25 years of timesheets

Some things in life can sneak up on you but they tend to be mundane, everyday things. To my own embarrassment i have been caught out this week by the arrival of my 25th anniversary of being in the workforce and more precisely 25 years working in professional services. A quarter of a century, 2.5% of a millennium. Yikes! It has led me to spend some time over the weekend sitting on the sofa at home thinking about what I have learned in those 25 years and, if i could go back in time and impart some wisdom to myself in October 1999, what would i say?

I am not a big contributor on Linkedin, and for those people out there who know me are well aware that this does not come easily or naturally to me, but i share these personal views as a method of reflection for myself and as a way that maybe some readers will recognise themselves in some of these observations and let them start to self-reflect. Lastly, like my last point, don’t take these too seriously ! So here are the seven points i would tell myself 25 years ago if i could.

1) Get the little things right because if you can’t do that, you will never get the big things right -

I remember listening to a clip on Youtube which went viral during COVID of retired US navy admiral William McRaven. He famously offered advice around making his bed every morning as part of what he learnt from Navy Seal training. This struck a chord with me. It struck me that i had been ironing my shirts every week since i started working in Edinburgh and could associate with the same small sense of pride, of personal responsibility to go to work half decently dressed and more generally how achieving some small trivial thing well could lead to large more substantive achievements. Sure as I got older I had less time and more money available to pay someone to do for me but i refuse to, rather sticking to the same ideals which McRaven felt about making his bed. A bit geeky but there you go. To the 22 year old Pip, keep ironing your own shirts.?

2) People remember not what you did, but how you made them feel -

This learning started during a very difficult few months on an audit client when they faced with some restatement issues, an accounting investigation and the inability of the company to publish accounts when this investigation was ongoing. I came out of an Audit Committee with the two engagement partners and we had to brief several senior partners within the firm such as the General Counsel and Risk Management types that the company wanted to publish?their accounts anyway despite the investigation not being finished. This was not going to be an easy conversation.

The lead partner got called in to talk to the AC Chair and could not join the call. The second partner somehow had a prior meeting said he was double booked and i should do the briefing. I had been a Manager for about seven weeks at this point and was totally out of my depth to tell six, 20 years plus partners that our worst case scenario was about to happen. I went back to my desk in a state of stress and had ten minutes to get my script together and pulse down to normal levels. At this point another partner on another client i worked on arrived from the airport with his suitcase and came into the office and asked me what was wrong. I gave him the short version along with questioning whether the parents of the partner who left me alone were married when he was born. He said over his dead body was I doing this call alone and even though he had no involvement in this audit, said he was to sit in with me and provide air cover. I was eternally grateful and things really hit home an hour later. The call had gone ok all things considered but the partner’s secretary had come looking for me later to ask why this had not turned up to the meeting with the Chair of the Board of the client he had flown in to meet. It then dawned on me that he had, without a second thought, stood up his most important client at a moment’s notice in order to help me out and put this ahead of the reason he got on the plane that morning. I felt hugely humbled that someone would do this for something they were not involved in. I went on to work with this person for a few years and when he said he needed help, my response was unequivocal. If there was a brick wall in the way, i would run through it for him. If i would or could ever have that impact on someone it would be a career highlight i have often reflected since then. So young Pip, if someone goes a long way out of their way to have your back, you need to be ready to cover their back one day.?

3) Focus when going down the funnel -

The end result counts in professional services - as a project moves from planning and scoping, through design and execution into finalization and reporting, the more ideas, challenges, innovation and opinions you get at the entrance to the funnel are generally a good thing. As you move to the crunch time, the pressure mounts and the funnel get narrower Too many of these become a distraction and you need to know when to flick the switch and focus on the end deliverable. This can be finishing an audit file under time pressure or it can be a scrum half marshalling a rugby team into position to win the match with a drop goal with the last kick of the game. The key principles hold. When at the end of the funnel, slow down, concentrate, block out the noise, back yourself and let your hours of training pay off and trust your team to do the same. So young Pip, we all start off as a lump of coal in our working life. How we react to the pressure make the difference if we become a diamond or stay a lump of coal.?

4) It’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how may times you get back up -

We fail. We do stupid things. We screw up. That needs a certain level of resilience to recover from. What is harder to is keep going when you get knocked down when you do the right thing or achieve what people expected of you and people still have a go at you. Sometimes in life people will knock you down anyway and it is how you come back from that which is the real test. For anyone in my network from that Edinburgh year 99 email address will no doubt still be wearing some bruises having gone through “that partner” review on bank & cash back in the day. We all could have done a great job auditing this but he was never going to let you feel that. What he was testing was our resilience?as much as whether he would sign a clean opinion by taking half an hour to go over the Assistant’s work one-to-one. Somewhat of a rite of passage to go through that but character building nonetheless. So Pip, sometime life is not fair but get up off the ground and keep going.?

5) Stand up to bullies and speak truth to power -

You occasionally will get clients who think they can treat advisers how they like and in a way they would not treat colleagues and expect us to tolerate this as a fellow human being. Internally, within the relatively flat hierarchies of professional services firms compared to corporates, you can have fiefdoms or concentrations of power who can ignore established governance and effectively act how they with limited consequences. I have experienced both but thankfully in small doses over my 25 years but we all have responsibility to both standing up to bullies and where necessary talking truth to power.

Clients expect us to have a view and not just agree with everything they say. As the years go by and i deal with more senior executives and Board members, the younger Pip may be surprised to learn that differences of views are more happily accepted and are even encouraged the more senior the people you speak to. Part of our value as outsiders to a company is the independent, well-reasoned and clearly communicated point even if it not the convenient narrative currently in vogue in the organization. So young Pip, sometimes a spade is a rectangular piece of earth moving equipment and sometimes it a shovel. Know the difference.

6) You don’t need a badge or a title to lead – the views of your peers empower and facilitate much more -

I have thought about the difference between a Leader and a Manager quite a lot and I see companies struggle with this one. Managers can be promoted into roles as they are reliable, compliant, make budget every year and are a safe pair of hands but are they really leaders just because they have a badge? Not always the same thing in my view.?

To say leader are born is a bit of a clichee but i would say that they can be recognised?by their peers more quickly than their bosses. My learning here goes back a few years when I once played a cricket trial match in Ireland. The North against the South. Our southern opposition all turned up well drilled, started to warm up and looked very professional with each role in the team defined. The team from the north was thrown together where eleven players were pulled from eight or nine separate clubs. When the umpires called the two captains to toss the coin the start the game, we all looked at each others realising that no captain had been appointed.

We had probably 8 captains of their own club in the team and many of them would have been up to the job. We realised that someone needed to go out to the coin toss and one player piped up first, “I had assumed that Pip would have been captain”. “Yeah me too, said another.” I was no star in the team but suddenly two voices became four nodding heads and in a few seconds i was on my way to flip a coin, quite relaxed i was ready for the job, despite 7 of my team mates feeling that they could do this job too. On my way back to the changing room i walked past the coach and said why did he not appoint a captain, as would be normal. He gave me a big smile and said he was fully confident that i would have ended up as captain anyway but if he had appointed me half the team would have resented it given the flat hierarchy of the team (cf professional services firm too….) but if the team appointed you themselves, this would be a non-topic now. I realised that i had been “done” on this one but i felt more empowered and confident after that than being appointed from on high by the coach. So young Pip, leaders don’t need badges. They just need room to do their thing and for people with titles and badges to get out of their way and let them do their thing. Leadership is sometimes what you don’t do, not what you actually do.

7) Take the rough together with the smooth -

Being self critical is good. Wanting to better yourself and to look for feedback is a positive trait. Don’t always go hunting the negative to improve upon without taking a moment to recognise your successes, those of your team’s and the hopefully positive impact you can have on people. Keep it balanced otherwise the hunt for the negative can be a vicious spiral if unchecked.

I recently got a wake-up call on this when we had a celebration dinner for some colleagues who have been successful in their promotion panels. To me, identifying people as promotion candidates and supporting them in the process is part of the job and, without underplaying the importance of this, can be as transactional as anything else we do. Towards the end of the meal I got on an unprovoked basis a very nice present and thoughtfully written card thanking for me for being there and helping the team in what they have gone through. First time that ever happened to me. It took me a moment to recognise this for what this was, being a hugely humbling and flattering gesture by a group of people i enjoy to work with. It also gave me a nudge to take more time to reflect and recognize what we do well even if it can be buried in the minutiae of what we do every day. ?

If you can reach the experience I spoke about in point 2 above then that is career defining. I would tell the younger version of myself to be to focus on improvements certainly but be more open to celebrate the little wins and positive praise that comes your way to get a more balanced view. Like all things, don’t ever start to take yourself too seriously though.?

So, those are my seven points of retrospective wisdom i would pass back if I had a time machine. I have not word counted this but i feel it has more words than i intended to write at the start. If you have read all this, then well done and you are already putting a tick against my resilience point. These are mine but what would you say to your younger self 25 years on?