Law Practice Management, Law Firm Coaching : Ronda Muir of Robin Rolfe Resources : Law People Blog

The use of assessments worldwide is rapidly expanding and lawyers are still lagging at the back of the pack--way back. 

An article by Lisa Belkin in yesterday's New York Times notes that there are 2,500 "profiling instruments" that companies rely on more every year when deciding whom to hire or promote. Sixty-five percent of companies surveyed reported using assessments in 2006, up almost double from the 34 percent reported a year earlier, according to Staffing Industry Report, a human-resources newsletter.

To paraphrase her article, the content of tests has stayed more or less constant for three decades. What has changed is the workplace. The cost of losing experienced employees now represents a tremendous lost of investment.  "Employers want a guarantee that a new hire will stick — and the best way to do that is to make sure that job and candidate are a good fit in the first place."

Globalization that separates performance and accountability/review across continents has further complicated the process of finding and training the best person for the job. So offering on-line testing across those continents makes these assessments not only appealing but also fast.  

I am often asked by potential clients, particularly those who have been in corporate settings, if we either offer or recommend simple, cost-effective assessments for them to use in attorney recruitment, training and development.  While we can recommend and administer a number of good assessments that can be highly useful -- Myers Briggs Type Indicator (the most popular test in the country, used by 89 of the Fortune 100 and taken by 2.5 million Americans each year), Caliper's Personality Profile, Birkman Method, MayerSaloveyCaruso Emotional Intelligence Test, Thomas Kilmann Conflict Instrument, among others--they are not inexpensive and they are not targeted to lawyers. 

A recent college graduate friend took a Johnson O'Connor aptitude assessment, a common test for teens and young adults to help determine career possibilities.  Since her father and grandfather are lawyers and she is considering going to law school, she was surprised to find that "lawyer" was not one of her designated career possibilities.  She was told that a few years ago Johnson O'Connor stopped offering "lawyer" as an option for any of their test-takers.  The reason?  They are no longer able to reliably correlate attributes or aptitudes with the successful practice of law.

And therein lies one of the problems with assessing attorneys.  While research has indeed identified a number of attributes that lawyers exhibit to a greater degree than others-- for example, high pessimism, skepticism, urgency and autonomy, and low resilience, sociability and collaboration-- the problem lies in the data that shows the impact these characteristics are having on practitioners.  These very attributes present in so many lawyers are also the attributes contributing to the dissatisfaction and distress that the legal profession exhibits:  astonishingly high rates of depression and other mental illness, substance abuse, suicide, and divorce, for starters. High rates of dissatisfaction that are also contributing to the staggering drop-out and attrition rates.

In addition to the challenge of identifying what makes for a good (as well as well-adjusted lawyer), there is also the expense of doing that well.  The testing often done at corporations is highly individualized, developed after an extensive review of what attributes in fact produce productive and satisfied employees at that particular company, and sometimes at that particular location.  Google hires over 10,000 new employees each year and enjoys the amazingly low attrition rate of 4%, but to accomplish that.it invests in a highly detailed questionnaire and assessment that is developed from extensive employee data   That process is not inexpensive. 

Not only is it the individual lawyers who have complex and sometimes hard-to-read attributes.  Law firms and law departments, often in spite of their studied denial, also have "personalities."  Understanding those personalities is critical in determining the type of person who will thrive or fail there. 

Our unique expertise in understanding the attributes of individual lawyers, as well as each legal workplace, makes us ideally suited to help you enter the challenging world of 21st century attorney assessment, development and retention.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Growing future leaders at our best business schools increasingly involves teaching "softer" skills, and often using personal style assessments. One of the more rigorous and long-standing low-residence courses at Harvard Business School is the nine-week Owner President Management Course (OPM), which spans three years.  Roughly 120 business owners, only half of whom are usually from the US, are enrolled in this course.

Last year, one of the course professors, Dr. Linda Doyle, included The Birkman Method in her "Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness" classes for the OPM, a class that examines leadership styles through case studies.  The Birkman Method is a personal style assessment that identifies a number of traits, and also how those traits manifest in an organization and morph under stress.  Using the Birkman assessment, OPM participants are able to identify and analyze their own authority styles, and the strengths and problems that might develop from those styles.  Harvard has decided to continue the use of the Birkman in this course and is considering including it in other MBA courses.

Yale School of Management has also introduced personal style assessments into its curriculum.  All MBA candidates are now required to take an assessment to help identify leadership styles, strengths and potential problems.

Heidi Brooks, Director of the Leadership Development Program at YSOM and a lecturer in Organizational Behavior, is convinced that these assessments are avenues to self awareness and interactional intelligence that can only improve management effectiveness.  Since most major corporations hire and promote at least in part on the basis of similar types of assessments, having MBA candidates familiarize themselves with the testing process and the information it provides also gives them an early advantage. 

Besides Harvard and Yale, Dartmouth University's Tuck School of Business, University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School and Stanford's Graduate School of Business are among the business schools that have heard from alums and companies across the country that it is the softer skills--communication, brokering compromises, managing conflict, developing relationships and leading groups--rather than strategy or financial analysis that are missing in MBA graduates.  And are doing something to address those weaknesses. 

Stamford's B School revamped its leadership-training curriculum this fall, now requiring all first-year students to take personality tests, participate in teamwork and management-simulation exercises and critiques of their people skills.  Professional executive coaches will watch the simulations and offer advice.

At Tuck, the leadership-development program, modeled on corporate programs, that was launched in 2004, puts all first year students in teams of five.  The groups complete coursework together, help each other with assignments and then rate themselves and each other on how well they operate in a team, including how well each of them "solicits feedback and acts on it" or helps "manage conflict."  Reports on their performance are used to inform the coaching sessions the students attend and to design personal development plans.

Says Warren Bennis, professor at USC's Marshall School:  "It isn't just nice--these interpersonal skills.  It's the stuff that's necessary to lead a complex organization."

It is only a matter of time, as they say, before law schools recognize the impact of "people skills training" and follow suit.  Not only are lawyers less educated both in school and in the workplace on the importance of developing these skills and the methods of doing so, the data shows that they are as a group psychologically and behaviorally more challenged  in achieving results.  Which makes this sort of training--whether at law school or on the job-- even more critical.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

What is the most important attribute to be looking for as you groom your young lawyers for management? 

A 2006 study reviewed in the Leadership and Organization Development Journal assessed the relationship between emotional intelligence and managerial effectiveness, confirming what you might expect.  A total of 38 supervisors (37 males and 1 female) and 1,258 subordinates from a large manufacturing organization participated. Data analysis found that the total MSCEIT score (an emotional intelligence assessment that I consider most reliable) displayed a strong positive correlation with supervisor ratings; that is, the more emotionally intelligent the supervisor, the more effective and productive s/he was rated by others in the organization.

First, I would point out that this study doesn't tell us whether these emotionally intelligent supervisors who were rated more effective actually were more effective than their lower EI colleagues.  All we know is that they were perceived to be more effective.  The implication being that even if those high EI supervisors weren't quite so great in the accomplishments department as advertised, their loyal team still saw them in the best possible light.

This distinction is particularly important in environments such as law firms and law departments, where dramatically high skepticism (averaging in the top 10% of the American population) creates hurdles that make it hard for managers to establish rapport and trust, much less garner appreciation for a job reasonably well done.  Second- and third-guessing is often standard procedure, regardless of how demonstrable  the accomplishment might be.  While emotionally intelligent managers may be in fact most effective, this and other studies demonstrate that they are in any event going to have the interpersonal skills to align legal staff and professionals on the same side.  Given the challenge of creating supportive cultures for growth and accomplishment in law organizations, identifying these kinds of leaders becomes imperative.

Two major subscores make up the MSCEIT total score.  In the study above, Experiential EI, which includes perceiving and using emotions, was found to be very highly correlated with high supervisor ratings, whereas the Reasoning EI subscore, which includes understanding and managing emotions, displayed no significant correlation.

Our study of emotional intelligence and lawyers (also using the MSCEIT) indicates that lawyers' scores in EI are generally a standard deviation below the general population (that is, 85 compared to 100).  In addition, lawyers score significantly lower on the Experiential subgroup than on the Reasoning one.  Their ability to "read" their own and others' emotions is notably low compared to the general population, and they also are not facile at "using" emotions, i.e., moving from a less appropriate emotion to a more appropriate one.  Their Reasoning scores are usually significantly higher than the Experiential ones, lawyers being evidently well-suited to logically analyze even the emotional realm.  The problem is that weakness in reading emotions creates a garbage-in, garbage-out result when that reasoning horsepower is applied to inaccurate information.  So lawyers often get blind-sided by what they hadn't originally correctly perceived .

This finding as to the importance of Experiential EI to effective management can be critical in the case of managing lawyers.  Not only should we be grooming our young lawyers to be emotionally intelligent managers, but we should also be specifically rewarding those who are expert at recognizing and using emotions, an item I would bet is not currently on any evaluation form.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

"We evaluate 'courage' as a behavioral characteristic of our lawyers, and we link this evaluation to compensation," says John P. Donahue, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of Rhodia Inc., in the July 2007 issue of InsideCounsel.   Rhodia has "embraced professional objectivity of its in-house lawyers as a core value" and Donahue wants to make sure that "our lawyers can deliver bad news to clients," with whom they are often closely aligned. 

Valuing Courage

Given the data we have about the strong tendency of lawyers to avoid rather than confront conflicts (yes, even those feisty litigators, oddly enough) (see my article "The Unique Psychological World of Lawyers"), Donahue's goal is one that can't be lauded enough.  Hospital administrators contend that a ratio of 1 conflict avoider in 4 employees results in a "dangerous workplace"--think:  "I don't want to get so&so in trouble over reusing needles" or "Maybe she'll start writing down dosages after she gets used to our procedures". 

Left to their own proclivities, lawyers' much higher rate of avoidance than hospital workers risks being just as dangerous.  Avoidance not only fails to resolve firm and client issues, but at the extreme, failure to report and confront violations of Sarbanes-Oxley, insider trading and discrimination laws, to name a few, can not only crater a career, but also a firm or a company.  Add in malpractice, fraud and the range of criminal possibilities (see, for example, Enron and other corporate demises and the unfolding saga of Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman) and silence should never be considered golden.

Hence Donahue's laudable efforts to support and promote courage.   

Which is where our thought for today could end.

Evaluating Courage

But Donahue goes further than suggesting putting in place environmental supports like "constantly talking" about maintaining objectivity, creating a culture that embraces bearers of bad news and rotating lawyers among client departments. He wants his lawyers' courage to be evaluated and then to compensate them accordingly.

Evaluating courage or any other personal characteristic as it relates to their work is a radical idea to many lawyers. Basing compensation on that evaluation is outlandish.  They don't know what a "behavioral characteristic" actually means, don't trust the evaluation process, and certainly don't think their compensation should be linked to so un-rigorous a process.  They are, after all, good lawyers, and good lawyers average in the top 10% on the characteristic "skepticism" in personality assessments (see again my article "The Unique Psychological World of Lawyers").

In this case, they should get over it.  Whether Donahue is using structured assessments or more unstructured evaluation techniques, these behavioral and personality evaluations are likely to be the key for law firms and law departments to break their recruitment and retention quandaries and, as icing on the cake, help solve the diversity dilemma.  (See my January 5, 2007 blog entry "KPMG Model Delivers Risk Management, Teamwork, Client Satisfaction and Diversity Too," reporting on KPMG's use of the Birkman Method assessment to revamp its business model and achieve retention and diversity goals.)

This is not a new position, at least for me.  (See my article "The Case for Assessment: Using Discrimination for Better Hiring," which outlines all the uses of assessments in the non-law firm world and how law firms might profit from them.)  And now the tipping point is in sight as more law departments and law firms inch towards greater use of evaluations and assessments-- and trumpet the benefits.

General Counsel Scott Terrillion, of Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc, uses an "evaluative selection method" to find the best attorneys for his company, with diversity being a natural consequence.  Roland Dumas, director of diversity for the legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, points out that "if a law firm screens candidates based on what law school they went to and how well they did there, it won't achieve much diversity.  There simply are not enough African-American and Latino law students in the top law schools who would survive the 'top quarter' cut."  Instead, Dumas recommends "capabilities" interviews, which use rich conversations to probe candidates to find those who have the talents the firm values. 

Struggling to complete with bigger firms, Kansas City, Mo.-based Blackwell Sanders developed a system for selecting and assessing associates that is more behaviorally evaluative than most firms use, and it found that using these behavioral evaluations, starting with the initial interview, enabled the firm to spot talent it might otherwise miss. The firm has documented its efforts in a handbook, From Classes to Competencies, Lockstep To Levels, which, according to the foreword by Ida Abbott, is "an act of remarkable candor and leadership ... [that] will enable law firms to expedite the design and implementation of competency-based evaluations and performance-based advancement."

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.  Blackwell Sanders doubled the total number of minority associates, tripled the number in recent incoming classes, and increased by 22% the number of females associates.  Perhaps even more notable, a "high" minority attrition rate declined to "0" within four years. 

Jeffrey N. Berman, managing partner at Berman Fink Van Horn, says that for the last 10 years his firm has taken an even more radical step--using individually administered psychological assessments as part of their hiring process. Determining assessment traits important to the firm has given the firm "a handle on the type of attorney that is going to be happy and successful here," Berman says.  

The firm tells all prospective hires, lawyers and staff, that they will be required to take a personality test if an offer is made.  Contrary to the fear of many hiring partners, Berman reports that no one has ever objected to the assessment or refused to proceed, in part, he believes, because everyone in the firm has participated and also because it has been so accurate in predicting success.   "It never ceases to amaze me how accurate the testing is," he adds, noting that it has never proved inaccurate with anyone they've hired, even when the results contravene the impression of interviewers.

So diversity is not the only benefit firms can expect from the targeted use of evaluations and assessments--law turnover and high satisfaction and performance result as well. 

Our firm offers law departments and law firms state-of-the-art advice on identifying the characteristics that produce happy, productive lawyers in your environment and designing evaluations and assessments to use in hiring and promoting those candidates.  Don't be left in the backwash.  This is a wave that can do much to move you forward.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

"Think of a succession plan as life insurance for a law firm." 

An article in the August 24-30 issue of the Puget Sound Business Journal entitled "Firms Make Plans to Carry on When Leaders Go" quotes Ronda Muir on the subject of succession planning and describes the services that she and Robin Rolfe Resources performed for a Seattle law firm.

"Senior Attorney Jay Derr of Seattle firm GordonDerr said that nearly three years ago his firm decided to hire Muir and company to put together a succession plan... Thus, the preparations were in place when founding attorney Peter Buck decided to leave... to start his own firm...' We felt no economic blip from it at all,' said Derr."

"Succession is especially critical to the survival of so-called first generation 'founder firms,'"said consultant Muir.  'It involves finding a dynamic leader who can transition into a new role... and moving the founder to a different level...'"

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Ronda Muir's article "The Looming Associate Crisis" leads the July 2007 ALM Law Firm Partnership & Benefits Report, Volume 13, Number 6.   

After reviewing statistics that show an ever-tightening supply, and potentially less qualified pool, of associates who are paid more yet leaving earlier than in years past, Muir recounts some of the tried (and perhaps less currently true) strategies for coping, and also identifies some more radical solutions that innovative, forward-looking firms can benefit from.

• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks

An article by Ronda Muir entitled "The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Law Firm Partners" appears in the July/August 2007 issue of the ABA Law Practice Management Section's Law Practice Magazine. 

Among the attributes that emotionally intelligent partners bring are better judgment, higher productivity, enhanced business development skills and better client relationship management.  Most importantly, high emotional intelligence fuels the kind of leadership-- one which promotes collaboration and teamwork-- that is critical to excellence in the 21st Century, and that can provide firms with a competitive edge.

• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks

Oddly enough, where it is most needed, Boards and other management groups may be the last frontier for achieving enhanced performance management. 

Historically, the perceived advantages of relying on a managing group, instead of one individual, include access to the group's collective wisdom –"several heads are better than one"–as well as the ability to spread an increasing management workload over a number of people. 

A recent Center for Creative Leadership study identified an additional advantage. Effective management these days requires the resources of several people, rather than the lone hero, in order to meet the global challenges of collaboratively connecting across boundaries of all kinds—geography, language, culture and expertise.

Avoiding "Extreme" Group Decision-Making

Yet there is a well-documented propensity for groups to drift toward "extreme" decisions, that is, a committee often makes a decision that none of the individual members of the committee, acting alone, would make. These group decisions can be extreme by being either extremely risky or extremely conservative, and you see lone Directors routinely disavowing their cohorts’ actions after the fact. There seem to be a number of reasons for this tendency:          

Diffusion of Responsibility. An individual's part in a group's decision evidently weighs less heavily on him/her than an individual decision would, the implication being that not as thorough an evaluation of the issues is made when the decision is attributed to the group.

Ignoring the Lone Voice. Often groups do not properly take into account the most relevant expertise in the room.   Most small groups tend to make decisions based on the information all members share about a topic, overlooking important facts that one or several people bring. Although management committees are usually looking for creative, out-of-the-box strategies, a solitary opinion is often taken lightly or ignored in the flow of debate within the group.

Social Pressure. The more bonded the group, the more committed they are likely to be to reaching a decision, particularly one that pleases most of the members, even if a decision should be delayed or a less pleasing one would in fact be best. 

Competition. When committee members agree on the parameters of an issue, individuals may try to one-up each other by suggesting more and more extreme solutions, then promoting their solution as the best.

Stress. Groups under pressure act very much like individuals under stress, only more so. They often procrastinate, calling for further information, or become committed to bad decisions primarily to protect themselves and each other against criticism. This effect may account for the popular notion that committees tend to "split the baby," resulting in a less controversial solution that does not in fact work very well.

Seeing What Others Say

The impact of psychological factors on group decision making may go even further, to actually alter each person’s perceptions. A study using advanced brain-scanning technology shows that, in effect, group members often in fact see what the group tells them they see. In an exercise involving mentally rotating images of three-dimensional objects to determine if the objects were the same or different, subjects were assured of an incorrect conclusion by confederates and then agreed with those wrong answers 41% of the time. The brain activity of those who went along with the group was markedly different from those who took independent positions. When subjects concurred with wrong answers, activity increased in the area of the brain devoted to spatial awareness, meaning that their actual perceptions were being influenced. Those who made independent judgments showed activity in the region of the brain associated with conflict management, signifying an emotional toll for going against the group's perception.

Based on the results of this study, one of the potential major advantages of a group decision—"several heads are better than one"—can disappear if the group successfully, even if unintentionally, co-opts individual insights. The most problematic aspect of these results is that not only does the group lose the "lone voices," but also the lone voices lose their very awareness of their differing perspectives. The change in their perception makes them incapable of raising their idiosyncratic flags.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Why Feedback?

Effective leadership in lawyers is achieved by using some of the same strategies that work with other high-performing professionals, while also requiring an appreciation of the nuances that are particular to the legal personality.  Awareness is the standard starting point for most leadership assessment and improvement programs.  Studies have clearly shown that the higher your self-awareness, the better a manager and performer you are, and, as an added carrot, the more you actually enjoy your work. 

Unfortunately, studies also clearly show that the higher you rise in the ranks of an organization, the less likely you are to be accurately aware of your impact.  Thus, oddly enough, in any given business the CEO is probably less informed about how she and her work are perceived by her colleagues--below, across and above her-- than is the night typist.  This turn of events is often attributed to the fact that the higher up most organizations one goes, the less systematic, extensive and honest is the feedback. 

Feedback and Lawyer-Leaders

Lawyers, and certainly general counsels and firm partners, often function like the CEOs of their own small businesses, and therefore risk suffering from that same top-of-the-heap lack of awareness that other senior management executives experience.  As to the younger lawyers, while run-of-the-mill annual associate reviews are often standard, most of these reviews are still not successful in effectively giving meaningful feedback . And once those lawyers become senior managers or partners themselves, there is usually no system at all for them to get feedback-- from the associates who work for them, from other partners or senior managers or from clients. 

There are well-established ways to produce effective feedback in an organization: professional assessments of individual working styles using Myers-Briggs and other testing instruments, regular feedback-targeted personal reviews, mentoring programs that include in-depth feedback, and department, practice group or firm-wide meetings or retreats. Bottom-up (from associates) and cross (from other partners or colleagues) reviews are recent additions to the array of law firm/law department feedback systems that try to provide senior lawyers with that critical awareness.  Other tools are practice group, partnership and client surveys, particularly if the surveys are followed up with face-to-face discussions. 

Unfortunately, giving and receiving written and person-to-person feedback strikes many lawyers as bordering on, if not squarely in, the realm of useless touchy/feely psycho-babble. Yet it is a skill that should come easily to lawyers.  Rigorous analysis and clear communication, particularly in identifying issues and crafting resolutions, are the stock-in-trade of what we do.  Why then is it that lawyers so resist using these potentially powerful tools in their own practices?

Feedback and the Half-Empty Glass

The wrinkle here may well lie in other personality attributes that lawyers often possess.  First, as a group, lawyers score high on resistance to feedback-- they get defensive and don't listen, or lash out with their point-by-point answers.  Part of this response derives no doubt from years of advocacy thinking-- every point deserves a good counter-point.  The high esteem that lawyers tend to hold themselves in-- another trait that serves them well when under attack from opposing counsel-- also feeds the inability to hear "criticism." 

A further attribute that may well contribute to lawyers' disinterest in feedback is their inherent pessimism. Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor who has been a leader in the development of the field of positive psychology over the last ten years, identified lawyers, in a survey of 104 careers, as the most pessimistic.  While researchers can argue whether that attribute makes lawyers likely to be more or less accurate in their assessments of legal situations, it does make them, as a group, more resistant to "new" policies or procedures, and more likely to think that remedial steps are of dubious value. 

"Peanuts" and You:  Cashing in on a Valuable Commodity

I was recently in the student center of a large suburban high school.  In a deja vu from a "Peanuts" cartoon strip, a teenage boy sat behind a hand-written sign that said "5 cents -- I'll tell you what I think of you."  Beside the sign was a very large pile of nickels.  An enterprising kid was demonstrating what a valuable commodity honest feedback is. 

Lawyers have the skills and the opportunity to cash in on that valuable commodity.  As lawyers, we can begin our leadership effectiveness program right there:  by simply learning something about ourselves, we can start accessing a whole new array of potentially useful tools for enhancing our practices and our lives. 

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Ronda Muir, Senior Consultant, led a two and a half day retreat at the end of May for UNICEF's 22-person Armenia office to help them better serve the country's children.  She was engaged to improve teamwork, communication and conflict resolution and to assist in the office's preparation for upcoming reviews and its transitioning to potential structural and policy changes. 

Through the use of individual and team MBTI work style reports, personal conflict style assessments, emotional intelligence tests and a confidential office-wide survey, Muir assisted the team in identifying personal and office strengths and challenges and in determining strategies for improved communication, conflict management and change management.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Ronda Muir, Senior Consultant, has been asked by UNICEF's Armenia office to lead a two and a half day retreat at the end of May to help improve teamwork, communication and conflict resolution. Through the use of individual and team MBTI reports and emotional intelligence assessments, Muir will help the team identify personal and office strengths and challenges and determine strategies for improved communication and conflict management in order to better serve the country's children.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

In connection with the 129th annual International Tradmark Association meeting in Chicago, Ronda Muir, Senior Consultant, presented a program on Wednesday, May 2, at Robin Rolfe Resource's Women's Power Breakfast for seventy senior corporate and law firm women in intellectual property.   Her presentation focused on what makes lawyers, and women lawyers, different from other professions and how to use those differences to make good lawyers better.  This year INTA welcomed over 8,500 registrants from around the world.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Give yourself the advantages that insights from sophisticated behavioral science tools and informed collaboration can produce.  Out of ideas for how to motivate your team?  Can't take another day with a difficult boss or colleague?  Strung out from too many committments and not enough time?  Looking for a meaningful way to both practice law and live your life?

Achieve improvements in your professional and personal life, including progress in leadership and management skills, work/life balance, conflict management, business development and time and resources management. 

Our experienced lawyer coaches use their expertise and assessments to give you the tools to maximize your strengths, raise your emotional intelligence and social IQ, as well as benefit your bottom-line results.  You choose the program that best suits your needs and schedule.

For further information, contact RMuir@RobinRolfeResources.com. 

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The 100 Best Employers

From over 400 organizations surveyed, five law firms, down one from last year and with most of the survivors heading down the list, made Fortune magazine’s 2007 list of the best 100 employers to work for: Alston & Bird, Arnold & Porter, Nixon Peabody, Perkins Coie and Bingham McCutchen, with Morrison & Foerster having dropped off.

The list is based on two criteria: an evaluation of the policies and culture of each organization, and the opinions of the employees, which is given more weight. Two-thirds of the total score comes from responses to a 57-question survey, on attitudes towards management, job satisfaction, and camaraderie, sent to at least 400 employees from each company. The remaining one-third of the score is based on demographic makeup, pay and benefits programs, and culture.

It's a tough competition, with No. 1-rated Google providing employees free gourmet meals, a swimming spa and free doctors on site.

But apart from offering outsized bennies, there are some lessons Google may be able to offer us legals.

Hiring for the Right Reasons

Google has doubled the number of employees in each of the last three years, and now with 10,000 employees, expects to double in size again this year, resulting in about 200 hires a week. It also enjoys an attrition rate of 4%, low by Silicon Valley standards. Historically, much like law firms, Google has relied on grade requirements and interviews to make hiring decisions. The challenge is to continue to find valuable employees at such an astounding rate of growth.

A recent review of over 2 million data points made it clear that Google's hiring criteria were not necessarily correlated with success at the company. So Google has revamped its hiring process, using assessments of existing personnel to produce a more quantitative measurement of success in terms of skills, intelligence, personality and integrity. All incoming applicants will now take a personal survey, which Google is already finding produces better matches for its work and culture.

Lessons for Law Firms

Law firms with spiraling growth requirements are competing to hire from the same number of law graduates with good grades from the same number of top-rung law schools as 20 years ago. The lesson from Google, the best company to work for and possibly the hiringest company as well, is that grades and an interview don't do it anymore. Now is the time to identify your real indicators of success and hire candidates with those.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

In a study conducted last fall of managing partners, general counsel, and other legal leaders, Altman Weil identified five key market trends and critical concerns.  It noted that people management was one of the highest priorities on everyone's list, with one partner saying that he goes to sleep "never knowing who might be leaving tomorrow."  The limited pool of quality law graduates, the "free-agent mentality" of lawyers from new associates to rainmakers, Gen-Xers emphasizing work-life balance and achieving diversity were all cited as challenges to people management by this august group. 

To my mind, the other four critical areas identified-- growth, competition, client service and even pricing-- are also each dependent on achieving effective people management.  Growth requires wrestling with "cultural, office and practice integration," competition is felt most dramatically in the "war for talent," with quality people, superior client service skills and strong training and development programs giving firms the competitive edge.   Client service requires superior communication and relationship, among other, skills, and "improved project staffing." (See our entry today on KPMG's success with their staffing model.)  Even pricing is acknowledged as a function of the quality of a firm's work and service-- which general counsel have consistently linked to people skills.  (See our entries Do You Know Why You Were Fired? dated November 8, 2005 and Companies Unhappy with Their Law Firms dated December 20, 2006.)

So why do law firms and law departments not take advantage of the extensive body of expertise available on hiring, retaining, developing and motivating people?  Maybe, as David Maister has suggested, it is the herd instinct that keeps them from going for the glory-- rather go down as a group than risk a "new-fangled" approach.  Interestingly enough, that is what our psychological profiles of lawyers tell us-- that they are risk-averse, often low in resilience, optimism, and emotional intelligence, all of which has helped mire them in an 18th-century business model. 

Here's the question-- which firms will be the real leaders, the ones who actually take the out-of-the-legal-box steps toward addressing these critical people management areas?  Because there seems to be a consensus that that is the only effective way forward.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Accounting firms have long been ahead of law firms in innovative management strategies for personal service firms-- and as law firms head toward numbering thousands instead of hundreds of lawyers, there is much we can learn from how accounting firms manage people.

At a two-day ARK Group conference in December on Women in Professional Service Firms, Sandra Bushby, KPMG's national director of Women's Initiatives and other Workplace Solutions, recounted how KPMG uses workstyle assessments, particularly the "color-coded" Birkman Method, to put together successful client and project teams.  The firm-wide assessments were undertaken primarily as a risk management strategy-- to build teams that have the varied talents to insure that everything from technical details to interpersonal skills to long-term visionary considerations are fully dealt with.  But by balancing teams with accountants with red, green, yellow and blue workstyles, KPMG is finding that it is also acieving an unexpected bonus:solving the diversity puzzle-- creating culturally, gender and racially diverse teams.

Law firms, whether big or small, have a world of insight available to them from the use of assessments, which they often do not take advantage of.  Lawyers will contend that law is too "technical" or "expert' a service for personal or work styles to have any impact on success.  Yet accounting is no less technical, and accounting firms have had to become expert in drilling down to the most effective risk management tools available-- which style assessments unquestionably are.  To have the additional bonus of effectively producing diverse teams without resorting to "affirmative action" add-ons is ground-breaking-- a one-assessment-for-all-purposes bonanza.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

While Emotional Intelligence has become a popular buzzword, the researchers on whose work Daniel Goleman based his bestselling Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, only formulated an assessment to test EI in 2002. Called the MSCEIT (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test), it is the only EI assessment based on abilities instead of self-reports, i.e., it gauges your actual EI performance instead of asking how good you are at EI. 

Does it make any difference whether a lawyer is emotionally intelligent or not? To determine whether there is a correlation between emotional intelligence and excellence in lawyering, we undertook a study. 

We began with lawyers listed in The Best Lawyers in America as our "excellent" lawyers. Those willing to participate were given the MSCEIT and follow-up feed-back free of charge. 

Our participating lawyers practice across the country: Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Columbia, SC and New York. Their firms range from a small, 15 lawyer boutique to regional powerhouses to global behemoths. And the results are interesting.

• This group of excellent lawyers performed 20% higher on average than lawyers generally.
• This group's highest score was in Understanding Emotions, the most cerebral of the four branches of EI, and the branch that most lawyers perform best in.
• Also like most lawyers, this group's lowest score was in the Perceiving Emotions branch. Although notably higher than the average lawyer score in this area, even excellent lawyers barely score the national average.
• Excellent lawyers score significantly higher than lawyers generally on the sub-branch Managing Emotional Relationships. 

While these excellent lawyers, like lawyers in general, are better at analyzing emotions than recognizing them, they are operating on a higher EI plane than their colleagues. The excellent lawyers' significantly higher average total results and significantly higher ability to manage emotional relationships may account for at least a part of their excellence: they are generally more emotionally intelligent and they are better in relationships with clients and colleagues.

Stay tuned for some of the (non-identifying) specifics on the best performing individuals.

CALL TO BEST LAWYERS TO PARTICIPATE

While we have a good start, we want even more results to produce a more reliable study. We invite any lawyers now listed in The Best Lawyers in America to take the MSCEIT—a 40-minute confidential on-line survey-- at our expense. We will provide you with individual feed-back, a written report, and the opportunity to have your firm identified as high performing.

• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks

In a December 13, 2006 Legal Times article extolling the energy and talents of Pamela Rothenberg, the managing partner of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice’s Washington D.C. office, Rothenberg stressed how much she relies on The Gallup Organization strengths, an assessment that is described in the book First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, in managing the firm. 

Martin Seligman, the Fox Leadership Professor of Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, has worked with The Gallup Organization to expand and refine their strengths assessment to make it particularly relevant to lawyers. Seligman is so certain of the usefulness of the Gallup strengths assessment in raising productivity, that he has issued a challenge to assess free of charge the members of any firm willing to participate, on the condition that he be paid 10% of their increased profits. 

We have used the Gallup strengths assessment in a number of client projects for law firms and law departments. If you are interested in participating in Seligman’s challenge, or simply want to know more about these strengths and how they could be useful to improving productivity in your firm, contact us.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

BTI Consulting Group recently announced the results of its sixth annual client service survey, with the conclusion that corporate America is not very happy with their law firms.  Of the more than 250 corporate counsel and top executives interviewed over the past year, only 32% said that they would recommend a firm that worked for them.

Of those firms who were in the top 30 for client service, Sidley Austin topped the list.  In a separate list of the most arrogant law firms, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom took top honors.  It was notable that California and other West Coast firms were well-represented on the former list and New York and other East Coast  firms seemed to dominate the latter.  Several firms are clearly working their way up the service list, including Morrison & Foerster and Reed Smith.

While the survey provides useful data for most firms for understanding their public persona and marketing themselves to prospective clients, those who didn't do well or who figured prominently in the arrogant and other undesirable lists should do their own risk management review and come up with strategies to address their shortfalls.  Understanding the firm's values and how the culture reflects them, possibly reevaluating and redirecting either or both, educating both associates and partners in client service, raising the firm's emotional intelligence, and setting a timeline to confirm by marketplace and client surveys the effectiveness of the firm's new policies are possible strategies.  In a competitive marketplace where clients are king, doing nothing is not a reasonable course.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Christopher Columbus Langdell, first dean of Harvard Law School in 1870, formalized what is now classic legal education, pioneering the use of the Socratic method and a course of study driven by reading appellate court decisions. But “the world of law has changed,” Harvard Law School’s Dean Elena Kagan recently announced, and so finally has Harvard’s curriculum. This year first year law students will be required to take a new course, among others, on legal problem solving, i.e., resolving clients’ dilemmas rather than simply analyzing abstract legal issues. Other law schools, including Stanford and Northwestern, have incorporated similar programs into their curriculum. 

A recent survey conducted by Pace University School of Law of midsize law firms in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey asked firms to name a law school with the ideal curriculum. Nearly 60% couldn’t identify even one. About a quarter of the firms cited the greatest weakness of law school graduates as a lack of real-world experience. Over 20% of the firms polled felt that law school curriculum should include some clinical experience.

“You can get a J.D. without having any connection with a client,” said Mark Heyrman, director of clinical programs at the University of Chicago Law School. “No medical student could graduate without at least having some patient contact.”

The clinical component of law school education is expanding. And there are external prods. The American Bar Association now requires accredited law schools to offer “real-life practice experiences.” Some state bars are also mandating certain client training before associates can interact with clients. And, as pointed out in an earlier blog note, corporate clients may designate how senior an associate has to be before working on their matters.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Part of the growing managerial team at law firms over the last decade or so has been the addition of the Professional Development or Career Development Officer. The goal, according to one firm, is happier, more productive attorneys who in turn are less likely to leave. The trend began several years ago, when large firms, such as Paul Weiss, whose current Director of Professional Development is David Cruickshank, realized the benefits of actively directing and supporting their attorneys' career development. 

Over time more firms have signed on to the concept, such as Chicago’s Gardner Carton & Douglas (soon to merge with Drinker, Biddle & Reath), which in 2004 appointed their first Chief Career Development Officer, responsible for the summer associate program, orientation of new associates, assignments and feedback, mentoring, training and formal performance reviews. Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal also hired at that time its first Chief Learning Officer, as have Holland & Knight and Arnold & Porter. Each position is tailored to the individual firm’s goals and requirements-- some focus primarily on providing targeted training to associates and partners, some attempt to manage quality assurance or reach out to alumni, while others take a more free-wheeling approach. Cordell M. Parvin, the lawyer at Jenkens & Gilchrist who became their first official Attorney Development Officer a few years ago, said at the time that his firm was moved to formalize the position in order to help their lawyers make for themselves a career that they love. “We’re in an era where young lawyers have never been paid more money, and they’ve never been more unhappy.”   

Adding Internal Coaches

A recent twist has been the inclusion of individual coaching responsibilities in the Professional Development officer’s role, or, as in the case of some firms, such as Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe (soon to merge with Dewey Ballantine), Arnold & Porter and Fenwick & West, the addition to the team of an internal full-time coach. Like the Career Development position, the coach's role can be defined in many different ways, depending on the values and goals of the firm. And the coaching methodology could differ significantly depending on which of the myriad coaching approaches are used.

The Challenges of Coaching Lawyers

Dr. Martin Seligman, the Fox Leadership professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, founded the school of Positive Psychology, which focuses on factors that make for professional and personal success, instead of following the traditional diagnostic model of addressing weaknesses. His work identifies optimism particularly as producing sizeable psychic benefits. A widely successful coaching program based on Marty's positive psychology model encourages “learned optimism.”  

According to Marty's research, however, lawyers are strongly pessimistic-- so much so that law appears to be the only career where pessimism is a career enhancing attribute. So the question arises as to whether changing lawyers' pessimism to optimism will kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Ideally, such coaching would give lawyers the ability to switch out of their day-job mindset, not only when socializing or in family situations, but also when engaging in non-lawyering professional activities like managing their firms and courting their clients, producing bottom-line benefits. 

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

In-House Counsel recently reported on the results of the Managing Outside Counsel Survey Report prepared by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Serengeti Law of Bellevue, Washington.  The study revealed, among other things, the four reasons that companies are firing outside counsel. In 2005, 55.6% of the General Counsel surveyed reported that they terminated the relationship with at least some of their outside firms, up almost ten percent (50.7%) from 2004. The reasons most cited for firing outside counsel were:

1.       poor quality of work

2.       lack of responsiveness

3.       high fees

4.       personality issues 

Note that, after the threshold issue of competent work, two of the three main reasons for firing an outside firm were for deficiencies in what some lawyers refer to as “soft” skills—lack of responsiveness and personality issues. 

How responsive are your lawyers?   Do they have well-developed client relationship skills?

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The Fifth International Positive Psychology Summit 2006 was held October 5-7 in Washington DC.  Dr. Martin Seligman, the Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, founded the school of Positive Psychology, which focuses on factors that make for professional and personal success, rather than following the traditional diagnostic model of addressing weaknesses.  There were a number of presentations of interest to lawyers.

Richard Florida, an economist, Hirst Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, author of the bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic Books, 2002) and The Flight of the Creative Class (HarperCollins, 2005), was the keynote speaker.  The dramatic results of his research found that highly talented people will overcome financial disincentives to join communities and businesses that promote subjective well-being, such as supporting diversity and encouraging tolerance.  His astonishing findings are that it is the people, the "soul of the city," that drives the production of jobs and financial success, rather than the other way around, as classic economics theory maintained.

These findings fit nicely with the results of David Maister's survey on the factors that drive financial success in personal services businesses.  Maister asked simply "Are employee attitudes correlated with financial success?"  In his book Practice What You Preach:  What Managers Must Do To Create A High-Achievement Culture, he expands on the results of that survey.  Not only is the answer "yes", but, more importantly, Maister found that it is attitudes that drive financial results and not the other way around.

The message for law firms and law departments is that, in a world of escalating pay raises but ever-increasing movement, the soul of the firm-- and how it influences employee attitudes and their sense of well-being-- cana be the key to achieving financial success.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks