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6. "Performance management" can be a real issue in a culture of peers. Appropriate training for both new and existing professionals is required to help them manage people effectively, and to learn how to give and received appropriate feedback.
Technical experts rarely number people skills among their prominent characteristics, so putting them in charge of teams of people is often not conducive to effective management, or strengthening client relationships.
To make matters worse, most technical experts are fiendishly clever, but have a real blind spot when it comes to making them understand why people skills matter. And if they happen to be a partner as well, the degree of difficulty associated with providing meaningful performance management can be truly stupendous.
Coaching helps with professionals who are prepared to try. Recalcitrants may require sterner measures. In my view, many technical experts should just settle for being rich - there's no shame in not being a good people manager, but there's no inherent career path for bad people managers, regardless of how brilliant they are. It is never a cost effective solution to ignore the problem.
7. Emotional intelligence is not an oxy-moron. Leaders of service firms need to be chosen, and then constantly evaluated for their intuitiveness, their emotional intelligence, and their willingness to tackle the big problems around people and culture.
Too often, leaders are chosen for all the wrong reasons. Of course, we need leaders who can stretch us, challenge us, and make us more competitive, but equally, we need leaders who will listen, be responsive, thoughtful, and empathetic. Who can talk easily about values, and more importantly, live them. Leaders who are optimistic and engaged - we're over cynicism and apathy.
A good leader is fair, balanced, and sensitive to their external environment. They use their emotional intelligence to prevent little problems from growing into big ones. To detect the unsung heroes in teams, and single them out for praise. To intuit the difference between a robust exchange and the more sinister bullying and intervene.
To suss out an under-performer, and offer help, and so on.
A great CEO can manage financial performance, without being in thrall to it. He or she can resist the ideological extremism of the worst aspects of globalization, and keep people and culture issues in perspective, as a partner in peak performance, instead of an enabler.
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