Archive for year: 2015

The topic of commitment has been coming up over and over in the last few weeks. What’s the first thing you think when you think of commitment in the context of your practice?  Without commitment in three particular areas, success is unlikely.

Commitment to business development.  To get consistent results in building your practice, you must be consistent with your business development efforts.

When I consult with a potential client who wants to secure more work, I always ask questions to uncover not just what business development activities they’ve tried, but how consistently they’ve tried them. That’s because when a practice is underperforming, consistency is always lacking.

• Calendar your plans and keep a checklist, divided into daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly activity.  This kind of reminder keeps you from leaving your activity up to chance.  It also avoids allowing your activity to slip when some change in outside circumstances might undermine habits you’ve developed. 
  
  One of my former clients wrote articles for a publication every other month for several years, but when the journal that published those articles closed, he neglected to put writing for publication on his checklist, and guess what?  He quit writing.  He found a couple of journals that were eager to publish his articles and added writing to his quarterly task list so it wouldn’t slip through the cracks again, and his stalled list of publications began growing again.  Checklists and schedules will help to keep activity consistent.

• Commitment to clients.  I have observed lawyers who are so committed to growing their practices that they focus almost solely on getting the next new client, leaving behind current clients.  Legal ethics rules mandate a minimum level of client service, but when’s the last time you felt good about receiving merely adequate service?
  
  If you want to succeed in practice, make it your habit to create value for your clients through exceptional client service.  That means providing the substantive service the client needs, plus providing it in a way that surpasses need.  Every lawyer will do this in a different way that suits the lawyer, the practice, and the client. A few ideas: be proactive, share information, educate your clients about topics that are relevant to their needs, and look for opportunities to introduce your clients to other professionals they should know.
  
  Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable has many ideas on crafting service that will delight your clients.  

• Commitment to succeeding in the business of practicing law.  What’s your backup plan if your practice doesn’t prosper?  Many lawyers, risk-averse by nature and training, need to have a backup plan to feel secure, and that isn’t a bad thing.  However, having a fallback can be a sign of serious trouble.
  
  I once spoke with a lawyer who told me that she was excited about moving in-house, but that if things didn’t go well, she could always go back to the firm she was leaving.  Plan B so permeated our conversation that I virtually guarantee she’ll be back at the job within a year.  And that’s ok, except that she’ll return with a feeling of failure if she doesn’t recognize that she was never really committed to building her own practice.  (I would be remiss not to note, though, that without a book of business, she may find it difficult or impossible to return to private practice or to return at the same level she held when she left. That’s part of the business of practicing law as well.)  

• If you start every week (or every day or every project) with Plan B in mind, that’s where you’ll end up before you know it.

So, where’s your commitment level in each of these areas? You only have three options with respect to these three areas of business: get committed, find an alternative, or look for another way to practice law.

Last week I offered an idea on how to manage business development through upcoming hectic vacation times, and boy did that strike a chord! I received a bunch of responses asking for more suggestions.  And so…

This week I’m reprinting a 2011 review of Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life by Wharton professor Stewart Friedman. This book asserts that building an integrated life calls for finding activities that will benefit more than one domain of your life (work, home, community, and self) so that you can maximize the positive effects of each action. Instead of doing one thing to serve your practice and another to serve your family, maybe there’s a way to serve both at the same time—and perhaps even your community and your self as well. It’s the soundest approach I’ve seen to living a high-performance, satisfying professional and personal life. And doesn’t that sound more achievable than work/life balance?

Book Review: 

Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life

By Stewart D. Friedman

Spurred by conversations I’ve been having with clients recently, this month’s book review focuses on “work/life balance” or (as I prefer to call it) work/life integration.  As I’ve previously written, self-management is a critical skill for leaders.  That it’s also a challenge is reflected in the number of leaders who excel at work but have less satisfactory home lives, or those who prioritize “success” above health and suffer the consequences.

In Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, Stewart Friedman urges leaders to seek “four-way wins,” meaning high performance in the four domains of life: work, home, community, and self (mind, body, and spirit).  Achieving these wins creates “total leadership,” which in turns creates sustainable change to benefit the leader and the most important people around him or her.

Traditional “work/life balance” principles, which suggest that there’s one single point called balance and innumerable other points that are unbalanced.  That connotation is why I prefer the phrase integration to balance, and why I find Friedman’s approach to be so helpful.  By recognizing that our lives are more than “work” and “everything else,” Friedman opens the possibility that we don’t have to live on a see-saw.  Instead, we can find give-and-take among the domains, ideally finding activities or ways of being that serve all four.  Doesn’t that sound better than stealing time from work to serve life, or vice versa?

Scoring four-way wins is grounded in a clear view of what you want from and can contribute to each domain of your life, now and in the future.  Naturally, you must pay thoughtful consideration to the people who matter most to you in each domain (the “stakeholders”) and the expectations you have for one another.  Doing so raises the likelihood that you will take steps that serve not only yourself but also the stakeholders in each domain. Otherwise, you might end up with a brilliant plan that suits you perfectly but undermines or alienates colleagues, friends, and family members—or one that serves everyone in your life except yourself.

Having done this foundational work, the next step is to systematically design and implement carefully crafted experiments, doing something new for a short period to see how it affects all four domains.  If an experiment doesn’t work out, you stop or adjust, and little is lost.  If it does work out, it’s a small win; over time these add up so that your overall efforts are focused increasingly on what and who matter most.   Either way, you learn more about how to lead in all parts of your life.  The ROI that Friedman reports is truly impressive:

In a study over a four-month period of more than 300 business professionals (whose average age was about 35), their satisfaction increased by an average of 20% in their work lives, 28% in their home lives, and 31% in their community lives. Perhaps most significant, their satisfaction in the domain of the self – their physical and emotional health and their intellectual and spiritual growth – increased by 39%. But they also reported that their performance improved: at work (by 9%), at home (15%), in the community (12%), and personally (25%). Paradoxically, these gains were made even as participants spent less time on work and more on other aspects of their lives. They’re working smarter – and they’re more focused, passionate, and committed to what they’re doing.

Four-way wins tend to have direct impact in one domain of life and indirect impact in others.  For example, a commitment to working out three mornings a week directly benefits the leader’s “self” domain, with better health and reduced stress, and the work and home domains indirectly benefit as the leader focuses more effectively on matters at hand, has greater emotional stability, and is a better “partner,” whether to colleagues or family members.

Each individual will create his or her own unique experiment, but Friedman has identified nine general categories of worthwhile experiments:

• Tracking an activity and reflecting on progress toward a goal: increases self-awareness
• Planning and organizing: find ways to use time more effectively and plan for the future
• Appreciating and caring: building relationships
• Focusing and concentrating: being fully present to key stakeholders
• Revealing and engaging: enhanced communication and relationship-building
• Time shifting and “re-placing”: changing when and where work is done
• Delegating and developing: passing appropriate tasks to subordinates and assistants
• Exploring and venturing: taking steps to align the four domains of life with a leader’s core values and aspirations

As Friedman recommends, tracking the results of the experiment is critical, and tweaking an experiment as it proceeds will often increase the benefits.

What’s in it for lawyers?  Friedman’s approach is an evidence-based approach to help lawyers learn to make changes that will benefit all aspects of their lives.  Choosing no more than three experiments, measuring the results, and then deciding whether to continue the experiment removes the “high stakes” nature that so often tanks sweeping changes.  (For example, how often have you sworn “never” to do something again, only to find yourself doing the foresworn activity within the next few days?)  This excerpt encapsulates why I expect Friedman’s work will speak to lawyers:

The best experiments let you try something new while minimizing the inevitable risks associated with change. When the stakes are smaller, it’s easier to overcome the fear of failure that inhibits innovation.  You start to see results, and others take note, which both inspires you to go further and builds support from your key stakeholders.

If you’ve been looking for a workable work/life integration solution, pick up Friedman’s book.  You’ll find it a rational, sensible approach that will offer substantial directions toward a life you want to lead.

It’s hard to hear “no” when you’re working to increase your visibility through speaking or writing or when you’ve asked a potential client for new business. But as difficult as it is, you probably hear “no” on a regular basis. (In fact, if you don’t get turned down at least every now and again, you’re probably playing it too safe and not pursuing enough opportunities.) 

You’ve likely come up with some methods to handle the disappointment of the “no”…

But how do you handle it when you’ve made an overture and all you get back is silence? Do you assume rejection? Do you follow up, or follow up again, and how do you avoid becoming a pest? Do you take a new approach and see if that gets you further? Do you tuck tail and give up? Ugh—these are tough questions.

Was your overture interesting enough? Did you offer a juicy tidbit designed to pique interest? For example, rather than simply describing an article you’d like to write on some aspect of law, offer the same description plus a snappy tentative title.  If you’re requesting a meeting with someone, be sure you’re offering a good reason for your contact to give up the time to meet with you. Always seek to show explicitly or implicitly, what’s in it for your recipient.

• Was your request clear enough? Instead of asking for a short meeting, ask for a 15-minute meeting. Suggest a target length for the article you’re proposing. If you’re inviting someone to speak on a panel, suggest a couple of topics she might consider. Details yield specific thought, and you’re more likely to get a response if it’s clear what you want and why (and,as above, why it is in their interest to respond positively).
  

• Did you choose the right method of communication? Sometimes you’re stuck with a prescribed format (how to submit an article proposal, for example), but take the time to think it through when you have options. If you know the recipient, what mode of communication does he prefer? How likely is it that his email in-box is overflowing and yours simply got overlooked in the volume?
  

Prescriptive questions: What can you do now?

• Might you follow up to try again for a response? Follow-up is fairly easy when you have a somewhat close relationship with your contact or when your contact actually suggested you be in touch. Even without some previous connection, you can typically follow up once (and, depending on the circumstances, perhaps twice) even on a cold contact.
  
  If you’ve pinpointed a potential problem with the diagnostic questions, edit your request and try again. To avoid looking like a pest, give serious thought to calling if you’d previously emailed or vice versa. Pay attention to the way you phrase your follow-up: consider the difference in tone between “my email dated 5/1/15 may not have reached you” vs. “you may have overlooked my email dated 5/1/15.” Whatever you do, think pleasant, not pushy.
  

• Do you have some other reason to be in contact? Be careful with this approach, because it can backfire if you’re clearly manufacturing a reason to communicate with the person. However, if you have an article that they might find useful or if you bumped into a mutual acquaintance who shared some interesting information, pass that along with a gentle reminder about your initial request.

• Look for another route to that person. Especially if you’ve made a cold contact, look for a way to network into the connection. Check for mutual connections on LinkedIn, for example, or ask around in your firm or circle of acquaintances. Finding someone who can introduce you or promote your request can be an effective way to gain attention.

• Let time pass, then try again. When you can’t follow up again, make a note on your calendar to get back in touch in a few weeks or months. End-of year and summer holidays are often a good time to get back in touch with someone thanks to cultural expectations. You might also watch for an announcement or publication that affects your request or for some suggestion that your contact was involved in something time-consuming that may have prevented a response. One of my clients was frustrated by the lack of response from a distant friend until he discovered that the company in which the friend was an executive had just negotiated an agreement to purchase a competitor. That news both explained the silence and opened an opportunity to get back in touch.
  

Most importantly, don’t take silence personally. Chances are good that your contact was simply too busy to respond to you. Even if the silence was intentional, the lack of an explicit rejection leaves the door at least cracked for a future attempt at communication.

How often do you think about what you’re doing? Probably more often than you should.

Consider this quote:

When it comes to business development (and practice in general), building good habits will help you to accomplish the tasks you want more consistently. For example, if you make it a habit to connect with a new contact on LinkedIn and to send a “nice to meet you” note, then to update your contact management system and calendar a keep-in-touch schedule, you’ll never let a great new connection slip through your fingers. If you routinely enter your time at the end of each day, you’ll never have to spend an entire morning (or more) to recreate your records at the end of the month.

Where might you incorporate habit? If you struggle to establish new habits, enter your name and primary email address here to receive an immediate download of the book review for Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit.

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When do you share your best ideas? BTI Consulting, a group known for its deep research in client satisfaction and preferences, reports that:

“[j]ust over 2/3 of clients tell us the best new ideas they see coming from law firms happen during an RFP process. Somewhere among the sea of bland boilerplate submissions lies one scintillating idea, suggestion or nugget. One firm invested the time and energy to simply blow their potential client away.”

Being the firm that came up with an amazing nugget is great, but as the BTI article continues, “why wait until an RFP to strut your stuff?” RFPs may be a necessary part of business, but preserving—and perhaps expanding—client relationships is critical to a prosperous practice.  (The article is directed to large firms, but the principles adhere to small firms as well.)

Read the article for a suggestion on how you can do better by proactively sharing your best ideas with your best clients. In the meantime, ask yourself…

• How often do you offer the “scintillating idea, suggestion or nugget” in an RFP? How can you increase the frequency?

• How often do you proactively bring a fresh idea, insight, or approach to your clients? The BTI article focuses on corporate counsel, but regardless of your practice area, you must spend time thinking about what will make things better for your clients. For example, a litigator might recognize a trend in litigation and offer that to clients to help them avoid unnecessary suits.

If you tend not to have repeat business from core clients, identify your ideal client profile and ask what would blow that kind of client away. In other words, is there a new process or resource that would be incredibly helpful?

• More globally, what do you do when you’re trying to win business that you might do to strengthen the relationship with your current clients? Building a relationship with a current client will, in general, deliver much better results than trying to land a new client. (That doesn’t mean you need not pursue new business, though.)

Offering something eye-catching in an RFP is good, but bringing the nugget to a current client is even better. Read the BTI Consulting article, then apply it.