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 When Professionals Have to Manage
Jay W. Lorsch and Peter F. Mathias
The senior members of professional and financial service firms, where the products and services are inextricably linked to the intellectual capabilities of the professionals and their interpersonal effectiveness with clients, all struggle with the same problems –
- How to find professionals to manage the people and business problems, given that the professionals are not hired, trained, or rewarded for managing
- How to train, assimilate, and develop a growing staff without creating an excessively hierarchical organisation
- How to achieve strategic control and coordination among departments in a dynamic environment where effective strategy has to be made by people close to the action
- How to grow in size but remain non-bureaucratic
These organizational dilemmas will look painfully familiar to people in many professional and financial service firms.
This article examines how, despite the great time, skill, and work required to multiply successfully, many producing manager firms can grow to formidable sizes. The only limit to growth is the supply of qualified producing managers and the commitment from top leadership to spend the necessary resources to develop them. Most important of all, the entire organization must be devoted to an established set of values and goals, including the producing manager concept itself.
read full article (PDF) 
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