Survival of the fittest: The barriers to successful key account management
Dysfunctional key account teams undermine client relationships, says Meirion Jones
The group dynamics of key account teams in law firms have much in common with stranded survivors of a traumatic event.
As characterised in the US television series Lost, when the survivors of an air crash first assemble, stunned and traumatised, their self-absorption blinds them to the suffering of others.
Devious and competitive, they share information only to the extent that doing so will benefit themselves. They mistrust others’ motives, perceiving that some will be calculating how best to advance their own interests at the cost of others.
If they can be called a group at all, they are a thoroughly dysfunctional one, refusing to compromise for the sake of a greater common good, stubbornly unwilling to subsume their interests to a common purpose and ignoring the possibilities of sharing activities and goals.
As time passes, however, the team dynamics change. Sometimes grudgingly, individuals become more cooperative, learning to put aside their paranoia and invest their trust in others. They learn how to complement each other’s strengths for the greater good. They adapt to their roles within the group hierarchy, accept the natural leaders and learn to recognise the value of consensus.
Most importantly, they learn to communicate, sharing information with each other about sources of food and shelter, possible dangers on the island and their own strengths and weaknesses. Sharing this key information, they discover, increases their own security and wellbeing rather than risks it.
In your experience, which of these two – the before or after – most closely resembles the team dynamics of your firm’s key account team? If you’ve answered the second one, you’re in a small minority, because the characteristics of the first dysfunctional group are all too common in key client teams.
The lack of collaboration, the refusal to share information and the unwillingness to participate actively in joint initiatives will be eerily familiar to long-suffering key account managers and managing partners.
Let’s look at the causes and see what lessons can be learnt to forge a strong, cooperative and focused team-building model.
Hunters vs. farmers
A survivor washing ashore on a desert island faces the literal option to ‘eat what you kill’, but this cultural mantra still prevails in a growing number of law firms. Even in the UK, where lockstep tends to dilute the red-blooded approach towards BD of US firms, the pressure for a partner to look out for his own interests first is enormous – and growing.
At heart, partners often feel encouraged to behave as sole practitioners, as hunters rather than farmers. If a client partner knows that his client development performance has a direct impact on his remuneration, or even whether he stays on as a partner at the firm, this will encourage self-interested behaviour. Arguments about how much more aggregate value a client partner can create by bringing in other partners to act for the same client will often fall on deaf ears.
This is compounded by the likelihood that the client partner will have received little, if any, training on how to lead a team effectively. So, how should a team leader meld together different personalities and agendas? How should the leader foster a collective sense of purpose and endeavour when team ‘membership’ is often little more than a result of chance?
And, how can the leader compel those team members to cooperate more closely, when that very cooperation involves sharing precious information and personal contacts?
These challenges seem to demand a social worker rather than a partner.
When coupled with a typical mistrust of management processes – of business planning and analysis, of individual team member planning, goal-setting and metrics – the team leader will naturally shy away from developing either the vision or the processes for creating a strong, integrated team.
Impact on clients
Of course, all of the things that a leader and members of a fledgling client team find so difficult to deliver are precisely the things that clients want.
A client relationship is a complex, potentially chaotic thing. Information – on developments in the client’s business, its needs, its service expectations and concerns, and its organisation – is arriving via a range of sources and channels. Capturing all of this data, circulating it promptly and transparently across the team and then acting on it are the keys to creating the kind of seamless, consistent responsiveness that clients want.
This information-sharing is the critical underpinning to a successful client team. It enables the team to act quickly to exploit new opportunities, encourages further cooperation and focuses individual efforts on fostering the client relationship for the good of the team overall and, ultimately, the firm.
Model behaviour
The following leadership model, which comprises five key criteria, can be used to diagnose client team performance issues and to implement plans for improved teamworking.
- Clarity of vision and goal-setting: creating a sense of urgency, collective mission and enthusiasm.
- Communication effectiveness: articulating clear, specific client development objectives; creating team engagement, buy-in and endorsement of the plan; sharing client insights; and celebrating success.
- Focused delegation, direction and execution: agreeing specific actions against specific timescales and sharing responsibilities across the team for these actions, according to individual strengths.
- Assessment and appraisal: undertaking regular and rigorously assessed progress reviews; reminding individuals of their responsibilities and obligations and, if necessary, holding them to account for underperformance.
- Continuous improvement: learning from successes and failures; capturing best practice and building it into future team planning and behaviour.
This shows whether the respondent and team has either an essentially active attitude towards leadership (i.e. welcoming and responding to strong leadership) or a more laissez faire approach (i.e. preferring to be allowed to get on with things with minimum intervention).
Unsurprisingly, those teams that most actively embrace the five key leadership criteria are the ones with the most profitable clients, the most active levels of cross-selling and the most positive client feedback.
Typically, those teams that gravitate towards the laissez faire end of the spectrum (the ones whose behaviour most resembles the dysfunctional, newly arrived castaways) do not see compound growth in their client relationships. They market their services in limited practice group silos and often do not operate as teams in any practical sense of the word at all.
The measures on which laissez faire respondents tend to score themselves particularly poorly are the ones involving ‘softer’ skills: fostering shared enthusiasm, encouraging and addressing underperformers in the team and, in particular, creating an overarching vision for the team.
Sense of urgency
Creating a clear team vision – fostering a shared mission and sense of urgency, and creating a sense among team members that there is a compelling need to act – is the most critical leadership skill of all for effective team-building.
Returning to the earlier analogy, the survivors didn’t choose to collaborate because of some abstract sense of shared humanism; they collaborated because it was essential to their survival.
No matter how challenging a law firm’s culture becomes, it is extremely unlikely that any partners feel their lives are threatened by non-compliance with KAM edicts. On the contrary – for most, there is very little comeback at all.
If there is no compelling sense of urgency, the need to act differently and to adopt behaviours that feel counterintuitive will become unreal and theoretical. This is why so few client teams really meld, why so many KAM initiatives stay firmly grounded and why having a leader to forge a sense of team urgency is critical.
Compelling cooperation
A team’s collective behaviour will only change if its shortcomings are recognised. Once a team is confronted with empirical evidence that its standards of teamworking fall below ideal norms, members will begin to recognise the value of changing.
The team as a whole should then develop a client development plan that compels them to cooperate. Ultimately, it is up to the team leader to flex his or her leadership muscles to make this happen.
It is easy to see why leadership is such a troublesome issue in a law firm. It requires a range of soft communication skills that rarely come easy to lawyers. But since it is an essential component of a successful key client team, it can’t be shirked or fudged. Without a leader to guide, challenge and inspire them, those teams would be lost.
meirionjones@me.com