The best industry teams include professionals from assurance, tax and consulting. Cross-functional teams help break down silos and build collaboration and trust between different lines of business. They also enable team members to get a more holistic view of their clients, which helps team members bring the client the right basket of services or solutions so the business can really thrive, not just survive.
Trust is essential when partners are asked to recommend services that will be delivered by the firm’s other service lines or lines of business. Team members must be able to trust that service delivery will rise to the same level of service excellence the client has come to expect. Without trust, cross-selling strategies are rarely successful.
You can’t collaborate if you don’t meet!
Industry groups must hold meetings. I’ll explain why, but first, I’ll give you some background.
At firms I advised, most accountants tended to minimize the number and length of meetings. It’s understandable. Accounting professionals are generally driven to focus on client work and billable time. Internal meetings divert focus. It’s not wrong to consider internal meeting time as a distraction that takes away from metrics like utilization and realization. This is especially true during busy season when managers, senior managers, directors and partners face difficult deadlines and often heavy pressure to produce client engagement work.
All internal meetings, therefore, must add significant value. They should be designed to be effective, productive and not overly long. Meeting frequency should be sufficient to accomplish longer-term goals.
As I stated above, industry team meetings are essential to building a successful industry specialization strategy. Meetings build trust, camaraderie, collaboration, loyalty and reliability that grows over time. Everyone becomes familiar with each other’s personalities and develops friendships and solid working relationships. Formal meeting protocols make for efficient meetings, but familiarity breeds the team spirit that reinforces the notion that “we are all in this together” and “many hands make light work.”
The team’s plan, not the leader’s plan
When industry leaders are asked how the process of designing and executing their industry’s strategic plan is going, invariably, they say they have a great plan. My follow-up question is, “Who built your strategic plan?” Too often, the industry leader proudly expounds on the time and expertise needed to build the plan. My reply was always, “The plan you devise yourself is the plan you’ll have to implement yourself!”
An industry team’s initial meeting should be an in-person one. Its first mission should be to begin developing strong personal and professional relationships and a sense of co-ownership of their common mission and goals. When every team member actively participates in the strategic planning discussion, the implicit goal is for each team member to feel the imprint of his or her hands on the final plan. Everyone will buy into the plan if everyone participated in building it.
Trust is built over time and with recognition of successes and offerings of support when needed. To build momentum and reinforce team spirit, you need a natural meeting cadence where growth opportunities for all will be revealed and discussed.
