Aligning the Stars by Jay W. Lorsch & Thomas J. Tierney

Author:Jay W. Lorsch & Thomas J. Tierney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: How to Succeed when Professionals Drive Results
ISBN: 9781578515134
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2002-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

Building on Strength

Fully developed performance reviews require a lot of time, both from the person who’s being reviewed and from the reviewers. The return on this investment is knowledge and insight that can be used to take the value created through performance evaluation to the next level— customizing senior stars’ roles and responsibilities throughout their careers. Why customize? The whole point of a performance management system is to help stars manage their careers so that they create the greatest possible value for the firm and for themselves. The way that happens is to help them build on strength.

Every individual has a set of relative strengths and weaknesses. Customization entails nurturing and building on strengths rather than trying to eliminate weaknesses (which is usually impossible). Great firms and outstanding professionals recognize this fact and work with it.

They don’t force superlative producers to become indifferent managers. Nor do they penalize highly regarded mentors for devoting time to young stars. On the contrary, they encourage their senior people so that over time their career paths and the performance criteria to which they’re held become more individualized. The rewards of this approach are not only more satisfied and productive senior stars but also a firm with a more diversified and balanced portfolio of skills.

Customization requires emphasizing some skills and neglecting others. Assignments that divide a partner’s time equally between client and firm responsibilities will nurture his management skills. Pointing a partner toward marketing and client development will foster her skills as a rainmaker. Encouraging a partner to develop intellectual property may produce a guru. The tradeoffs inherent in how professionals allocate their time are inescapable. Taken as a whole, those tradeoffs will determine the likelihood of each individual’s success in the partnership, as well as the success of the partnership overall. That is why in professional firms, the deployment of talent is inherently strategic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.