Embracing modern leadership

We can debate it ?all we like, but the nature of the legal profession has changed. ?We’ve moved beyond the highly specialised ‘status’ professional. An increasingly empowered public is seeking more customer-centric services from all aspects of professional firms, and members of the legal profession can no longer rely on deference to their expertise to effectively meet the needs ?of clients who are, more importantly, customers.

Marketplaces change. ?In the UK, it is clear that the ?legal profession is over-capacity and the salaries and conditions experienced in the past, when expertise combined with ?scarcity lent itself to relatively easy takings by being on the advantageous side of the ?rules of supply and demand are gone. Customers now have a superabundance of companies they can approach.

Equally, the law has gone beyond basic specialism into ?an array of sub-specialisms that have evolved in an increasingly sophisticated, technologically based society where more people own more property, actual and intellectual, than ?ever before.

In addition, there is a recognition that companies ?need to market and present themselves in a competitive market space, and the experienced lawyer who believes status and expertise ?will suddenly inspire the management qualities to deal with these factors is optimistic ?at best and delusional at worst.

For many lawyers, embracing leadership is still seen as a function of case management and fee generation, rather ?than something that involves inspiration, direction, and vision for the organisation. Now the most successful firms are not those that simply rest on the status and might of their inherent expertise in law. ?They acquire skills involving ?the understanding of business, psychology, economics, ?and finance.

The vocational professional view of the client as the lead agent in one’s practice is no longer appropriate, as organisations take their strategic direction from the markets they occupy and the skills, capacity planning, and other factors essential to modern businesses. We can fight it all we like, but the practice of law is no longer about just representing the client. It is about making one’s business fit for purpose: competitive, evolving, and positioned in a market space ?for now and the future.

As such, encouraging ?people to undertake leadership development and improve the skills needed to supervise staff ?is still a bit of a hard sell. Even larger firms appoint ‘business managers’, as though there is some impenetrable boundary between those with business skills within the organisation and those who are cloistered legal artisans, remaining ?within the pure discipline of their specialism.

The truth is, leadership development simply can’t be subcontracted. One of the key resistances I experience in my travels among lawyers is that most people see any action other than fee earning as ?not productive. There is still ?the small firm focus on the immediate transaction, not the transformational leadership moves that are needed to take firms into a modern competitive environment, ensure the whole company is prosperous, and serve the client well, not just ?the individual practitioner. 

This requires appropriate skilling up, support, and, crucially, an opportunity to ?take time out, often assisted ?by impartial others to reflect carefully on the direction and future of the organisation. These activities are necessarily time consuming and seem anathema to the transactional immediacy ?of hours spent earning fees.

Firms that do not make this investment include those which have ageing grandees without effective succession plans, ?missed  opportunities to generate and attract clients, and have disengaged, dissatisfied staff who will happily jump ship to organisations that actually display reasonable leadership and direction.

Research derived from ?across the sectors, pretty much concludes that leaders are made, not born. Their behaviours, insights, emotional repertoire, ‘business savviness’, and style are developed through balance of training and reflective process. Yet one often sees the ‘nominal manager’, a leader in name only, devoid of the development ?and skills that actually accord ?with the inspirational, transformational, ethical, charismatic, and other elements that go towards an appreciation of modern leadership. 

It just isn’t enough to have the title of ‘manager’ or ‘lead partner’. It needs to be backed with an investment in skills that can ?really make a difference in a competitive world where, for most law firms, even the bigger fish, it’s fair to say that it’s pretty tough out there.

A key attribute of those with true leadership qualities is the ability to embrace change. ?For the legal profession, this is now an inevitability. It is now a modern prerequisite of survival in the provision of legal services. Those that do will survive and prosper. The others will be left only with yearnings for simpler times.

David Cliff is managing director of Gedanken and chairman of the Institute of Directors’ Northern Sector Group @David_Cliff www.gedanken.co.uk