Promoted to Partner - What's Next?

Jane Bleach, Former Regional Managing Partner & Head of Diversity & Partner Development at RSM returns to Adlestrop to share her exclusive insight on how to progress your career successfully after making it to partner.

You have been promoted to partner - congratulations! It is a great achievement and you should be rightly proud. But this is not where it ends - this is the start of the next phase of your career. And what you do in the early months and years of your partner career will have a significant bearing on how successful and sustained that career will be. 

Do Great Work

Your ability to do great work for your clients is likely to be one of the things that helped get you to partner. Make sure that you continue to deliver great work so that your clients value you highly. This doesn't mean, though, that you have to deliver all of the work personally. Use your teams - associates, managers and more junior staff - to deliver work at the right level while you lead your team and personally deliver the complex high level work that your clients need you to do. 

Get as many great client work experiences as you can. Every new challenging piece of work you do gives you more experience to bring to bear in the future. The more you've seen, the better you get and the more able you are to deal with the new challenges that await you. 

Build Networks

You are likely to be expected to win work for the firm. It is important to spend time in the marketplace, building a network of contacts who will refer work to you and who you can work well with.  You will need to refer work back to your contacts too so you need to get to know people well enough to be comfortable recommending them. Your clients will trust you to make recommendations and with that comes a responsibility on your part, in the client's mind if not in contractual reality, for the quality of work of those you recommend. This is more important than you may realise. 

Remember that people at a similar level to you in their organisations are almost certainly in the same situation as you - they want to build a network of contacts who will refer to them, who they are comfortable working with, whose quality they trust and who they are confident to recommend. If you build and nurture well at this stage of your career you will have great contacts for life. 

Embrace social media in your networking activity. The business contacts and potential clients of today and tomorrow use many different ways of connecting. You need to understand and exploit new ways of communicating to lead by example and make the most of opportunities to connect. 

Make Yourself Known

A friend of mine was recently bemoaning the fact that "getting your head down and doing the work" was not enough to get on in today's professional world. The fact is that you do need to make yourself known if you are going to realise your full potential. You can do great work but who will know, other than your own clients and teams, if you do not yourself visible? Especially if you are in a multi-office firm or a very large office and you have particular specialist skills that are useful to other offices and departments, other people need to be aware of you to make use of those skills. Make sure that you use the available communication channels, including social media, talk to your marketing and business development teams, welcome any training or coaching they can provide and involve yourself in appropriate sector groups. 

Be a Great Role Model

As a partner, staff notice you, whether or not you want them to, and they notice the good things and the bad things so make sure you behave like a partner should.  You are a role model, like it or not, so be a great one.

Ideally, you should try to take the opportunity to mentor someone else, or even several people.  The individuals you mentor will benefit, the firm will benefit and you will benefit personally if you allow some reverse mentoring into the relationship. 

Display your firm's values in everything that you do.  Firms' stated values vary but there are many common themes to be found - lead by example, work together as a team and in the best interests of the firm as a whole, treat everyone with respect, be open and honest, act with integrity and be prepared to go the extra mile.

Don't Try to be a Superhero 

So you have to do great work, win more, build networks and be a great role model - it is tempting to think that you have to be a super-hero.  But the good news is that you do not have to do all of this alone, or even simultaneously.  You will be much more effective if you work in teams.  Yes, you need to deliver great work that is wholly attributable to you and you need to be confident in your ability but you also need to know when to ask for advice and when to consult.  You need to win work but business development is usually more successful when you hunt in packs, with people contributing different but complementary skills to the team.  And firms will have support networks of professionals in relevant areas - HR, marketing, compliance etc - so don't feel that you need to know everything yourself but use the expertise available to you.

Enjoy Yourself

Becoming a partner is exciting and challenging and perhaps a little daunting.  Your firm will have promoted you because they believe that you will add value to the firm and you need to be conscious of that in everything you do.   But don’t let that frighten you.  Being a partner is lots of fun too.  So, above all, make sure you enjoy it!