When the Partnership Changes

In 2026, as a partner from outside the founding culture prepared to leave, the managing partner saw a chance to examine assumptions the partnership had never discussed together. Firms founded within one cultural frame often run on implicit standards. Those standards work until someone from a different frame joins or leaves. The firm wanted to understand itself clearly before bringing in the next partner.

We began with evidence. Hogan 360 feedback came from the partners and staff, and from leaders of companies the firm invests in, so the partnership heard from outside its own walls. Each person first met with me one-to-one to work through their individual feedback in private. Only then did I aggregate the data into a team report, so nothing reached the group that had not been digested individually first.

The report pointed to four areas the team wanted to strengthen: how feedback is given, how performance is addressed, the quality of working relationships, and how readily people speak up and lead. The outside leaders added a request of their own: faster and more substantive responses from the firm.

Harrison data added a second lens. The partners explored their individual and collective risk profiles, and saw where boldness and caution balanced each other and where they did not. For an investment partnership, risk appetite is the business. Seeing it mapped turned unspoken friction into something the partners could discuss.

The team session took up those four areas directly, along with a second question: what should excellence look like here? Afterward I sorted what the room produced into two categories.

Separating the two mattered. Teams often argue about mechanisms when the real divergence is in mindsets, and the split made both visible without blame.

Thirty days later we reconvened. We took up the outside feedback first: how the firm would respond to the companies it backs with more substance and speed. Then came the harder question. What will you commit to, personally, to move the firm toward excellence? Each person named a commitment aloud, with the team as witness. Alignment work becomes real at the point where people move from diagnosing the system to owning their part in changing it.

The firm has since brought in a new partner from outside the founding culture. The managing partner has asked me to return once that partner has settled in, to help him integrate with the partnership and the wider staff. Because the firm did the alignment work first, he joins a partnership that has already made its standards explicit.

This engagement mirrors my earlier work in China. There, Western-led multinationals had to integrate Chinese teams and standards. Here, a Chinese-rooted firm operating in the United States is integrating Western partners. The collision runs in the other direction and the discipline is the same: make implicit standards explicit, ground hard conversations in data, and convert insight into personal commitments people can be held to.