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
In 2005 The Civil Service Commission asked Professor Clive Fetcher to
"To review up to date UK research findings on the most reliable, validated techniques for recruiting and selecting senior staff in the private, public and voluntary sectors, with particular reference to effective selection interviewing, the use of assessment centres and psychological and psychometric testing"
His report is in the public arena, yet until recently I didn't know it existed. His results are fascinating - structured interviewing is best, unstructured interviewing is worst and assessment centres only rate third.
You can read the full report here
Despite a high take-up of psychometric tests within law firms, there seems to be no consistency in which tools are used and when. Generally speaking, the tools have 3 uses:
- Recruitment. At the junior level the tests are often work-based tools (see here for a good example). At the senior level it is more often a trait-based tool (OPQ, 16PF et al), which is often administered by an external organisation.
- Development. If the firm runs a development centre, MBTI is often used. Feedback is usually given one-to-one, but there is sometimes a group session for the whole cohort to explain how the model works.
- Coaching. Every coach seems to have their own armoury of tests. Some are standard, some are more exotic. The client firm is usually content if the individual being coached is content.
Some firms attempt to minimise their use of different tests, or to provide a hierarchy of tests (e.g. DISC for associates, MBTI for new partners) to harmonise the learning involved. Despite this, I have found no lawyer who can remember the output of any of these tests - unprompted - after a few weeks have passed.
The missing use for all these tests seems to be behavioural change. All psychometric models allow individuals a tool for:
1. Self analysis
2. Identifying differences with others
3. Understanding behavioural styles and
4. Developing practical strategies for maximising their influencing skills.
Most firms seem to use psychometrics only for 1&2. This is probably because 3&4 require both a simple model (which rules out OPQ & 16PF), and a way of identifying peoples' profiles from observation (which is possible from MBTI, but requires a deeper knowledge of the model). This is a shame, because although 1&2 play to a lawyer's preference (lots of analysis), it is in 3&4 that a firm develops people with the skills for behavioural change which are the bedrock of leadership and business development.
I use Insights to address 3&4. It's not the only test we use - I have a colleague who integrates 16PF, life history, values & intelligence tests for profound individual change - but it's the one that has really worked for us when facilitating behavioural change in law firms since it's easily memorable, practical and Jungian-based.
You can licence the test yourself and if you want to know how I use it, just ask.