Key Lessons from Fostering Loyalty in Our Consultancy

Much has been written about the demise of company loyalty, from companies to their employees and from employees to companies. Not surprising as we're walking into a form of capitalism which seems too short-sighted to value relationships. The trend seems to be unapologetically towards a mercenary company, staffed by a team of self-centred employees, who are seduced, tempered and mollified with perks.

Yet the need for Loyalty remains strong from a human and a corporate perspective. This is especially true in consulting companies, where the benefits of cohesive teams are enormous, but harder to realise as teams group, disband and regroup across projects.

In a previous role, I inherited a team with a voluntary churn rate of around 40% - meaning that every year 40% of our team was leaving because they didn't want to hang around. In mathematical terms, this meant having to replace the entire team in 2.5 years just to stand still. But in reality, it threatened to take us out of business.

We turned that round to an industry leading 6%, and achieved this during intensely competitive times. We did it mainly by focussing on humanity, and demonstrating, then earning, loyalty. Here are some of the ways we did it, and some lessons we learned.

1. Benefits of loyalty

Loyalty is quantifiable, financially impactful and spiritually rewarding. Although the following are some of the more tangible benefits, don't underestimate the feeling of walking with a team where you feel some form of kinship - it is both infinitely satisfying, and underpins and expands the long-term financial impact.

1.1. Retention & Recruitment

• The direct cost of replacing staff is reduced - not only recruitment fees, but also on-boarding time; opportunity cost while you're a team-member down; interview and selection time; time for new starters to get as effective as departing members.
• Attraction. Loyal consultants naturally wax lyrical about their team and company - not an enforced elevator pitch to repeat verbatim, but conversations they have because they genuinely feel valued and empowered by their workplace. This is very effective in attracting good fit candidates. People want to work with other people they respect and like. In our case, we ended up with the double whammy of attracting better consultants without paying external recruiters.
• Retention compounds. A team that has been with you longer is more cohesive and tends to breed similar behaviour with new members as they come on board. It also creates a body of people who can more quickly and effectively on-board new team members as you grow, making that process more effective.

1.2. Project Delivery

• Delivery quality improves as longer-serving staff understand and are comfortable enough with your methodologies to deploy them effectively, to know when and how to amend them, and when to ignore or abandon them.
• Teamwork and delivery. A team that is loyal to each other delivers better quality projects. No one wants to let the rest of the team down. Team members are on the lookout for obstacles, and proactively warn the rest of the team about them so that they can collectively surmount them.

1.3. Engagement

• "Looking out" for the company. A wonderful symmetry happens when you look out for your team. They start to look out for you. This translates to a number of benefits, ranging from caring more about finding new business, to making sure they don't let their team down in delivery and to improving quality as a result.
• More enjoyable. We've all been in workplaces where people are hanging around for the money, or because they can't find work elsewhere. Where conversations revolve around employment woes. No one enjoys working there except whingers, who rarely make the best consultants.

1.4. Business development

• Not everyone is, or should be, a salesman. Often, consultants excel at delivery and suck at sales. But business development is more than sales. Although they may not sell directly, every consultant is ideally placed to identify opportunities to add more value to his or her client, and should be able to escalate these opportunities through a sales channel. (We go into this more in our training for consultancy owners / leaders, as well as our consulting skills course).
• Every consultant represents her or his consultancy, and as such is a model for the client of whether to engage more with that particular consultancy. An enthused consultant who clearly feels positive about his consultancy, provided this is not combined with arrogance, is a very strong attractor for additional business.

2. Key factors that foster loyalty

So what are the key influencers of loyalty? Here are the key ones I experienced.

2.1. Vision and/or Principles and/or Values

A compelling vision and belief that collectively you can achieve it is a key factor in developing loyalty. Leaders in all companies, but consultancies especially:

1. Need to have a vision in place that means a damn;
2. Need to be able to create belief that they can create it with their team;
3. Need to lead in a way that demonstrates their commitment and takes their team towards it.

2.2. Team

A huge part of company loyalty comes from working with a team you like to be with and respect. So if you're looking for the best people in your field while ignoring cultural fit, then you're not going to be helping create a bond.

Does that mean you should only employ consultants in your image (heaven forbid)? Not at all - that would be myopic disaster. The point is to balance diversity with fit. You want the best people and you want them to be able to bond without needing to sing kumbaya in a circle around you on a raft drifting down some corporate-bonding event.

So make sure during your interview process you're looking for cultural and values fit as well as excellence, aptitude, keenness and experience.

2.3. Leadership

If you're a sociopath, it's unlikely you'll build loyalty.

If you're a micro-manager, you're unlikely to build loyalty amongst autonomous self-starters (which is who you should be recruiting and growing).

If you're just an unlikable jerk, and think respect or fear alone will build loyalty, you'll only have people hang around who can't find somewhere else to go.

Which isn't loyalty.

So pay attention to your leadership style. It doesn't mean you need to go overboard on theatricals: in fact, in his excellent book "Good to Great", Jim Collins identified the Level 5 leader as one who encompasses "personal humility and indomitable will".

But sitting behind a desk in the corner looking morose won't cut it either.

For my part, I believe that leadership is most effective when viewed as a role, not as a position of superiority or infallibility. It's too easy to believe your own hype. But fall into that trap, and not only will loyalty be compromised, but so will the future of your company as you close your blinkers to ways to move your business forward.

In my case, having inherited a team which felt very little or no loyalty to its leaders or employer, it meant demonstrating first my own loyalty to the team. One of their biggest gripes at the time was feeling that their management didn't value them as individuals - typified by a career development process where nothing was documented or reviewed, where it wasn't uncommon for the focus of career development meetings to be on the manager rather than the team member, and where very little intentionally happened to develop the consultant between one session and the next.

So my first action was to personally have full one-on-one career development sessions with the whole team (numbering around 60 at the time), leaving no topic off the table, personally documenting each session, and putting in place a process to make career development integral to how we did business.

Was that hard? It was a hellish few weeks of very late nights, emotionally demanding and sapping. But if I was to expect any loyalty from my team, I needed to demonstrate that I would be loyal to them. Besides which, they were only on loan to me for this part of their career, and it would have been selfish in the extreme not to help them make the most productive advances I could during the time they were with me.

So my question to you is whether your team feels and sees that you are in it as much for them as you expect them to be for you?

2.4. Community

A genuine belief that your firm is contributing to something bigger than itself is becoming increasingly important in today's workplace. I wrote about this in my article on how Maslow is affecting your workplace. But suffice to say that if your team feels like it is contributing to something more than your bottom line, they're more likely to feel genuine reward and hang around.

And, ironically, in so doing, will contribute more to your bottom line.

2.5. Loyalty to your consultants

Branson famously puts his team ahead of his customers. In a consulting business, this is even more important.

Note that by no means is this saying that the customer is anything less than very important. It is simply that your consultants, especially those that get it and get you, are more important. And if you treat them that way, they will make sure that your clients don't feel anything less than incredibly valuable. Rate your clients higher than your consultants, and you will ironically end up providing a worse service to them.

What does this mean practically in our trade? Here are a few examples:

• If you're in a meeting where the client is going hell for leather at your consultants, don't default to taking the client's side. Try to reduce the confrontation and turn it constructive, but defend your consultants (unless what they've done is indefensible). If the client has a point, and you need a stern conversation with your team, have that discussion afterwards alone with your team, not in front of the client.
• If deadlines have become unreasonable, don't expect that your consultants should work 24/7 to deliver. And don't apply emotional blackmail on them to do so. Manage your client's expectations and have the tough conversation rather than horse-whipping your team.
• Don't sell the impossible project. Earn your stripes by renegotiating a project that's on a hiding to nothing, or only deliverable through 60 hour weeks (which comes to the same thing).
• Simply treat your team as well as, or better than, your client.

Loyalty is a two-way thing. If you don't go the extra mile for your team, don't expect them to do it for you.

2.6. Trust

Demonstrate trust in your team. It's hard to be loyal to someone who doesn't trust you.

Make sure not only that you personally demonstrate trust in your team, but also that your processes do the same. I often find that the more laborious and long a company's policy documents are, the less trust is fostered. For instance, a travel expenses policy that goes into enormous detail on every variant of what is acceptable and what isn't tells your consultants that you don't trust their judgement.

The best way to make trust work? It's a fairly straightforward process:

1. Recruit people who demonstrate trustworthiness;
2. Be clear about your expectations of them;
3. Give them support to make acceptable decisions;
4. Let them make them;
5. If the decision turns out to be suboptimal, simply learn from it if it was in error, and only deal with it firmly if it was a betrayal of trust.

3. Practical strategies

So how do you turn this into action? Essentially it comes down again to that wonderful word, leadership. And here are some tangibles.

3.1. Create vision

Find your compelling vision. What is your consultancy about? Don't confuse this with a marketing USP (which in my view wastes a lot of time and budget for consulting organisations). It is essentially what you want to do and stand for.

Once you've articulated your vision, clearly commit to it. Demonstrate how everything links back to it.

(We cover the route from vision and values to goals and operations in our Value/s Led Consulting online course, which you can read about here.)

3.2. Spend time with your team

I've mentioned this before, but schedule time to visit your team on client site.

If you've scheduled a client visit, make sure you see your team when you're there. Don't come onto client site, walk past or avoid your team, and straight into that client meeting. See your team first. Take them for a coffee or lunch. Or have a beer afterwards. But don't let them find out you that you came simply because the client told them after you left.

If you've not seen one of your project teams in a while, schedule a visit explicitly to see them, and find a way to add value to the client in your visit while you're there.

3.3. Work as hard as you expect them to

Don't be that boss who always has an offsite "meeting" at 2pm on Fridays. And if you've been unable to ward off working late for a project team, then don't let them feel alone - rock up on occasion. After all, unless they've screwed up, it's partially your responsibility that the client's expectations haven't been managed to avoid the scenario.

3.4. Create community-building opportunities during work hours

Find ways for your team to get together. Physically. I know that it's terribly untrendy now to expect people to actually meet, rather than Skype or IM or Slack.

All of those have their place. But so does getting your team together for work, knowledge sharing or letting off steam.

In Conchango, as our team got into the hundreds, it became a real challenge for us to foster a culture where we were all a part of the same team rather than on disparate client teams. So I instituted Community Days, where we would all come off client site one day every 4 to 6 weeks, share project learning, develop intellectual capital, drive forward our own initiatives, and just as importantly, have a drink or twenty at a nearby venue afterwards. It made an enormous difference to our culture and organisation, and became an attractor for many applicants as word spread in our industry.

3.5. Recruit good and good-fit people

It all starts here. And by 'good' I mean both good at what they do, and a good fit.

Hiring people who are good at what they do has an impact not only on quality of delivery, but also on loyalty. If your team feels like you're letting standards drop in your recruitment, it will reduce cohesion and belief in your conviction to your vision. Consultants like to work with people who they feel they can learn something from, or who they can teach something to. Someone who shows no predilection for either is unlikely to bolster a growth culture.

But that's not enough. You do need your team to like and respect each other. Recruit jerks and you'll soon see loyalty from team members to each other dissipate.

3.6. Implement a deep induction process

By "deep induction process", I mean one where new starters not only learn how to do things, but also the story of your consultancy, the story of the founders, what's important to you, what your values are, how they translate into real day-to-day work, get to meet other team members and so on. The softer elements that start them on a journey of being a part of your team rather than an simply someone on payroll.

3.7. Create social opportunities

I'm not personally a fan of "team bonding" events. Done well (and that's not always the case) they can be fun, for sure. But I remain to be convinced that they make a long-lasting impact.

However, regular opportunities for social interaction - lunch, drinks, coffees, events - build momentum. And that's even more essential in a consultancy where your teams may be on client sites and not see each other for weeks or months.

3.8. Look out for your consultants

Check up on your team. Both in person, and through your eyes and ears on the ground. My ops and scheduling team was by definition very close to the action daily, and gave me very timely tips of when I needed to have a reassuring word with someone.

If a consultant is in difficulty professionally or personally, be supportive. Remember your team comes first. Find a way to meet client needs if a consultant genuinely needs to come off client site for a personal reason. Your clients are (mostly) human, and you might even find it easier than expected when the need comes.

3.9. Practice Level 5 Leadership

I alluded to this before. But be humble. Many of your team can do what they do better than you can or ever will. Hopefully. Accept that leading is a role and responsibility, and treat it with respect.

3.10. Let your team make real decisions

Empowerment. A big word. An overused word. An essential concept. If you don't let your team make real decisions, and I mean decisions that can genuinely impact your top and bottom lines, then you're not showing you trust them.

Obviously, you apply your own common sense on this - any strings that exist will become looser as people become more senior or demonstrate their responsibility with the authority that you give them.

3.11. Don't insist on reviewing every blog post before it's published

This is a somewhat detailed point. But I raise it because of the amount of times I still see a gatekeeper on blogs. There's a real message about lack of trust in that. Let alone the fact that backlogs of blogs build up until they can be checked and amended, slowing down momentum and will.

Publish a set of guidelines (we give you a sample set in our course), trust your consultants to work within them, and have a word if they don't.

3.12. Don't micro-manage

Aside from enabling them to make decisions, allow the team to get on with its work without having to get your approval / interference at every step.

AND, ensure that your management teams, including project managers, also don't micro-manage. I can't over-emphasise this. So many in situational positions of power rather than permanent ones feel the need to prove themselves by micro-management. And if you're using Scrum or some other form of agile, anyone micromanaging needs severe realignment as to what those methodologies mean and why they work.

Hire and train your team into doing the right thing, accept that not every right thing may be your right thing, and only pull things back when there's a genuine need to.

3.13. Don't hide stuff

If your company values include transparency (and make no mistake, expectations regarding the level of transparency are on the increase), then make sure you demonstrate it. Trust your team with information - company strategy, financials, opportunities, threats. It will not only demonstrate trust, but in most instances (especially if you're getting loyalty up), it will also allow your team to participate in the strategy, in improving financials, in realising opportunities, in minimising threats.

If that trust is betrayed, deal with it swiftly. You're not doing this to be naive, but to be open with your team and get them all aligned and pushing in the same direction. If you tell them something should stay in house, and it doesn't, then deal with whomever lets it out.

3.14. Follow your values

In fact, whatever you say your values are, live them and make sure your processes reflect them. Study after study shows that it's better not to articulate any values at all, than to articulate them and fail to live up to them.

3.15. Help your team raise its profile

Don't be shy of getting them on stage, and supporting them in raising their profile. It shows confidence and enthusiasm for your team's abilities.

Will the successful ones become the target of headhunters? Sure they will. Will you lose some of the best ones? Quite possibly. But that's where loyalty comes in - the more effective you've been at fostering it, the less likely it is that you'll lose them. And, paradoxically, putting your best consultants in public view is one of the most effective ways to build loyalty as it demonstrates that you value them.

Quite aside from which, it's a great client-winning and employee-attraction tool.

It's about creating a company that feels good

While Loyalty is only one strategy for retention, it is the most effective, and the one that brings the greatest set of benefits.

But the effects reach far beyond that. It makes for a more stable workplace. A more positive environment. A greater attractor for good consultants. A stronger message to potential clients. A deeper rooted Intellectual Capital base.

And just a plain good feeling! Which matters a lot.

This is one in a series of posts about leading a tech consultancy and/or digital agency from my blog at Value Led Consulting.