Client Centricity in Multidisciplinary Practices: What Actually Works?

Over the past 30 years working with multidisciplinary practices across the built environment, one challenge has been remarkably consistent: how to make complex organisations feel genuinely joined up for clients.

Most large consultancies already offer an impressive breadth of services. Architecture, engineering, project management, cost consultancy, sustainability, advisory. On paper, this should be a powerful advantage.

In practice, clients don’t experience value through an organisational structure. They experience it through clarity, continuity and confidence. True client centricity is not about what sits under one roof, but about how well those disciplines connect, collaborate and act as one.

Why Multidisciplinary Firms So Often Struggle

Across different businesses, market cycles and leadership teams, I see the same underlying challenges repeat.

Common barriers include:

• Teams operating in silos, with limited understanding of each other’s capabilities
• Individuals protecting client relationships, often driven by fear of losing control, visibility or credit
• Incentive structures that prioritise individual performance over collective outcomes
• Insufficient time, process or confidence to make collaboration feel natural rather than forced

The result is familiar: fragmented client experiences, missed opportunities, and an organisation that feels far less integrated externally than it appears internally.

Time and again, breaking down internal silos proves to be the single biggest unlock – and the hardest to achieve.

Why Structure Alone Rarely Solves the Problem

Many firms respond by reorganising, introducing new service lines, or investing in systems and processes. These steps can help, but on their own they rarely create the shift leaders are hoping for.

The real challenge is cultural and behavioural:

• how people define their role in relation to the wider firm
• how safe they feel sharing relationships and insight
• how confident they are having broader, more commercial conversations
• how leadership models collaboration in practice, not just in principle

Without addressing these fundamentals, client centricity remains an ambition rather than a lived experience.

What Actually Works in Practice

The multidisciplinary practices that make genuine progress tend to focus less on forcing cross-selling and more on enabling connection and confidence.

What I’ve seen work consistently:

• Making collaboration a clear leadership priority, not a “nice to have”
• Investing in internal knowledge sharing through joint reviews, case studies and shared learning
• Rewarding collaborative behaviour, both financially and through recognition
• Building trust via shared account teams, cross-discipline kick-offs and informal internal networks
• Equipping professionals to ask better questions, recognise opportunities for colleagues, and join the dots for clients

This is not about turning technical experts into salespeople. It is about helping them understand how their expertise fits into a broader client context.

Client Experience Is Built Behind the Scenes

If clients are to experience a firm as integrated, the organisation must be integrated behind the scenes.

In multidisciplinary practices, client centricity is not primarily a systems or structure issue. It is a leadership, capability and culture issue – sitting at the intersection of business development, incentives and confidence.

Firms that address this deliberately build stronger relationships, develop more rounded future leaders, and reduce reliance on a small number of individuals to hold key clients together.

What has genuinely helped your organisation improve cross-discipline collaboration – and where does it still feel hard?