Leadership in the legal sector
Written by Andy Nisevic (One Degree Training and Coaching) - Speaker at the Legal Growth Conference 2024.
I’ll be honest, when I was first asked to write this blog, I was a little nervous. I’ve never worked in the legal sector, I don’t have any clients in that sector, and except for buying a house, and getting a will written, I’ve (**touches wood**) never had any involvement with solicitors in a professional context.
I drafted something, that felt very basic, very generic, and I wasn’t comfortable with it being sent out. I was concerned that it would be presumptive, and based on bias, rather than reality.
After reaching out to my LinkedIn audience, a good number of people kindly volunteered to be interviewed. They were solicitors, business development managers in law firms, and HR professionals within law firms.
As it turns out, my bias appeared to have some truth to it. (NB: there was a mix of current and past experiences, it wasn’t always who they were currently working for. Each person had very similar experiences throughout their careers.) I started to think, where does that bias come from? What would an outsider to the legal profession say about leadership within a law firm?
When I joined the RAF in November 1999, I assumed that military leadership was what TV told us it is. That I'd be getting called all sorts of names, I'd be shouted at, sworn at, and generally treated like dirt (when I put it that way, why on earth did I join?!). Every other person in my life at the time had very similar opinions. In fact, they were shocked that I wanted to join. In my early days as a leader in the RAF, this is the type of person I thought I needed to be. Thank goodness I had good mentors who taught me differently.
What does TV tell us about life within the legal professions? Well, if programmes like Suits is anything to go by, you'll be working 17-hr days, at least 6-days a week. You'll have unreasonable demands placed on you, no support, chastised for making the tiniest mistake, and ridiculed for not being able to keep up.
All the interviews I conducted suggested that bias was the lived experience. Here’s a couple of the headlines of the interviews:
Case loads of greater than 300 per person isn’t unusual.
If you’re in work after, and leave before the senior partner(s), you’re considered “lazy”.
Many aspects of law are process driven, so don’t require a lot of human-to-human interaction.
In aspects of law that require court room appearances, the “good” solicitors are the ones who are good at arguing, and never believe they don’t know better. (These are the ones who get promoted.)
A heavy tendency towards remote working, so no sense of “community”.
High stress levels.
Staff churn rates of 50-60% isn’t uncommon (10% is considered high in all other sectors!).
Now I need to accept that there may well be some prejudice in my writing. As a leadership development specialist this suggests huge opportunity for me, and people like me. So please allow me to balance this out.
The sense I took from my interviews was that the legal profession is a calling, a vocation, if you will. People tend to be attracted to the legal profession through a desire to help people. Which is a pretty good foundation for a person who would be a good leader. So what changes from joining a law firm, to becoming a leader within one?
We need to consider what a client of a solicitor needs from them: results focussed, detail orientated, process driven, high success rates, no mistakes, etc. None of these lend themselves to directly to the development of the “soft skills” required for great leadership.
Secondly, what are the metrics used to decide if someone deserves to be promoted in the legal profession? The only answer given when I asked this question was the person who generates the most income is who gets promoted. That means promotion is based on technical skills, not soft skills.
When we work in professions that don’t require us to have those skills, and we’re promoted then faced with leadership responsibilities, we revert to what our biases and prejudices tell us is required of a leader in our chosen field. When we’re not provided with great leadership development, we tend to try to emulate someone else. This is a mistake for 2 reasons.
Firstly, when we try to be somebody else, we’re not being ourselves. This make us come across as inauthentic. Secondly, if that person wasn’t someone who’d been provided with good leadership development in the first place, we’re setting ourselves up to fail.
There were 2 strands of law that stood out as not meeting this stereotype:
Family law.
Complex personal injury.
These 2 strands require huge amounts of empathy, and ability to communicate with clients in deeply personal ways. The mutual skills required for these, and good leadership, are high in number.
It would have been incredibly easy to walk away from the interviews I conducted and say very negative things about leadership in the legal sector. The truth is though, the only thing that’s going on here is basic human psychology, not lack of desire to be good leaders.
With the exception of a very small percentage of people who have natural attributes that lend themselves to good leadership, people aren’t born leaders. Leaders are made. Leadership is complex, everchanging, and time consuming. Unless we’re provided with good training, mentoring, coaching, and all-round development, we’re going to get it wrong. Even specialists get it wrong. If the people we’re reliant upon for mentoring as we move up the management chain haven’t been provided with good leadership training and development themselves, we’re at risk of falling into the “toxicity” trap.
In any profession, it’s incredibly easy to be a great person and a toxic leader, all at the same time. When we get promoted because we’re good at our jobs, we get promoted out of a job we were good at, into one we have no training, or experience, in, and we’re expected to deliver from day 1. This can be hugely stressful.
The obvious answer is to invest in leadership development. For some, that will be easy. For others, they’ll have the structure to bring the expertise in-house. For others, the budgets just aren’t there – except for basic training.
A great starting point, to create a strong foundation for a culture where people can thrive, is a compelling vision.
A compelling vision has 3 pillars:
A meaningful purpose.
Clear values.
An exciting mission.
A frequent mistake I see across all industries when setting a vision, is they use vague language, based in logic, in a manner that sends out a good PR message. For example, the RAF’s advertising slogan is “RISE above the rest”. So, their organisation values: Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence, spell out RISE. Hilton Hotel’s spell out HILTON: Hospitality, Integrity, Leadership, Teamwork, Ownership, Now.
They may sound great, they mean different things to different people, so holding staff to account to the values becomes very difficult.
A clear and meaningful purpose. This is the reason your business exists. It can’t be based on logical factors, nor can it be something egotistical such as: “to be the best”, or “to be the biggest”. Your staff don’t care about that. To generate desire within your staff to see your business succeed you need to tap into their emotional drivers. A great purpose statement has two factors: contribution & impact. I.e. *** so that ***.
For One Degree Training & Coaching Ltd it’s: We make the workplace a more fulfilling and engaging place, so that person-by-person, the world becomes a happier place.
It’s the emotional aspect of making the world a happier place that will either drive people towards or away from us. The people it drives away would never have been my ideal clients or staff. The people who are drawn towards us are the ones who will get the best results from investing with us, and they’ll be employees who want the business to succeed.
Clear values. Values are complex. They’re far more than marketing or PR activity, they’re there to inform your staff of how you expect them to behave. The term “Integrity” appears regularly in values statements. The trouble is, it means so many different things, to so many different people. When holding someone to account for lack of integrity, who’s definition are you using? Yours? Theirs? The person who set the value in the first place?
A value needs to be a statement that’s easily understood, and something that you’ll hold yourself to account to. When you can hold yourself to account for something, it’s far easier to hold other people to it. Staff behaviour is driven from the top of an organisation. If the senior personnel don’t adhere to the values, nor will anyone else.
An exciting mission. A common mission statement is to generate a certain amount of revenue, or growth. This again is an ego driven statement that your employees don’t care about. A mission that’s based on the impact you want to have, with metrics aligned to it as success criteria, will motivate your staff to WANT to achieve it.
One Degree’s mission for 2024 is: By 31st October 2024, we will have developed 20 x 1:1 clients, so that 650 people’s lives can be improved. (I won’t go into the maths to explain it, that’s all in our strategic plan.)
The final thing to consider when writing a compelling vision is honesty. It doesn’t matter if you’re an autocratic person whose values are hard work and long hours. If this is who you are, lean into it. It will drive people away from you who don’t meet your values, and attract people who are. If you’re a “work all hours” type of person, but claim work-life-balance in your values, then you’ll be creating leadership challenges that needn’t be there. Just be honest. Your pile of job applicants will be much smaller, but full of your ideal staff, rather than a large pile where finding your perfect employee is hidden like a needle in a haystack.
