Sublime

Ideally, your focus will be on these four things in running the firm: shepherding the financial performance of the firm; hiring/molding key staff (if you have them); ensuring that new business is happening regularly; and strategizing for clients. If you have no team to help, you’ll be expanding this fourth one to a significant degree, but it is

Here we pull a page from Patrick M. Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, a book we recommend that all leaders peruse (it’s a quick read).

“There are no single leaders anymore. There’s the deal maker, the glad hander, the hands-on person and so on. The same skills matter but in new ways. You need to know how to get things done, how to deliver.” According to Walshok, few people achieve this goal on their own. We’re all specialists. “Today’s model should be a basketball team,” Walshok

Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria,

Guide to Management: Lasting Lessons from the Best Leadership Minds of Our Time, p. 82.

Why not tell them what it will be like to work with you and reduce their anxiety about leaving the devil they know for the devil they don’t? Specialization and focus and proprietary problem solving will always play a role in landing clients, but it is never enough. In the end, they will have to work with you, and you will have to work with them,

The best leaders create, sustain, and improve their organizations’ social circuitry,* the overlay of the processes, procedures, routines, and norms that enable people to do their work easily and well. While individual specialists are focusing their attention on the problems immediately in front of them, this social circuitry establishes the