionals look for careers, not jobs. Create an environment where your people can grow and build their skills.

Talent is critical. Become a student of hiring. Develop a recruitment strategy. Be a magnet for talent. The problem is that people often hire the wrong person at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. When you do this, you encourage disaster.

Being the Best

Hire the best talent you can afford. Ask yourself: How do you define being the best? Is it about finding the most competent technical expert? Is it about finding people with years of relevant experience? Yes and no. Yes, you want to find skilled talent. Yes, a strong track record is ideal. Does this equate to being the best? Not necessarily.

“Hire the best athletes. A willingness to take chances. An ability to generate original ideas. An active curiosity.”

— TOM LANDRY

Technical expertise is not the only answer. Make sure you offer projects and opportunities that will instill in your new employees a drive for excellence and opportunity. You must also offer reasonable compensation and benefits to reap the success of an organization where everybody is pulling together to build a world-class firm.

Beyond the Basics

While most people make the mistake of singling out technical skills as the most important attribute, I think a person must have two other attributes in order to be considered the best: good character and the ability to be a team player.

When hiring, consider not only whether the candidates can do the job, but also whether they will continue to grow as the organization grows. If your people are preoccupied with only themselves, they may be more prone to unethical behavior. If they focus on who they are now, plus who they want to be in the future, they will behave ethically.

Content of Your Character

Character is the bedrock of people. It drives their decision-making and how they treat others. A person’s character can strengthen your firm’s culture or poison it. Discovering the content of a person’s character during the interview process is extremely important.

When you evaluate a person’s character, look for five qualities before hiring them:

• Look for drive. You want people who are passionate about their profession. They should be excited to wake up, jump into action, and make an impact on a daily basis. Eliminate people who just punch the clock, dread their jobs, and are in it only for the paycheck.
• Look for confidence, as it enables a person to take an expansive view on life. Confidence fuels curiosity and leads to new possibilities. People who lack confidence usually have a narrow perspective. They let fear envelop them, keeping them from exploring or dealing with change.
• Discipline must be coupled with passion and confidence. You are running a business. Make sure your people have the focus and commitment it takes to deliver on promises to clients.
• New hires must know right from wrong. It is non-negotiable. Jack Welch’s motto was, “Do not do anything you wouldn’t want to show up on the front page of the newspaper.” Trust is hard to earn and easily destroyed by bad behavior. Keep your firm strong by bringing in people who do the right thing.
• Finally, it is so important to seek people who demonstrate that making a difference in the world matters to them, both at work and outside of it. Inquire about which charitable and philanthropic issues are important to them. Do they volunteer? Are there issues that they are passionate about and are proactively trying to improve?

Teamwork

Most professional services firms are small because they do not know how to build effective teams. Look for talent with experience playing team sports, being part of musical groups, or being involved in charitable projects. Ask potential hires to describe their team experiences. Observe whether they acknowledge the contributions of others, or are egocentric. Seek people who love being part of a team versus feeling trapped by it.

Even if you take the smallest unit of a single service provider and a single client, you see a team dynamic. As you build a firm at scale, the one way to avoid the plague of a “Me vs. Us” attitude is to be certain that you have talent whose default approach is teamwork.

21

Attract and Keep Talent

Hire People Smarter Than You

Do you want to go beyond being a solo entrepreneur? Do you want your firm to become great? As a group leader, do you want to expand or improve? In all these instances, you will need to attract and keep talented people.

While you seek to recruit the right talent for the right position at the right time, one question you should always ask yourself is: Is this person smarter than I am? They might not be smarter than you in your area of expertise, but stronger in another area. Does hiring this individual raise the bar for your organization? Will they bring that special expertise to your organization?

Put aside your ego and ask probing questions to determine whether they are smarter than you are. By surrounding yourself with smart people, you have the best chance of consistently creating value for your clients. A bright and intelligent new employee can supply the talent your organization needs in areas where you are not an expert.

Responsibility plus Authority

Very smart people want to make use of their talents. They are hungry for responsibility and welcome the chance to flex their minds. Challenging assignments give them an opportunity to grow.

You should do everything possible to empower talent to serve your clients and represent your firm in the most positive way possible. The key to unlocking your talents’ potential is to make sure they are given the authority they need to succeed. Authority enables them to access resources and make decisions that help advance the firm. Some managers are afraid to empower others. If you are one of these leaders, I suggest you offer levels of authority. As your talent makes wise decisions, you can grant greater levels of authority. Always match the responsibilities you give them with the right amount of authority to get the job done.

Keep Your Word

Finding the right talent is one thing, retaining it is another. The single best way to keep your talent is to keep your word. Talented employees want to understand what it takes for them to perform, grow within the firm, and succeed. It is your responsibility to make sure they understand what is required.

Be candid about it. Living by your words creates authenticity. This is the only way a true merit system takes root and thrives. Meritocracy is absolutely the best way to consistently attract outstanding talent year after year. It has worked for our firm for the past 50 years.

22

Invest in Your People

When a good athlete successfully jumps over the high bar, what does a good coach do? First, celebrate the accomplishment, then raise the bar. Focus on strengths. Coaches show only winning plays, not where failure has occurred. Visualize winning.

Your Team Is Your Business

Your talent is your business in the professional services world. As an owner or leader, you are responsible for making sure that your firm is investing in its talent.

Start Training Right Away

If you are just starting out, you might think that investing in your people is a luxury. You are mistaken. It is a necessity. Make it a priority as a sole proprietor and on through the time you become a large-scale organization.

Even when I was starting out and cash was tight, I found ways to bring in experts to help us improve. I worked with a top lawyer, Dennis Rice. I had relationships with top engineering consultants, and early on I hired a professor, Glen Strasberg, to teach us business skills after-hours. Fortunately, today there are multitudes of online resources, many of them free. You have no excuse to avoid investing in your team from the beginning.

Get Everyone Involved

When you build your firm, make sure that a passion for self-improvement is part of the culture. By doing this, you lay the groundwork to activate everyone as an educator. Senior talent can take on the mentor role, but as you bring young talent onboard, they can serve as reverse mentors by exposing senior members to new technologies and new trends.

Learn from Athletic Teams

When we think about investing in our people, we often approach it much like sports coaches would with their teams. The coaches with the best track records often have surprisingly straightforward workout regimens for their players. They understand that for every sport, there is a core program that serves as the fundamental building blocks for achieving high performance at game time. They know it takes a constant and consistent investment in everyone on the team getting these fundamentals right in order to produce season after season of victories.

Core Professional Services Regimen

There are three ways to invest in the education of your talent. This applies to all professional services firms.

INVEST IN CROSS-TRAINING: While you want your talent to be deep in one area of expertise, it is equally important that they have a solid understanding of how other groups work within your firm. By encouraging different groups to collaborate through learning activities, you create major benefits. Both your talent and your firm become resilient. Markets come and go, and the pace at which this happens is getting faster and faster. Cross-training helps you navigate this reality. The better cross-trained your people are, the more likely they will be able to adapt and adjust to new opportunities once the old ones no longer exist.

Also, collaboration efforts improve your team. Cross-training creates meaningful experiences between different gro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Preface
• Building Service Companies
• Culture
• Leadership
• Talent
• Daily Work Life
• Strategy
• Operations
• Winning Business
• Power of Design
• Design Process
• History of Gensler
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• The Authors