Archive for category: Coaching for lawyers

One of the most interesting things about having a book is watching the sales.  A few weeks ago, I saw that sales had almost increased by a factor of five for the month of December for my book The Reluctant Rainmaker.

You’d think I’d be happy. If the sales had quintupled in April or August, I would have been ecstatic!

Sadly, I’d be willing to bet that many of the people who purchased marketing books in December bought because they’d resolved to learn about business development in 2011 and finally, finally build the business they knew they could. Now that we’re ten weeks into the new  year, how many of those books do you suppose are sitting unread on a bookshelf?

Imagine Larry the lawyer who goes through an end-of-the-year review (formal or otherwise) and decides that he’s got to get his act in gear.  He’s got to bring in more business, or 2011 is going to look as bleak as 2010 did.  So he buys a book in mid-December.  But December means year-end billing and collections, not to mention the holidays and all the requisite family activities.  Despite his good intentions, Larry just doesn’t have time to read the book, and he certainly doesn’t have time to make a plan.

January 31 rolls around and Larry still hasn’t found the time for business development planning.  So, what’s changed in his practice?  Nothing.  Neither the new year nor the resolutions he made nor the book he bought (but didn’t finish reading) made a bit of difference. But Larry’s determined.  February 1 is a fresh start, or there’s always Chinese New Year.  Where’s Larry headed?  Nowhere good, though he has the best of intentions.

January 1 isn’t a magic date. Starting a project at the beginning of the year doesn’t portend success any more than beginning a diet on Monday.  If you resolved to intensify your business development efforts this year and you haven’t hit your goals, yet, here’s some good news:  I tend to see more success and more investment from clients who dig into rainmaking activity on a random date — March 10 or May 16 or June 4 — than I do from those who wait until the new year to get started.

I’ve heard from a number of lawyers who’ve been beating themselves up because they had high hopes for 2011 and haven’t yet hit their stride for the year.  And here’s what I’ve told them:  start today.  Don’t wait for tomorrow or Monday, or for the start of the next quarter.  If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing now.

Decision time:  what have you been putting off?  Make a plan and get it done today; if not today, get it done this week.

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time Paperback
January 6, 2004
by Susan Scott

Have you ever been in one of those deadly conversations in which a lot of words fly about and yet nothing happens? Or when decisions are made and strategies are crafted, but everyone sitting around the table knows that nothing will actually change because everyone is talking around the real problem?  What a waste of time!

What’s even worse is when the dead-end conversation is one going on inside your own head. We can spend hours and years dancing around an issue, solving symptoms or even just pretending that we’re addressing the right question when in fact we’re skipping what matters most.  When you’re dwelling in the land of the unreal, even a minute is too long to spend.

Fierce Conversations revolves around the “Mineral Rights conversation.” This simple 7-step process can be used to get to the truth of a situation, create understanding about it, tackle the challenges in the situation, and enrich relationships in the process.  The seven steps (with some sample questions) are:

1. Identify the most pressing issue.
   What issue doe we most need to resolve?
2. Clarify the issue.
   What is going on?
   How long has it been going on?
3. Determine the current impact.
   How is this situation impact me and others?
   What do I feel about this impact?
4. Determine the future implications.
   What’s likely to happen if nothing changes?
   What’s at stake in this situation, for myself and others?
5. Examine your contribution to this issue.
   How have I contributed to this problem?
6. Describe the ideal outcome.
   What difference will it make to resolve this problem?
   What results will resolution create, for myself and others?
7. Commit to action.
   What’s the most potent step I could take to move this issue toward resolution?
   What’s going to attempt to get in my way, and how will I get past it?
   When will I take this step?

The critical tactic to make a Mineral Rights conversation a success is to ask questions and not to comment on the answers until you’ve completed step 7. The reason is simple:  your goal is to interrogate (gently but fiercely — meaning powerfully, robustly, eagerly), to understand, and to assist in finding a solution.  This is your opportunity to listen and to provide uninterrupted attention, not to speak.  If your input is needed, you can provide it later.

And, as the author writes, allow silence to do the heavy lifting. We’re often quick to fill a gap in conversation, whether from desire to show how much we know or to avoid uncomfortable silence.  Don’t do it.  Silence creates the opportunity to reflect on the situation — on the cause rather than the effect — and to appreciate its scope.  Reflection often yields new understanding that leads to action.

Incidentally, from the perspective of business development, silence can be one of the most effective tools you can use. Of course you need to bring information and ideas to the table, but after you speak, allow them to hang long enough for your potential client to have the space to consider what you’ve said.

Imagine having a Mineral Rights conversation with a client, or having a modified version of it with a potential client. Imagine having it with colleagues representing a client with you, with staff, or even with your family.  Take a step today and answer this question:  What’s the most pressing challenge you need to resolve?  If it’s a situation that requires input from others, with whom should you have the conversation?

Fierce Conversations also includes other tools, including an exceptionally useful model for determining decision-making authority, which I previously described on the Life at the Bar Blog.  Please click here to read that post.

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
by Seth Godin

Seth Godin is a brilliant thinker who packs a lot in just a few words. Read his blog posts, and I almost guarantee he’ll reveal something fresh as a return on just a couple minutes of your time.  The Dip is no different:  in 76 pages — small pages, at that — he delivers insight that can change how you approach your goals

The idea behind The Dip is that there’s an initial reward for most anything you start.  You could call it excitement, beginner’s luck, or just the early, steep part of the learning curve.  But then there’s a long slog between beginning and mastery.  This is the dip, and most people never see the other side of it.  The few who persevere through the dip reach mastery, and our world rewards mystery because mastery is scarce.

Godin also describes the Cul-de-Sac, which represents the dead end projects, jobs, relationships, and so on.  You may make sideways moves or small advances, but no breakthrough is possible.  Instead of a blow-out success, the pinnacle of a cul-de-sac is mediocrity. Things won’t get much better or much worse.  If you’re in a cul-de-sac, you’re stuck.  No matter how diligently you work at it, there’s no significant upside.  Hello, status quo.

Godin argues that you must quit when you’re in a cul-de-sac so that you have sufficient resources to power through the dip. While we often regard diversification as a sensible approach, we become mediocre in a number of areas and excellent in none.  But mediocrity will never deliver the results you want.

So, how do you distinguish the cul-de-sac from the dip, and how do you know when to quit? When you consider quitting, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Are you panicking? If so, wait.  Don’t allow your panic to prompt you to quit.  If you quit, you must decide to quit.
2. Who are you trying to influence? If you’re trying to influence a single person, you have only a few opportunities to succeed.  If you’re trying to influence a market, Godin argues, you can build your success slowly, since every success gets you more traction.
3. What sort of measurable progress are you making? Look for milestones that show forward progress.  If you see none, or if you see that you’re actually backsliding, then it may be time to quit.

What’s in The Dip for lawyers? If you’ve ever heard me talk about business development tactics, you may have heard me urge you to identify your strengths and to improve those.  If you’re a natural speaker, speak.  If you’re a natural at building one-on-one relationships, do that.  That’s because you can put in energy in areas of natural skill (get through the dip, in other words) and become excellent at that skill, whereas putting in the same energy to shore up a weak skill will get you only to mediocrity.  That’s only one application, but it’s a critical one.

Since reading The Dip, I’ve taken a look at where I’m spending my time. Quitting isn’t easy  (especially for those of us who’ve always been encouraged to persist no matter what) but the payoff in energy to invest elsewhere makes that discomfort worthwhile.

Pick up a copy of The Dip.  It’ll take about an hour to read, but that hour can save you many hours that you would otherwise invest in activity that lacks the payoff.  It’s great investment.

I saw The King’s Speech on New Year’s Day. You’ll probably see the movie (about the efforts by King George VI, informally known as Bertie, to overcome a stutter around the time he ascended the throne following the abdication of his brother, King Edward VIII, who left to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson) described as one about stuttering, about royalty, about friendship, about conflicting and social status.  It’s all of that and, to this Anglophile, more besides — a must-see that’s apparently the front runner for multiple Oscars.

But beneath all of that, deeper lessons become apparent. Here are the top three that struck me.

Masks tend to reveal as much as they cover. In other words, if you pretend to be that which you aren’t, cracks will show.  Perhaps the real you won’t leak through the cracks, but fault lines will reveal all that is not as it appears to be.  Bertie’s speech therapist Lionel Logue opined that no child is born with a stutter and that a left-handed child forced to write with his right hand will never find that motion to be natural.

From the business angle… so what? I’ve had the opportunity to coach professionals who feel they must wear a mask to work with colleagues or to attract clients.  The “lucky” ones are unsuccessful, which prompts then to re-evaluate; lucky and unlucky alike are miserable.

Who are you in your business, or in your practice? As Bob Burg has written, “All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they know, like and trust.”  People are sensitive to hints of in-authenticity and tend not to trust those who wear masks.  So, really, it’s often your choice:  would you prefer to lose some business because people sense you are not the person you’re pretending to be, or would you prefer to lose some business because you are who you are, knowing full well that others will be drawn to you because you are that person?

Breaking the rules may be precisely the thing that propels you forward. In The King’s Speech, one of Bertie’s breakthroughs comes with the freedom granted when Logue urges him to curse.  Bertie, a straight-laced royal, soon lets the expletives rip.  I won’t spoil the movie for those who haven’t seen it, but letting loose plays a role later in the movie in an amusing way.

Some rules must not be broken – but those who are successful often find certain rules that don’t work for them, and shattering those restrictions also shatters the glass ceiling. What rules are holding you back?  Are they truly non-negotiable?  If you could break them, how would you do it?  And, most importantly, for the sake of what?  Don’t go breaking rules just to break them.

Opportunities may arise in the form of problems or defeat.  Take them anyway. Bertie was never supposed to be king.  His wife (the woman most of us knew as the Queen Mother) never wanted to be queen.  And yet, when King Edward VIII abdicated, Bertie and Queen Elizabeth stepped up at a crucial time in British history.  Bertie found his voice because he had to work for it.  England would likely have come through World War II and the Blitz regardless, but to hear English citizens of those years talk, the leadership shown by the “shouldn’t-have-been-royals” shaped the courage and determination of a generation.  Bertie did what was necessary to stand as a leader; his country modeled what he did.

What opportunities are in front of you?  Which have come in the guise of defeat? Perhaps you made a proposal to a potential client and lost.  What will you do?  One of my clients asked why, received valuable feedback, and proceeded to convert the prospect into a client within a matter of days for a parallel project created solely because the prospect wanted to work with her.  Perhaps you launched a program or a product and no one bought.  What opportunity can you spy when you take your eye off the failure?

I read a Forbes article about WikiLeaks last week while waiting for a delayed flight. The release of diplomatic cables has caused much embarrassment, both because of unpalatable (though apparently legal) directives and thanks to candid assessments of diplomats and leaders in other countries.

WikiLeaks is transforming the era of transparency in operations to one of forced transparency, and that got me thinking. Back when I was practicing law, I often heard friends and colleagues complaining about their clients.  “Business would be great if it weren’t for the clients!”

Some complaints were good-natured; others were real complaints about overly demanding, rude, difficult clients. I hear similar complaints at times from my clients now.

We’ve all heard the anecdotes about service providers who’ve complained about their clients on Facebook, and that’s just stupid. That’s a self-inflicted wound.  I honestly find it a little tough to feel bad for someone who doesn’t know not to whine about clients (or just about anyone else, really) on the Internet.  But you don’t do that… Right?

But imagine if someone intercepted a handwritten note attached to a file, “Mr. Z is being obnoxious about the bill again — pls call him.” (Insert your own complaint here.)  And I started thinking (as you should), what if Wiki leaked that?  The chances are remote at best, that private communications within a small organization would ever be viewed outside that organization… But what if it happened?

Here’s the real issue:  what we say tends to take on a certain power and truth in our thoughts and is expressed in our actions. I don’t mean that in some touchy-feely, weird way.  Think about this:  if you get all incensed thinking about how Client X is always calling to ask questions you’ve already answered and then Client X calls you again, aren’t you more likely to be frustrated with that call?

Professionals don’t allow that frustration to show, but when words, thoughts, and actions are all aligned, a belief is solidified. And when a belief exists, we tend to selectively see evidence that supports that belief.  We don’t intend to, necessarily, but we tend to see what we expect to see.  That, in turn, can create a self-perpetuating cycle of dissatisfaction.

Consider how you usually think and talk about your clients. Do you enjoy the people who engage you?  If not, ask yourself why.

• Perhaps you’ve elected to ignore warning signs that a potential client will be difficult. The truth is, difficult clients do exist, and they can lead to headaches and even ethical or legal complaints against you.  Learn the signs of a difficult client so you can make a conscious decision about whether you want to work with a particular person, and consider that a difficult client can cost far more than the income he or she may bring.
• Perhaps you’re working harder than you’d like or with fewer resources than you’d like, and stress is showing up as frustration with clients. If this is the case, figure it out and fix the problem.  Now.  You’ll be happier, your clients will likely be happier, and you’ll probably do better.
• Perhaps you’ve simply fallen into a habit. It’s sometimes easy to be negative.  If you notice that you’ve dropped into a destructive view of your clients or your practice, call a time-out and focus on why you do what you do.  Especially in a period of prolonged stress (as we’ve experienced in this long recession), you may need to reconnect with your purpose more frequently.

Check your words and thoughts about your clients. There’s no doubt that clients can be frustrating, simply because human beings can be frustrating.  But your success, and your clients’ success in your work together, depends on your ability to address your frustration when it’s well-placed and to set it aside when it isn’t well-placed.

So, the next time you catch yourself grousing about a client, ask yourself:  What if WikiLeaks leaked that?