In Professional Services the team is the most important and vital asset in my opinion. The shared experience prior knowledge residual expertise and motivational power that the team can bring to a project and accomplish immeasurable good for organizations and businesses.
When I recruit and seek to retain team members I tend to use a very different rubric for how to measure success and what the focus on. I recommend focusing on culture and values Andy emphasizing platform knowledge expertise and prior experience. The sounds crazy though in my experience over the last eighteen years it has given me breakout success across many fronts and to the benefit of many partners.
Let me share one example of why I believe this is a superior message. Imagine a project has been going along for about 8 months and some red flags begin to appear. The client is complaining about some key deliverables being missed and having to be a big surprise that there was no warning or wrist raised. At the same time the project team is reporting some Community challenges and relational friction with a team member who happens to be a very responsible party needs deliverables and has customer visibility.
As a project lead or an executive on a delivery side this needs attention. My question is which is more difficult to solve is it the challenge with the person who has relational friction because they don’t share the values of follow-through keeping to a calendar closing the loop servant leadership or Shoring up skills such as opportunity product Revenue schedule configuration or work order life cycle detail. It’s challenging and any project to shore up these items. The ladder is so much easier and less risky than the former. Additionally in my experience Shoring up culture and values in a project is virtually impossible to do we’re showing up skills is always possible when you get the culture and values right. This is why I would prefer having someone who has the right culture and values on the team regardless of their self-worth skills and experience versus the ladder looking for sales skills and experience and not aligning on culture and values.