A few people have asked me to do episodes on office politics and office interactions - one angle I wanted to look at that was through the lens of professional services firms.
Laura Empson is a Professor at Bayes Business school having previously worked in professional services herself.
She’s focussed on understanding the way that these firms work. Many professional services firms are a highly paid collection of partners who collectively own the firm. It means that the organisations are different to the version of work we are most used to. Rather than being low agency and low control they are high agency and are able to elect their leaders. I wanted to understand the impact that this had on the running of the companies - does the ability to elect leaders mean that politics takes place in public? Or does the overt nature of debate change the need for backchannel and gossip?
We talk politics, collective leadership, identity, and also how to achieve elite performance in a collective organisation - whether there has to be trade off between comfort and success. We also discuss the growing impact of AI as a disruptive force on professional services firms and whether it is upending pressure from younger workers to make these firms less toxic.