Six Ways of Determining Service Professionals' Productivity

by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, Organisational Provocateur

1. Do we clearly articulate our objectives? Focus on outcomes not merely on activities. Activities make you busy beyond comprehension, but cannot make you effective and profitable. As the old Chinese proverb says, “It makes no sense to go to bed early to save candles if the result is twins.” Your people must be able to think in terms of results (ends), not tasks (means to ends). If you run a law firm, what do you tell your lawyers? Do you tell them, “Save your clients!” or “Your task in court is to jump up every 15 minutes and shout ‘Objection, your honour’!” The former is an outcome, whereas the latter is a set of activities. Tell your people about the outcomes you want to see, and they will know how to do it. Why not trust them just a little bit. And if they can't do it, who was the idiot who hired them?

2. Do we make our people accountable for their actions? Making people accountable for their work gives them autonomy they actually must have to perform the work itself. Without autonomy they are merely indentured servants, performing sets of tasks as prescribed by their bosses.

3. Do we keep learning? There are two major aspects of the profession to lean in service businesses: Content and process. For instance, if you have an IT consulting (NOT a computer repair firm), you must constantly improve your technical, business and people skills. And one of the best ways of learning is teaching. This teaching can be you regular free prospecting seminars, during which you share valuable “How to...?” information with your audience.

4. Do we focus on quality? Productivity is more about the quality of client work than about the number of billable hours (by now, you probably know my take on time-based fees anyway - they suck!) or the number of new sales closed. In a professional service firm it is the intangibles (culture, attitude and atmosphere) that define profitability.

5. Do we treat our people like partners? Unlike in other forms of business, in professional service firms we do not have superiors and subordinates. If you do, there is a good chance that your firm is seriously underperforming. Running a service firm is real team effort, which also implies that people are treated as equals, and have the authority to make decisions without having to run to the big boss for permission to do something. Without this authority, the situation is similar to telling skydivers to open their emergency chutes if and only they have permission from their superiors who are standing on the ground. By the time the permission comes, you may be as dead as a dodo.

6. Do we keep innovating and renewing ourselves?Or are we just regurgitating lukewarm concepts? Most firms are so focused on problem solving that they totally ignore raising the bar. It is the equivalent of wasting time, talent and money on building better and more beautiful abacuses instead of investing in an entry-level computer.

Copyright Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan. All rights reserved. You are free to use this article in whole or in part. One favour though: Can I ask you to you include complete attribution, including a live website link. Also, can you please let me know where you plan to publish the article.

The attribution: This article was written by Organisational Provocateur, Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan of Dynamic Innovations Squad, a firm specialising in helping consulting firms to sell their expertise at the highest margins. Get Tom's free Practice Management Black Paper when you sign up for his monthly newsletter, Commando Consulting: Lessons And Practices From The Ultimate Professional Service Firm, The Military. Visit Tom's website at http://www.di-squad.com.

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