Culture Matters: Building the Wise Firm

Growing leaders faster is a key need for most companies. With the changing workplace demographics—including the mass exodus of Baby Boomers and inept succession planning—organizations are scrambling to grow high potentials into leaders who can lead faster.

Despite the light-hearted approach to last week's blog, 5 Foolproof Ways to Fail as a Performance Advisor, I believe the point was still clear—being a good performance advisor actually is hard work. But, it's without a doubt one of my most rewarding and fulfilling responsibilities. Creating a rising tide is something that has always been incredibly important to me and being a performance advisor gives me a fantastic opportunity to do that. I think Seth Godin sums it up in a recent blog by saying, "We get what we invest in. The time we spend comes back, with interest."  

Being a good performance advisor is hard work. It can be time consuming, it takes vulnerability and real collaboration, and at times, it requires difficult, uncomfortable conversations. We all have overflowing plates between client service, other firm initiatives and our personal lives. Who really wants to add something else on top of that? Shouldn’t team members be responsible for finding their own potential and direction anyway?  

I love that the term we call our culture, the Wise Firm, is based on the Biblical parable and a song I grew up singing in Sunday school. “The wise man built his house upon the rock, the wise man built his house upon the rock…and the rains came tumbling down.” This little song got me thinking about how we build our team members? Do we really build them up with a rock like foundation? Do we encourage them to reach their full potential?

I grew up in a diverse family—four sisters, one brother, three races, and a 75 year age span between the family members that still lived in my parent’s house in Tennessee. I’m so blessed to be part of a family with so many perspectives, learning to empathize with others’ positions rather than automatically becoming judgmental. As you might expect, getting along with everybody all the time wasn’t always easy. I remember one particular instance when my 5-year-old brother and 13-year-old sister were having a particularly difficult time refraining from killing each other. My mom, the wisest person in the world, pulled my sister aside and told her “I know your brother is hard to deal with and sometimes really hard to like. You know how the greatest commandment is to love God, and the second is to love others? Well, your brother was made in the image of God. You have to love him.” Mic drop.

For millennials, the workforce looks vastly different today than when baby boomers were entering. Passion is a hot topic that society pushes millennials towards in the search for a career. Many millennials believe they will be unfilled in the corporate world because it does not provide an opportunity to pursue certain passions. For me, a millennial, life at HORNE has proven that a personal passion can easily align with my career. 

My first two years at HORNE were pretty exciting and filled with fast-paced learning. But, I slowly started to feel eager for a bigger more impactful role in a project. Then, one day my performance advisor was talking about having to travel to Tennessee for a client meeting. I immediately chimed in, “I want to go to Tennessee!” He smiled and said, “Well, I don’t need you on this project right now, but we have a big project coming up that’s also in Tennessee. And, it’s a big one.”

Due to some recent unfortunate events in my life, I’ve been thinking a lot about failure. At HORNE we are very positive about failure and see it as a necessary element of success in the workplace as well as in our personal lives. We encourage the act of failing forward, but what does this mean?

I think our philosophy aligns well with the Winston Churchill quote “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” We choose to see our failures as necessary learning opportunities on the way to a successful career. But in order to live this out we have to remember several things that define the way we handle failure. I have compiled a list of a few things we need to do in order to use our failures for ultimate success.

Recently, I was given an opportunity to be a part of proposing for work with a new client. I learned many things during this process, but my biggest takeaway was a comment made by the company’s CFO.

At this point in the conversation, we were talking through the process of them changing accounting firms. We addressed the fact that we would reach out to their former firm regarding the inspection of work papers. Realizing this could be an awkward process, the CEO asked if that encounter was typically hostile. In response, the CFO said, “Well no, because we aren’t switching firms due to issues with quality of the work, we are switching because these guys specialize in working with companies like ours.”