Building long-term value in professional services – it’s about trust
For professional services firms long-term value comes from just two things: client relationships and firm capabilities. Both of these are built on trust.
It is pretty obvious how client relationships rely on trust. They are built up over time by listening, by delivering, and by flexibility. Trust requires a focus on shared goals, not just contracted deliverables, and on acknowledging outcomes. When there is a strong relationship even goals can change when they are not leading to the desired outcomes. The best consultants invest their time and attention to building trust with clients. Clients that trust their consultants will get more value than those who reduce everything to a transactional relationship.
What about capabilities, how are these dependent on trust? This comes down to three questions.
How do we know what capabilities we people have?
How do we build capabilities?
How do we apply capabilities?
How do we know what capabilities we people have?
We can only know about our own skills by asking other people. Our colleagues generally know more about our real skills and how effectively we apply them than we do ourselves. To get honest feedback from people, and to accept that feedback, there has to be trust. This is one reason managers struggle to have real conversations about skills with their reports — these conversations are predicated on trust and are more powerful when carried out between peers.
How do we build capabilities?
The best way to learn something is to do it with other people. Other people keep you honest, they help you see what you can’t see yourself, and they provide information, feedback and coaching. The relationship can range from the classic master-apprentice relationship to modern team learning approaches. In either case, trust is an important part of what makes learning work.
How do we apply capabilities?
Mostly by working in teams. Capabilities are made real when we use them with other people. And by working with other people we can focus on building our own unique strengths.
Trust is the foundation of capability building for both individuals and companies.
One way we see this is through complementary skills. There is an important difference between associated skills and complementary skills.
Associated skills are skills that we expect to find together. A database developer will know SQL inside and out, be good at data schema design, and know all about ACID transactions (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated and Durable). When a person claims a skill we look for associated and when we don’t find them we ask if the person has them.
Complementary skills are different. They are like a knife and fork. You can use a knife or fork on their own, but there are times when having both makes them more valuable. With complementary skills, there is no expectation that one individual will have complementary skills. We do expect to find complementary skills on teams: front-end and back-end developers; UI designers and front-end developers; copy writers and A/B testers. The presence of complementary skills is one signal of a strong team. And good consulting companies try to build complementary skills with their clients.
TeamFit builds trust in two ways.
We invite people to suggest skills to each other, leveraging the fact that our co-workers know more about our skills than anyone else.
We rely on social ranking of skills as an important input to SkillRank™.
TeamFit creates value for our customers in four main ways.
We help companies to
Win more repeat work by delivering successful projects and building better relationships
Win more work by demonstrating capabilities to potential clients
Book revenue faster by finding people for teams quickly
Deliver more efficiently by getting the right people on teams
We base all of this on a foundation of trust. Using TeamFit builds trust between professional services companies and their clients, the people on teams and between consultants and companies.