Katzenbach Partners Profile, Pt. 1: How Employee Empowerment Vaulted Them to the Top Tier

Management consulting is an industry built on trust and a solid reputation. A perusal of the most prestigious firms as ranked by employment researcher Vault yields the fact that nearly all of the top twenty-five have been around a while and assembled large staffs of consultants. So how does a small, upstart firm like Katzenbach Partners find itself among the top firms, established names like McKinsey, Bain and Accenture? The answer lies in its culture of empowerment and collaboration.

Katzenbach Partners is comprised of 182 employees with 4 locations in the United States and was founded in 1998 by Jon Katzenbach, a former director at McKinsey, where he had worked for 35 years before striking out on his own. Like many of the talented consultants who would gravitate to his company over the next several years, Katzenbach wanted to focus his efforts on organizational behavior and step outside the established roles and processes of the larger firms.

Principal Zia Khan has been with Katzenbach Partners for just over 4 years, after parting ways with the larger and more established AT Kearney.

" I thought it would be more fun to work at a smaller firm where you can steer the ship a little bit," Khan said. "I found that it actually wasn't that hard to come up with a strategy. If I had to bet on company with good strategy but poor execution versus a company with a lesser strategy but good execution, I'd bet on the latter."

Khan was drawn to Katzenbach Partners by its reputation for empowering its employees, and it's for similar reasons that the company has become so popular among top management talent, drawing resumes from an impressive 10 percent of Harvard's graduating class.

"We can create this value proposition that says if you come work for us you can be yours, don't have to fit a mold," says Khan.
"What I personally found most powerful was they had profiles of every single person, so a guy in the mailroom had a profile just the same as a director. They value everybody as individuals."

The firm creates not only a respect for brainstorming, but an obligation for every team member to contribute to ideas. Though team leaders are often instrumental in coming up with many of teh approaches simply because they have the most expeience, they ask each team member for their take as well.

"We ask, if you had a year to research something what would you research," says Khan. "You want to see someone lean forward and see their eyes light up when they get really passionate about something."

Stay tuned to hear how Katzenbach Partners' culture of collaboration has helped both the consultancy and its clients grow.