Muir will participate in a webinar entitled “Think Like a Lateral—How to Hire and Retain Quality Lawyers” to be presented on Tuesday, March 9 for the members of the Attorneys' Liability Assurance Society (ALAS).
Firms are placing their futures at risk if they cannot identify, develop and empower the next generation of leaders. So it is no surprise that more law firms are investing in leadership development. For example, according to PaLAW 2009's 14th annual Managing Partners Survey, cited in the November 23, 2009 issue of The Legal Intelligencer, the number of firms surveyed that provide leadership training at any level increased from 40.5% in 2008 to 67.7% in 2009, almost a 60% increase.
What does it take to be a good leader? And do we lawyers have what it takes?
There are numerous theories about the best style of leadership--see Primal Leadership (2002) by Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee for an informative evaluation of 6 major styles. Apart from style, Richard Daft, author of The Leadership Experience, cites numerous studies that have sifted out five recurring personal attributes of successful leaders: openness to experience, emotional stability, conscientiousness, agreeableness and extroversion.
If you look around for potential leaders in your firm, chances are few of your colleagues possess all five of those attributes. While conscientiousness is something lawyers tend to have in spades, openness to experience (also known as risk tolerance), emotional stability (or emotional intelligence) and agreeableness (aren't we hired NOT to be agreeable?) are all factors that in various studies lawyers tend to fall short on. Certainly, we have clear and robust data that most lawyers (over 70%) are introverts, rather than extroverts.
So can introverts lead? Successfully, that is?
There seems to be some hope. If the concern is that introverts tend not to be charismatic, outgoing personalities, Jim Collins's book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . And Others Don't provides some comfort. Collins discovered that glitzy, dynamic, high-profile CEOs are actually a hindrance to the long-term success of their corporations. Charismatic leaders are attractive to others, but they may be less effective in drawing people to the mission and values of the organization itself.
Collins contrasts Lee Iacocca, Chrysler's leader and spokesperson in the 1980s, with Colman Mockler, the CEO of Gillette from 1975 to 1991. While Iacocca almost single-handedly steered his car company away from disaster and put it on the road to prosperity, after his retirement Chrysler's profits faltered, and the company was sold to a German rival five years later. Apparently Iacocca had done little to invest in his successors or build a culture that would ensure the longevity of Chrysler.
In sharp contrast, Mockler made personal sacrifices and took substantial risks for the long-term success of the company and the profits of the shareholders, and he was so effective that $1 invested in Gillette in December 1976 was worth $95.68 in December 1996 and eventually earned a significant premium when the company was sold to P&G in 2005. Laconic and reserved, Mockler labored in relative anonymity for a big-time executive; he was a man who prioritized the success of his company over ego gratification.
Mockler and executives like him are examples of what Collins calls "level 5 leaders," those who are modest, self-effacing and understated, and display a workmanlike diligence—more plow horse than show horse, they set up their successors for even greater success in the next generation.
Leadership guru Peter Drucker goes further to say that "charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change."
So maybe we introverted lawyers, likely to be low on the charisma meter, may have some hope of mastering leadership. Certainly being people who think before we act and listen before we talk can be useful in leadership roles.
Successful leadership may also be enhanced by introspection--a natural for introverts. Leaders who scrutinize every aspect of their leadership and personality (and that of others) may be able to find internal motivations and assumptions that contribute to dysfunction and inefficiency.
Another way that introverts may be able to surpass the traditional leadership attributes is in their ability to "make sense." Wilfred Drath and Charles Palus at the Center for Creative Leadership explain that "most existing theories, models and definitions of leadership proceed from the assumption that somehow leadership is about getting people to do something." Essentially cheerleading. That is an effort that requires relish for and persistence in being extraverted.
But Drath and Palus reimagine leadership as "the process of making sense of what people are doing together so that people will understand and be committed." Leadership, in this view, is a matter of providing interpretation. Leaders can give people a lens and a language for understanding their work and experiences in light of larger purposes. They can help shape the mental frameworks of others so that those people see themselves as making contributions to the mission and direction of their organization, working in community for a common purpose. Here is an opportunity for the thoughtful introvert to make his or her mark.
In the corporate world over the past decades, leaders have produced greater organizational efficiencies by employing advanced analytics and defined metrics and systems. But most organizations that have successfully manipulated these resources are finding it difficult to extract even greater efficiencies from them over time. Many are turning to their human capital as the next source of growth. Yet many businesses are realizing the difficulty of identifying and developing leaders, particularly those who can lead this kind of productivity growth. For example, the 2008 IBM Leadership Survey found that over 75% of CEOs lamented their ability to identify and develop leaders to succeed them.
Law firms should take note.
Leadership involves not just leveraging the collective knowledge and expertise of an organization. Leadership is also about cultivating and nurturing human capital, particularly in such a talent-dependent industry as ours. Leaders who recognize the perennial needs of individuals to be appreciated, to be part of a community and to feel they are contributing to the greater good are more likely to be able to raise the productivity of their troops.
And even introverts can do that.
Following up on our November 1 entry "The Importance of Glue" is an article by Patricia Gillette, a partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, published December 9 in The American Lawyer, and reproduced below in its entirety.
"The Message That Will Seal Law Firms' Doom: 'It's Nothing Personal'
It's not personal.
This is the current mantra of law firms with regard to their staff members, associates and partners.
"Sorry, first-year associate, you won't be starting work when we said you would. Come back in a year."
"After careful consideration, tenth-year associate, we just can't make you partner yet. Maybe next year."
"We're sorry to do this, twenty-year legal secretary, but we have to cut back on costs and so we're letting you go."
The messages all inevitably are followed by the exculpatory: "It's not personal, it's business."
There is no question that change is coming to the legal profession -- in the way firms are structured for advancement, in the career expectations of associates and in how work gets done. But law firms have yet to come to terms with the fact that these changes might also impact profits, in the same way that changes to the medical profession affected the profit margins of physicians. As such, in many law firms, change is embraced as long as equity partners can continue to earn salaries that will be reflected positively in the almighty profits per partner competition. (And make no mistake that it is a competition, as are most things with lawyers. Thus, we see firms stretching the definitional limits of "profits per partner" as they vie for the top spots on the "list.")
In the resulting wreckage, personal connections are lost. Because what these firms fail to realize is that managing only to the bottom line is a short-term strategy. And while that might be OK with the megafirms that want to see their shadows cast further into the global market and higher up on The Am Law 100, it is not strategic and it ignores the reality of the changing market. Still, large law firms continue to march down this path. And that is the path that has led to the depersonalization of large law firms.
Depersonalization is what allows big-firm associates to come and go freely (no question, when the economy comes back, they'll start moving again). It allows powerful partners to take large books of business to competitors so they can make more money. And, in many of these firms, depersonalization means that quality work plays second fiddle to realization, and good citizenship and mentoring are trumped by profitability.
This phenomenon doesn't stop at the entrance to the law firm. It has spilled over to the clients. The lack of a relationship-driven business model permits clients to be arbitrary and fickle. Historical relationships are traded for "what have you done for me lately" and "how much did it cost." Years of good work and great results are thrown out for the low-cost leader, or a change in the general counsel. Because it's not personal ... not for you, not for anyone, not anymore.
Law firms used to be about relationships. Relationships between partners and partners, associates and partners, clients and lawyers. Law firms used to be about retention and growth of lawyers and client relationships, mentoring and development, loyalty to the institution and to each other and respect for those who came before. Law firms used to be about trust.
That trust, however, has been broken. Witness the demise of giant firms like Heller Ehrman, Thelen and Brobeck -- all big firms that appear to have traded their culture for currency. As a former partner of Heller, I saw our firm, with its rich culture of consensus and collegiality, collapse in part because some partners thought it would be OK to trade core values and firm identity for a moment at the top of a list; because some partners favored the elusive "global reach" over more realistic ambitions; and because some partners chose more immediate returns over the history and tradition of the firm. In big firms that have survived, loyalty is too often defined by the portability of a partner's business, associates are seen (and see themselves) as fungible commodities in whom no one has a stake, and fudging numbers of women and minority associates and partners is justified, if it gets the firm to its rightful place on yet another list.
Is this bottom line/list-driven model sustainable? The answer has to be "No." Because, it ignores what law firms need to fuel their engines: associates who are invested in the firm and the future of the institution. There is no question that the new generation of lawyers is relationship-driven -- social networks define their reality; connecting with others and sharing experiences is their passion. Money is important, but community is more important. Loyalty from young associates cannot be bought with law firm logo-emblazoned swag and big pay checks. It must be earned by good and meaningful work assignments, team approaches and a feeling of being an integral part of the firm.
If Big Law wants to have a sustainable and renewable model, these law firms will have to re-engineer their models. Some law firms are making efforts to do just that by:
Reconnecting with clients for the broader and longer relationship.
Looking at associates as valuable assets that have to be mentored, developed and retained by the firm incentivizing firms to deepen their relationships with associates through active mentoring programs, investing in training and instituting career development programs that recognize and support a nonlinear path to partnership.
Developing a skills-based evaluation and compensation system that rewards teamwork, productivity, quality work, loyalty and competence.
Valuing institutional maturity, diversity and historical contributions along with immediate returns by crediting nonbillable hours spent on broadening client relationships, rewarding partners for retaining associates and increasing diversity, recognizing the need to pass the baton through institutionalized succession planning on client relationships.
Finding ways to truly partner with clients so that law firms and clients have shared risks and rewards by encouraging and supporting alternative billing arrangements, knowing the client's business and recognizing its needs and seconding associates when needed.
Big law firms simply cannot continue to trade relationships with their associates and clients for the prospect of raising profits. In fact, firms that ignore this do so at their own peril. Firm leaders need to recognize that it is relationships and culture that bind people to their firms -- because, for the best and the brightest lawyers in big firms and for the clients who want quality legal work, it is personal."
Thanks, Patricia. Couldn't have said it better.
One of the important implications of Muir's article "What the New Law Firm Looks Like: The Reinvention of a Reluctant Industry" is that going forward firms will require the close involvement of sophisticated management professionals who are not necessarily or even preferably lawyers to help design and manage change. These critical players will not only assist in initially envisioning the goals of the firm and its related programs and in easing the various players toward them through the transition period, but will also remain important in ongoing firm management in order to make those initiatives fully operational and successful over the long term.
In the past many law firms have often taken a pass when it comes to building the depth and quality of their non-lawyer professional staff. For the most part we aren't that focused on these "unseen" professionals--there are going to be complaints about them within the firm anyway and rarely does a client interact with them. So the firm librarian could be a dud, and the head of recruitment simply cheerful.
We seem to realize marketing and technology advisers (and at the bigger firms, the professional development directors) have some importance, but still we often opt for less sophisticated, less expensive personnel who act more as placeholders than change agents, undercutting their potential effectiveness from the start. We tend to hire them young and tell them what to do and even sometimes how to do it. After all, lawyers are the ones who really head all of these areas: the non-legal staff are simply assistants and overhead to boot.
The problem is that lawyers are no longer the experts in all the areas that law firms need expertise in.
For example, Muir notes that firms will develop "serious project management skills that focus on evaluating and reviewing client goals (both fee-related and outcome-related) and managing matters to reach them." Such skills include the technological capacity and human expertise to analyze, bid on and track client matters, including producing interim progress analyses to manage staffing and expenses and keep the client up to date. Lawyers working on those projects need to be spending their time doing what they do best--providing legal services, and should rely on non-legal professionals to fine tune the timing and extent of those services.
Similarly, "staff managers" acting like purchasing managers are likely to be responsible for engaging and managing a complex and highly changeable array of lawyers and services for specific and often fixed-term projects. They will need the technology and expertise to manage a large database of information on individual lawyers, temp providers and outsourcers, produce contracts, evaluate performance and follow up complaints and contract violations.
Making "frequent and accurate evaluations of lawyers and staff and effectively using targeted training" are not only complex processes in themselves requiring careful analysis but become critical to morale and retention as these evaluations and trainings impact compensation in the new merit and competency models (see, for example, "The Issues in Moving From Law Firm Lockstep to 'Levels' Compensation"). And those charged with determining compensation based on multiple indices and complex formulas applied across numerous parties similarly need to have reliably sophisticated expertise. The mid-level partner who doesn't have a lot of client work these days isn't the best choice to run with these valuable, exacting tasks.
Finally, "building relationships, which is key to exerting leadership influence, will be more challenging," and firms are likely to require more leadership time from their leaders--whether firm-wide or practice group leaders--which implies more time diverted from practice to firm management and more reliance on professional assistance. Work assignment evaluation and management, leadership development, diversity compliance, client succession planning--these tasks can be taken on or assisted by non-lawyer professionals with the appropriate skills.
Of course, these professionals mean a rise in overhead--whether you obtain your expertise by in-house personnel or from outside consultants, another reason profits are likely to be diluted going forward.
But we lawyers can't effectively do all these jobs. We can't because we are not diverse enough in our approaches and talents (see "The Unique Psychological World of Lawyers"). We not only haven't been trained in the relevant areas--project management, talent evaluation, competency testing--but we also aren't likely to be naturally inclined toward or good at the process, patience and attention to the types of details that are required. Or if per chance there are lawyers among us who are so inclined or talented, we are not likely to know who they are.
There is the problem of overcoming the legal ego--it's not important if we can't do it well, and conversely, if it's important, then we can do it--but don't let that attitude be what keeps your firm from moving ahead. Good management these days lies in identifying and locating needed expertise, not in attempting to be it.
Muir led an inter-active limited-attendance roundtable on Law Practice Management for Current and Prospective Law Firm Leaders at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Association of Patent Law Firms (APLF) in Chicago, Illinois on Thursday, September 17, 2009. Topics discussed included the distinction between managers and leaders, the importance of values-driven firm identity, the role of practice group leaders in moving the firm forward, and transitioning from consensus-led management to more executive approaches.
In the current stressful marketplace, the rate of lawyers' incidence of impairment has been ratcheting up from high (see, for example, our September 5, 2008 entry "The Depression Demon Coming Out of the Legal Closet") to even higher. See "Employment Woes Fuel Uptick in Lawyer Depression." Firms suffer losses in productivity, morale and recruitment because of impaired lawyers, and also risk client desertions, losses to their reputations and malpractice liability.
Firms can take several approaches to both assist their lawyers and protect their bottom line. Thomas & Knight attorney Peter Riley, as managing partner, instituted an extensive program to address lawyer stress caused from depression, substance abuse, anxiety, etc. in order to provide help fast, without worrying about insurance authorization or long waits for appointments, and with complete confidentiality. Even with the costs of the program, Riley finds it cost-effective to the firm. "When a lawyer or lawyer's child or spouse is in crisis, that is going to be the focus of their attention," he says. "If we can provide assistance for them quickly, we have not only done the right thing for our lawyers, we have done the most economic thing. It's the perfect intersection of what is right and what is profitable."
Let us draw from our extensive experience in this area to help you spot and support critical talent confronting personal distress. We can assist on an individual-by-individual basis or by helping you set up a confidential, effective program attuned to your goals and budget.
An article by psychologist Amy J.C.Cuddy in the February 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review reports that we make fast assessments of people on two bases: their intentions and their competence. And more importantly, we assume one is related to the other. This response is evolutionarily linked, she argues, to the advantage of quickly determining whether an unknown person 1) is friendly or hostile and 2) can follow through on their threats or promises.
Unfortunately our assessments are often marred by biases that produce faulty judgments. For example, we have a bias towards the elderly as being incompetent but non-threatening.
In the business world jungle, these instant assessments can carry long-term consequences, particularly if they are inaccurate because of poor perception skills (a common problem area for lawyers) or individual biases. Inaccurate assessments can lead managers to trust untrustworthy associates or undervalue potentially important people. They can also undermine efforts to build effective teams and retain valuable employees.
Which One Are You?
For our work with lawyers, the more important finding of the research is that people see "warmth" and "competence" as inversely related: a surfeit of one ("She's SO nice") is believed to imply a deficit in the other ("She probably can't stand up to a board"). For example, employees who are consistently perceived as "warmer" are also viewed as less competent, with the practical result that employees who are mothers are often demonstrably underpaid and under-promoted.
While lawyers as a group are not usually at risk for being rated high on the warmth scale, leaders who know the importance of interpersonal relationships, and particularly women, often struggle with portraying to clients and colleagues the "right mix" of warmth and competence, fearing, just as the research tends to show, that too much of the former undercuts the perception of the latter.
There is some trepidation in telling lawyers not to be too warm--certainly there are those who would argue there is little risk there. Yet, particularly at a time when, rightfully, the legal world is exhorted to value and praise and build relationships, knowing how to do that practically without impairing the legal product produced, either in actuality or in the perception, is important.
Our advice has long been to bifurcate these two parts of leadership: warmth is important and should be directed toward individuals, while critical analysis should be directed toward issues, not people.
Whether with clients or colleagues, inquire about the kids, rib them about their diet and praise them for their recent efforts, but when you review the business product, do not stint on hard analysis. In both conflict resolution and decision-making research, similar findings make it clear that too pervasive an effort to build cohesion can overwhelm the validity and productivity of the underlying endeavor. The hard but important work of critical give-and-take can be mortally blunted by attempts to be "nice."
In order to improve our judgments and others' perceptions of us, Cuddy suggests that we also spend time working to reeducate ourselves and our employees away from the savannah influence: don't be too quick to make judgments in these two areas, and do not assume that kindness and competence are mutually exclusive.
On Thursday, March 26, at 2:00 pm EST, Ronda Muir will lead an audio conference sponsored by the Center for Competitive Management entitled "Turning Lawyers Into Leaders: How to Survive the Economic Slide." The discussion will cover who leaders are, what skills and attributes they should have in this economic climate and how to develop them. For more information and to register.
Innovation may be coming to law firms the hard way—prompted by crippling economic conditions. As pointed out in our entry “Fearing Fear“ on February 9, a natural reaction to the downturn is fear, which often neurologically prompts “pencil counting,” or furiously holding on to whatever you still have. Fortunately, if you push through the fear, there is the possibility of another response, and that is creative innovation. So far there are not any major revisions to the business model, to be sure, but at least there are some spasms of change.
Law firms are notorious lemmings, hesitant to do anything everybody else isn't doing. But in this downturn firms are starting to take more individualized approaches to managing their businesses, particularly with respect to reducing their largest expense: compensation. Reducing compensation costs through across-the-board associate salary and bonus freezes, delays, or cuts, jettisoning practice groups that are not deemed profitable or imposing layoffs have been the most common steps taken. Another approach is a reduced hours work week--targeted, across-the-board, or by invitation to those who want a period of work-life balance that errs on the "life" side. Even “furlough,” a fancy corporate word for temporary unemployment, is appearing in the downturn vocabulary of law firms, with the promise of holding on to talent for when business returns.
Pillsbury, one of the firms whose layoffs were outed by Above the Law because of a partner's indiscreet cell phone conversation on a commuter train, has preempted those layoffs with a “voluntary departure plan” for lawyers who want to leave of their own accord.
But some firms are also paying new associates to arrive later, to work at public or non-profit organizations, or to be seconded to clients, a move that can cement wobbly client relationships.
Another approach is to manage compensation by changing or expanding tiers. A number of firms have de-equitized partners and quite a few are considering thinning their non-equity partner ranks by moving those attorneys into different tiers.
WilmerHale is putting more steps firm-wide on its attorney ladder. To the titles of associate, counsel and partner will be added senior associate, special counsel, senior partner (for those approaching retirement) and senior counsel (for partners practicing beyond normal retirement age). Co-managing partner Bill Perlstein hopes the move will increase flexibility and allow attorneys a greater choice for their career path. Given increasing attorney preferences, particularly among Gen Xers and Yers, for more personal control over their schedules, additional tiers, if announced and managed thoughtfully, can help create a more satisfied, productive team.
Partner compensation is often the “untouchable” at firms, but even there, change is in the offing. Chicago firm Much Shelist Denenberg has announced a temporary across-the-board 10% pay cut for all lawyers, partners as well as associates, through the end of its fiscal year. Sharing the pain can promote those firms that pride themselves on their egalitarian treatment of all lawyers.
Patton Boggs recently announced that it is replacing its “eat-what-you-kill” partner compensation system with one that also rewards cooperation and firm-wide business development, associate mentoring and training, and moving clients to the next generation of client managers. The compensation review will look back three years instead of two to give partners longer to realize on business development efforts. Under this system, a partner’s income cannot fall in any given year more than 25%. Over 90 percent of equity partners voted for the change, which managing partner Stuart Pape called an “incentive for doing things that are supportive, collaborative and productive…In bad times, a meritocratic system is absolutely the best model.”
On the other side of the pond, similar tactics, and innovation, prevail. Allen and Overy, when axing 450 attorneys and staff, announced that it was spinning off part of its practice, imposing a pay freeze and asking remaining partners to each contribute an average of about $50,000 in additional capital to the firm. That move is expected not only to boost the firm's coffers but to raise the commitment to the partnership and its success of those partners willing to put their dollars there.
Doing It Right
The way that these initiatives are both announced and carried out have a major impact on firm culture and morale. Latham & Watkins’ stunning announcement recently of layoffs of 12% of its associates was accompanied by very generous (six months compared to three months) separation payments and health insurance, as well as interim salaries for new associates who delay their entry a year. In spite of the severity of the layoffs and questions about what the firm will look like in the future, the street buzz on the firm's handling of the layoffs has been positive—“classy” is Bruce MacEwen’s assessment. Similarly, the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office rescinded offers to its incoming attorneys only after several attempts to cut costs, and, when the inevitable occurred, actively sought jobs at other DA offices for those dis-invited, hoping to preserve relationships with lawyers who they might one day want to extend offers to again.
Latham and others have also received kudos for making the cuts in one whack instead of dribbling them out, as Dechert, for example, seems intent on doing. Although the realities of the downturn may drive some firms to second and third whacks. In one of the largest cuts of this layoff season to date, Orrick sent home 12 percent of its nonpartner lawyers on Tuesday, the second cut after a November 2008 one that promised to be the one and only. Those laid off Tuesday didn't fare as well as those cut in November: they got three months' severance instead of five.
Sign of the Times or Window into the Future?
Are these fairly modest innovations we are seeing now simply a sign of these difficult times, or do they signal a growing snowball of changes that could well roll far into our future?
These changes are not in and of themselves going to make any major inroads on the broken business model that now exists, but hopefully they signal a greater willingness (ok, motivated by a gun to the head) to get out there and slog through the swamp of uncertainty until we find firmer ground.
Experimentation is what will drive innovation, and up till now law firms have been fat and sassy enough to be able to afford not to experiment. But the old "one size fits all" attitude about how firms should be run is beginning to fray. Unusually bad market conditions have freed firms to stop copying what everyone else is doing and look more carefully at and respond more creatively to who they specifically are, where they are headed and what resources and skills they need to get there.
Given the layoffs across the country, if a recovery is not in motion soon, the next issue for firms to grapple with creatively may well be the dissonance between recruitment and retention that the current structure produces. How long can firms withstand waves of painful and expensive "forced attrition" at the same time they are undertaking time-consuming and expensive recruitment and training of new incoming associates, who may well then be forced to move on in a few years?
After arrival dates, compensation, bonuses and tiers have been manipulated, we can then start facing the decisions that will direct innovation toward the very structure of our firms and the traditional lawyer life-cycles there.
On February 18, 2009 Muir will lecture students at Northwestern University's Business Institutions Program on how to improve management decision-making. Based in part on the article "Promoting an Effective Board or Management Group," the discussion will explore, among other subjects, optimal personality traits for good decision-making, constructing effective teams and avoiding extreme decisions.
A 2008 ABA Journal survey, with reponses from more than 1400 women lawyers, produced some interesting results as to who they prefer to work with. Of the 42% of women who expressed a preference in the gender of colleagues, that preference was different depending on the age of the respondent.
Female supervisors age 40 and over preferred working with women lawyers because they 1) take direction better (80%), 2) have more discretion (79%) and 3) take constructive criticism better (59%).
Yet younger female lawyers don’t have the same regard for their older female colleagues. Of those under 40 who thought gender matters, the majority preferred male supervisors for 1) keeping confidential information private (64%), 2) giving better direction (58%) and 3) giving more constructive criticism (56%).
Theories about the reasons for the difference abound. Some contend that younger women (and also some younger men) are not on the same wave length about the role of work in their lives, and are not willing to make the sacrifices that older women have made.
According to Lauren Stiller Rikleen, who advises law firms about workplace issues, “I'm concerned that more senior women don’t fully understand the profound demographic changes taking place,” demographic changes that affect all young lawyers and override issues of gender. As a practical matter, Arin Reeves, another lawyer who does diversity consulting, notes, the differing generational views of women can mean that women’s initiatives developed by female partners are often not useful to female associates.
The upshot is that there may no longer be “the woman’s situation,” but rather a growing diversity in what women lawyers want, and, given the luxury of having more role models to choose from, a growing diversity of what they can actually have. Perhaps it is worthwhile reminding ourselves that, as we have advocated for years, rather than placing judgment on women generally or on any particular choice, we as women lawyers can and must accept more diversity even among ourselves.
This is the time of year when many of us take stock of our direction and goals and make plans to step up our effectiveness. This particular year, 2009, many lawyers are facing an extremely difficult once-in-a-century marketplace for which no one has been truly prepared. So we may also find ourselves questioning our ability to successfully grapple with the challenges ahead.
How to acquire the skills that will improve your practice and advance your leadership in such a disorienting environment?
The old adage of two heads being better than one is born out by the data available on the results of coaching. According to a January 13, 2009 article by Susan Letterman White in The Legal Intelligencer, "a research report by Diane Coutu and Carol Kauffman in the January Harvard Business Review found that coaching is a business tool most often used to develop the capabilities of high-potential performers or facilitate leadership transitions," and one which produces quantifiable benefits. "The Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology has reported that coaching leads to higher interview ratings for individuals. Telecommunications Weekly reported in November that a change program, which included coaching, improved customer satisfaction by 10 percent and call resolution rates by 56 percent at Motorola. And according to a 2008 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, coaching of university faculty improved the writing process of professors who were under pressure to publish."
As Ms. White states, "coaching is to a lawyer what organizational development is to a law firm; they both foster intentional change toward particular goals through a collaborative process. The goals are those that move the client to a higher level of professional effectiveness...Most importantly, a good coach is paid to ask the right questions."
In addition, a good coach is one who listens.
Sheryl Axelrod of Hepburn Axelrod & White, a Philadelphia firm, was quoted in the article as extolling the benefits of coaching in a law firm context. "We worked with a coach who had an uncanny ability to not only listen to our needs, fears and desires for our firm, but our own internal dilemmas and concerns about each other."
Of course, after listening, a coach must also be able to help coachees arrive at and implement beneficial changes. And those changes are sometimes unexpected. In the Hepburn Axelrod case, "one of our partners...reach[ed] the difficult decision to leave the partnership."
But the proof is in the pudding. "The result of the coaching is that our firm, on our own, and our former partner, on his own, are each thriving in a market in which most firms are doing worse, not better, than the year before, " Axelrod said.
Quantitative evaluations of coaching are rare, but those that have been done demonstrate conclusively its effectiveness and bottom-line contribution. In an evaluation by MetrixGlobal of an executive coaching program provided by the Center for Performance Excellence in 2004 to Booz Allen partners and principals, results indicated that "all leaders readily applied what they gained from their coaching experiences to make significant strides in self-development, while over half (53%) made significant improvements in their relationships with peers and team members and some leaders (19%) went on to significantly improve client relationships; gaining greater clarity about how their behavior impacted clients and being better able to respond to client issues."
Of eight business areas senior leaders expected executive coaching to impact, "two were found to be positively impacted by at least half of the leaders who were coached: teamwork (58%) and team member satisfaction (54%). Three other areas were selected by 31% of the leaders as having been impacted: quality of consulting, retention and productivity."
Monetary benefits were rigorously documented in this evaluation. "The total monetary benefits were $3,268,325 with four impact areas each producing at least a half million dollars of annualized benefit to the business: improved teamwork ($981,980), quality of consulting ($863,625), retention ($626,456) and team member satisfaction ($541,250). Given a total, fully loaded cost of the coaching of $414,310, the ROI was 689%."
Coaching can provide to all lawyers the simple but valuable assistance of a supportive yet out-of-the-law-firm-box perspective that can be critical when steering through dangerous waters--and that can positively impact the bottom line. That perspective can help you become a more effective partner, develop individual business, expand your expertise, master management responsibilities and otherwise plan and implement the next step in your career (whether you are motivated to do so proactively or reactively).
At RRR, we offer confidential high-performance coaching programs of six to eighteen months that are tailored to your objectives and your schedule. Contact us for a consultation on how we can help you achieve your goals in 2009.
Happy new year!
In a recent article in The New York Times entitled “Girl Power at School, But Not at the Office,” Hannah Seligson gives some good advice to all working women, even those of the “post women’s right movement” generation in which she grew up.
After feeling self-assured and equal to men in academia, Hannah found the workplace to be different: women undermining other women, men not taking women seriously--focusing on their appearance and “assistantizing” them.
But she also recognizes that women can get in their own way in the workforce. Work skills women must develop, in her opinion, are a thick skin, the ability to promote oneself, and the ability to negotiate. She also recommends that women dump the perfectionism and create a professional network.
Here are some jewels to consider:
Rather than getting rattled by their feminine “sensitivity,” women have to “become impervious to the daily gruffness that’s a part of any job.”
Seeking perfection can lead to paralysis and keep women from speaking up or taking risks.
“Soliciting feedback… demystifies what your boss thinks about you and it also gives you the data to become a more valuable employee.”
“Reprogram your brain to think that girls do brag. Your job is a two-part process: one is actually doing the work and the second is talking about it in bottom-line terms.”
Since “women don’t have as much of a tradition of business networking (‘Do you want to go grab a beer?’ doesn’t quite roll off our tongues),” learning to ask colleagues specific questions about how to advance can be the organic approach to mentoring.
Finally, women need to “speak salary.” Women often think they will be paid what they deserve, as long as they do the work. Follow the example of men who fearlessly ask for a raise over and over again, regardless of the response. As a Harvard Business School faculty member explained: ‘By and large women believe that the workplace is a meritocracy, and it isn’t.”
Sonja Lyubomirsky, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, admits being surprised by the results of the research she conducted on how to permanently increase happiness, funded by a 5-year million-dollar grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. She conducted a meta-analysis (a "study of studies"), along with Ed Diener and Laura King, two well-known names in positive psychology, of 225 studies and concluded by writing The How of Happiness (Penguin Press, 2008).
Lyubomirsky expected, consistent with a number of previous, more limited studies, that relationships would emerge as the over-arching key to well-being. Contrary to those expectations, she found that, more than any other variable, including relationships, work was both a cause and consequence of happiness.
"The evidence demonstrates that people who have jobs distinguished by autonomy, meaning and variety - and who show superior performance, creativity, and productivity - are significantly happier than those who do not," she concludes.
"Why does our work make us happy? Because it provides us a sense of identity, structure to our days, and important and meaningful life goals to pursue. Perhaps even more important, it furnishes us with close colleagues, friends and even marriage partners." So the relationship piece is not lost, but plays a supplemental role to work itself.
The story doesn’t end there, however. Her studies reveal that the causal direction between happiness and work runs both ways. Not only do creativity and productivity at the office make people happier, but happier people have been found to be more creative and productive. They are better “organizational citizens” (going above and beyond their job duties), better negotiators, and are less likely to take sick days, quit or burn out.
One interesting finding was that people who express more positive emotions on the job receive more favorable evaluations from their supervisors as much as 3.5 years later.
"The more successful we are at our jobs, the higher income we make, and the better work environment we have, then the happier we will be. This increased happiness will foster greater success, more money, and an improved work environment, which will further enhance happiness, and so on and so on and so on."
What does this have to do with our legal business? Of autonomy, variety and meaning, autonomy is the one we have nailed. Autonomy is often an attribute of the legal job, one that research shows lawyers embrace, sometimes to the detriment of collaboration. Variety is worth noting, given the rush to specialization. In light of high salaries, many firms have retreated from the first-year rotations through departments and later year department-wide assignment systems that used to give young lawyers some claim to it. Carefully reinstating some opportunities for variety may be greatly appreciated.
Meaning can be harder to come by, being the trickier piece to consciously engineer. Information we have on why young people, particularly Gen X and Yers, go to law school, and what they hope to achieve in their careers, reinforces the importance of meaningfulness. As a practical matter, that is often assumed to be measured by the amount of public or pro-bono work available to them. Reinvigorating your pro bono program, and involving young lawyers in the process, is a good first step but also articulating and reaffirming the firm's values vis-a-vis those within the organization (for example, "we provide premier training and career support") and its clients ("we build long-term relationships based on superior industry expertise and unparalleled service") helps young lawyers place themselves in a framework of meaning.
Creativity is a skill not as often singled out for recognition by law firms, and even productivity is usually rewarded only on a single level minimum-billed-hours-required-for-the-bonus formula. Fine-tuning both salaries and bonuses so as to reward specific behaviors, such as business development activities or developing a specific expertise, offers eager Type As the opportunity to both increase their compensation and distinguish themselves from the pack, while achieving firm goals.
Providing positive feedback is an important part of evaluations that firms often overlook, so set in their problem-solving mode that they forget to reinforce what's working. This study points out the importance of encouraging evaluees to crow or compliment too, for the firm's sake as well as theirs.
In short, this meta-study flags as important some of the same things we hear from lawyers going out the door: provide a more meaningful, personally relevant work experience with supportive personal relationships in order to increase satisfaction and earn loyalty.
Now, back to work...
Lawyers are introverts, big time. According to Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) results, almost 3/4th of lawyers, compared to only 1/4th of the general public, are introverts. That means they go inward to charge their batteries-- preferring internal introspection to external interaction.
On the Caliper Profile personality test, lawyers also rank astonishingly low in the sociability trait--which measures how comfortable a person is initiating and building close relationships. Low sociability scorers are less inclined to enjoy interacting with others, preferring to spend more time with information.
Of course, we know that lawyers are thinkers--they think, analyze documents and deals, edit and write, all loner tasks. In a recent study, lawyers ranked sixth overall on a list of the 200 best jobs for introverts, just behind the loner braniacs who work as computer software engineers and accountants.
The question for management becomes how to integrate these loners not only into a coherent, committed organization but also into the 21st century vision of service delivery: coherent, committed teams. How do you overcome/compensate for the introverted nature of lawyers in day-to-day management, business development endeavors, client service?
Slowly. Start by using the strengths of introverts--such as their tendency to (appear to) listen and to deliver well-thought-out opinions-- and proceed from there logically to the overwhelming consensus from research that collaboration improves productivity and satisfaction.
Regardless of your politics, the last year has been a fabulous display of woman-power in the political arena. For the first time in American history, a woman was a major contender for her party's presidential nomination, and came damned close to winning it.
Without Monday morning quarterbacking her entire campaign, there are some interesting nuggets to retrieve from her run, perhaps telling us something about the future of women in politics and in power generally.
As someone who assists women lawyers in developing good business producing skills, I was interested to see the following note about Senator Clinton in the Sunday, June 8 New York Times:
"Unlike her opponents, Mrs. Clinton refused to make solicitation calls to donors and had to be talked into calling the party officials known as superdelegates."
Sound familiar? Hesitation to make direct appeals for support is a recurring theme in the work I do with women. Results should speak for themselves, they say. I shouldn't have to ask. Who wants to be a squeaky wheel? Men, on the other hand, I find, tend to take the attitude that if they don't ask, how can someone say yes, and that if they are not the ones to champion their own cause, why expect others to?
What seems to underlie the hesitation on women's part to "ask" is a fear of having to deal with rejection and also an uneasiness about putting the relationship at risk. What if they say no? What do I do/feel? And what happens to our relationship then?
There is an argument that this kind of sensitivity makes women better in the relationship building department, a critical part of developing business. So is this a tendency that should be overcome or preserved? The answer is both. The sensitivity should be protected but the kind of fear that immobilizes should be allayed. Good relationship builders know how to keep the relationship even if there are disagreements. Good relationship builders survive rejection and help the relationship survive as well.
Learning and believing the self-talk and attitudes that help overcome the hesitation is one way to start coping with the fear. Taking the risk and then seeing that the results are not as scary as anticipated also helps. It is a matter of venturing into the unknown, or what has been projected to be a distasteful known, with good intentions and a willingness to listen. So you get the benefit of both high sensitivity and, hey, if you don't ask, how can they say yes?
Shedding additional light on earlier explorations in this forum of the subject of happiness is a new book written by Arthur Brooks that distills mountains of data on the subject. For one thing, politics and happiness turn out to be clearly correlated. But the correlation may not be what you think.
For starters, conservatives are happier than liberals. Much happier. And they have been for over 35 years. Almost twice as many who describe themselves as "conservative" or "very conservative" say they are "very happy" (44%) as those who consider themselves "liberal" or "very liberal" (25%). Brooks ascribes that result to three factors: conservatives are twice as likely to be married, twice as likely to attend church every week, and more likely to have children. They are NOT, however, richer than their more liberal, more miserable cohorts.
In fact, when the religious and political data are combined, a fascinating continuum of happiness appears. Religious conservatives are ten times more likely to report being "very happy" than "not too happy" (50% to 5%). Secular conservatives and religious liberals are about equally happy in the middle. And secular liberals are as likely to say they are "not too happy" as to say they are "very happy" (22% vs. 22%).
In addition, extremists on both sides are happier than their more moderate cohorts. Of those "extremely liberal," 35% say they are very happy (vs. 22% of the ordinary liberals) compared to 48% of extreme conservatives (vs. 43% of their less extreme brethren). Brooks attributes the extremists' happiness to their conviction that they are right, which, he notes, often leads them to conclude that the other side is not merely wrong, but evil. Evidently two-thirds of America's far left and half of the far right say they dislike not only the other side's ideas, but also the people who hold them!
Brooks finds the determinant underlying happiness to be attitude. Conservatives are more optimistic, believing that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can succeed. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to focus on injustice and victimization, encouraging people to feel helpless and aggrieved.
So what does this mean for us hard-working lawyers? The striking correlation is with the well-established personality trait that lawyers exhibit en masse: pessimism, which, according to Brooks' analysis, should mean that we are also a less happy lot.
And indeed we are. It is now well-documented that lawyers are less happy in their work and their personal lives than nearly every other profession surveyed.
Maybe we should get hitched, join a church and start a brood?
For a full book review of "Gross National Happiness," go to The Economist.
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.
In the era of the global law firm comes (wisely, in our view) the introduction of the position of Global Chief People Officer into law firm senior management . Reed Smith announced last week that its creation of the position underscores the increasing importance the firm places on running itself as a business.
"You see more of this in global companies," said Gary Sokulski, Reed Smith's chief operating officer. "Since we're a people business, it's only natural to have someone who focuses on the people aspect. It's similar to a human resources officer, but focused more on employee concerns such as work-life balance, better managing and evaluating talent, and creating higher-level training programs."
Since 2001, Reed Smith has consolidated with firms from around the world, including in New York, California, Chicago, London, Abu Dhabi, Greece, Dubai, Paris, Hong Kong and Beijing, increasing in size from 600 attorneys based in the U.S. to more than 1,500 worldwide. Meeting the challenges of that much lateral integration alone would merit a full-time professional.
DLA Piper, with more than 3,600 lawyers over 64 offices in 25 countries, and arguably (depending on which moment you're counting) the second largest law firm in the world, has had a Global Chief People Officer for several years, Robert Halton, headquartered in London.
"Unlike other organizations, the cliche of people being the best asset is completely true in law firms. We don't have any machinery or stores, so it's the people providing the competitive edge in the market. Getting the right people is crucial to the success of a law firm, and keeping that pipeline of talent flowing is also crucial," Halton says.
Small and mid-size firms face equally critical people issues as do the new behemoths, but for them, adding a dedicated full-time professional to firm overhead in order to address those issues often is unrealistic.
We at RRR offer an Outside/Inside Consulting arrangement whereby we will spend a designated number of days per week or month as your Chief People Officer. Our experience brings efficient expertise to your people concerns in an affordable format.
Make way for a Global Chief People Officer at your firm, whatever the size.
As many of the biggest law firms are concluding, “professional development” has become the preferred vehicle for addressing diversity attrition. Professional development encompasses enhanced orientation, mentoring, assignment and delegation processes, leadership training, career planning, diversity training, management skills, feedback training, business-development training, affinity groups and other tactics aimed at recruiting and keeping a diverse associate group.
The concept of professional development or talent management did not exist in law firms 20 years ago, and the data shows a clear pattern of women and minorities historically reporting less assistance with professional development, as well as lower job satisfaction, compared with white males.
Now most large law firms have some sort of professional development program and recent data from the NALP Foundation shows that this trend toward formalized programs is paying off. In 1998, 20% of associates left their positions at or near the end of their second year of employment. This year, entry-level lawyers are more likely to make their first move at the end of their third year of employment, staying 30% longer.
The ABA Commission on Women engaged the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to examine why retention rates for white men are so much higher than those for women of color, and women of color retention rates are higher than those for men of color and white women. Consistent with the NALP’s data, the study found specifically that women of color felt excluded from networking opportunities, felt they were denied desirable assignments, and had limited access to client development opportunities, thereby making their billable hours targets harder to achieve.
The NALP found that white men are more likely to report a consistent workload, regular feedback and intellectual challenge in their work, and they also report the intention of staying longer at their firms.
A consistent workload, regular feedback and intellectual growth are matters within the control of each firm, and are geometrically enhanced with the involvement of a person charged with professional development.
What specifically can firms incorporate into their processes to improve diversity retention? For starters, here is a short list.
But the best way for firms to systematically enhance diversity retention is to establish a professional development department/person/consultant who can provide benchmarks to identify areas for improvement, formulate goals and then work with the diversity committee, the associate recruitment committee and associate managers to realize those goals.
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.
A recent article in the New York Times on young 20-something Internet mega-millionaires quoted one as saying “You ask yourself, ‘Why am I not happier given how lucky I’ve been?’”
While we as lawyers, being supremely circumspect, would rarely verbalize this sort of “squishy” sentiment out in the open, given the levels of unhappiness in our profession, it is a question we should be asking ourselves.
So here are some of the findings about "happiness," which has exploded as a subject of research over the last few years. Let’s start with the data on the current state of happiness in the US.
Recent surveys point to a relatively high “happiness quotient” these days:
· 86% of Americans are content with their jobs (General Social Survey)
· 76% are satisfied with their family income (Pew Research Center Survey)
· 62% expect their personal situation to get better over the next five years vs. only 7% who expect it to get worse
· 65% of Americans are satisfied over all with their own lives—one of the highest personal satisfaction rates in the world.
As the query of that Internet mega-millionaire illustrates, happiness is not correlated with financial resources or even political stability: countries like Nigeria, El Salvador, Columbia, Mexico and Puerto Rico (along with Switzerland, Denmark and Canada) register higher rates of happiness than the US in the World Values Survey. Other countries, such as Romania, Russia and other former Soviet countries, consistently score at the bottom.
This fairly rosy picture in the US becomes decidedly darker when we factor in the “happiness” data on lawyers:
· Lawyers generally have one of the highest dissatisfaction rates with their work of all industries/professions, with 65% of young associates surveyed by the ABA last year intending to change professions within two years.
· Lawyers also have the highest “personal distress” rates of any industry, exhibiting dramatically higher incidences of suicide, mental illness, divorce and substance abuse than other industries.
Women lawyers seem particularly effected by these developments:
· Fewer women are seeking law degrees: from 1963 through 2001 female enrollment at law schools climbed nearly every year, from 3.7% to a peak of over 50%; since 2002, however, the percentage of women in law schools has declined each year, currently down to 46%.
· At a time of very high attorney turnover generally (over 20% leave their jobs every year), the highest drop-out-of-the-profession-entirely demographic is women.
· In spite of many years of women in the "pipeline," only a small proportion of women stay to become partners in law firms (17%) or senior legal counsel in corporations (18%).
The message seems to be that, in spite of Americans' general glee, few lawyers are happy living the lawyer's life.
What Makes Us Happy?
As it turns out, over the last few years a wave of books on happiness, primarily written by academics, have been published. Among them are:
The Pursuit of Happiness, by David G. Myers
Happiness, The Nature and Nurture of Joy and Contentment by David Lykken
Happiness, A History by Darrin M. McMahon
Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman
The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and Dr. Howard C. Cutler
The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt
Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
Happier: Learn the Secrets of Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment by Tal Ben Shahar
Most of these books are based on David Lykken's findings that there is an individual “set point” of happiness to which most people revert, regardless of their life circumstances—illness, financial concerns, family problems. Lottery winners and paraplegics, those both accepted and rejected as partners or general counsel, all on average return to their baseline levels of happiness within a year.
If health and other circumstances don't impact our happiness, what does? Jonathan Haidt compares our emotional life in The Happiness Hypothesis to a small, conscious monkey riding a large, unconscious elephant: in many ways we are estranged from the great bulk of our own inner feelings. The running commentary in our minds about what we feel and why is often simply wrong, he contends. For example, research subjects unknowingly hypnotized to react in a specific way to a cue quickly come up with rational, and in their mind truthful, “explanations” of why they acted that way, even though those explanations are causally entirely beside the point: their reaction was programmed in their unconscious by the hypnosis.
Not only are we not able to access a great part of our inner feelings, evidently we are not very good at analyzing the happiness data that we do have access to. Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness explains that we are very bad at remembering what made us happy in the past and in predicting what will make us happy in the future, often overestimating the bang we will get and how long it will last. For example, people often list children as a source of happiness, yet the data indicates that children in fact are "extremely negative," "mildly negative" or have no effect on overall happiness. (More about this later.)
Could We Be Happier?
Continue Reading..."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.
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.
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.
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?
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For further information, contact RMuir@RobinRolfeResources.com.
Ronda Muir, Esq., Senior Consultant at Robin Rolfe Resources, was featured as a speaker at a conference on Risk Management for the Modern Law Firm, sponsored by ARK Group. The conference was held in Chicago on April 17 and 18, 2007.
Muir's presentation was on the risks that arise in managing a law firm's greatest asset: its people. She pointed out the ways in which lawyers are different from all other professionals, the challenges and risks that those differences pose to management, and how to use those differences to make good lawyers better.
Participants raved:
ARK Group also lauded Muir's participation: "Your involvement was pivotal to the success of the program… and brought a fresh perspective to the agenda."
Temple University’s Beasley School of Law is including a course on law firm management in its curriculum for third–year law students starting this past month.
Called "Legal, Professional and Business Aspects of Law Practice," the class is divided into four sections: law firm economics, time management, client development, and ethics related to the business of firms. Some of the topics included are fee structures, accounting, partnership and tax law as related to firms, firm organization, and referrals.
The textbook for the course was written by a professor who teaches a similar course at Pace University. Stephen J. Friedman, dean of Pace University School of Law, and formerly commissioner of the SEC, general counsel of The Equitable and E.F. Hutton, and co-chairman of the corporate department at Debevoise & Plimpton, finds law graduates to be "ill-equipped to be effective beginning lawyers" and wants curriculum at law schools to be "more purposeful, more focused and more integrated."
And evidently particularly more attuned to the challenges of effective legal practice and good law firm management.
Carol S. Dweck, a Stanford University psychology professor, is the author of the recently published "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success," which documents how people with a "growth" mind-set who believe they can improve themselves out-perform those with a "fixed" mind-set who believe their capabilities are fixed. "The growth mind-set person recognizes that you're not good at something before you're good at it," Dweck points out.
In one instance, Dweck found that when people experience a blow to their self-esteem, those in a fixed mindset repair their self-image by trying to feel that they are better than others, which n a business setting might take the form of blaming or taking things out on a colleague. Those in a growth mindset recover their self-esteem by trying to improve themselves and correct their deficiencies.
While it's gratifying to see the impact of personal belief documented so clearly, parts of this thesis are hardly new-- optimists outperform pessimists across all industries and job descriptions (except in law), in part simply because they believe they are capable of effecting change. And the success that this sense of empowerment generates in any arena leads to the expectation of and achievement of success in others. Optimists are also more resilient--understanding that specific setbacks are just that, and not a referendum on their personal worth, which makes them more likely to persevere.
Which brings us to lawyers, the least optimistic of any career, for whom Dr. Seligman has documented that pessimism is in fact a career enhancer, and who consistently score low on resilience. For lawyers, the new psychology of success begins with systematically training themselves to confine their pessimism to their legal analysis and to bolster their resilience and optimism in the rest of their lives, including management.
In any event, Dweck's overall assertion that rigid thinking benefits no one, least of all yourself, and that a change of mind is always possible, is welcome.
A recent study conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership found that effective leadership has changed over the last five years. Eighty-four percent (84%) of those polled said leaders today are valued for collaboration skills, such as building and mending relationships, rather than solitary heroics, the standard five years ago. Specifically important is being able to "enhance co-worker relationships." This change is due, according to those surveyed, to the more far-flung demands of leadership, which often go beyond an individual's capability, creating a need to work interdependently with others across boundaries—geographic, language, cultural, and expertise.
Law firm and law departments would do well to take note of this study-- "leader" is often a designation born out of unrelated circumstances-- a lawyer has extra time, was good at revenue production so will maybe be good at this too, or is simply senior, none of which relates to his or her ability to build a collaborative organization that supports individuals and teams.
In a recent interview, Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ and more recently Social Intelligence, commented on the error many make in choosing leadership: "Too many organizations are rather naive about the ingredients of leadership and make the classic mistake of assuming that someone who is an outstanding individual contributor would therefore be an outstanding leader. If they're an outstanding individual contributor, keep them as an individual contributor. Give them a raise," he says emphatically.
This study brings that point home in spades.
The Board of Law Examiners proposed increasing the passing score on the New York bar exam from 660 to 675 in 5-point intervals, the first of which was instituted in July 2005 with the next two increments scheduled for the following two summers. Those have been delayed and the National Conference of Bar Examiners has issued a 155-page report on the diversity impact of that proposal. If the full 15-point increase were instituted (which is significantly less than the 33 point increase initially considered), fully half of all African-Americans would fail the exam--up over 8% from the prior fail rate. The impact on other races would also be significant--an additional 5% of Hispanics, 6% of Asians and 10% of Puerto Ricans would fail, but their total pass rates would in each case remain over 65%. Only the African-American pass rate would fall below 50%.
This data corresponds interestingly with the study conducted by Professor Sander at the University of California, Los Angeles, which has generated fierce debate. Sander's provocative study concludes that a major reason blacks are not as well represented among law firm partners as they are among new associates is that they have much lower average grades than their cohorts. Sander also indicts the law schools for admitting blacks who are not prepared enough to do well at law schools. Very few blacks graduate from the top 30 law schools with high grades. While blacks make up 1-2% of law students with grades in the top half of their class, they make up 8% of corporate law firm hires, yet they are one-fourth as likely to make partner, and they leave large firms at 2-3 times the rate of white associates. An interesting fact is that blacks have a much better shot at partnership at smaller firms, which are less likely to hire associates with lower than standard grades.
Some commentators have questioned the importance of grades (women lawyers have higher grades than men but are also under-represented as partners), others have attributed the fallout to a lack of mentoring or training, or to the fierce competition for able blacks, who are often hired away by clients, while still others contend that the big firm hiring practice sets blacks up for failure, reinforcing stereotypes on the way.
The importance of the two studies converge, particularly for New York law firms, if raising the bar pass rate further reduces the number of eligible black associates that firms can choose from. Will those reduced numbers make prestigious firms lower their grade standards even further, with the implication that retention rates may drop even lower?
There is no question that any firm solving the diversity puzzle reaps a hiring, marketing and productivity bonanza. Successfully hiring and integrating blacks, as well as other minorities, including women, requires that a firm understand its own and its associates' cultural strengths and biases, have an active, long-term integration program that addresses each specific attorney and his/her goals, and honestly, consistently and regularly evaluate its own progress.
Between 1986 and 2005, the number of lawyers employed by the nation’s 100 largest law firms nearly tripled, from roughly 25,000 to more than 70,000, and the most recent report is that the Am Law 100 gained 4% in numbers of lawyers this past year. During this time the number of top students at top law schools has not increased measurably.
In the last two years, firm attrition rates have gone up dramatically. According to NALP reports, in 2003 53% of fifth-year associates had changed firms. In 2005, that percentage rose to 78%, more than three-fourths of associates, and 81% for women of color. According to The American Lawyer, in 2005 2,429 partners left their firms for other attorney jobs, compared with 2,081 in 2004, up more than 20%.
More and more law firms are trying to land a limited number of top-tier associates, who will, once bagged, nonetheless leave their firms—most while still associates, but others as partners. Therein lies the recruiting challenge.
Some firms are looking to alums to fatten their recruiting pool. On October 16 2006, The National Law Journal highlighted how firms are working harder to maintain ties to alums, sometimes succeeding in bringing that talent back to the firm. Vinson & Elkins partner Veronica Lewis, who left to go in-house for more flexibility, was courted personally by V&E’s managing partner, and returned as a partner after 18 months. Gibson Dunn was cited as viewing rehires as a growing component of its recruiting program.
The National Law Journal’s Sept 25, 2006 special section on the Business of Law included a lead article on the hunt for talent. It suggests that top students at less prestigious schools be carefully considered and that summer programs should more accurately reflect real legal practice, both to educate the associate and to test the students’ interest in and commitment to the practice of law. Third, it advocates that firms “integrate, integrate” to bolster retention generally and diversity specifically. However, the assertion that attorneys envision their law firm as not merely a job, but a professional home base that they return to after government or academic stints, is out of touch with the realities of modern legal practice. As ideal as that goal may be, given the turnover in attorney ranks, both associate and partner, loyalty to a firm looks fast to becoming an outdated concept.
Another alternative is to make sweeping changes in the way you hire and care for your associates. Assessments that corporations have used for decades more accurately pinpoint those candidates who are likely to flourish in the practice of law as you practice it and who can add a healthy mix to your current team. Refining your culture by addressing the most important concerns of your hires will go much further towards raising retention rates than throwing another wad of money at them.
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.
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.
The last few months have seen five new studies relating to diversity and the practice of law:
1. A new study by the ABA’s Commission on Women in the Professions entitled “Visible Invisibility: Women of Color in Law Firms” found that few women of color are offered equal opportunity and most choose to leave their firms rather than stay and fight for equality. One of the study’s promoters decried how similar the results are to the results in the studies her committee conducted on the same issues in the 1990s. While, largely in response to client demands, more law firms are attempting to hire for more racial diversity, few pay attention to what happens once these women actually start working at the firm. The attrition rate for these lawyers, according to NALP, reaches nearly 100 % within eight years. At least one reason for their lack of success is laid to the lack of like-situated mentors. While there is a tendency to believe we are past the overt discrimination, 49% of women and 34% of men of color reported harassment or discrimination, compared to 47% of white women and 2.5% of white men. However, the primary reason women of colored reported for leaving legal practice was to obtain greater work-life balance, which is also the most frequently reported reason for all other groups surveyed to leave.
2. The Inside Counsel/Dickstein Shapiro Diversity Survey, published October, 2006, focused on the diversity progress in corporate law departments based on 377 in-house counsel responses, including 19% participation from general counsel, with respondents being 70% white,14% black; 7% Hispanic and 7% Asian.
The primary findings of that study are consistent with the ABA report above that looked at law firms, including:
§ Legal departments lack racial diversity. "The average legal department that responded had 46 attorneys of which 3.5% are non-Caucasian; the median department employs 11 attorneys of which 1 is non-white."
§ Less than 9% of legal departments are headed by non-Caucasian general counsel
§ Senior leadership fails to set goals--only 32% of companies surveyed had formal diversity polices.
§ Commitment from the GC and CEO is essential, although often leadership compensation is not tied to meeting diversity goals.
3. “Presumed Equal: What America’s Top Women Lawyers Really Think About Their Firms” surveyed 16,000 lawyers to report on what women attorneys experience in law firms, updating a 1993 report and its 1998 followup. The report found that many women believe their firms don’t provide opportunities to make partner or foster an environment that values diversity and family. The survey looks to general trends in disparate treatment that women experience at various law firms and highlights specific weaknesses of 105 individual firms ("most prestigious law firms in the US"). It scores the firms based on responses and ranks them nationally and by geographic location.
Since it was initially created to assist law students in their consideration of job opportunities, this survey attempts to provide a discourse about what it is like to be a woman at a top law US law firm and evaluates environment for women to achieve personal goals such as (i) making partner, (ii) finding a mentor, and (iii) life balance.
The report concludes, "Objective indicators still show a disparity between the relative power held by men and women in the legal field and indicate that gender is still relevant to women's success."
The report also finds "that long-term professional satisfaction for women is not based on the quality of a woman's work. At present, the reluctance of male dominated partnerships to mentor female attorneys, the persistance of gender biases regarding women's roles, and the tacit penalties that women endure for taking advantage of maternity leave, to name only a few dynamics at play, still profoundly shape women's experience within the legal profession."
4. "Creating Pathways to Success: Advancing and Retaining Women in Today's Law Firms, " issued by the Women's Bar of DC in May 2006, examined better ways to stem the departure of women from law practice. While the report includes many specific actions, the findings generally are that there are more stumbling blocks to the success of women in law practice than are currently being addressed by the commonly used methods of supporting and promoting women. The most common current practices focus on specific programs in specific business areas in a silo-like approach. The stumbling blocks, however, cross broad issues and fields but unite on the key issues of how women can achieve the level of business success they expect of themselves consistent with societal demands and personal creativity.
5. In October 2006, the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) reported on its survey of the American Lawyer Media's 200 largest firms, measuring the comparative role of female lawyers at different levels of seniority, types of partnership opportunities, where women stand in relation to men in firm governance and comparative compensation at the same levels of seniority. According to NAWL, the survey findings reflect the situation at law deparatments as well.
With responses from 103 of the 200 firms (and against the background that women have been 50% of law school graduates for each of the past 15 years), women constitute:
§ 16% percent of equity partners
§ 26% of non-equity partners
§ 28% of "of counsel" or other special counsel positions
§ 45% of associates
Looking at the 16% representation among equity partners, in an era when partnerships are made within 7-10 years, many of us would have expected greater gender parity at all but the most senior levels of law firm partnership.
The statistics also reveal that of the 16% percent of all equity partners, women are more heavily represented among the more junior classes of equity partners, constituting 21% of equity partners who graduated law school between 1990 and 1995, and 24% of those who graduated in 1996 or later.
But NAWL warned that the trend emerging from such figures is unclear, noting that women who have recently become equity partners could yet leave the profession, and that even at 24 percent of equity partners, women are substantially under-represented relative to their 45 percent of the total number of associates.
In terms of leadership positions:
§ 16% of the members of law firm governance committees are women.
§ 15% of the firms reported that up to 25% of the members of the highest governing committee were women
§ 10% of responding firms reported that there were no women on the highest governing committee
§ 5% of managing partners are women.
As to compensation, of 62 firms responding, 92% said that the highest paid lawyer was male. Of the 35 firms that provided compensation breakdowns, male equity partners were paid an average of $510,000 whereas female equity partners averaged compensation was $429,000. The survey recognized that the higher number of men at senior partnership levels could account for the significant difference in compensation.
Pepper Hamilton has recruited one of their of-counsel attorneys who sits on a diversity committee to be responsible for a new program that Pepper Hamilton is sponsoring with Villanova University School of Law. Pepper Hamilton will provide two three-year law school scholarships, help screen applicants for the scholarships, hire minority law students as summer associates and new associates, and provide lawyers to lecture and mentor minority college students who attend the law school's summer preparation course.
In April 1955, Dean of Harvard Law School Erwin Griswold noted, "Many lawyers never seem to understand they’re dealing with people and not solely with impersonal law” -- a comment that unfortunately continues to ring true today, when the legal profession’s reputation suffers from an image characterized by a lack of interpersonal sensibilities.
One of the first law school courses in the nation to apply human relations training to law was taught by Professor Howard Sacks at Northwestern Law School during the 1957-58 school year. The two-week course, entitled "Professional Relations," was offered without credit. Professor Sacks appealed to other law teachers to join in his experiment, both by offering stand-alone courses and integrating human relations training into the regular law curriculum. But a law review article written by Harvard Law Professor Alan Stone in 1971 noted that "law schools . . . have largely ignored the responsibility of teaching interviewing, counseling, negotiating, and other human relations skills."
Legal academics continue to take the position that lawyers must learn to be more effective interpersonally. As Vanderbilt University Law Professor Chris Guthrie summarizes it, "Lawyers are analytically oriented, [and] emotionally and interpersonally underdeveloped."
It’s more than just a matter of being “nice.” Our survey of Emotional Intelligence and Excellence in Lawyering shows lawyers who are listed in Best Lawyers in America score significantly higher in emotional intelligence than the average lawyer. There’s excellence in that intelligence.
To participate in our study, see our entry “Emotional Intelligence and Excellence in Lawyering” under the topic Emotional Intelligence.
Another message that the increase in associate departures may be sending is that our attempts at mentoring are failing. Mentoring has become a favored buzzword recently that many law firms at least pay lip service to. Most of these programs tend to fairly arbitrarily assign new associates to mentors, dictate a certain number of meetings annually, and require reams of paperwork. They are, in short, more a product of lawyers’ natural tendency to be “thinkers” (78% of lawyers) instead of “feelers” (22%), using the Myers-Briggs personality trait descriptions. Mentoring is business shorthand for “someone to watch over me,” a skill that does not come naturally to attorneys.
Sullivan & Cromwell has recently announced a revamping of its mentoring program for its general practice group in New York and Washington. There are separate programs for junior associates—paired with mid-level associates who focus on acclimation and socializing—and more senior associates, who are paired with two partners to help develop skills.
Why are law firms and law departments providing this “soft” support for young attorneys? There is, of course, always the “herd mentality” argument, that if other firms are doing it in this competitive talent market, so must we. But that begs the bigger issue. Why, after generations of no such official “coddling,” have associates begun to need this sort of assistance, and, more astonishingly, firms have been providing it?
Why firms provide mentoring is partly in response to what firms view as ill-prepared and poorly motivated young associates, coupled with the exodus of those associates when they are throw in to sink or swim. Add to this the growing bigness of law firms, with more extensive policies, rules and procedures, and mentoring becomes a formalized, lengthy orientation process.
But I would wager that an even bigger reason behind the need for mentoring originates in the personal lives of the Gen Xers, Yers and Zers themselves. These young people are more likely to have been supported financially and academically up to and through college and law school, so they expect continued support. They have also grown up in a more generally “therapized” culture, where identifying needs and asking for them to be met is a sign of mental health. Finally, the continued breakdown of the nuclear American family and its broad geographical dispersion may mean that, as their careers progress, these young adults need to replace or supplement lagging or distant family support with relationships at work. If they're not getting that support from your firm or department, they will go elsewhere.
Enter keywords:
Muir Lectures on Improving Management Decision-Making
On Wednesday, February 17, 2009 Muir will lecture students at Northwestern University's Business Institutions Program on improving management decision-making, using law firm management committees as a case study. Based in part on the article "Promoting an Effective Board or Management Group," the discussion will explore, among other subjects, optimal personality traits for good decision-making, how to construct effective teams and the challenge of avoiding extreme decisions.
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