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New Partner Onboarding: Best Practices for Professional Services Firms
Hiring or promoting Partners within a professional services firm marks a pivotal moment. In addition to signaling a path of growth for the firm, Partners shape the firm’s culture, drive business development, and ensure client success. The most progressive firms prioritize building new Partner onboarding programs to ensure their biggest bets gain traction quickly to accelerate their performance and success.
From our experience serving clients across the professional services landscape, we’ve identified six essential components of new Partner onboarding programs that directly impact Partner performance.
For firms with new Partner onboarding programs, this article outlines proven strategies to reduce Time to Traction and accelerate Partner success within professional services firms.
Why New Partner Onboarding Matters for Professional Services Firms
While metrics like utilization, pipeline value, and revenue credit are critical indicators of a Partner’s performance, those metrics are often lagging indicators of success. The first 6-12 months in the new role represent a critical time to build confidence, gain role traction, and post some wins.
Reducing Partner Time to Traction—the time it takes someone to get up to speed in a new role – is the most important thing a firm can do to accelerate performance.
When new Partners get up to speed in their role faster, they can:
- Strengthen existing client relationships or build new ones.
- Enable the delivery of cross-functional service offerings.
- Gain personal confidence related to their role and responsibility in the firm (which drives results and retention).
Reduced Time to Traction is a leading indicator that will improve results in lagging indicators like utilization, pipeline value, and revenue.
Common New Partner Onboarding Practices
When it comes to new Partner onboarding, common practices typically include a process that looks something like this when a new Partner enters the firm or is promoted internally:
- Distribute laptops and order business cards
- Require a one-size-fits-all onboarding process including training in risk management, CRM etc.
- Ask newly hired Partners to list contacts and “off limits” clients
- Meet a dozen new colleagues virtually, including assigned “buddy”
- Join standing calls
- Wash, rinse, repeat for every new Partner
This is a typical, yet insufficient, new Partner onboarding process for newly hired or promoted Partners in professional services firms. While these things may be common practice, common practice isn’t the same as best practice.
It’s not that these things aren’t important, because they are. They are just not enough to accelerate performance and predict success on their own.
There are 6 additional elements of an effective new Partner onboarding process that should be part of every firm’s approach to reducing Time to Traction for both direct admits and internal promotes.
6 Best Practices for Successful New Partner Onboarding Programs
Follow these best practices to ensure your new Partner onboarding program is as effective as possible to better predict and accelerate Partner performance.
1. Use Targeted Insights from Industry-Specific Assessments
What’s often missing from new Partner onboarding programs is the specificity and personalization built from individual personality data – like the data provided by Kinavic’s Verity Leadership Assessment℠, powered by Hogan Assessments.
Verity is a tool that accelerates the identification, selection, and development of high performing professional services leaders.
Tools like Verity provide critical personality data highlight tendencies related to the Partner role that should be used to inform future decision-making. Learnings from assessment data can be used to:
- Identify individual strengths and performance barriers specific to the Partner role.
- Align Partner tendencies with role expectations.
- Deliver actionable insights for targeted performance coaching and development.
2. Clearly Define and Measure Success
Many professional services firms don’t have specific timing or a consistent process for sharing targets with new Partners.
Without a consistent process, there’s a lot of assumptions and “read between the lines” type of indirect communication that occurs. This lack of clarity around targets and expectations can be a huge stressor for new Partners and can have a direct impact on their performance.
Firms should define a clear process for communicating targets within their onboarding process that addresses each the following:
- What are the specific targets (pipeline, sales, utilization, etc)?
- How are they measured?
- When are they expected by?
- When are they communicated?
- How are they communicated?
Clarifying expectations reduces unnecessary stress from ambiguity around how success is being measured for new Partners. If you think you’ve been 100% clear, keep going. There’s no such thing as expectations that are too clear.
3. Build Individualized Performance Plans
Effective Partner onboarding programs should pair assessment data with role context to create tailored performance plans that leverage strengths and address barriers for each new Partner.
At Kinavic, we call these tailored performance plans Traction Plans.
At a fundamental level, an effective Traction Plan needs to address the following:
- Clarity – What is excellent performance in the role?
- Reflection – What about the person will accelerate/limit their success?
- Intention – What will the person do to leverage their strengths and address their barriers?
- Accountability – What commitments are being made by whom to generate better results faster?
More specifically, a Partner Traction Plan should include:
- Role definition and expectations – Describe role, metrics, and timelines.
- Psychometric assessment summary (strengths and barriers to success).
- Year one objectives (3-5) and metrics. Monitor/update 1-2x month.
- High level activation plan and record.
When tailored Traction Plans are created and implemented, accelerated performance becomes more predictable for new Partners in your Partner onboarding process.
4. Utilize an Effective Sponsorship Program
An effective sponsorship program reduces Time to Traction and accelerates long-term success by pairing new Partners with experienced Partners at the firm.
Sponsors should assist new Partners in integrating into the firm’s culture, building relationships within the firm, and making progress toward reaching sales and utilization targets.
To build the most effective sponsor program, consider the following:
- Make sure that sponsors are committed to and prepared to help new Partners succeed. Clearly define expectations for sponsor performance.
- Sponsors should have and provide clarity on the firm’s operational practices and cultural expectations.
- Provide sponsors with individual assessment insights to help them customize their guidance for new Partners they are sponsoring.
5. Tailored Performance Coaching
While sponsors provide mentorship from an internal, firm perspective, performance coaches offer dedicated, tailored support to new Partners and often exist outside of the organization.
Performance coaching (different than traditional leadership development coaching) focuses on helping individuals leverage strengths and address barriers related to performance in their role as a Partner.
Consider these factors when selecting the right performance coaches for your program:
- Have they performed in a similar Partner role in their career?
- Are they committed to the new Partner’s success. Are they willing to be held accountable?
- Do they have a history of driving measurable performance improvements?
It takes someone who’s been successful at the Partner level to support a Partner in accelerating their performance. That’s why Kinavic’s team of Executive Advisors is comprised of former CXOs, Partners, and MDs.
6. Engaging Outside Perspectives
With the right experience, resources, and time, you can create an effective new Partner onboarding program in-house. It’s also important to consider the advantages of engaging outside perspectives.
For one, it can be difficult for Partners to feel comfortable sharing their struggles, doubts, or roadblocks with their immediate supervisor, internal stakeholders, or your HR department. That’s where external strategic partners can provide unbiased perspectives that foster psychological safety and are conducive to overcoming the biggest barriers to performance.
External partners can also bring fresh insights into your culture, systems, and processes, uncovering opportunities to improve efficiency, enhance impact, or accelerate success.
While building a robust new Partner onboarding program in-house is certainly possible, many firms find it more effective to leverage external capabilities and relevant expertise.
Conclusion
Creating an effective new Partner onboarding process is essential for professional services firms aiming to thrive in a competitive market.
By combining a data-driven approach, clear success metrics, effective sponsorship programs, tailored performance coaching, and external expertise, firms can better predict and accelerate the performance of their new Partners.
At Kinavic Leadership Acceleration, we have a track record of helping numerous high-growth firms predict and accelerate Partner performance using our tailored performance acceleration strategies.
Are you confident your new Partners are positioned for rapid success? Contact us today to discuss opportunities help your new Partners perform better, faster.