Never Say Sell

CHAPTER 14Discipline 3: Leverage Your Team

As our colleagues begin to leverage us for their client projects, and we them in ours, our path toward growth and new work smooths and accelerates. Sharing our expertise with our colleagues is the easiest business development action we can take, and mastering the art of leveraging our team is a critical strategy for growing our business. It's impossible to scale our services if we alone are the product. Our time and capabilities are finite. Bringing others into the fold to help scale both trust and credibility allows for new types of work within a client. That said, experts worry about introducing their colleagues and scaling the trust they've built with a client across their team.

Basking in the Warm Glow of Outgroup Homogeneity Bias

In 1980, two Princeton professors, George Quattrone and Ned Jones, published an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about an experiment they ran with Princeton and Rutgers students. In the experiment, they asked student observers to watch a videotape in which student actors made some simple decisions. The actors were identified by their supposed college affiliation – either Princeton or Rutgers. Then the student observers were asked to predict how the two university populations would make decisions by extrapolating what they had seen with the student actors. Quattrone and Jones found that student observers from Princeton predicted that the Rutgers population was more likely to ...