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Exclusive interview with Patrick McKenna

Interviewed by Greg Thomas

Patrick J. McKenna is a partner in Edge International where since 1983 he has worked exclusively serving professional service firms worldwide. While based in Canada, Edge International operates from offices in four different countries. Mr. McKenna did his MBA graduate work at the Canadian School of Management, is an alumnus of Harvard University's Leadership in Professional Service Firms program, and has professional certifications in both accounting and management. Mr. McKenna has worked with at least one of the top ten largest professional service firms in each of over a dozen different countries. Patrick is also a contributing author to a number of books on the subjects of the management and marketing of professional services, and is co-developer of two proprietary video-based programs. You can learn more about Patrick and his latest book, First Among Equals at http://www.firstamongequals.com

1. Patrick I have just finished reading an advance copy of your new book, First Among Equals - How to Manage a Group of Professionals, co-authored with David Maister. Tell us what inspired you to author this book and why it is needed?

Well Greg, as I think back, I guess the issues and content contained within First Among Equals has probably been an integral part of my career for quite some time. In an earlier life, while serving as the Vice President of a telecommunications company, I remember working alongside talented electronics engineers who soon realized that the corporate ladder required that they become managers in order to advance their career status and personal compensation. And, of course, electronics engineers, like many other professionals, reflect upon the arduous training that they've already been through to become engineers and figure that management can't be all that difficult.

Not surprisingly, a year or so into the management position these engineers come to realize that the budgeting and administrative tasks may be within their grasp, but the interpersonal and people management challenges extend well beyond anything they were ever trained for. And what's worse, they realize that the all-consuming nature of being a manager has now caused them to fall behind in keeping current with their professional engineering development - they are quickly becoming obsolete in a fast changing profession that was really their primary passion. Now what do they do?

Yet another example; I remember while on the Board of a national pharmaceutical distribution company, watching new pharmacists begin their careers. These young professionals went through rigorous years of medical and pharmaceutical education only to eventually discover that their career advancement was far more dependent upon how well they were equipped to operate a retail drug store, manage staff, and empathize with their customers than it was on how proficient they were at dispensing pills.

In my consulting work during the early 90's, I found that I was increasingly being engaged by clients to help them develop new service groups in areas as diverse as life sciences, franchising, waste management, and in one case, even catering to the special needs of women entrepreneurs. In each of these situations the assignment was essentially the same - assemble a disparate collection of autonomous professionals who had never worked together (and might not even want to) and help them focus their collective resources on the special needs of a common client base.
In each of these situations it soon became apparent that the individual chosen to head-up the particular group may have been chosen because of their seniority, because they were the leading luminary in the area, or because they were an acknowledged developer of new business, but rarely because they possessed the skills of knowing how to inspire, motivate, coach or lead their fellow professionals. In fact, truth be told, it's doubtful that they even wanted the job of being the group leader. In most instances they saw their appointment as a reward or confirmation of their informal status within the firm. They weren't seeing this as a job to be performed.

So I really came to this not as a dispassionate, hands-off observer, but as a surrogate group leader myself. Out of necessity, I had to both work with the group, as a group and also with individual members in one-on-one coaching interventions, while also training that individual who was the appointed group leader to actually function as a group leader.

2. What would you say was your major contribution to the book or the section you personally got most excited about?

It's really difficult to identify one particular section of the book above any other. There isn't a chapter, or even paragraph in this text that David and I didn't both agonize over or rewrite a number of times in an effort to try to make sure our wording was as helpful and prescriptive to the reader as possible. This is a personal bias on my part I'm sure, but many business books I find could be summarized into a decent sized article and you would get the vast majority of the value without ever having to read the entire book. Still others might present you with some interesting information and make you think, but don't necessarily tell you what you should be doing. Our objective in writing First Among Equals was a brain-dump of everything we knew or had learned about working with and managing professional talent, in as usable and prescriptive a manner as possible.

Indeed, in an earlier draft of the manuscript we had actually compiled and isolated some 92 action lists contained throughout the book and decided to repeat them as guidelines in an Appendix. When we realized how that would expand the final text to well beyond 500 pages, we abandoned the idea.

3. The very first section of the book, entitled, "Getting Ready" is mentioned as perhaps the "most important part of the book, because if you don't get this right, nothing else will work". Can you expand upon the importance of a group leader,clarifying their role?

Normally, when you assume a management position, there is usually a job description, a summary of your responsibilities and authority, perhaps some identification of key result areas, a defined job appraisal process, and some sense of your possible career progression. But that is not always the real world in most professional service settings - even within established corporations.

I hearken back again to my experience in the telecommunications industry. My area of expertise was in Corporate Planning, so I was largely responsible for things like preparing financial forecasts, developing scenarios, pursuing merger and acquisition opportunities and so forth. I spent a portion of my time engaged in these professional activities. But I also had management responsibilities overseeing a number of departments including human resources, corporate, and legal affairs. Thus in many respects I was both a practicing professional and the manager of a number of departments. I had to divide my time between being a doer and a supervisor; a player and a coach. And in this setting the challenge can often arise where you may be in the middle of a sensitive and protracted acquisition negotiation and also find yourself needing to find the time to deal with an important staff crisis. Now where do you devote your energies? I at least had some established guidelines and support resources that I could draw upon to help me in those situations. Such is not the case in many professional settings.

All too often, the norm that we observe is some professional who is given the responsibility of heading up a group, usually of their peers, and given next to no job description, training, authority, or guidance as to how much of their time they should devote or what specifically they should be focusing their time on. Worse yet, when there is some guidance provided, it is usually around the routine administrative or budgetary matters, and not around how to effectively deal with a problem performer or energize the group's efforts. Because of the nature of their ongoing professional responsibilities, they are told that they should take time away from their productive activities of writing computer code or providing financial counsel, to manage their group as their time permits - like their time is ever going to permit! And it's not as if they don't want to do a good job of managing their group, it's more a matter of the proper support structure being there to aid their good intentions. As one group leader put it to me when I asked if he had been given any formal outline of his responsibilities or what was expected of him, he replied, "Well, essentially I was told, do a good job or it'll cost you." Now there's a sure-fire recipe for success!

The essence of this first Section, "Getting Ready" is to spell out in minute detail, all of the elements that are necessary for the group leader to get clarity around; from what is expected of you and the time involved, to the kinds of things a team leader must do to actually add value to the group. This section includes not only discussing approaches with upper management, but also clarifying your coaching role with team members, which we think is an often-overlooked aspect of success.

4. In Chapter 15 you discuss an issue that immediately got my attention and I am sure it will engage our readers. It is entitled, "Energize Your Meetings". Since this is a universal need, could you discuss the purpose of this chapter and perhaps give us a few helpful pointers?

I have often joked that group meetings are places where minutes are kept, while hours are lost. I have also said to many group leaders that the true acid test as to whether your meetings really hold any value for those attending is to suspend the food and then see how many people show up!
What I've learned is that the true value to a meeting is whether it provides the platform for meaningful collaboration, the development of action plans, and some realistic mechanism for those action plans getting implemented. In other words, if your meetings simply result in interesting discussions of what everyone has been up to lately, they are probably a waste of time, as that kind of information could have easily been communicated without the investment of expensive resources sitting around a table accomplishing nothing tangible. Just imagine the cost and wasted resources of everyone sitting around a table for an hour and then assessing your return on that investment. The numbers, cumulatively, over a number of groups and multiple meetings, become quite shocking.

Let me give you an example of what transpires at the typical group meeting that we've observed and then what we recommend as an alternative course of action. At the typical meeting, making a huge assumption that there is even an agenda and reason for the meeting and that members will be able to contribute equally, you will see people engaging in a number of discussions on various topics, rarely if ever, reaching consensus of what to do. We conclude that that is why you are likely to hear someone in the group comment, "that our meetings are like television soap operas. You can return in three weeks or three months and pick up exactly where you left off." Pushing this to it's extreme, we would even suggest that in more mature groups, these people usually already know each other so well and each other's positions so intimately, that they can often finish each others sentences . . . unprompted.

We recommend that the group focus it's collective attention on only one issue of importance to the group's future, say how we might train our people to better do their jobs, or improve the level of service and satisfaction that we provide our clients. We then spend the very limited amount of time we have together brainstorming different ideas for how we might go about this task. What we are looking for is new ideas, things we haven't yet done as a group, things that might advance the group's interests.

Now back to your typical meeting. If these participants have ever progressed to generating a list of action plans concerning some issue of interest to the members before, they have likely concluded that meeting by doing one of two things. They have either congratulated themselves on the list of wonderful ideas they generated and adjourned to return to their offices feeling like they have accomplished something. Notice, no real action yet.

Or, the group leader in his or her wisdom has assigned some of these ideas to various members of the group to work on. Now this becomes a fairly self-defeating process. Imagine the leader says, "Greg, I'd like you to take responsibility for task number five." And you are thinking to yourself, well okay. After all you are the group leader and I want to be perceived to be a team player, so if that is the task you want me to take, fine; but it's not exactly the one that appeals to me or the one that I would have chosen.

Worse still, the group leader assigns some task to someone that all of us recognize is so huge, that there isn't a hope in hell that it will get done before our meeting next month. And can it get any worse? Yes it can! How about assigning a task to that member who didn't make it to this meeting. That will certainly teach them not to miss attending our meetings. Needless to say, everyone regroups for the next meeting and ten seconds into the first report we all realize that there isn't any significant action to report. We enter into a demoralizing cycle of what I've come to regard as "promise big, deliver nothing, and be forgiven." Why are we forgiven? We're forgiven because we're all very busy professionals trying to complete those blueprints for the deadline, write the new computer code, or close the client deal on time. So this seemingly non-productive activity is allowed to take a back seat.

Again, what we've learned is that there is nothing more demoralizing to the spirit of a group then letting this happen. Pretty soon you may as well disband the groups, forget trying to function as team, write off the benefits that could be achieved, and just let everybody do their own thing.
What we recommend in First Among Equals is a way to break this cycle. We suggest that as a group leader, you must do three things.

First, allow your people to individually volunteer for that particular task that they, for whatever idiosyncratic reason, find most compelling. Don't assign the tasks. In letting people choose their own homework assignments, they will be far more motivated and far more committed.

Second, instill an atmosphere of no pressure, allowing people to opt out of volunteering for any task. In other words, if you impose a subtle pressure for everyone to have to volunteer, it will serve to deliver no better results than assigning a task. We have to accept that in some sense when working with busy professionals, we are really dealing with volunteers in the truest sense of the term. An effective leader might say to the group, "In a moment I am going to go around the table and I would like to hear from each of you in turn. I would like to hear from you as to whether there is one idea from the lists of ideas that we have generated that you would be prepared to work on over the next month. Now I accept that you may either not see an idea that you are sufficiently excited to want to work on, or alternatively you may be so weighted down by your current work load, that to take on any more would be an unfair burden on you. Should that be the case, when I get to you, you need only say 'pass'. No explanations, no obligations, no recriminations. However, if you do take on a project, then my obligation will be both to help ensure that you only accept a task that is small enough that it can actually be completed by our next meeting, and I will undertake to try to help you with that task. Your obligation is, under no circumstances, to come to the next meeting without your task fully completed. Because if that happens, you will not have let me down as the group leader, you will have let your group down. And does anyone here really want to continue having meetings where nothing is accomplished?"

Lastly, carefully define the parameters of volunteering for any task - both time expected and deliverables. I've come to believe that most of us regard the time we invest in group activities as something that needs to be fair and equitable. People have told me, "I'm prepared to do my bit; I want to be seen to be a team player, as long as I don't come back to the next meeting and find out that I was the only sucker who did anything." So we say to group leaders, here's what you've got to do. You have to define an equal amount of time that every member should be expected to work on activities that benefit the group, and that time commitment should be fairly modest. Hypothetically then, let's say it's three hours a month. A very modest commitment, maybe higher for some groups; but it should be agreeable to the members of the group, not a number that the leader imposes.

The group leader would then say to his or her members, "As you look at those various ideas we've generated, think in terms of what you might be able to accomplish with an investment of no more than three dedicated hours of your time. Now you might see an idea there that excites you and would involve many multiples of three hours. In that event, please think in terms of what the first logical step might be that could be taken to advance the implementation of that task. I want to hear from each of you what specifically we may expect that you will bring back to the next meeting. Is it a report, is it an outline, is it evidence of the task being completed? Let's be specific."

5. In a later section of the book you dedicate a chapter to measuring group results and conducting a group self-evaluation. Many people wouldn't consider doing this, and would just assume that if the group got the assigned "task completed" they were successful! Tell us why measuring group results is so important?

One of my favorite parts of this chapter is going beyond the basic team evaluation guidelines into effective and practical suggestions for specific ways to evaluate leadership. It isn't always easy for leaders to open themselves up to receive feedback, especially when it is essentially coming from their peers, but we attempted to provide a format and numerous suggestions to make this relatively painless and the means by which any group leader can achieve credibility with their team members.

As we put forth in the book: There is an old military saying that goes, "Leadership is not saying 'Charge'; it is saying 'Follow Me!'" Accordingly, if you want to send a message that your group should be willing to review and be held accountable for its performance, it follows that you should be willing to go first. We recommend that, once a year, you invite all your people to evaluate your performance as a practice leader. This is scary, but powerful. And at the end of the process, you are better positioned to say, "OK, I've been willing to discuss my performance, now it's your turn!"

We strongly believe that group leaders should be measured and appraised predominantly by how well their group has done, with their own personal statistics being deemed a lesser performance target. Only improving the group's success represents a complete fulfillment of the role. If they can help the group succeed while still fulfilling their own professional obligations, so much the better. But if they cannot do both, then it is clear that the number one priority is the group.

6. Patrick you are a professional management consultant and have authored a number of best-selling management books. Do you have any other projects in the works you can discuss?

As you know, the majority of my consulting work is with professional service firms and breaks down into two discrete areas - practice management (the materials contained within First Among Equals) and strategy, most specifically, strategic innovation.

Now while the latest corporate studies and the most insightful tome from the pen of management guru Peter Drucker may proclaim the one business competence needed for the future to be innovation, most professional service firms have been slow to embrace the importance, concept or methodologies.

The commonly held view that innovation is about creativity is only one side of the coin. If a group of professionals have lots of off-the-wall ideas, they may be creative, but innovation only happens when and if you can convert those ideas into something of value. The challenge then is two-fold. First there is the question of how to go about getting the good ideas out of your professional's heads, out of those casual and brief corridor discussions, such that they might actually see the light of day. Then there is the issue of recognizing that a great idea is just a great idea without excellence in execution. So, you have a need for both creative ideas and effective execution.

But there is also a strategic imperative. A great idea executed effectively is only worthwhile if that idea represents something of value to clients and offers a means of creating new wealth and differentiating your firm. Getting an idea for how to build a better mousetrap may be creative. Building that better mousetrap may be an example of excellence in execution. But strategic innovation lies in developing a whole new way to get rid of mice. It is not about marginal improvement on a marginal product. To be competitive, and strategically significant, it has to be a serious leap forward.

My challenge within the professional world is that far too much credence is given to concepts like precedent and best practices; all of which I contend suppress innovation. So much of my research and writing as of late has been centered around this topic and I'm currently compiling a data base of innovation examples drawn from sources around the world, of firms who are doing something innovative and worthy of being emulated. Perhaps my next book, who knows.

Thanks Patrick!

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