Arthur Andersen/Andersen Consulting/Accenture got it right a long time ago. The key to rational, sustained services organizational growth is leverage: the practice of consistently hiring at the lower experience levels and growing your consulting staff from the bottom up. Over time, this will allow you to leverage the experience of your existing consulting staff to help develop and mentor those being brought in at the entry level.
Formal training has its own place in the professional development process, but as a consultant in my early years (and even today), I learned the most and achieved my greatest professional growth simply by working alongside those who had more more experience than I. This is not to say that hiring senior, experienced consultants has no merit. Within the startup world, it is especially important to seed the organization with experience and professional maturity before bringing in consultants whose greatest achievements occurred in the classroom. But once the machine is up and running and seems to be well-oiled, moving to a model that includes a prominent component of organic growth will help build a well balanced consulting organization.
There is a financial impact associated with this model that should be mentioned as well. I hate to use the term "cheap labor", but the fact is that resources with little to no professional experience are far less costly and represent a real opportunity, if managed right, to achieve growth while maintaining strong margins. Of course, to be successful in effectively bringing junior resources into the fold will require some up front investment - college recruiting, new hire "boot camp", extensive training programs specifically designed for inexperienced hires - the payoff in the longer term can be substantial.
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I couldn't agree more; however, how do you take a company ready to make the leap toward growth and sustainability but has a culture rooted in experience and independent performance?
ReplyDeleteCulture is rooted in senior leadership. There has got to be a respected evangelist, either someone internal or someone brought in from the outside, who can clearly articulate the advantages associated with taking this new direction. Ultimately, there has to be commitment at the highest levels because the new approach will take some patience and faith as it is a longer term strategy.
ReplyDeleteThe second piece to this lies in how incentives are structured. Incentives drive behavior and if they do not align with strategic goals, success will be difficult to achieve. Middle management and senior consultants need to be incented to mentor and develop junior folks. Incentive programs need to include team goals to start changing the individual performance mind set. And growth and margin objectives need to be measured annually, or at least every 6 months, versus quarterly. That's where the faith and patience come into play.
My take on Accenture is a bit different. Accenture baits and switches with clients to bring in a team of several seniors and a bunch of juniors. They bill for all of the resources and continue to do so even ifthe project fails due to inexperience. Corporate VPs are often mandated to use Accenture due to other relationships. But they rarely get the value promised by the brand name.
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