Law Firm Leadership - Keeping the Right People
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.