by Patrick J. McKenna

Defining contribution and accountability in practice teams.

One of the more agonizing problems that pervades many practice groups is the question of how a practice leader is to deal with those professionals who don't follow through on what they say they are going to do.

Take your basic practice group meeting as a trite example. It was to have started at 4:00 PM. Each partner who sticks their head into the boardroom, drops their papers off at their favorite seating place while quickly scanning the room to see if there is any other colleague present whom they feel is more powerful or senior than themselves. Seeing none, their papers now signify that they were on time and they quickly rush back to their offices on the pretext of making just one quick client call. Then there is that insecure partner who brings their work into the meeting as if to impress upon everyone just how busy they really are. And of course there is the partner who accepted responsibility for that important project at the last meeting, who upon two minutes into their action report has everyone realizing that they really have no specific action to report.

One of the most common complaints we have surfaced in our work with practice groups is that members are disturbed by any practice leader who is unwilling to deal directly and effectively with self-serving or noncontributing members. These professionals tell us things like:

This is George's group. We're there to lend a hand and provide some ideas when he asks for them, but when things get off track or partners are wasting time, it's his responsibility to set things straight.

We call ourselves a practice group, but we're really just a collection of professionals from different functional disciplines. Sure, we try to collaborate on projects, but in subtle ways many of the group members are simply pushing their own special interests.

In many practice groups, members also avoid dealing directly with each other when performance is lagging or individual behavior is annoying and obstructing progress. We hear comments like:

If one of my partners isn't delivering the goods, as long as it doesn't negatively impact my client work, then that's the practice leaders concern.

If I'm asked my opinion, I'll give it; but there's no sense in ruffling anyone's feathers to make your point.

In these groups, performance is seldom greater than the sum of each members' individual achievement. Partners operate as though engaged in some unspoken collusion: Stay out of my face and I'll stay out of yours! They may do good individual work, but as a group they rarely soar.

If this sounds all too familiar, it may be time for you to discard a few old notions of how practice groups should function and how practice leaders should manage, and look to adopt a system that provides for higher levels of enthusiasm, decision-making, performance, participation, and morale.

In our experience of working across a number of countries with a number of professions over the years, the best practice groups seem to operate on the basis of two fundamental principles:

• All members of the practice group should and must have an opportunity and obligation to contribute; and
• All members of the practice group should and must hold one another accountable for individual and for group performance.

In these practice groups it isn't good enough that people just show up at meetings; there must be evidence of a genuine commitment to contribute. And, it isn't appropriate that only the practice leader be held accountable for the group's efforts; everyone must buy-in to feeling responsible for the group's progress. Thus we see a system of what we have come to call: shared contribution and mutual accountability.

SETTING LEVELS OF SHARED CONTRIBUTION

To determine who are truly committed members of the group and who are not, the first question that must be addressed is: What is the price of membership into your practice group?

Being a member of any group of truly committed, exceptional professionals can have a motivating impact on each individual. To that end, the best practice groups demand some price, some requirement, some commitment for membership. This approach incorporates one of the most fundamental motivators throughout human history -- pride in belonging.

Interestingly, in most firm we are obsessed with micro-managing the billable hour contribution and commitment of our professionals, with very little attention given to the non-billable side. Yet it is precisely this focus on the non-billable obligation by which real practice groups are defined.

Imagine everyone in your practice group engaging in a little exercise to help define what their individual level of contribution might look like.

First we could determine how many hours the average partner spends at the office. When we have asked that question of groups of partners, most respond that they spend about 55 hours a week. Accounting for holidays, sick time and vacation periods, if we were to project a work year of 45 weeks, that would result in each partner spending approximately 2475 hours annually at the office.

Now assuming a billable hours goal of 1800 hours, that would leave 675 non-billable hours remaining investment time. If partners were agreeable to devoting a conservative 10% of those hours to efforts on behalf of their practice group, that would provide ample time to attend one monthly meeting and also invest four hours (or, a half-day) monthly to the implementation of some chosen activity that would advance the common interests of the group.

High performing practice groups set some minimum level of non-billable time requirement as the base line from which each member is expected to make their contribution.

Of course the beauty of this lies in having each member of the group realize that every other individual has signed-on to provide a relatively equal commitment; and therefore no one need feel that they are the only one who is always being called upon to do something. When you establish a level of shared contribution in advance, you increase the likelihood that everyone will freely cooperate, contribute, and be committed to achieving reciprocal benefits from working together.

SETTING LEVELS OF ACCOUNTABILITY

If the practice leader isn't to be given a big stick (like compensation) to scold those group members who are tardy for meetings, consistently inattentive, argumentative, or not meeting project deadlines; (and the practice leader shouldn't be) -- how do you compel professionals to do anything?

The key questions here become: Is it acceptable for members of the practice group to confront those who don't complete the projects that they have accepted responsibility for and those who place their personal agendas ahead of the group's goals? Is the practice leader to be the only individual responsible for the group's collective performance or should individual group members be expected to be responsible for each other?

The irony is that in discussion after discussion, we are struck by the extent to which practice group members have high expectations of each other, expect that everyone will contribute to the extent that each is capable, and become distressed when certain members or the group itself is not performing well and when a member pursues individual objectives at the expense of the group.

Concurrently we find that every championship team, in every endeavor, has attained their championship status largely by having some hard and fast, non-negotiable ground rules that everyone agrees to abide by. The best practice groups seem to formulate together and commit to (writing) a set of sensible ground rules for how their championship team will work together and self-manage themselves; thus bringing about a degree of constructive peer pressure.

Some of the best performing practice group we have observed, be they start-up or veteran teams, have defined very basic ground rules. When you see them applied you realize the positive impact they have upon the group's effectiveness.

These groups collectively define sensible rules to cover issues such as how within our group we will ensure...:

• mutual respect and cooperation
• interpersonal communications and expression of ideas
• making of decisions and resolving of conflicts
• support for personal risk-taking
• frequency and format of practice group meetings
• meeting attendance and punctuality
• participation in group business development efforts and sharing of clients
• completion of individual projects
• client service and handling of complaints
• learning and sharing knowledge
• supervision, training, delegating and staffing of engagements
• constructive feedback and performance evaluations

By way of example, some of the seemingly trivial but practical and important ground rules we have seen, include:

• Make meetings of the practice group and prompt attendance a priority. Unless there is a client emergency, everyone is expected to attend -- on time.
• Honor commitments -- if you say you'll do something, do it. If you can't accomplish a task, don't say you can. If you have committed to do something and a problem arises that will prevent you from following through, let us know in advance.
• Be receptive to all new ideas. Don't tell us about someone who's tried this before and failed or why it won't work, until you have constructively addressed how we can make this work.
• Don't finger point or assign blame -- every success is a group success, and every failure is an opportunity for our practice group to self-correct, learn something new and constantly improve.
• Maintain confidentiality -- the group's dysfunctional processes are our group's business. Don't bad-mouth our team, any individual group members, or discuss contentious issues outside of our group.

In high performance teams the players police themselves. Each member of the practice group demonstrates superb self-discipline. Professionals hold themselves, and each other, accountable. Discipline boils down to several basics. Do that which one commits to doing. Live within the agreed upon rules. Stick to standards. It enables the team to execute with precision.

Basic ground rules foster trust and openness. They establish common expectations for members. behavior. They provide a guide for how your team will operate on a day-by-day basis. The best ground rules then are:

1. Behaviorally defined

Behavior is observable. It is action that you can see and hear, and that everyone can objectively agree is either taking place or it isn't. Having a ground rule like, Show respect for your fellow practice group members may sound good, but isn't likely to work if it's not behavior-specific. If we take it a step further and explore what we would likely see or hear if we were showing respect for one another, we might get the answer: We wouldn't hear group members interrupting one another. This behavior then, translated into a ground rule might be: We agree that only one person should speak at a time; therefore we must allow someone to complete their statement before responding, and we will refrain having side conversations during our meetings.

2. Agreed upon by all members

Majority rule does not build accountability. Total consensus is what makes the rules come alive. Everyone must agree to participate in developing the group's rules, actively support them, and be confronted if his or her behavior is contravening any of the agreed-upon rules. These groups also, interestingly, will go to great effort to ensure that any new members agrees to the existing ground rules as a condition of their joining or as an expression of their commitment to the group.

3. Always kept visible

We seem to give more credibility and pay closer attention to anything we commit to writing and keep in sight. The best groups ensure that every member has a copy of the ground rules and may even reference them at the beginning of periodic items on any meeting agenda.

4. Consistently observed

Among the best performing teams there is an understanding that any member may stop the play by calling a time-out if someone's behavior is contravening the rules. If someone does something inconsistent with the defined standards, anyone in the group can and is encouraged to say: Excuse me, didn't we all agree that...

5. Specific as to consequences

Effective practice coaches make sure that the group invests some time to address it's collective mind to defining what the consequences will be if any of the group's ground rules are violated -- after all, if there are no consequences, there probably are no rules. In those practice groups that we have seen define consequences for violating standards, those consequences are usually designed not to be overly punitive, but simply to serve as a gentle reminder that the standards are important. Thus, we might see a two dollar fine that gets contributed to funding the group's beer-bash, or sent to a favorite charity. The essential principle is that the group collectively sets and manages the ground rules, and the ground rules then manage the practice group.

In high performance teams the practice leader encourages members to take on more of the leadership function themselves, assuring coordinated performance such that the entire group owns the team's success. For those practice group who do not deliberately set sensible rules, we notice how the group's norms (habits) quickly become the guidelines by default and the inevitable anarchy that results.

The best teams learn to hold members mutually accountable for collective results.