86SMART COLLABORATION
and any other factors that might help you judge their potential
“fit” with your client.
Over time, build a team whose expertise you can count on. One
low-risk way of testing others’ capabilities is by working with them
on a third partner’s project. Obviously, this strategy hinges on your
developing an effective network. So next time a colleague rings
to ask for your input on a client, rather than weighing the oppor-
tunity costs (i.e., the time you could have spent developing your
own clients), reframe the situation as your chance to develop con-
tacts that you might tap in the future. Join, help, and learn.
Foster interpersonal trust
One firm I work with has a psychotherapist on retainer. He spends
a day or more each week with partners, helping them work through
personal and interpersonal issues that arise in the course of their
work. He tells me that trust issues rank among the partners’ most
common challenges—and yet, some people do find ways to place
their trust in their colleagues: “Some people are more wary, para-
noid, expecting relationships to go badly based on their own life
script from childhood, marriage, or wherever. Others are optimis-
tic and will take chances on other people, thinking it’ll get lived out
in a positive way.”
His experience has taught him that all but the most psycho-
logically vulnerable partners can learn to develop trust, but that
many people may need repeated, safe interactions before they get
comfortable with each other. The problem is especially acute for
lateral hires, because not only do they not know whom to turn
to, but others may avoid them as potentially disloyal (and there-
fore dangerous) colleagues. One of the safest ways to figure out
whom to trust is to use referrals. Just as “honest brokers” inside
the firm can help you find someone with the right expertise, they
should also be able to recommend people whose character meets
your standards. When asking around about who has the expertise
to fill a gap on your client team, be sure to ask the critical (albeit
awkward) questions about their character.
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Collaboration and the Solo Specialist87
Another thing to keep in mind: quality attracts like quality.
If you act with integrity—sharing credit where it’s due; giving
people constructive and honest feedback, rather than talking
about their mistakes behind their backs; and bending over
backward to be transparent about your client relationships—
you’re much more likely to be a magnet for other trustworthy
partners. And don’t forget that today’s associates are tomor-
row’s partners. Treating them with dignity and fairness is more
than a moral issue; it’s smart business, if you want to develop a
reputation as a trustworthy partner who attracts high-quality
collaborators.
Develop confidence and capability to dig
into the client’s broader issues
How do you get smart enough to ask your clients that key question:
What’s keeping you up at night?
My first observation here is that you can’t fake it. You need to
develop a genuine interest in the client’s business—not just in the
kinds of technical issues you may be focused on, but the “big pic-
ture.” What are the company’s leaders proud of? Where’s their
most intense competition coming from, and why? What are the
biggest risks to their business and their career?
One way of developing this big picture is to look on their coffee
tables. What do they read on a regular basis? Subscribe to and read
those publications to get an insider view of the client company’s
competitive context.
Loke-Khoon Tan is a partner and head of the intellectual prop-
erty (IP) practice group at the law firm of Baker & McKenzie.
7
He
has, together with his partners, built a highly successful legal prac-
tice advising some of the world’s best-known luxury goods com-
panies. His initial focus was IP issues in Asia, but several years
ago, with backing from his firm, he founded a luxury and fashion
“subpractice” within the firm. He subscribes to Women’s Wear
Daily to keep his finger on the pulse of the industry, and jokes
about the odd looks that he sometimes gets from his postman. He
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88SMART COLLABORATION
spends his free time reading unlikely journals, he explains, to make
himself smarter:
I feel obliged to pick up as much industry knowledge as
possible. Today we can point to multiple successes that
happened because we understand the industry—deeply.
But I also read the trade press to pick up little items that
might be top-of-mind for my client, like gossip, trendset-
ters, big events. I find that dropping one or two of them
into a client conversation gives me some credibility and
also helps to deepen the relationship.
Seek out the best salespeople in any organization, and you’ll find
that most of them have their own version of this technique. When
I was a sales rep at Procter & Gamble, back in the 1990s, many
of my more seasoned colleagues were avid readers of Progressive
Grocer, Supermarket News, and similar magazines.
This isn’t all that hard, and it’s not all that unusual. So I’m
astonished when, as often happens, I ask a partner what his or
her client’s bonus depends on, and the answer is, “I’m not really
sure.” Yikes! If you are determined to help your clients suc-
ceed, personally and professionally—and you are, right?—you
need to understand their personal and corporate metrics. If a
client’s boss is holding his or her feet to the fire on the issue of
cost containment, for example, then your pitches for lots of new
work in your established model are likely to be unrealistic and
annoying.
On the flip side, you can turn around a strained client relation-
ship by uncovering and engaging in their deepest, darkest con-
cerns. A consultant from a global firm recounted this story about
“EnergyCo”—one of the world’s major oil and gas companies:
It was a time when EnergyCo had turned off all their con-
sulting spend, but that didn’t matter for us. With the help
of an outside consultant, we learned how to hold conver-
sations focused on the issues that mattered most to them.
Despite the drought, we maintained a dialogue—we told
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Collaboration and the Solo Specialist89
that we wanted to invest in the relationship and to learn
with them. Together we zeroed in on a huge issue for the
industry: how to handle late-life assets in areas of dimin-
ishing reserves.
Over time we got to know the COO. He would have
never given us the time of day. A real bruiser. But we even-
tually got an initial meeting with him and it went well,
met a number of his people. Why did it work? Because
the rigor we’d implemented into our thinking about that
account gave me, and the wider team, confidence to see
those people and talk about their issues in a much more
credible way.
When we first met him, we didn’t go with PowerPoint
slides. He hates consultants, sees us as adding no value.
Instead, we got him engaged in a conversation about oper-
ational issues. We brought along one chart, which showed
an example of what we’d done for a competitor in the
North Sea. He actually pulled his chair around to our side
of the desk to look at it.
I bumped into him at a reception a couple months later,
and he spoke to me like a long-lost friend. Very warm,
open. Turns out, a very significant RFP came in the other
day in that area we’ve been focused on. And the RFP only
went to us and one other small boutique—none of the
firms that we’d regularly compete against.
8
Also remember that there is safety and comfort in numbers. At
the end of chapter 2, I recounted the story of the two consultants
who shored each other up on a cold-calling trip across Australia.
They were prepared to be rejected—as indeed they were, more
often than not. They were also prepared to be wrong, and to offer
opinions that might not come from a full data set of knowledge,
which in turn meant that they were prepared to be vulnerable.
Why? In part because they were working toward a common cause.
Further, pick something you’re truly passionate about. Loke-
Khoon Tan, introduced earlier, got involved in the luxury and
fashion industry because he was interested in it personally. His
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90SMART COLLABORATION
after-hours hobbies focused on branding. In his work as an IP law-
yer, he was regularly exposed to the industry, and made lots of
contacts within it. He found those contacts to be intriguing and cre-
ative people—in part because he shared their interests. “Marrying
my hobby and my work happens naturally with clients like [big
name fashion house],” he explains. “Developing knowledge about
them, and bringing that knowledge to work, is both fascinating for
me and enables me to contribute to the firm. I do it because I want
to do it.”
9
Finally, you have to keep the faith that over time, with practice,
you’ll get better at these conversations. Honest—you will. In the
meantime, as one experienced lawyer said, “You’ve gotta be will-
ing to put yourself out there, be prepared for it to go badly, and
then have a laugh if it does. If you’ve got an honest curiosity about
their business, clients will most often respect that you’re trying to
learn, even if you’re a bit clunky at first.”
Do you still find yourself paralyzed at this prospect? If so, con-
sider turning to a professional coach or licensed psychotherapist to
address the underlying reasons. You may think I’m joking, but I’m
not. You would be surprised how prevalent this practice is among
your client executives—and, most likely, among your competitors.
Learn about your own firm’s oerings
How fast is your firm changing? The faster the pace of change,
the more likely it is that your understanding of the organization
is lagging behind reality. Again, this is something that you can fix
on your own, although having interested partners in this exercise
certainly helps.
Use every chance you can—from firm retreats to casual conver-
sations around the office—to ask your fellow partners what they’re
working on. Again, authenticity matters: you need to be truly curi-
ous, rather than just pumping them for information. Recognize
that some people (you, perhaps?) might hesitate to engage in what
they see as self-promotion, and need to have their knowledge
drawn out of them. One executive coach who participates in my
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