Sublime

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky

Of all the ways of improving a professional firm’s success, partner performance counseling is one of the most powerful. Done well, it can help ensure that all professionals are making the most of their talents and capitalizing fully on their potential.

A full program to differentiate the firm through client service requires action on five fronts (in this order): 1. Measurements 2. Management 3. Tips and tools 4. Training 5. Rewards

Leadership is more than management. It’s about inspiring change and improving results through who you are and how you motivate others.

In his groundbreaking 1946 book The Concept of the Corporation, management pioneer Peter Drucker keenly observed, “No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.”

Talented people have a wealth of options available to them, so they will not tolerate bad leaders.

In The Good Life, the New York Times bestselling book by Marc Schulz and Harvard Study of Adult Development director Robert Waldinger,

describe the qualities of a leader they’ve especially admired or viewed as a role model or a mentor. Think

successful firms I know, all of the individual partners act as if they have personal strategic plans for their own careers—they have each thought through what their special value on the marketplace will be, what will make them more than just one more practitioner in their specialty, how they plan to achieve this vision of personal career progress.