1. Aligning Amid Chaos

Sun Tsu, the legendary Chinese general and philosopher of ancient times, said, “Every battle is won before it’s ever fought.” In the heat of battle, one must think like a medical triage unit in combat. Casualties are all around you and you’ve got to treat the most serious, life-threatening injuries first.

Mid-February is when the kids get sick, your spouse is working late, the holiday bills come due, and then that hot prospect you pursued all last year suddenly wants a proposal ASAP — and it conflicts with three pressing client deadlines. High-performing firms follow a playbook, so every team member knows what to do on every play. They react instinctively to the task at hand rather than calling or emailing others in a panic about what to do next.

2. Focusing on the Front Windshield, Not the Rearview Mirror

The rearview mirror in your car is smaller than the front windshield for a reason — you should be focusing on what’s in front of you, not behind you. But, when firm leaders are putting out fires all day long, they’re simply leading from behind. They’re not managing their time well, and they’re not utilizing the leveraging model in which they can assign the highest billable rate jobs to the lowest-paid team members capable of doing those jobs. At firms where partners lead from behind, teams are often confused about the firm’s vision and have no clarity about what management is hoping to accomplish. High-performing firms, by contrast, have established a governance process and have a leveraging model in place. They set SMART goals and they align their strategy with their tactics.

3. Having a Strategic Not Just Tactical Mindset

As Sun Tzu said, “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” I couldn’t agree more. As a firm leader, you must be willing to step away from day-to-day client responsibilities and focus on the big picture no matter how badly your technical skills are needed for complex client engagements. You must devote time to envisioning the future — anticipating the skills, resources and talent the firm will need months and years down the road. This type of complex strategic thinking requires large periods of uninterrupted reflection and concentration. If you keep allowing yourself to get pulled back into firefighter mode, the firm will just keep doing things “the ways we’ve always done them” and will never evolve.

4. Overcoming the Tyranny of the Urgent

No matter how stressful things get, high-performing firms have learned to distinguish between actual deadlines (i.e., IRS mandated), client-imposed deadlines and self-imposed deadlines. A governance model, which is then manifested in a unique trimester outlook methodology, emphasizes clarity around roles and responsibilities, policies and procedures, and metrics and  goals. This clarity leads to the opportunity to perform most efficiently and at your paygrade. Distinguishing tasks between “important” and/or “urgent” by using the Eisenhower Matrix (left) is the first step in prioritizing tasks in the heat of battle.

5.  Sharpening the Saw

To paraphrase Steven Covey: If you don’t sharpen the saw periodically, the blade gets dull, causing you to spend more time and effort to cut the same amount of wood. As a firm, if you don’t devote some time to working ON the business rather than solely IN the business, you’ll keep making the same busy season mistakes: you’ll continue burning out good staff and your leadership team will never build a sustainable and transferable firm. Effectively led firms envision the future and commit to providing the resources to build the skills and infrastructure that will be needed for years to come — not just to get through busy season.

Is your firm minimizing chaos and leading from the front? Or are you leading from behind? I'd love to hear about it.