#2 - Congruency: The Key to High Performing Design Practices

Welcome to the second in a series of posts about running and succeeding within design firms.? If you are interested in why I am writing these, my intro is here.

An absolute fundamental for a high performing design practice is congruency – Purpose, Vision, people, strategy, operations - everything must be aligned. ?This is akin to tug of war – if you don’t have all your people pulling in the same direction, you are surely going to lose to the practices that do.

There are many reasons a practice may not be in alignment:

·?????? Unclear or unresolved strategy

·?????? Poor communication

·?????? Inconsistent implementation

·?????? Key leaders and partners with different objectives and views on the way ahead

·?????? Reluctance to make necessary trade-offs

Collaboration vs Individual Accountability

One the most fundamental choices is how much your practice wants to drive a team collaboration vs individual accountability. ?Most practices of any scale want strong teamwork and collaboration across their people, sharing of skills and experience to help them win projects and deliver them effectively and efficiently.? Most practices also want very clear, individual accountability for their people, especially those at a partner level.?

But these two elements conflict – there are trade-offs.?? If you want to drive collaboration, then you must deal with the thorny issue of how to share credit and rewards.? If you want a black and white “spreadsheet score” for each individual/group, accountability will be much clearer, but you will be driving individualistic behaviour.? In my experience, you must make a clear choice, a half-way house of conflicting signals will drive confusion, not high performance.

For example, winning work in design is typically a collaborative endeavour – while the relationship person and/or designer may be critical, the client needs to have confidence in the whole team.? The relationship person may not be a great designer, the designer isn’t necessarily a great project manager, and so on.?

With a trusted relationship built from a history of delivering – an individual may be able to win work on their own, not because the client trusts you to do everything, but that you will do the important things, that the project will remain a focus for you and you will put together a team that can deliver it to their expectations.? If you don’t have that, then you will almost certainly need a team conversion.

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Case Study 1:? Sustaining a One Firm Approach

At a practice I am familiar with, a One Firm approach had been embedded for some time.? This encouraged studios (offices/profit centres) to share excess work with other studios that needed work.? In that way they didn’t have people burning out in one place while others were under-utilised, or worse, hiring in one place while firing in another.? Balancing work across the network provided the best outcome for the firm overall.? ?But it did require studios to share revenue and profit with that other location.

The practice then went through a period of stubbornly low profitability.? As a result, there was pressure to increase financial accountability.? Little credit was given for revenue (and thus potential profit) passed on to others.? Little surprise as to the behaviour that resulted.? Studios kept their own revenue and ran their people hard and recruited locally.? While the centre pushed back on this (because it was detrimental to the practice as a whole) the studio leaders knew that when their performance was assessed, the black & while outcomes of their studio P&L would be substantially more heavily weighted than any assessment of their One Firm behaviour.? ?

What practice may have gained in increased accountability they lost through poorer collaboration and profits remained stubbornly low.

Case Study 2: ?Optimising Trade-offs ?

With some clear thinking and creativity however, these trade-offs can be minimised, enabling strong accountability while encouraging teamwork.? A well-known professional practice rewards its partners largely based on an adjusted revenue rather than actual revenue.? If a partner sells a project on their own, then a dollar of revenue = a dollar of adjusted revenue.? If, however, they sell it in collaboration with one or more partner(s), then they get an uplift of say 30%, so $1 of revenue = $1.30 of adjusted revenue. ?The partner leading the project gets to decide how to apportion the adjusted revenue among the collaborating partners.? They do that in the knowledge that this game will play out many, many times over their career.?? If they are seen to be unfair with their allocation, other partners may not collaborate with them or will allocate similarly when the table is turned. ?The incentives are thus balanced between teamwork and accountability – and congruent with the desired strategy and culture.? (The partners’ adjusted revenue targets are of course adjusted for this potential uplift so that the right amount of actual revenue is targeted – and therein lies some risk - but otherwise an elegant approach.)

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Is your practice congruent?? ??

Are you recognising trade-offs and making aligned strategic choices, or trying to have it both ways?

Are all your partners / key leaders clear fully aligned on the most important elements of your purpose, vision and strategy – and how to execute it??

Next post:? Are you truly congruent - the moments of truth that tell you?