First question: Who do you want to keep?
Partners find it easy to divide their team into categories - racehorses, workhorses and mules.
Where should the effort be made to motivate staff? Not the mules, who can absorb a disproportionate degree of time as they are the squeaky wheels for whom nothing is too much trouble!
Racehorses normally get firm-wide recognition. They are those few tipped for the top. Most are genuinely talented. A few are serially lucky, but as Somerset Maughn said, it's better to be born lucky than rich.
It's the workhorses you need to think about. It's them who your career is built upon - the people who deliver predictably good work in season and out of season. It's they who will, if treated well, be working with you for the next 20 years, and who must not be taken for granted.
Talk to every one your team, and ask what you could do to help them. This includes support staff. They will be astonished and rejuvenated. If you're too important or too busy to do this, you should step down from partnership. - Phone up a client and ask them how things are going. Not in legal matters, but generally. Then consider how your network of professionals could help that individual with his/her problems, and take action. Your client's loyalty will rocket.
- Find somebody to give honest praise to. Someone who who has done something you noticed that was good. It doesn't have to be earth-shatteringly important. But the person who receives the praise will remember it for months, and redouble their efforts in that area.
Demonstrate the behavioural change that you'd like to see throughout the firm. That's the core of leadership
There is a lag between what's happening in "the real world", and the effect it has on law firms.
So have a look at the short video on the landing page of Right Brain Media http://www.rightbrainmedia.com/, and ponder how long do we have to adapt, and what will adaption look like?
Jamie Pennington
Jamie@penningtonhennessy.com
Most partners are not good at giving feedback. If they were, this
is what an upfront partner would tell you that he or she is looking for in a junior lawyer:
- Honesty.
If you've screwed up, I need to be the first to know. If you say
something is true, it must be true. We all make mistakes - I did when I
was your age and I am not immune today. The problem is not making a
mistake, it is failing to acknowledge and learn from it.
- Time recording.
It's not your job to decide if someone should pay for what you've spent
your time on. I need to know how long things take, or else I can't work
out profitability.
- Curiosity. If you don't ask,
you won't know. So ask me how the work assigned fits into the wider
client brief. Ask me why things are structured the way they are. And
keep current with world and business affairs so you can ask good
questions, not just legal ones.
- Attitude. I need you
to learn how to do new things. You need to be pro-active. What area do
you need to develop in most? Find work that stretches you in these
areas, and get feedback on your efforts. I may also ask you do boring
mundane stuff - that's life when you're junior (and even when you're
not so junior). Do it cheerfully. Then the next time some interesting
work comes through, you will be top of the list.
- Attention to detail.
You can get a First Class Honours with 70% right. I expect 100%. It's
what you're supposed to be good at, so if it's not your natural
preference, you need to spend more time on it.
- Ability to listen to instructions.
When I give you a piece of work, and tell you what to do, I expect it
to be done the way I said. Ask if you don't understand something. But
make sure you are asking the right questions. Take the time to think it
through for yourself as far as you can, then ask about the bits you
really don't get.
- Tenacity. When I'm busy I can appear
distracted, off-hand or even rude. Sorry. But that's life. Get over it,
smile, and get back to work.
By the way, apart from
time recording, these are the same qualities that the client looks for
in a partner. So it's worth developing them now.
Alan Hodgart recently spoke to a group of Law Firm Learning & Development Professionals about the challenges facing law firms - particularly leadership. His analysis was sound but he offered few practical ways for addressing them.
I can think of 7 reasons why developing leaders in law firms is more difficult than in many other fields.
- A typical partner’s psychometric profile is very different to that of a senior corporate executive.
- Lawyers are atypical leaders, for whom traditional models require adaption.
- Lawyers rarely want to lead. Most law firm leaders would be happy if they reverted to client-facing work.
- There are few role models, and leadership is “caught” as much as “taught”.
- Leadership development is left late (30 years +) compared to the corporate model.
- The rewards for leadership in a law firm are not always obvious.
- Few lawyers have corporate experience outside the legal function, so they haven't experienced people who just want to lead.
The solutions are harder to find, but possible. Key aspects are:
- Developing leaders, not training them.
- Leaders are grown, not made, so it requires a joined-up, firm-wide effort to develop leaders.
- Ne
w leaders learn by leading.
As John Wimber used to say "Leading is a doing word."
P.S. If you want some very practical summer reading on the subject, you can try these 2 excellent books. I've got about 70 books on leadership, and these are the best on leadership development. They're not aimed at lawyers, so you'll have to translate into a law firm environment.
Developing the leaders around you - John Maxwell
How to Grow Leaders - John Adair
A great deal has been written about the Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y.
The FT entered the fray on Thursday with a well-crafted piece looking at ways some companies are linking the retiring generation (Boomers) with Generation Y to give the feedback and meaning that characterises the Generation Y.
I don't know of any law firm that is this pro-active. Advantages could include:
- Linking the "grey hairs" heading for retirement with NQ's might well bridge the feedback gap that hard-worked partners are often accused of neglecting.
- Linking could also give those retiring a sense of legacy, and a chance to share the accumulated wisdom which is rarely captured on a formalised basis.
- Linking could be a natural part of the wind-down process, formalising the latter stages of a highly successful career. Note the Cisco example given by the FT.
In my experience mentoring programmes usually stumble because of the mentors preoccupation with his/her career&clients, or the unwillingness to give frank feedback.
Perhaps Boomers heading for retirement would be the answer.
There's a great deal written about leadership. You've probably read lots of it.
This article by Professor Nigel Nicholson of London Business School illustrates the challenge that we face within a law firm. It's not that the article is wrong, it's just that most of it is entirely unapplicable to a typical law firm. Can you imagine a typical partner's response to being told:
"Leaders should be unafraid to tell people how they forge meaning, hope and belief out of such times. You have to do so with authenticity - speaking about your own feelings, learning, foibles, biases and so on, in a way that reveals enough of your own fallibility to bring you close to them but not so much as to shake their confidence."
You can read the whole article here