In terms of serving your masters, your client comes first.
Right behind this obligation, though, is the pressure to serve your organization. And senior management is very focused on signings, revenue, and profitability, as they should be, given their responsibility to shareholders and to the bottom line.
That focus is manifested through the systems that measure progress to targets, which often result in last-minute calls to action and significant amounts of your time away from your clients while receiving “help” from senior management.
And that “help” is almost never helpful, because of two realities:
- With respect to both your sales and your delivery, the critical drivers of your success are not measurable by those management systems, and
- Those critical success factors cannot be put in place at the last minute, regardless of how much you or your senior management wish it were so.
How, then, can you survive and thrive in today’s challenging professional services environment?
The simple answer is to never need that kind of “help”.
The less obvious answer is to act based on what you believe about your long-term investments that are necessary to drive your future short-term successes.
What are the drivers of long-term success in signings, profit, talent development, and personal renewal? What should you believe is important personal behavior, in spite of the urgent messages coming from “the system”? What personal management system will you have to implement in order to sustain that behavior?
Figure that out, and you will not only survive, you will thrive in your chosen career.
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