Are You on the Right Track? Part 2

"John didn't come in with his own prescriptive plan," fellow Bain partner Lisa Walsh recalls. "Instead, he'd tap into individual partners' aspirations. Then he'd help us translate those into priorities and achievements. He's a spectacular listener. At meetings with him, we'd end up doing 90% of the talking, and only at the end would we realize that this was on purpose."

That deceptively gentle style unleashed a great deal of productive energy. During Donahoe's six years in San Francisco, his office became one of the fastest-growing parts of Bain worldwide. Various partners in his office championed initiatives to raise Bain's profile in industries ranging from computer technology to telecommunications to private equity. "I'm not the smartest person in the firm," Donahoe explains. "We have several dozen partners who are far better consultants than I ever will be. It's my job to make sure that everyone is working together effectively, and that everyone has the resources they need. That's a role that comes naturally to me."

As striking as Donahoe's own progression may be, it is a story in isolation if no one else at Bain has been able to break away from the pack and still thrive. In recent years, partners in the consulting firm have been struggling to create a new vocabulary that pays tribute to anything other than a classic climb up the company ladder. They talk about the importance of "affiliation" and "lifelong learning." They portray successful careers as those with the most options, rather than the most promotions. Such rhetoric is just a start though. The real test is how consultants end up living their lives.

For Lisa Walsh, the past 10 years have been a chance to be a top-flight partner at Bain and still find the time that she wants to spend with her children and her husband. She is one of the firm's leading strategic thinkers, helping clients find winning moves in industries ranging from coffee to semiconductors. But her cleverest strategy may be the way that she manages both her teams and her time.

Take something as basic as overnight travel, for example. It's a hallmark of her business, but it's also a grating part of the routine as consultants enter their thirties and forties. Slyly, Walsh has cut her travel load down to about one night a week, partly by encouraging out-of-town clients to use conference calls or to visit her offices in San Francisco. "It's a good way for them to have a quick off-site," she explains, "and to be able to get away from their daily routine so they can focus on the big picture. It's also a way that all of our consultants on a project -- even the most junior ones -- can meet a CEO and really get to know his or her perspective."

Walsh also has made sure that clients don't see her as the only person on a Bain team who is capable of fielding an urgent call. From initial meetings onward, she positions one or two of her team members as people who have the knowledge and the authority to make decisions too. That helps keep her work hours under control -- without leaving clients feeling shortchanged. It also speeds the development of new consulting talent at Bain, which the firm cherishes.

The result: time to see her daughters' activities; time for relaxing dinners with her husband, Richard, who is an attorney at Bank of America; and a reputation for reliable work with clients. "If Lisa were willing to move to Colorado, I'd hire her for a senior position," says Bill McCallum, a longtime Walsh client and the CEO of Great West Life, in Englewood, Colorado. "She's helped us evaluate some divestitures and also some new lines of business. I've never had a problem setting up a meeting with her, and if I didn't know her as well as I do, I wouldn't even know that she has a family."

Over the past five or six years, a growing number of young Bain consultants are talking openly about work-life balance. Some are asking for time off to pursue personal interests; others want transfers to different cities so that they can be closer to loved ones or ailing parents. Walsh is leading a West Coast team that is setting policies on such matters and that constantly fields both personal and professional requests. She wants most of these candidates to contribute a year or two of reliable work first. If they are top performers, though, she tends to look leniently at such requests -- even from young consultants who want time off to shoot a surfing video in Costa Rica or who want a part-time arrangement to see if they can make it in Hollywood as actors or actresses.

"We've felt for a while that it was the right thing to do," Walsh explains, "but there was a time when we were concerned that it might just become an outplacement service. What we've been seeing, though, is that people do come back to the firm. In fact, often it's our very best performers who make the most use of these programs."