Archive for category: Coaching for lawyers

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:

1. The Law of the Lid:  Leadership Ability Determines A Person’s Level of Effectiveness
2. The Law of Influence:  The True Measure of Leadership Is Influence — Nothing More, Nothing Less
3. The Law of Process:  Leadership Develops Daily, Not In A Day
4. The Law of Navigation:  Anyone Can Steer The Ship, But It Takes A Leader To Change The Course
5. The Law of Addition:  Leaders Add Value By Serving Others
6. The Law of Solid Ground:  Trust Is The Foundation of Leadership
7. The Law of Respect:  People Naturally Follow Leaders Stronger Than Themselves
8. The Law of Intuition:  Leaders Evaluate Everything With A Leadership Bias
9. The Law of Magnetism:  Who You Are Is Who You Attract
10. The Law of Connection:  Leaders Touch A Heart Before They Ask For A Hand
11. The Law of the Inner Circle:  A Leader’s Potential Is Determined By Those Closest To Him
12. The Law of Empowerment:  Only Secure Leaders Give Power To Others
13. The Law of the Picture:  People Do What People See
14. The Law of Buy-In:  People Buy Into The Leader, Then The Vision
15. The Law of Victory:  Leaders Find A Way For The Team To Win
16. The Law of the Big Mo:  Momentum Is A Leader’s Best Friend
17. The Law of Priorities:  Leaders Understand That Activity Is Not Necessarily Accomplishment
18. The Law of Sacrifice:  A Leader Must Give Up to Go Up
19. The Law of Timing:  When To Lead Is As Important As What To Do And Where To Go
20. The Law of Explosive Growth:  To Add Growth, Lead Followers — To Multiply, Lead Leaders
21. The Law of Legacy:  A Leader’s Lasting Value Is Measured By Succession

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.

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?

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:

1. Get specific.  Make sure your comments connect with this potential client and ensure that you understand his or her specific situation.
2. Make small talk big.  Lawyers sometimes wonder how much to ask in the context of growing a relationship.  Small talk is the starting point.
3. Make your pitch interactive.  Don’t tell a potential client how you’ll solve the problem.  Have a conversation about possible approaches and solicit input.
4. Give a call to action.  This is marketing language for requesting a next step, and it can be as simple as offering to sit down and discuss how some event or legal development might impact your potential client’s situation and how you might help.
5. Write down a connection point.  The authors suggest that you demonstrate that you listened and tried to help with something not directly connected to a sale.  If that’s not applicable (because sometimes your conversations will be quite sharply focused on the legal needs), simply demonstrate that you listened intently and how you’ve connected your background or approach to the potential client’s needs.
6. Practice good timing.  There’s an art to finding how to move a conversation forward without pushing it.  Learn and apply that art.
7. Follow up.
8. Partnering versus closing.  Think of working together with a client to achieve identified objectives rather than landing a new client.  The distinction may be subtle, but the transparency you demonstrate in placing your focus on the service to this specific client will bolster your relationship.  Moreover, in my experience, it’s also likely to increase your willingness to engage in rainmaking activities.

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.

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?

Do you know how to get the most from your sponsorships?

If you’re building your “brand,” whether it’s your personal brand or your firm’s, the goal is to raise others’ awareness of you.  It’s an opportunity to let them know what you stand for and what space you occupy in the market.

An example here:  Jeep might sponsor an outdoor enthusiasts’ conference as a way of saying, “We are the kind of car that outdoor enthusiasts drive.  We are your people.”  Mercedes, in contrast, would never sponsor such an event, because Mercedes doesn’t match the outdoor enthusiasts’ way of life.  Sure, some people who drive Mercedes love being outdoors, and some Jeep drivers don’t, but each company positions itself based on the average driver who might purchase and drive their car.  Moreover, note that Jeep’s reason for sponsoring such a conference is to raise attendees’ awareness of the brand, its offerings that might be appealing, and so on — NOT to sell cars during the conference.

Sponsorships can be good avenues for business development, but simply posting a firm name on a tent at a high-priced (or even high-visibility) event is unlikely to accomplish that goal.  That flavor of sponsorship will build brand awareness, at most.  The article notes that, “Firms are zeroing in on opportunities that allow their attorneys to get out in front of a specific group of potential clients, such as industry conferences.”

And truly, getting in front of potential clients (and referral sources) is the only way that sponsorship can make a real difference toward growing your practice.  Passive activities, such as sponsorships in name only or simply posting a profile on a social networking site, may have a place as part of your business development plan.  You must not, however, fall into the trap of thinking that those activities (or, more accurately, ways of being present) will in themselves lead to new business.  To get new business, you do have to interact with people — or, as the article puts it, get in front of groups of potential clients and/or referral sources.

But “getting in front of a group of potential clients” can mean different things to different people.  These are some of the considerations I recommend you evaluate if you’re contemplating taking on a sponsorship:

• Who will be present?  Potential clients or referral sources are good; the general public is less likely to produce measurable business results.  If the event you’re considering does not primarily attract your ideal clients or referral sources, think twice.
• What recognition will you receive as a sponsor?  Will your firm name be on the signage, on the event website, on bags or t-shirts?  Will you be mentioned during the event itself?
• What perks will you receive as a sponsor?  Look for opportunities to mingle with attendees at sponsored luncheons, coffee breaks, or cocktail parties.  You’re more likely to be able to meet selected participants if the sponsored event is not open to all comers.  This is where you move from a passive to an active sponsorhip.
• Who will attend from the firm, and what is the strategy for making the most of the opportunity?  As usual, without a plan, your efforts are likely to produce little.  The strategy will depend on your business development goals, the nature of the event, the attendees, and more, but you must be able to identify at least the basic strategy before you commit to sponsorship.

Sponsorships aren’t dead by any means, but your investment won’t yield good results if you take on random sponsorships without a defined objective and a clear plan to reach that objective.  The take-away here:  think carefully before you sponsor an event or an organization.  Once you commit to a sponsorship, be sure you take the necessary steps to make it a win/win.