Practice What You Preach

In his book Practice What You Preach (published by the Free Press in 2001), David Maister studied a number of professional service firms and identified nine factors that, if firms lived and breathed these statements, explained over 50 percent of the variation in firm performance. These nine statements were:

1. Client satisfaction is a top priority at our firm
2. We have no room for those that put their personal agenda ahead of the interests of the client or the firm
3. Those who contribute most to the overall success of the firm are rewarded the most highly
4. Management gets the best work out of everybody
5. Around here you are required, not just encouraged, to learn and develop new skills
6. We invest a significant amount of time in things that will pay off in the future
7. People within our firm always treat others with respect
8. The quality of supervision on projects is always uniformly high
9. The quality of the professionals in our office is as high as can be expected

When you take a close look at these statements, you notice how much they have to do with leadership and the building of a market driven firm based on knowledge. Maister was quick to point out that these statements were not just rhetoric but were values that each employee lived and breathed in their daily work, including the senior partners of the firm, hence the title of the book.

His findings are even more relevant given the hard times many firms are facing given the global economic slowdown and the mass of layoffs and other cost cutting measures we have seen. Leaders at these firms are under increasing pressure to walk the walk and become ethical managers. However, given the findings of some recent research on being able to ‘practice what you preach’ this is not easy. In a paper published in Psychological Science and profiled in Strategy + Business, researchers found that power was linked to hypocrisy. Using a variety of experiments, they concluded that powerful people display a greater inconsistency between what they practice and what they preach than their counterparts with less power. In other words, people in positions of authority are less likely to do what they tell others to do and based on the findings of David Maister, this could have significant implications for the leaders since they have a disproportionate influence on others inside the firm and we all know that actions speak louder than words.

The message for senior leaders within an organization is clear, if you expect certain types of behavior from your people (such as those listed in the nine statements above), you better be prepared to carry these through yourself in order to maintain your credibility.