Expectations for Your Senior Associates

We polled a group of senior associates recently and asked what they believed the top five expectations of their role were. That is, what do the partners of the firm expect these seniors to do all day? They were not given time to research answers from any company documents describing expectations of seniors, just a moment to jot down what they felt was most important.

Before reading further – what are your top five expectations of your senior associates?
Write them down on a piece of paper or blank word doc and you can compare them to their responses below. Looking at your list, how consistent would these expectations be across different partners or managers at your firm?

Of course, all professionals will have varying opinions on what matters most but it may be worth thinking about how consistency in this area could help the development of your team AND make difficult conversations easier when someone isn’t performing well. Once you come to an agreement the obvious but often ignored next step is to communicate these expectations.

Enter Role Descriptions
Many of our clients lately have been working on developing role or level expectations for their firm. It’s not uncommon for smaller firms to find ways to staff their firm using only external job postings, and then assume the staff know what is expected of them, or simply assign work and that’s their job. There’s nothing wrong with this approach – until you find people curious about career progression and learning their peers at other firms have a clearly defined “path to partner” and written information about what skills, behaviors and competencies the firm expects of them.

This doesn’t have to be an onerous project, but it does need a champion to get it done. It will also be more successful if you start by setting partner expectations from which staff expectations can align. If that’s too much to dig into – at least get a start by defining the role for an associate-level position and branch out from there.

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Expectations from the Senior Associates’ Perspective

If you’re curious what the senior associates said they felt the top expectations of their job were, here’s a sampling (taken from several different respondents):

• Stay organized to ensure work is completed efficiently
• Maintain good relationships with clients
• Properly engage and work in a team environment
• Have technical accounting skills
• Develop, train and manage staff
• Communicate regularly
• Own issue resolution with clients

When asked how they meet these expectations, here were some of the more thoughtful replies:

1. On issue resolution: “I like to see things through to completion. Seeing the process through is satisfying to me; from making samples to testing, resolving issues and seeing all variances go away and be replaced with that dash [in excel].”
2. On organization: “Being structured with each engagement by setting expectations with my team, holding status meetings, etc. allows our managers and partners to know where the job is and ensure we’re on track to meet deadlines.”
3. On staff development: “Empathy helps me to think back to when I was a staff and what I did and didn’t know. This helps me design a way to help that’s beneficial to them.”

What else would you add to the list of expectations? What responses would you want to see from your team on how they meet your expectations?