Firm-wide adoption of LinkedIn: managing partners must lead by example

There is no escaping the fact that LinkedIn is one of the world’s most powerful professional networking and business development platforms. It represents a virtual space in which vast swathes of the business community hang out, and I don’t regard it as an overstatement to say that every legal professional, from newly qualified lawyer all the way through to managing partner, should be making active use of it if they want to be at the top of their game.

Yet we still see a certain degree of reluctance within many law firms when it comes to harnessing the power of LinkedIn. In many instances, this reticence starts at the top with the managing partner, whose attitude to social media has a very real impact on everyone else within the business: if leaders don’t show their colleagues that it’s safe and indeed desirable to post on LinkedIn, this creates a throttling effect that chokes off communication and innovation on this platform.

What is marketing’s role in relation to management teams adopting social media?

Arguably, marketing teams often try to constrain or define the remit of what people can and cannot do on social media by creating a centralised communications policy, almost as if it were still 1997. The major problem with this approach is that social media is, of course, a democratised version of communicating with the world: it is inherently decentralised, and therefore resists and elides any attempt to constrain it.

As a result, the firm’s social media mavericks (or early adopters, if you prefer) will laugh at what is essentially an unenforceable policy, and will point to their own successes when challenged on their non-adherence to the marketing department’s social media guidelines. Comms teams spend too much time embroiled in these arguments, rather than realising that these mavericks are essential allies in getting the entire firm to up its social media game.

In practice, this involves a two-pronged approach. The first prong is asking the mavericks to go beyond their established comfort zone and up their social media game: to graduate from posting words to posting videos, to doing LinkedIn Live streams, to hosting podcasts, and thereby broaden their reach, become even more adept at serving as ambassadors for the firm, and – just as importantly – thereby make these activities safe in the eyes of others.

And the second prong is to get the mavericks to turn their engagement inward and help train their more risk-averse colleagues to follow in their footsteps. In the process, the mavericks should be as honest as possible about any trepidation they felt when they first began using social media, and how they overcame this. By sharing their own vulnerabilities, the mavericks can help their colleagues to be brave and dip their own toe in the water and realise that it is warm and that there is nothing to be afraid of that can’t be mitigated.

Yet in order to be fully successful, a firm’s social media adoption model must necessarily include a socially enabled senior partnership: no matter how many times the marketing team tells them otherwise, using social media will never feel fully safe to non-maverick junior lawyers, associates and partners unless they can see the managing partner leading by example. Why risk your reputation and promotion opportunities if the people you see in positions of authority aren’t using it?

However, in trying to clear this roadblock to firm-wide buy-in, the biggest mistake that either the marketing team or the managing partner could make at this juncture is to have the marketing team run the managing partner’s LinkedIn account for them: they must avoid the internal-comms mindset.

The perils of an internal-comms mindset

The hard truth is that many managing partners have their internal communications written for them by internal comms experts. I believe this is a major part of the equation when it comes to figuring out why many managing partners haven’t yet adopted social media: if they are unpractised in drafting the relevant messages for their internal audience, they are even less likely to feel comfortable doing so for a wider, external readership. In other words, if you haven’t yet fully grasped that communication is a vital part of leadership, then it is hard for the first step you take in course-correcting to be an external-facing one.

This dynamic breeds the second problem, which is ghost-written external communications. A ghostwriter would have to be an incredibly uncanny mimic to leave none of their own fingerprints behind on their work and convince others that it accurately reflects the tone of voice of the respective managing partner. It is a very tough act to pull off, and I would posit that the overwhelming majority of ghost-written external communications can be identified as such, not least by those readers who know the purported author.

The real problem here is that ghostwriting in the arena of social media doesn’t really work, because we’re not issuing communications for their own sake, but in order to produce outcomes – whether that’s hiring a new partner, celebrating colleagues and successes, winning new business or celebrating the firm’s values in action.

For the managing partner to not take the time to author these communications themselves, or indeed to curate their own social media account (that is to say, liking and commenting on others’ posts), is a false economy that can backfire badly.

The issue is one of authenticity: the content will always land better with audiences when it sounds like it was written by the person that posted it. And what if the comms team running the personal account unwittingly comments on a message from a colleague about an issue that, unbeknownst to the team, the managing partner and said colleague had discussed face to face over coffee that morning? Such an unfortunate situation would leave a certain amount of egg on the managing partner’s face.

In any case, it behoves managing partners to run their own LinkedIn accounts because it is another great way to keep their finger on the pulse of the sector, read about what colleagues and rival firms are up to, and be alert to any ripples that they might otherwise fail to detect. And it also buys them an unquantifiable amount of industry kudos to be seen playing an active role within the legal community’s online discourse: it’s a highly visible demonstration of what leadership looks like in the digital era.

One radical idea: managing partners should get in the trenches alongside their junior colleagues

When I worked at Simmons & Simmons in the middle of the financial crisis, the then-managing partner Mark Dawkins informed me that he was having trouble communicating with the firm’s associates because there were too many layers of management hierarchy standing in the way; he was struggling to get messages to them and was unable to hear what they had to say about the business, despite them representing the future of the firm.

To resolve this issue, we set up a series of lunches, with Mark as the host and the associates as his guests. While recognising the value of having some access to the power that Mark represented, these lunch guests attended with some initial trepidation at meeting with the managing partner; however, Mark was soon able to put them at their ease and conduct a fruitful dialogue by asking them what they thought he should know about the firm and how it was functioning during this critical time.

This approach removed all the politics from the room and allowed for honest and highly necessary conversations to take place. Mark was then able to take what he had learned from the associates and feed it into his thinking and back to the partnership, providing them with the views and opinions of those working at the coalface and thereby expanding everyone’s understanding of the firm’s direction of travel during the extremely volatile period of the credit crunch and its immediate aftermath.

If managing partners were to recreate this approach today in relation to social media adoption, they could work with their firm’s next-gen lawyers (PQE 4-6) – who are digital natives and have a need to grow their networks, improve their profile within their area of expertise, and win business – and the marketing team to jointly develop and put into action a LinkedIn strategy that empowers this cohort in their business development work.

What really supercharges this approach is the fact that the managing partner shows themselves willing to put themselves back in the shoes of the junior lawyers, to sit with them and learn with them and from them. There is no better way for managing partners to establish their bona fides and build esprit de corps than demonstrating that they are willing to learn alongside their junior colleagues.