It’s estimated that fewer than 5% of partner compensation systems have been designed with collaboration in mind.

That’s a problem, because collaboration is a critical factor for success in today’s complex business environment.

Firms are facing a tsunami of challenges – regulatory, geopolitical, technological – that increasingly can’t be solved by a single partner working a single relationship. They require firms to bring integrated expertise to bear across practice groups, offices and disciplines.

The firms best positioned to do that are the ones where partners actually work together. Yet whether partners collaborate is, more than almost anything, a function of how they’re rewarded.

Dr Heidi Gardner, Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School and CEO of Gardner Co, has built a database of more than 10,000 responses to a single question: what stops you from collaborating?

Compensation comes back in the top three almost every time. In most firms, it’s number one.

To explore why, and what firms can do about it, Gardner joined Michael Roch, founder of MHPR Advisors and one of the world’s leading advisors on partner compensation design, for a recent webinar walking through the ten compensation mistakes most commonly undermining partner collaboration.

So, what are the three, and what can firms do about them?

1. Solo scorecards: when individual focus becomes a firm-wide problem

The first and most pervasive mistake is straightforward: partner reward systems that overemphasize personal results.

Almost every compensation system talks about the collective, profit sharing, firm performance, team contribution. But when it comes to the actual compensation conversation, it defaults to a single individual’s numbers. And when that’s what partners learn to expect, their behavior follows accordingly.

“Collaboration is either glossed over or it’s an afterthought. It’s not usually baked into how we look at profit-sharing among partners.”

— Michael Roch

The problem shows up in two ways. The first is overt: the compensation policy explicitly states that partners are evaluated and rewarded based on their own billings, with little or no accountability for group outcomes. The second is more common and harder to spot. The system appears to reward collective results, but in practice the committee defaults to individual production data at decision time because it’s simpler to measure.

The fix isn’t to abandon individual accountability. It’s to build genuine alignment between what the firm says it values and what it actually rewards. That means being deliberate about:

As Roch puts it: “We have to align our profit-sharing system, how we do performance management, how we achieve compensation decisions, so that the individual is rewarded for both the results they achieve alone and the results they achieve as part of the group.”

Without that alignment, the individual column will always win.

For more detail on how firms can restructure contribution management to reflect this, download our white paper on collaboration and compensation.

2. It’s all about cross-selling: why collaboration needs a broader definition

Of all ten mistakes, this one may be the most quietly limiting. In most firms, when leaders talk about collaboration and compensation in the same breath, they mean one thing: business development. Who brought in the work, who referred the client, who gets the credit for the win.

“If we’re using collaboration as a euphemism for cross-selling, I can’t play. It’s not a game we can play.”

— Michael Roch

The problem isn’t that business development doesn’t matter. It’s that defining collaboration so narrowly misses most of the value chain. Gardner is equally direct: there’s a meaningful difference between deepening a client relationship to help them tackle their toughest challenges and pushing services at a client to get more wins in a particular column.

Firms that get this right build reward structures that recognize collaboration across the full client lifecycle:

Not all revenue is created equal either. Low-margin transactional work and high-margin long-term mandates that strengthen the firm’s reputation and resilience shouldn’t be rewarded the same way. A well-designed system will reflect that distinction.

The question worth asking: does your compensation system reward partners for the full picture, or does it stop at revenue generation?

3. Star culture: when hero worship undermines the team

Every firm has rainmakers. The question isn’t whether to recognize them. It’s what gets celebrated alongside them and what quietly gets ignored.

“Every time you hold up an individual partner as responsible for a win, it gets insidiously rewarded and supported.”

— Dr. Heidi Gardner

The tell, as Gardner identifies it, is how often you hear the phrase my client, and how unremarkable it sounds. When recognition consistently flows to individuals rather than teams, partners learn what success looks like. Sharp-elbow behavior gets rewarded. The collaborative infrastructure that makes the firm’s client base genuinely durable goes unseen.

Roch adds a simple test: at your next partners meeting, who gets stood up to be recognized, an individual or a team? That picture tells you a great deal about what your firm is actually signaling.

It shows up in subtler ways too. Think about the newly elevated partner, the result of years of firm investment.

Gardner asks a simple question: which senior partners are actively ensuring their success, and which have simply turned their back and said, ‘Okay, you’re a partner now. Good luck’? That invisible mentoring work is exactly the kind of contribution most compensation systems fail to see. If the comp committee can’t see it, they can’t reward it.

The fix isn’t to stop celebrating strong individual performance. It’s to get serious about assessing and visibly rewarding the how, not just the what. The white paper makes the case that being entrusted with leadership responsibility is often more motivating than a bonus, and that collaborative track record should be a primary criterion for advancement, not an afterthought. Gardner’s framework asks leaders to evaluate partners on:

If those questions don’t feature in your compensation conversation, the star culture problem will persist regardless of what the policy says.

The business case for getting this right

There is a measurable difference in outcomes between firms that get this right and those that don’t.

In her book Smarter Collaboration, Gardner presents what she calls “the twins”, two partners in a law firm, near-identical on paper. The difference is how collaboratively they work. The more collaborative partner, with a broader and more interconnected network across offices and practice groups, performs at four times the level of their counterpart across the full range of outcomes measured.

That differential isn’t explained by talent or effort. It’s explained by the system those partners operated within and the behaviors that system encouraged or discouraged.

There are versions of that story in every firm. The question is whether the compensation system is designed to see it.

The other seven mistakes

Solo scorecards, cross-selling and star culture are three of ten. The remaining seven are just as common, and just as costly:

The common thread across all is alignment, between what a firm’s strategy demands, what its compensation system actually rewards and how those decisions are made and communicated. Getting that right doesn’t require a wholesale redesign. It requires an honest diagnostic of where the gaps are and a clear sense of what to address first.

Watch the full webinar session, or download our white paper on collaboration and compensation for the research foundation behind it.

This is the first in a series exploring how compensation design shapes partner behavior. To receive future articles and event invitations, sign up here.