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
It is a common mantra within law firms that lawyers need to be "more commercial". Many programs have been established to address this issue, including:
*MBA-style programmes,
*client focus groups,
*industry lectures,
*case studies and
*specific training modules
Training departments also offer training to in-house legal teams on both legal and managerial issues to enable a stronger bond to be fostered.
But I've yet to find a firm who sends chosen associates on a specific client's own middle-management leadership development programme.
So, for example, you would send an Associate on IBM's 5-day "The Leadership Challenge" programme (assuming IBM was a client), where s/he would mix with the future senior line managers within IBM.
In this way:
The lawyer would meet people who will REALLY matter within the client in 10 years time, and get a true understanding of the client's business outside the legal function.
- Associates would understand that the legal function within most client companies is not the well-regarded powerhouse that the in-house team would have you believe.
- Associates would see that, conversely, the legal function is often seen as the "business prevention unit" within a company, and is avoided in the usual run of events.
Contacts within the client's line management would be established, so that they can help the client's own in-house lawyers be more effective.
You could also impress the client with the quality of your associates, since you would choose your delegate carefully. In this way you would build a long term client relationship based on what we preach; really understanding the client.
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.
If you want some solid research to challenge partners who think that people buy for rational reasons (let's send them the brochure with our Legal 500 profile...), Predictaby Irrational by Dan Ariely is the book to read.
In the book he narrates a whole series of scenarios which he set up to test various theories. Two examples:
- Why removing an alternative purchase that nobody chose could change the one they DID choose, and
- How to price a $5.00 product to sell - he tried 3 ways: $5.00 with free p&p; $2.50 + $2.50 p&p; or Free + $5.00 p&p. You can see the answer to this particular test in a short video clip he created here.
We know that clients buy the individual lawyer, supported by the firm's brand. This book unpacks some of the science behind how they choose.
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
Anyone who has spent any time in the HR environment will know that we are not always fully appreciated.
This article, "Why we hate HR" which first appeared in Fast Company magazine, goes further in its general criticism of HR.
Whilst you will not agree with everything it says, and it definitely has a US-bias, there is more than a grain of truth in the article. Even if there wasn't, your perception is your reality, and many of my corporate colleagues have read the article and said "that's so true about my HR team" .
The article is here.
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
They've attended the partners meeting, agreed the strategy, budgeted for the training and even attended a few of the training sessions. So why won't they go out and sell?
3 possible reasons:
- Lawyers are the wrong sort of people to enjoy selling. A typical psychometric profile for a lawyer is everything you don't want in a salesman.
- There is little perceived reward. Once a partner has filled up his or her own pipeline, the revenue-recognition for sales-performance is seen as small when set against how hard it is. Most partners would prefer to get back to doing high-quality work for grateful clients.
- Lawyers won't work the process. Good salespeople (whether lawyers or not) know that sales is a process. Exceptional salespeople have an intuitive grasp of the process. The rest of us have to learn it, and do it methodically, day in and day out, not just when we feel like it or have run out of fee-earning work.
So a typical lawyer doesn't want to sell, isn't rewarded for selling, and when he or she does try and sell they do it unsystematically.
So what should we do?
Possibly focus on the untypical ones. The ones who want to sell. The ones who are selling, but know that they could do better. Perhaps even the senior associates who show the spark, and who could be promoted as a sales partner rather than a traditional client-facing one. You wouldn't expect the entire senior team of BP or Proctor and Gamble to go out and sell, so why expect a stellar sales performance from all your partners?
The answer seems to be to invest in the best.
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.