Stages of team development

It is tempting when starting out as a new(ish) specialist team (or business) to look at other more established teams within the firm, or similar specialisms at other firms and assume that you should straightaway be doing what they're doing.?

This of course is not realistic and is just going to lead to you feeling sad and worrying about why it isn't working out.?

I speak from experience here.?But with experience comes learning.?I hope.?

We have just been through an exercise of writing five-year business plans for all of our teams and this gave me an opportunity to reflect on what kind of team we are trying to be and how we will get there.?

Being a long-time player of video games (I know, I should grow up and get a life) I am thinking about our team development in terms of "levelling up" and completing "achievements" to help us get there.?

Level One

I can talk about this one in the past tense because we've done this stage.?In the beginning, our new team had to establish itself and build a reputation internally.?Trying to chase big deals for non-clients was a non-starter as most of the external market probably didn't know we even had a team.?The majority of our work was therefore for existing clients of the firm and mostly this was done reactively, i.e. the client came to their Adviser with a need, the Adviser referred it to our team and we did the project.?In any given year, across the firm's client base, you would expect this to yield a certain amount of work and that's enough to justify having a couple of people to look after it.?

Delivering these projects has established our reputation with the client Advisers as a "safe" referral that they can be confident will benefit their client relationships and goodwill.?The importance of this cannot be overstated.?The core of our income depends on maintaining that confidence.??

At this early level, external leads were predictably few, but the projects we were doing enabled us to give referrals out to banks and solicitors and to have some case studies to publicise, which is how we began to establish some reputation in the external market.?

Level Two

Working reactively on the firm's client base will only bring in so much work.?There is also the risk of work leaking away from the firm to other providers simply because the clients aren't aware that we could do it.?

To get more work, which is essential if we are to develop the team, we have to capture not just all of the work that could come in reactively, but also proactively go out to clients with ideas and opportunities that help them to achieve their objectives and which create more projects for us.?

We have therefore invested time with the client Advisers, getting to know their client base.?At first, this is a data-gathering exercise:

• Who does what??
• Who might be interested in growing?
• Who makes acquisitions?
• Who is starting to think about succession?
• Who has key people they need to incentivise?

Once we know all of this, we can look for opportunities.?

There might be a young business seeking investment looked after by one team, and an established company in a related sector looked after elsewhere and open to investment opportunities.?The normal pressures of the day-to-day mean the client Advisers may not be aware of each other's clients.?By gathering this information and finding the connections, our team can potentially generate opportunities to benefit both clients that otherwise might not be there.?

Proactively creating projects is what enables us to grow beyond what could be achieved by just reactively delivering the work that naturally turns up. It also enhances our internal relationships with client Advisers and by giving them more ideas to take to clients, enhances their relationships and client goodwill.?This should hopefully bring more reactive opportunities in too, a kind of virtuous circle.?At least that's the idea.?

We haven't forgotten the external market of course, but we're still not expecting that to be a primary source of new work.?More projects though gives us more scope to refer out, more case studies to publish and builds our reputation in the market place.?At level two, we are getting some external leads, and dealing with them reactively.?

Level Three

By level three, we aim to be delivering all of the reactive needs of the client bases, generating proactive opportunities for them and receiving a growing stream of in-bound referrals and direct approaches from non-clients.

The focus can now start to move to our market profile and we actively seek out types of work to fill gaps in our repertoire of case studies.?

It is only now at level three that we need to start going after the same opportunities as some of the more established teams in other firms. It would probably be a fair challenge at this point for you to ask whether this is because I am actually scared of the external market and facing competition.?That is a good question that probably warrants a whole blog to itself.? What I will say here though is that we can get a long way along our journey of developing the team by picking our own fruit, starting with the low-hanging and moving up the tree, and picking the fruit other people can offer to us.?There is no need to go scrumping.??

Level Four

For our team to level up further, we do need to be doing all of the above, and then getting proactively out into the external market and making deals.?

I haven't used the term competitors anywhere, except at the end of level three, and that was in a question attributed to you the reader, so I haven't said it at all!?Like I said, we don't need to go scrumping in one another's orchards, there's a lot of apples to go around.?

More than that though, and this is probably me being idealistic, we could work together to the benefit of the west country economy.? The work we do to understand the firms' clients and proactively create opportunities for them can extend to collaboration with other firms to benefit everyone.?

Quite different to eighties and nineties notions of "smash the opposition", but far more in tune with the character of our team.?

Level Five

What, there's more??

Yes.?This is more of a ten year aspiration than a five year plan, because this really takes time, but ultimately we would like to be one of the teams that are viewed as "experts" and people seek us out.?

Long way to go to get there, but it's good to have an audacious goal right?

Where are we now?

About level one point five.?We've done the first round of information gathering from our client Advisers and are now working on joining the dots and finding the opportunities.

And in Gran Turismo Sport on the Playstation, I've just levelled-up to level 40 and earned the Sapphire Driver rating.?

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