Lead Like Neo

⏰ Today in 5 minutes or less:

• How to unlock success with the client team you inherit

• Be a Master that lifts all boats

• My Take: Are your clients ready for the AI revolution?

How to Make the Most Out of Your Client’s Team

Struggling to get the most out of your team?

As consultants, we’re tasked with helping companies achieve big goals with existing resources, like the current team they have. 

It feels like we parachute in. 

In over 25 years as a management consultant, I’ve dropped into existing teams too many times to count. 

I’m sure you’ve been there. As consultants, we rarely have control over with whom we work. We’re asked to build rapport, drive collaboration, and achieve results with the resources in place. Multiply this over twenty-plus years and we get pretty darn good at it. 

This gives us a unique vantage point.

First, we quickly learn how to assess talent.

Second, we learn how to orchestrate teams with a high variation of skill and motivation to succeed. 

I’ve noticed a few patterns: 

1. Client teams are usually quite talented and committed to success.

   • But as individuals, client team members vary in skill and bias for action.

2. Managers often assign ownership of projects to individuals.

   • However, the strongest teams align projects with partnerships of team members who complement each other. 

Based on these observations, I created the Technique x Speed Matrix to help clients achieve results with diverse and high-performing teams. It starts by simplifying each person’s contribution to two factors: technical expertise and execution speed. 

And guess what – you, the action-oriented, expert consultant, can be the Master that unlocks client success. 

A New Framework for Team Performance

Traditionally, companies use a High - Core - Low bell curve appraisal to categorize employee performance. 

While this method creates clear distinctions, it fails to capture the nuances of each individual’s contribution.  

And, it overlooks what really drives team success: driving collaboration with the right skills – that is technical, functional, or executive expertise – and moving with speed.

In addition to Masters, most teams consist primarily of “core performers.” But I break down this group into two categories so we can deploy them more effectively: 

• Deliberates: Highly skilled, but slow to move. Their slow pace may be caused by discomfort with ambiguity, desire for perfection, or being new in the role. Helping them embrace uncertainty and less-than-perfect results can unlock their speed of execution.

• Pacesetters: They bring energy and momentum, but their fast pace can cause them to miss crucial details or bring stakeholders along. Balanced with Deliberates, they can better identify connections in their work and improve the likelihood of success.

• Masters: Bringing the magic mix of technique and speed, Masters accelerate and improve the quality of an entire body of work. Many times, Masters are the invaluable, been-around-the-block individual contributors.

Collaborative Partnerships

Collaboration gets a lot of corporate air time. 

However, collaboration is rarely the first consideration when managers assign work to team members.

In my experience, managers look at individual factors: individual capabilities, current workload, stakeholder relationships, and past performance. Collaboration typically doesn’t enter the chat until work is underway.

This is a lost opportunity on several fronts. 

When helping clients with the ink through the allocation of their team to priorities, I advise they take a different approach. We strategically create Deliberate and Pacesetter partnerships with complementary employee strengths, improving the quality and pace of work. 

Pairing Pacesetters and Deliberates creates balanced, powerful teams. Pacesetters push the project forward, while Deliberates ensure consideration and quality. 

The secondary benefits of this approach are just as important.

Partnerships enable project diversification – which expands team members’ exposure to executives, balances workload peaks, and creates many more critical learning opportunities for core performers. 

Adding a Master to priority teams is the game-changer. 

The Role of the Master – YOU

And here’s the key: strategic placement of Masters transforms the team’s overall success. 

By strategically placing highly skilled Masters on projects alongside other team members – leaders elevate the overall performance of the team. Masters accelerate progress and use their unique expertise to guide everyone’s thinking.

But the problem is that Masters, especially individual contributor Masters, are few in number.

As High Performers, they’re identified for managerial roles early in their careers and put on the executive track. Leaders are lucky to have one Master on their team and rarely have several. 

This is where you, the individual consultant, play a pivotal role. You are a Master.  You can embed with client teams, partnering with the client team’s Deliberates and Pacesetters to work on the highest priorities and accelerate success. 

Our fractional strategy consultant team at Keenan Reid Strategies has proven this model. We embed top-tier strategy consultants with enterprises to unlock thorny commercialization and operations issues.

We look for individuals with expert-level problem-resolution skills learned at top-tier strategy consulting firms and a high, high bias for action. We pair them with client core performers, often ‘up-and-comers’ who get the added benefit of mentorship. Learn more about how we select our top talent here. 

It’s an extremely sticky model. In many cases, our consultants have been staffed for 3 or more years with a client team.

Why? Because they lift all boats.

They embed with teams, create partnerships, and unlock talent and speed on the client team itself. 

You can do this too. 

Is it Time to Let Go of the Anchor?

Let’s face it: some team members won’t reach the necessary standards.

Anchors fail to bring expertise or action.  

While you can guide and develop some, the reality is that many underperformers won’t improve enough to justify the effort. As consultants, you must know when to advise clients that leaving the Anchors behind is the key to keeping the ship from sinking.

How to Structure Winning Teams

When I’m looking to help a client implement this approach, here’s what I do:

1. Assess their existing team and identify the Masters, Deliberates, Pacesetters, and Anchors.
   

2. Stack rank the team’s projects based on priority to achieve business objectives.
   

3. Create partnerships of Pacesetters and Deliberates, and then assign them to projects.
   

4. Strategically place Masters across top-priority project teams
   

5. Reinforce a culture of collaboration where everyone’s unique skills and contributions are celebrated.

By leveraging the Technique x Speed Matrix, you too can enable clients to optimize team performance and accelerate progress across multiple projects. 

Do you think of yourself as a Master? Let me know how it’s working for you.

Think Bigger With These TSIA Takeaways

Stop the Gen AI prompt conversation.

You’re not thinking big enough.

Last week, my KRS team and I went to Vegas and attended the TSIA World Envision (Technology & Services Industry Association).

Here are our takeaways:

1. AI isn’t a path to efficiency – this isn’t the evolution from voicemail to email. Applying AI to the current world won’t win. AI-backed leaders will gain immediate cost advantage, out-compete the rest of the market, and change the ecosystem you operate in.

2. Your P&L is your map to deploy AI. The greatest expense line for most businesses is sales and support labor. Your greatest opportunities lie in reducing this cost and supporting revenue generation. I know companies who’ve already deployed sales opportunity identification and lead qualification. If you haven’t started, you’re five years behind.

3. Companies are thinking about internal AI use cases. What they’re not anticipating is that the customer itself will become AI. Will you be prepared to sell to an AI native agent of your customer?

4. As AI makes revenue generation more efficient, fewer sellers will be needed. But what will the remaining top-performing human sellers expect from their compensation as revenue generated per seller increases exponentially?

5. Have your sellers stop making discounting decisions. Discounting AI is a use case I haven’t seen deployed yet. I can almost guarantee this would increase margin.

6. The human workforce is already evolving from ‘doing the work’  to managing the technology that does the work. Play this forward. Roles will change from human-facing to technology-facing. Choosing technology, training technology, and developing technology op models will become mainstream jobs.  

7. Per-instance and per-seat pricing are a death wish. Fewer humans, fewer seats. Change your pricing now.

8. The next few years are going to be investment challenges for most companies.  Investment and development in models happen while the people are still in place. High cost ▶️ then payoff.  I’m holding my digital transformation investments through this period.

Remember, the path to success is paved with continuous learning and embracing fresh perspectives.

Let's stay connected, share ideas, and elevate your consulting business.

Stay curious, friends.

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