This article by Patrick McKenna summarizes the "anecdotal research"
undertaken by his consulting firm about the profile of managing partners.
Normally, we subscribe to Jack Welch’s famous, strict, and certifiablly
correct dictum that "anecdotes aren’t data," but we’re cutting Mr. McKenna a
break this time because he at least dimensionalizes how anecdotal his
(non-)data is: The survey went to more than 100 managing partners
randomly chosen from firms of from 150 to 600 lawyers in size, and
had a response rate of 43%, supplemented by one-on-one interviews
with some of those who responded. This doesn’t meet the test of
statistically reliable quantitative research, but it’s a heap better
than your typical focus group, erego worth reporting.
Some of the key findings:
- only 24% are "full-time" as managing partner
- a surprising 15% say they’re "50/50" between managing and serving
clients, and this is not correlated with size of firm or size
of market (in other words, it’s equally likely to be a big
firm in a big city as otherwise) - 93% are white males (surprise! but/and is this the 21st
Century yet??) - only 26% have a "job description"
- a vanishingly small 6% said they were subject to a formal annual
review process (are these people really less strategically important
to the firm than a typical associate?) - a coincidentally vanishingly small 6% of firms have or are exploring
establishing a formal succession plan (I served as an associate at
the late, and in its time great, Shea & Gould, which imploded on the
rocks of "no-succession-planning")
So here we have it: Organizations with annual revenues from $50—$250-million
with part-time CEO’s lacking a job description, formal training, serious-minded
evaluations, and realistic succession plans. The devastating question
this invites is: What would you advise a client with this managerial
structure to do?
