December 2015 Edition
Power to the people
Susan Hackett, CEO of Legal Executive Leadership, LLC
This second installment of our two-part series continues the discussion of five different “people practices” that law departments should be thinking about as they examine the kinds of talent, staffing, and development challenges they face. Previously, Part One featured best practices related to “lone wolf” syndrome and constant career development and stimulation. Part Two continues below.
For legal executive leaders focused on driving value in their work, great “people practices” should be top of mind. If your team isn’t happy, efficient, productive, and constantly evolving, or if the right talent isn’t there, nothing else really matters.
Practice 3. If you’re interested in driving value, you have to be focused on change.
Most lawyers and legal teams were not schooled or experienced in engaging in “value practices”; and certainly they have never been rewarded for doing so. So remember that change doesn’t flow from newly purchased technology or improved practices; change only happens when people agree to change, and then subsequently supported and rewarded as they cross each new behavioral hurdle. Achieving behavior change is imperative to achieving value. How do you encourage people, and especially lawyers, to change the way that they work – in any way?
Recommended Practices: If you’re interested in driving value ...
- Remember that most folks can buy into the larger concept of change as an intellectual exercise, but they are afraid or unprepared to take the 40 separate steps necessary to get to that larger change goal. And they’re so busy with the daily workload already that they haven’t got the time, much less the interest, in trying to figure it out on their own. So make sure to approach change in a manner that helps people to focus on each step, and shows them how to succeed in accomplishing it before taking the next step, and the next. One management guru describes this process by telling the story of teaching a pigeon to fly from point A to point B: the best method is to put a grain of corn down a few feet from the start, and after the pigeon eats that first grain, you lay down a trail of grain that allows them to happily follow the path until they arrive at the destination. Make sure you lay out the department equivalent of grain, and make sure there’s someone plotting the path and assuring success along the way.
- Reward success in adapting to change or leading the way, and punish those who ignore requests to change. It’s clearly noticed when some folks are allowed to ignore the new path and continue to be rewarded for doing their work the old way, and nothing is more destructive to promoting value-based practices than that. When you’re asking your team to take risks and step outside their comfort zone, you better make it clear that you will reward their effort (and not those who refuse to conform). Even go so far as to include adaptability to change and leadership in driving change in compensation and evaluation formulas.
Practice 4. Harness diversity and the nonlegal expertise and “leanings” of your team members
When I first started working with legal teams on diversity issues, diversity was more narrowly defined, and the goals were far more limited: The first departments interested in the issue were focused almost exclusively on hiring more attorneys of color and not much else. Today’s focus is broader, including a wider range of under-represented groups, as well as moving the focus beyond hiring to inclusion, and a respect for different values, life experiences, and skills. Today’s diversity initiatives are often aimed at more than maintaining the correct headcount. Instead, it recognizes that diversity drives business success through more diversified decision-making and the promotion of innovation, as well as through the advancement and leadership opportunities of more diverse performers.
And as generational issues layer additional complexity on the in-house workforce, legal leaders are looking for ways to not only promote new leaders, but help lawyers who have different work values understand and appreciate each other. It may be that younger generation team members need you to focus more attention on job satisfaction and better accommodation of team members’ outside-of-work lives and interests than previous generations. And in exchange, they may not be as high-maintenance about demanding some of the material benefits that older generation lawyers demand and expect.
Thus it becomes important to think more carefully about not only what attracts a worker to your team, and how they might best contribute and rise, but also how you can create a sustainable culture and rewarding work environment that increases everyone’s productivity and encourages them to be great in their jobs and collaborative with each other. Harness the diversity of your team to help it succeed; don’t simply hope that by putting a group of diverse and talented people in a room together that they’ll figure it out and bond on their own.
Recommended practices: If you’re interested in driving value ...
- While they may elicit groans, team-building retreats and similar “get out of the office” events are key to assuring that people interact more broadly, get to know each other, develop comfort in each others’ presence, and learn more about people’s lives outside of the lines that the workplace often draws around them. When zip-lining from a platform in the woods, a soft-spoken admin might entirely change your perception of him by his American Ninja-like prowess. Likewise, when trying to build an escape route from a raft on a swamp with 4 boards, 2 bungee cords, and a ball of twine, the ingenuity of a senior lawyer may remind people of exactly how she rose to her position in the first place.
- Some departments institute rotations that encourage leaders from one group to spend time trying out a role in another group – as a leader, worker, or project manager. Some departments still adhere to the old strategy of testing the metal of advancing leaders via a rotation to a business unit outside of the country, forcing them to operate in a “foreign” environment and culture. Some are engaging in secondments that are designed to offer the worker exposure to other critical business partners in the legal department’s firmament. By giving people the chance to see the job and its requirements through a variety of lenses, you can take advantage of diverse backgrounds to attack the role in a new way, and build interest in other parts of the company. They’ll learn respect for what each contributor knows and does.
- For those departments struggling with gender or racial diversity (because they’re too homogenous), it can be helpful to require team members to join and attend meetings of groups that are the outside of their comfort or experience zone. I remember that when I was contemplating our first racial diversity initiatives in my prior life at ACC, one of the best teaching and networking strategies I adopted was to attend the meetings of local diverse bars. As a Caucasian heterosexual woman, nothing taught me more about the “backpack” of presumptions that minority lawyers have to carry than being the minority myself for the first time: walking into a room full of black lawyers, or a room full of Latino lawyers, one of the few times when I was the only one who “was not.” Of course I was welcomed, but I learned pretty quickly the difference between being welcomed and being included or trusted. And what I did to earn my acceptance in those groups was instructive to my role in promoting diversity throughout ACC and its membership. So why not send your male lawyers to women’s bar meetings? Or your compliance lawyers to a plaintiff’s bar meeting? Or your mature management leaders to a young lawyers bar networking event? It’s hard for anyone to leave any of those settings without an increased appreciation of other people’s perspectives. Which leads to better sensitivities and skills you can tap into, as well as knowledge to improve individuals’ behaviors and performance.
Practice 5. Challenge your team to delegate some of their own work to an alternative staffing company or a solutions management provider.
Nothing sharpens a worker’s focus like seeing how someone else might do the job, right? I don’t mean to suggest this practice as a scare tactic – as in “you could be easily replaced” – but rather as a strategic planning exercise in thinking about different ways to skin the cat. Or, more simply, what would I be able to do or do better if I had someone who could make all this “administrivia” in my job go away? If there are good ideas that result from this process, it may be in the department’s best interests to think about how to fund them with savings derived from the increased efficiency or productivity of the department. Maybe less work has to be sent to expensive outside firms, or new work done by the team member brings back value-added deliverables that management is willing to support with extra funding.
Recommended practices: If you’re interested in driving value...
- Organize a two-hour team session each quarter examining one “slice” of the department’s workload or ongoing responsibilities: Can the team identify tech or service providers who can deliver more/better for less, freeing team members to focus on higher-level challenges?
- Assign leaders in the department to each spend an hour each month or quarter talking to a company that provides staffing services or other managed service supports or technologies that could be relevant for your department/work, and have each leader write a short report on the findings that is then distributed to others. This serves the purpose of keeping the team up to date with new advances in practice efficiencies and reminds them to consider such strategies as they execute new projects that might benefit from the services. Offering team members the opportunity to improve the way they practice and relieve some of the stresses associated with repetitive routine tasks is critical to their advancement opportunities and their job satisfaction.
Nothing is more important to the success of your department and the value of the services you provide to your client than your people. When you think outside of the box about how you can motivate them, improve their lives and job satisfaction, and find interesting ways to advance their skills and careers, you are building a stronger department and building the arsenal that not only protects, but better executes your client’s business goals.
About the Author
Susan Hackett is the CEO of Legal Executive Leadership, LLC, a law practice management consulting firm she founded in 2011 after serving as the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) for more than two decades. As an insider working with thousands of top corporate practice leaders, Susan has an amazing breadth of experience with the inner workings of in-house practice and the implementation of value-based legal models, as well as an international reputation for innovation, excellence, and success. Comments welcome to hackett@lawexecs.com.
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