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The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them And People Will Follow You
by John C. Maxwell
The subtitle of Maxwell’s book is “Follow Them, and People Will Follow You.” Each time I read that line, I hear a rejoinder in my head: “Don’t follow them, and people won’t follow you.” Revised and updated in 2007 for the 10th anniversary of The 21 Irrefutable Laws, this book is rightly regarded as a foundational piece of the leadership literature.
As the title indicates, Maxwell presents 21 laws of leadership, all of which are free-standing and yet buttressed by one another. You can learn quite a bit simply by reviewing the 21 laws with Maxwell’s brief explanation of each:
My favorite law, the umbrella under which all of the other laws fall, is the Law of Process. Leadership can’t be developed in a day or a week. Instead, it grows and becomes refined through a lifetime of self-management, skills acquisition, and relationships:
If you continually invest in your leadership development, letting your ‘assets’ compound, the inevitable result is growth over time. What can you see when you look at a person’s daily agenda? Priorities, passion, abilities, relationships, attitude, personal disciplines, vision, and influence. See what a person is doing every day, day after day, and you’ll know who that person is and what he or she is becoming.
Often, when I speak to newer lawyers about leadership development, someone in the group will ask why a new graduate in the first few years of practice should be concerned with leadership development, since they’re at the bottom of the totem pole. My answer is three-fold.
First, it’s critical for every lawyer to lead him- or herself and to develop a strong foundation in self-management.
Second, usually even “bottom of the totem pole” lawyers soon have an opportunity to lead something, whether it’s a document review team or a subcommittee.
And third, as Maxwell writes, “champions don’t become champions in the ring — they are merely recognized there.” If a lawyer waits until a leadership position is on the horizon to begin developing good leadership skills, the position may never present itself, or if it does, the lawyer will lack the necessary skills to thrive in that position. (Incidentally, point 3 is well illustrated in Maxwell’s first law, the Law of the Lid.)
What’s in it for lawyers? Although each of The 21 Irrefutable Laws is important for leadership development, perhaps none speaks to the profession in quite the same way as the Law of Explosive Growth. That law holds that leaders who develop leaders create an organization that can achieve explosive growth, since “for every leader they develop, they also receive the value of all of that leader’s followers.” Imagine the potential for enormous and sustainable growth in a law firm in which leaders are developed.
Read one chapter a week and apply what you learn. Without question, you will grow as a leader, and you’ll see the difference in your day-to-day life and practice, with clients, and in whatever leadership roles you may hold.
I burn my candle at both ends
It will not last the night.
But ah my foes and oh my friends
It gives a lovely light.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
What do you think when you read this? If you’re like many lawyers, you felt a flutter of recognition — perhaps just before you recoiled at the idea that, perhaps your candle won’t “last the night.” It’s just the weak who can’t burn and burn and burn, right?
Sustainability isn’t an exciting word, and most of us don’t see it as something to aim for. After all, we tend to want bigger and better and more, not homeostasis. What does it mean, though, to have a “sustainable practice?”
According to Merriam-Webster, “to sustain” means (among other things) “to supply with sustenance: nourish” and “to keep up, prolong.” And sustainable means, of course, “capable of being sustained” or “of or relating to a lifestyle involving the use of sustainable methods.”
How do you nourish your practice? How does your lifestyle support you in keeping up and prolonging your ability to work effectively? My clients have experimented with many different approaches, and the list that follows recounts some of the most successful.
Set aside time to check your progress on these and other habits that support you and your practice. Because it’s easy to get sucked into a hectic schedule (with your candle burning not only at both ends but in the middle, too), arrange a relationship that will hold you accountable to whatever adjustments you may decide to make. Consider whether coaching might be the appropriate relationship.
Through years of school and various jobs and activities, we’ve learned how to persist even in the face of difficulties. Persistence is an important trait, since (in the words of one of my current favorite songs) “what’s worth the prize is always worth the fight.” No fight may mean no prize, and we’ve integrated that lesson in our professional lives. (Think back to law school, and I virtually guarantee you’ll remember at least one class that would have stopped you cold had you not been committed to fighting your way through.)
An opposing principle is the concept of diminishing returns, in which additional effort doesn’t produce additional results proportional to that effort. For example, when you draft a memorandum for a client, the first and second drafts are generally critical to the end result. By the time you get to the fifth or fifteenth or fiftieth draft (depending on the complexity of the matter at hand), you’re making only small changes and word-smithing. A single word can occasionally affect the impact of an entire document, so experience is often required to know when you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns.
When it comes to business development, diminishing or even nonexistent returns may be difficult to see without qualitative or quantitative feedback. For example, publishing a substantive article almost always represents a significant advancement because it adds to your credibility in your practice area. However, it’s unlikely that a single article will result in a flood of new business, and it is possible that even a string of articles may not produce new billable work if the articles aren’t well targeted or if there’s no reason for readers to reach out to you. When should you keep publishing, and when should you move on to something else, at least for a time?
The Groundhog Day problem is this: how do you distinguish between activities that aren’t producing results yet and activities that are unlikely ever to produce the results you seek? We all know that time may be required to show results, so we don’t expect every activity to yield new results right away. But you have to know when to keep going and when to shift activities, or you can keep on working harder and harder at something, only to discover that all your effort has produced nothing.
Keeping track of the rainmaking activities you’re doing and the results you’re attaining is the only way you’ll know when to keep going and when to shift courses. Set clear and concrete goals for your rainmaking activity. Specific and time-based goals are helpful for measuring progress and staying on track. Examples include, “my goal is to bring in $35,000 of new collaborative divorce business within the next 12 months,” or “my goal is to develop a $75,000 book of business made up of personal injury cases each with a value of $15,000 to $20,000.” These goals provide a measuring stick for your progress, but you shouldn’t measure your success exclusively by the amount of business you bring in.
Landing new business is your ultimate goal and the reason for undertaking rainmaking activity, but you must also track interim goals. Imagine that you hadn’t run at all since high school and you decided to train to run a marathon. You almost certainly wouldn’t make that decision and then lace up your running shoes to run 26 miles right off the bat! Instead, you’d set smaller goals. Maybe running two or three miles, or even running for 20 minutes. As you achieve those goals, you’ll also notice additional accomplishments along the way, such as not being sore the day after a long run when in the beginning of your training you could hardly walk the next day. Tracking those smaller goals helps you know that you’re making progress toward the ultimate goal of running a marathon even though you aren’t yet running the full 26 miles. The same principles apply for tracking your business development efforts.
For example, let’s suppose you have a relationship with someone who was employed by a client company several years ago, that she has moved to a new company, and that she’s now in a position to recommend outside counsel but does not have authority to hire. If you measure success with that contact based solely on getting business from her, you will likely find yourself discouraged.
But you could instead measure the interim steps that move you closer to getting business from her. A few examples of those interim steps might be getting introduced to the person responsible for making decisions, getting your contact’s feedback on what she thinks it would take for you to be awarded business, being invited to make a presentation to the company or a department on a subject related to the legal matters you hope to handle, and so on.
None of these steps is the same as getting the billable work, of course, but they measure progress. If you notice that you’re working to grow the relationship with your contact over a period of months and years and you aren’t getting any business from it, you need to look at these kinds of interim steps to see whether there’s any progress or whether you should perhaps conclude that this contact is not as hot a prospect for new business as you had believed. Tracking the interim progress and measuring it against your ultimate goal is how to avoid the insanity of continuing to plug away at activity that won’t ever produce results.
In other words, watch the ultimate goals of getting new business, but keep your eyes on the interim steps as well to be sure that you’re progressing toward that ultimate goal. If you don’t see progress that is actually moving you closer to bringing in new business, then it’s time to ask yourself: Is it Groundhog Day again?
Last year was incredibly busy for me, first with writing The Reluctant Rainmaker and then with designing programs like the Lawyers Business Development Bootcamp, plus working with many 1-on-1 clients. It was a great year, but toward the fall I started to notice that I’ve met very few of my clients and newsletter readers in person over the last year. That has to change. And so, as I’ve been hinting, I’ve been laying plans for something new.
While it would be great fun to meet you in a social setting, I know we’re often too busy to set aside time just to chat. So, I created a 1-day workshop that I’m calling Effective Business Development Made Simple. In this highly interactive program, you’ll learn my 7-step Legal Rainmaker System, which will show you the steps you need to take to bring in the new business you need, and you’ll work on creating your own plans so you’ll have a roadmap to take back to the office with you. And then we’ll close the day with good conversation and refreshments at a reception. Presto – an opportunity to learn something that has the power to transform your practice, plus an opportunity to meet!
And, I’ve heard those of you who’ve been telling me that this economy has put a crimp in your budget: the workshop will be priced under $100 for the entire day!
Finally, I realize that it would be difficult for many of you to travel all the way to my Atlanta home base. That means it’s time for one of my favorite activities… A road trip! Effective Business Development Made Simple will be coming to TEN cities across the country. Here’s the list:
I’m excited beyond belief at the prospect of meeting many of you and sharing the step-by-step process that will make your rainmaking efforts simple and highly effective! I’ll be announcing all of the details, including dates and exact locations, next week… So keep your eyes open.
Do you ever feel that you’re just one lawyer in a large sea of others? New lawyers often begin their practices wondering how to distinguish themselves from the hundreds or thousands of other lawyers occupying the same niche. And lawyers who’ve been in practice for some time may have the same nagging question. Though the question may fade, it frequently re-emerges when a lawyer is preparing to grow her practice or is considering some shift in substantive areas.
Differentiation from other lawyers and law firms is useful in marketing and business development conversations. So, how can you differentiate yourself?
While the options are potentially limitless, three examples may help you to create your own ideas.
Be clear about what makes you different. If you want to differentiate yourself from other practitioners, it’s imperative to connect with an internal compass that will point to what does indeed make you different. If you don’t know what that is, you won’t be able to convince anyone else.
Tactical Transparency
By Shel Holtz and John C. Havens
I recently noticed a new television commercial for Domino’s Pizza, in which the company lays bare the perception that its pizza is bland and then describes new changes to the recipe, closing with an invitation to try the new Domino’s. That’s some transparency. But in today’s world, dominated as it is by social media, no company could credibly pretend to be unaware of discussions about it.
We’ve probably all seen the emails, watched the videos, or heard the audios in which a clueless or uncaring company drives a customer to fury — fury that produces a social media backlash. In the old days, we’d have been limited to telling a few friends (studies show that on average we tell seven others about negative experiences and tell only three others about positive ones), and they’d tell a few friends, and the word would get out…Slowly, and in limited distribution. Today, though, as Tactical Transparency describes, feedback can spread like wildfire, and corporations’ only choice is how to handle that feedback.
Tactical Transparency opens with one story about Sony’s having launched a blog purportedly written by a boy named Charlie who wanted to help his friend Jeremy get a PSP for Christmas. Readers quickly discovered that the blog was the creation of a marketing agency and lambasted it as lame and offensive, though Sony denied the deception until it finally had to own up to it. A second story describes a blogger who wrote a series of posts describing his problems with Dell’s computer service and technical support. His odyssey was followed by hundreds and Dell’s reputation (and stock price) suffered, until Dell saw the light and launched its own blog, Direct2Dell, which talked openly about problems and worked to resolve them. Unlike Sony, Dell’s reputation improved as a result.
The message: people – your customers and clients and those considering doing business with you will talk, and you’d better listen and respond. Though the facts are considerably different, this message is illustrated in the legal community through the many blog sites and posts that tracked layoffs last year and accused firms of conducting “stealth layoffs.” It’s continuing now in discussions about which firms are cutting salaries and how much. There’s been much speculation that some firms will be impacted by reduced loyalty from lawyers who watched colleagues sent packing and from law students who take the lessons of the last two years as an indication that they’d better keep their options open and trust nothing. And it goes both ways, as witnessed by lawyers and summer associates who’ve left their own career-tanking tracks in unflattering emails that can be sent around the world with just a few clicks.
The authors of Tactical Transparency suggest that the new reality of transparency has arisen thanks to the twin trends of declining trust in “business as usual” and the rising public scrutiny of business due to social media. Tactical Transparency goes to the heart of the matter, examining the practical steps a business can take to be “sincerely but prudently” transparent with its stakeholders about its leaders; its employees; its values; its culture; the results of its business practices; and its business strategy. The authors identify four characteristics of transparency, which may be applied in varying degrees to meet varying needs: Objectivity, Purpose, Esteem (for your stakeholders and your customers), and Navigation, which neatly form the acronym OPEN.
Tactical Transparency discusses transparency in a variety of contexts, many of which are aplicable to lawyers, but I’d highlight one as being particularly critical: relationship orientation. In other words, at least in part due to the rise of social media, business must look at the clients or customers in the context of relationships rather than one-off transactions. This is certainly a key concept for lawyers whose clients may have more than one legal need that they (or their firms) might meet. Tactical Transparency recommends seven steps to design relationship-focused marketing:
Although the key lesson I draw from Tactical Transparency has to do with business development, the book is wide-ranging in its discussion of social media and its applicability to business. If you participate in any kind of social media or if you’re considering stepping into the world of social media, this book will provide plenty of brain candy as you think about building your reputation with new social platforms.
One of the top concerns for most lawyers is time management. We all have so much to accomplish in so little time, and it often seems that we’re always trying to cram more activities (whether professional or personal) into the non-negotiable 168 hours we have each week. Most of my coaching clients bring time management issues to the table at some point, and time pressures are largely responsible for the high levels of stress that many lawyers face.
One distinction, “urgent” versus “important,” can form the basis for effective time management. Urgent vs. important is a simple distinction that applies equally to the substance of a lawyer’s work as well as to practice or career management. Stephen Covey has written about time use and devised a four-quadrant chart to help us judge where we spend most of our time:
QUADRANT I
Urgent and Important: Crises, pproblems, deadline-driven projects. Preparing for a client meeting that will occur in a few hours is a Quadrant I activity. Hallmarks of Quandrant I activity include intense focus, high stress, and limited opportunity for review and reflection.
QUADRANT II
Not Urgent, but Important: Preparation, problem prevention, planning, relationship building, values clarification, true recreation (“re-creation”). Preparing for a client meeting that will occur in several days is a Quadrant II activity. When you’re operating in Quadrant II, you’ll likely be focused (because your task is important) but you’ll feel less pressure and you’ll have more opportunity to consider all aspects of what you’re doing simply because you’re not staring down the barrel of a deadline.
QUADRANT III
Urgent, but Not Important: Interruptions, some phone calls, some meetings, some email. When you’re forced to deal with something that’s not especially important at a certain time, you’re in Quadrant III.
QUADRANT IV
Not Urgent, Not Important: Junk mail, spam, busywork, trivia, “escape” activities, mindless web surfing, etc. We all spend time in Quadrant IV, but spending time on those activities produces little or no meaningful results because the activities by definition are not meaningful.
Where do you spend most of your time? While it’s undeniable that Quadrant I requires attention and Quadrant III calls for attention (though the call may be illusory), Quandrant II is the critical zone. That’s where the real work occurs that truly moves us forward.
Clients appreciate lawyers who work in Quadrant II. All too often, lawyers send important documents to their clients and request a fast response. That’s disrespectful of the client’s time. It creates the impression that the lawyer simply couldn’t get his or her act together in time to plan in advance and complete the work early enough to allow the client time for meaninful review. Clients appreciate lawyers who handle matters during an emergency, but they tend to resent those who act as if every event is an emergency. Living in Quadrant II will increase the quality of your client service.
I worked with a client I’ll call Sheri, who was having a great deal of trouble getting everything done that she needed to in the office. She found herself staying at the office later and later, then going in earlier and earlier, and before long she was exhausted and angry that her personal life had disappeared. We started with the urgent/important distinction and looked at the kinds of tasks on her “to do” list through that lens.
After our first conversation, Sheri cut Quadrant IV activities completely and worked to get better at identifying Quadrant III activities so she could eliminate as many of those as possible. And then she looked at the Quadrant I tasks she’d listed to see whether any could be delegated or otherwise handled. And then our focus shifted to Quadrant II.
Sheri developed a schedule that guaranteed her planning and strategizing time (pure Quadrant II activities) and found that by spending time on those tasks, she was able to prevent problems and facilitate the orderly accomplishment of important aims. Her stress level decreased, as did the number of hours she had to spend putting out fires. Most importantly, when she did have to put out a fire, it was a real emergency, not a self-created one.
Your assignment for the week: look at how you spend your time. Review this week’s task list and mark every item according to its quadrant. If they’re all Quadrant I, you have plenty of room for improvement. And then, take a moment at the end of each day to look back at how you actually spent the day. Did you spend 30 minutes looking for a file or other document? Did you spend so much time sending “one quick email” that you didn’t even get to your top five tasks for the day?
Leaders are often depicted as resolute, visionary, motivational, intent on reminding followers to get with the program or get off the team. And we’ve all heard that it’s lonely at the top. No question that leaders may be called on to make difficult decisions and to demand compliance with those decisions. To fail to do so would, at times, be an unforgiveable dereliction of duty.
Servant-leadership, which may incorporate similar traits and approaches, operates from the perspective of leading for the best interest of the people or organization being led. Robert Greenleaf coined the term in a 1970 essay that drew a picture of a different kind of leader:
The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions… The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.
The different manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?
M. Scott Peck wrote, “Servant Leadership is more than a concept. As far as I am concerned, it is a fact. I would simply define it by saying that any great leader, by which I also mean an ethical leader of any group, will see herself or himself primarily as a servant of that group and will act accordingly.”
Consider what it might mean for a lawyer to consider him- or herself a servant of the group he or she is leading. It’s a natural model for client relationships, since an attorney is ethically bound to serve a client’s interest (within appropriate boundaries) and to conduct an engagement not by asking what’s best for the lawyer or the firm, but what’s best for the client.
What about the law firms? Imagine law firm leadership determined to serve the firm. Partners might be more inclined to mentor more junior lawyers, to grow them not only in substantive lawyering skills but also as ethical, civil professionals, viewing the activity as an investment in the firm’s future. Rather than cutting associates when the economy dips as a way to protect the firm’s income (and the much-reported profits per partner), firm leaders might elect to put the economic burden on those who might best afford it — the partners, particularly those who earn jumbo partnership draws. The culture would likely value “we” over “me.”
Before you conclude that such an approach would be too “soft” to survive, consider the leadership that would be required to enforce the policies. I suspect that any leader would require a backbone of steel to invite a major rainmaker to leave the firm rather than to allow the rainmaker to put his or her own interests ahead of that of the firm as a whole. Difficult decisions remain to be made and implemented. Servant-leadership is not by any means weak leadership.
How might a firm run under a servant-leadership approach differ from one run with a “me first” mentality? What do you suppose would happen to associate attrition? How do you imagine associates who did choose to leave such a firm would regard the firm? Would the firm be more or less stable? Would clients notice a difference? What’s the downside?
For reflection: how would you change your leadership (of self or of others) if your focus were on serving those you lead?
It’s the time of year for holiday specials, and last night’s offering was Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town. And while I enjoyed the story and the theme, I was dumbfounded when I realized that there’s a bit of a link between Santa and client development! If you remember the lyrics to the song, you’ll know that Santa is “making a list and checking it twice, [and] he’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice.” And we all know that Santa doesn’t reward the naughty.
Do you reward naughty potential clients by letting them hire you? Just about every lawyer has had the truly awful client: one who doesn’t pay or pays so slowly that the process is agonizing, one who blocks your efforts to get information you need to handle the representation, one who’s routinely rude or unduly demanding or critical, and so on. Unfortunately, naughty clients come in a lot of flavors. The good news is that you can avoid many of them if you know what to watch for during your initial conversations. A few red flags:
None of these red flags necessarily means that you shouldn’t accept the matter, but if one arises, you need to listen carefully to what is and isn’t said and to pay attention to non-verbal communication. And trust your gut.