Archive for month: September, 2008

Elementary school children learn something that talented adults often forget: systems awareness. Remember the song that goes, “the knee bone’s connected to the leg bone, the leg bone’s connected to the hip bone,” and so on? That’s a form of systems awareness: if the knee goes out of whack, you can bet that the leg and the hip will suffer too.

Systems are present in client representations. Imagine that you’re representing a client on a tax matter. Isn’t it natural to recognize that the outcome of the matter may affect not only the client’s tax liability, but potentially
his business, her marriage, or its employees as well? Lawyers are trained to recognize the ripples that flow from client matters, but what about other issues?

Your practice, your office, the personnel serving your clients – all of these are systems. Make a change in one area, and it’ll impact other areas as well. As a leader, it’s up to you to recognize the effects of your changes, both prospectively and retrospectively. Doing so will help you to anticipate and avoid problems and to design outcomes that positively impact a particular system.

A few years ago, the executive committee of a law firm decided that a live person should answer all calls received during business hours. To implement that policy, the office manager created a detailed system that regulated which secretaries could go to lunch or on break at what time and which lawyers’ telephones each secretary would cover. Seems sensible, right? Unfortunately, some lawyers didn’t want to have “strangers” responding to client inquiries, and morale among assistants plummeted since they were no longer free to take lunches and breaks together without careful planning. In other words, the system was disrupted. The plan failed miserably, and the hours spent in creating it were wasted – all because no one considered what impact the planned changes would have on the attorney/assistant system.

Systems awareness is also useful in evaluating how to accomplish professional and personal goals. Barbara hired me to improve her client development activities for her family law practice. She found it difficult to get in her billable hours and her rainmaking activities, much less optional interests like exercise and visiting with friends, or even being involved in her children’s extracurricular activities. As we reviewed Barbara’s activities, she remembered that she’d received a number of referrals in the past from people she’d met when she served as den leader for her daughter’s Girl Scout troop. We discussed a variety of activities she could add in, but Barbara kept returning to her prior Girl Scouts experience and finally decided to get involved again.

By resuming Girl Scout activities, Barbara deepened her connection with her daughter, put herself in a situation to meet parents who might need help with family law matters or know others who’d need help, and even got in some exercise. Barbara added extra time to her schedule to do this, but because the time yielded payoffs in several areas, she was able to leverage the time to get benefits that she might not have realized otherwise. Barbara became aware of the “system” formed by the intersection of her personal and professional life. (You might remember a recent review of Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, which suggests experimenting with 4-way wins, which takes advantage of systems awareness.)

To increase your own systems awareness, consider the ripple effects of changes you make or action you might take.

A review of Leadership That Gets Results by Daniel Goleman (Harvard Business Review, 2000)

Daniel Goleman gained notoriety in the mid-1990s for identifying competencies related to “emotional intelligence,” or the ability to perceive, regulate, understand, and work with emotions to enhance leadership. Those competencies are self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill. Based on research by the consulting firm Hay/McBer, Goleman identifies six distinct leadership styles, each of which uses a unique combination of the emotional intelligence competencies.

The selection of a leadership style influences not only the outcome of a particular situation, but the overall organizational climate as well. “Climate” is defined to reflect the organization’s flexibility, workers’ sense of responsibility to the organization, the level of standards set, the degree to which performance feedback and rewards offered are considered accurate, the clarity those in the organization feel about its mission and values, and the level of commitment they hold toward a common purpose. Each style affects each component of the organizational climate as well as the organization’s financial results, and each may be used effectively in certain situations. Highly effective leaders draw on multiple styles:

The styles, taken individually, appear to have a direct and unique impact on the working atmosphere of a company, division, or team, and in turn, on its financial performance. And perhaps most important, the research indicates that leaders with the best results do not rely on only one leadership style; they use most of them in a given week-seamlessly and in different measure-depending on the business situation. Imagine the styles, then, as the array of clubs in a golf pro’s bag. Over the course of a game, the pro picks and chooses clubs based on the demands of the shot. Sometimes he has to ponder his selection, but usually it is automatic. The pro senses the challenge ahead, swiftly pulls out the right tool, and elegantly puts it to work. That’s how high-impact leaders operate, too.

Goleman describes the six styles as follows:

• The coercive style, in which the leader unilaterally directs action and requires compliance, summarized as “Do what I tell you.”
• The authoritative style, in which the leader identifies a vision and motivates those responsible for achieving the resulting goal to choose their approach to it, summarized as “Come with me.”
• The affiliative style, in which the leader focuses on building harmony and strong working relationships, summarized as “People come first.”
• The democratic style, in which the leader seeks to build consensus among team members by giving each a voice, summarized as “What do you think?”
• The pacesetting style, in which the leader sets and adheres to high standards for performance for him- or herself and the team, summarized as “Do as I do, now!”
• The coaching style, in which the leader focuses on developing team members’ performance, summarized as “Try this.”

Although each style can be used well in a particular situation, the authoritative, affiliative, democratic, and coaching styles have a consistently positive effect on organizational climate and results. (The article includes a fascinating table that shows quantitatively the effect that each style has on each component of the organizational climate as well as the overall positive or negative effect.)

An effective leader selects the appropriate style based on the situation he or she faces. For example, immediately following a natural disaster, the coercive style would likely yield a positive effect (the leader would identify and provide direction as to what actions must be taken for the organization to weather the crisis), whereas a democratic style would be ineffective in such an emergency, as team members would waste valuable time reaching consensus.

Becoming aware of the six leadership styles may permit leaders to develop those styles that come less naturally and to choose consciously when to employ each style. Leaders may develop styles that don’t come naturally by studying the emotional intelligence competencies that underlie the style, as set forth in Goleman’s article. Although emotional intelligence may seem like a flighty buzzword, each competency contributes meaningfully toward an individual’s ability to motivate, encourage, and lead team members to high performance.

What’s in it for lawyers?

Unlike many corporate leaders, lawyer-leaders frequently lack training in or vocabulary to describe what creates effective leadership. Studying Goleman’s article is a good first step in understanding the empirical study of leadership styles and the circumstances in which each is effective. For example, though the pacesetting style is not a consistently effective model, it may be quite effective for teams composed of high-achieving, highly motivated lawyers.

Most lawyers have had the experience of working for a talented, demanding (perhaps even “obsessive”) senior lawyer who sets high standards and expects everyone to meet them as well as he or she does – someone who exhibits the pacesetting style, in other words. A pacesetting leader might learn about the drawbacks and dangers of using only the pacesetting style, including low morale that results from overwhelm in the face of unreachably high standards and fear that results from the need to second-guess what the leader wants rather than what might be most effective.

By learning to use other leadership styles masterfully, the pacesetting lawyer may round out his or her leadership repertoire and find more effective ways to evoke high performance from every member of the team. While such development requires consistent effort over time – simply reading the article will not, without more, produce meaningful change – learning the vocabulary and seeing that leadership is a science as well as an art will enhance every lawyer’s leadership abilities.