Post #778 – Friday, September 1, 2017

Another Leadership Nugget I Overheard

As a leader you are often surrounded by people who are content to stay where they are.  They do what is expected, but just enough.  They play it safe and never go beyond what’s expected; head down, simply following the ones in front.  They are the 80 percent who accomplish the 20 percent.  They go with the flow, but are soon “hooked” by their own disengagement.  They get entangled in the nets of complacency.  Today, it seems, for all too many people it’s 5 p.m. not only somewhere, but everywhere.

Then there are the outliers – the 20 percent who accomplish the 80 percent – who have the hustle and hunger that allows them to rise above the rest.  If only those qualities could be taught to the others!  CEOs will hire hunger and hustle over pedigree any day.

The talented few don’t have jobs, they have purpose; they radiate passion.  Especially people who are diverse in thought, experiences and backgrounds – they are incredibly agile around the new and different, and willingly become fish out of water who thrust themselves into unfamiliar environments.  Insatiably curious about what is around the next bend, they balance past experiences with first-time challenges.  They don’t shy from the rapids or the shoals, nor do they avoid the deep waters where few go.  They don’t just cope with change, they welcome and even instigate it.  They are the innovators and disruptors who aren’t caught up in the ordinary.

What about you?

Compliments of Gary Burnison, CEO – Korn Ferry

Rant #777 – Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Six Great Leadership Nuggets I've Overheard

• When hiring candidates, ask for their operating manual.

Tell candidates:  “Imagine you're a robot.  What does your manual say under 'ideal operating conditions.'”  Once they answer, follow-up with this question: “What does the 'warning label' say?”  You're likely to get insightful, unpredictable and even humorous answers but this is likely to be very subtle way of gauging an individual’s self-awareness and revealing their personality.

• Make speed your leadership obsession.

I have long believed that the two attributes most important to having the right professionals working along side you is having talent that has “highly attuned attention to detail” and an “fanatical sense of urgency.”  Many a firm leader and CEO has spoken about how speed is the ultimate competitive weapon in business.  All else being equal the fastest competitor in any given market will win.  As one CEO expressed it, “challenge the when!”  For my part, I continue to be absolutely amazed at just how often the best articulated plans and actions are discussed in meetings without any attention being directed to who is going to do what and by when.  It’s not that everything needs to be done NOW, but for items on your critical path, it’s always useful to challenge the due date. All it takes is asking the simplest question: “Why can't this be done sooner?” Asking it methodically, reliably and habitually can have a profound impact on the speed of your organization

• Practice saying “No” real often.

As you get into a leadership position you have more people reaching out to you, more invitations to meetings, more requests for you to make a decision, more emails to read and respond to and as one leader phrased it – death by a thousand paper cuts.  Saying no is not easy, especially as you want to be helpful and love to see yourself as a problem solver. But you have to draw the line somewhere.  To do this effectively, the most important thing is that you close the door to further communication.  Do it nicely in a way that truthfully explains the situation, but don’t leave things open-ended.  Try this: “Great to hear from you. Unfortunately, I’m under some extreme pressure to deliver against some very ambitious goals. My sincere thanks for understanding.”

• Expect to be attacked.

If you are at all effective as a leader you may expect that some people will react negatively to what you are declaring as your priorities and then begin a campaign of sabotage.  In some instances their resistance will be very overt - characterized by the obvious and verbalized messages that let you know clearly that someone is not supportive.  As frustrating as open resistance can be, the good news in these situations is that there are no surprises. You know exactly where someone is coming from.  In other cases it will be very subtle, which may look like a smile to their face but undermining behavior behind your back.  Being attacked comes with the job.  Just recognize that it is not about you as much as it is about people’s insecurities, people trying to measure up and just trying to merely hold on to what they have or where they are.

• Make sharing credit a part of your meeting agenda

Periodically, start off meetings with team members sharing all the good things that have happened since the last meeting.  Examples include specific acknowledgments of individuals, announcement of successes — even small ones — or expressing gratitude for the team in general.  This is a quick activity that can boost morale and make it easier for those who are unaccustomed to giving or receiving appreciation.

• Measure your people’s happiness as a performance indicator.

Job satisfaction is an important and useful leading indicator of productivity.  A lot more firms are starting to proactively keep tabs on how their people, both professionals and staff, are feeling about their work.  One tactic is to run an anonymous survey (using a tool like Glint) that asks people how willing they are to go above and beyond, whether they see themselves staying at the firm for more than a couple of years, and whether they'd recommend working at the firm to friends.  Benchmark the results you get every six months to make sure you're maintaining or getting better.

Post #776 – Saturday June 17, 2017

I’ve Been Busy Writing

My sincere apologies to friends in my tardiness with updating my Blog.  By way of an excuse and as an apologetic offering, here are links to some articles and materials that I hope you find useful and interesting – a summary of my most recent writings:
 

NEW REPORTS, ARTICLES AND WHITEPAPERS

Law Firm Strategic Planning And Deployment:
A Report On The State of the Art
[Forbes Report]
World-class motivational expert and author of Natural Born Winners, Robin Sieger, once said, “planning is as natural to the process of success as its absence is to the process of failure.”  That said he forgot to add that planning doesn’t mean a heck of a lot if nobody bothers to oversee or implement those meticulously formulated aspirations.  Such is the world of law firms and their strategic planning efforts as exposed in a survey legal consultant Patrick McKenna and I conducted for presentation at the recent Ark Group/Bloomberg Chief Strategy Officer’s Summit in New York City.  We canvassed and received detailed feedback from 68 firm leaders, mostly from AmLaw ranked firms, on their approach to strategic planning and their specific responses to 18 questions covering everything from who was involved in developing their current strategic plan and how long it took, to how satisfied they were and the one thing they would change with respect to their efforts in the future.  We found that . . .
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidparnell/2017/06/09/law_firm_strategic_planning_report/

Becoming Fearless: Facing Uncertainty in the Legal Market with Confidence and Insight
[Thomson Reuters White Paper]
Today’s legal market is rife with situations that could be seen as fear-inducing. This is not to say that leaders in today’s legal market are paralyzed by concerns. No, indeed those leading today’s legal businesses are savvy, educated, and bold in many respects. But the comfort of the status quo can sometimes make exploration of the unknown appear undesirable, or even intimidating.  Today’s legal leaders know about pushing fear aside – in their jobs every day they identify and mitigate risk, weigh options, and handle a myriad of issues, big and small, that hinge on their ability to put aside fear of change, fear of the legal market, and fear of meeting their clients’ needs – and simply do their jobs with confidence and insight.
http://static.legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.com/static/pdf/fearless-whitepaper-legal.pdf 

When Two Must Work as One: The Challenges in Sharing Leadership
[Legal Executive Institute column]
From my work with leaders of major law firms over the years, one of the inherent problems of having two professionals sharing any senior leadership role starts with role clarity. Indeed, the need for developing role clarity is not easy when most firms do not even have a formal written job description for their Chair or Managing Partner positions. The job of leading a law firm may certainly be demanding enough for two professionals; but the test is selecting the right two people to share the role. From my vantage point I have witnessed multiple examples of attempts to split the firm leadership job that led to clashing egos and crippling power struggles, especially if one of these two partners conceals any ambition for holding the position alone.
http://legalexecutiveinstitute.com/mckenna-sharing-leadership/

Becoming A Visionary Law Firm: Developing Board Foresight
[LegalBusinessWorld article]
Nearly every law firm of any significant size will have a Board of Directors or Executive Committee comprised of partners elected by their peers, for some predefined term.  Some Boards are primarily concerned with providing oversight on the activities and actions of their management team (managing partner, management committee and administrative professionals) and some are actually charged with developing the firm’s formal strategic plan or direction such that the management team can then focus primarily on implementation.  In either scenario, your elected Board is a valuable resource . . . if used properly.
http://www.lbw2017us3.legalbusinesslibrary.com/html5forpc.html?page=0 

Preconditions To Setting-Up Your Own Advisory Board
You don't always have to go it alone or rely only on the intuition of your colleagues. A good number of professional firms have formed an advisory board to counsel the firm leader and/or the firm’s elected board on various aspects of their business – everything from operations to personnel to planning for growth. 
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/preconditions-setting-up-your-own-advisory-board-patrick-j-mckenna

How Having An Advisory Board Can Add Value
If you are like many Firm Leaders you probably belong to one or more peer organizations where you can network with fellow professionals. But, what I’ve learned is that you may not feel comfortable sharing your most sensitive or pressing management challenges, or discussing competitive opportunities among those same peers.  Having your own advisory board can supplement those peer networks and relationships.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-having-advisory-board-can-add-value-patrick-j-mckenna

  

NEW BOOKS CONTRIBUTIONS

Measuring and Managing Performance for Law Firms
Lawyers are no strangers to performance metrics: from billable hours to PEP statistics and hours billed. However, firm-wide performance metrics are hard to tackle – not only are the numerous aspects often intangible and difficult to measure, but they can differ between firms, practice areas, and individual roles.  Ark Groups new book - Measuring and Managing Performance for Law Firms offers an in-depth overview of the metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that firms can employ to effectively measure and manage their workforce and firm-wide performance.
https://www.ark-group.com/product/measuring-and-managing-performance-law-firms-0#.WTrAIVeE1OE

Managing Your Legal Organization: Global Insights
[Published in India]
A compendium of thought pieces by global management experts and conversations with leading Indian Senior Law Firm Partners.
https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Legal-Organisation-Global-Insights/dp/9352682564/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496790661&sr=1-1&keywords=ISBN-10+9352682564
 

Rise of the Legal COO
For law firms considering restructuring their business to meet the demands of a highly competitive market, hiring an experienced chief operations officer (COO) is sure to be a consideration.  However, the reassignment of duties and shift in perspective this appointment will require may prove challenging for some firms. Finding the perfect match for a firm’s unique culture and requirements is a difficult yet essential task.  With input from a number of current law firm COOs and executive directors, alongside some of the most respected and sought-after consultants working in the legal space, Rise of the Legal COO examines the scope and variety of the legal COO role and how the challenges and demands of the position have altered as law firms have evolved over the last two decades. 
https://www.ark-group.com/product/rise-legal-coo#.WTrBUleE1OE

Recruiting and Retaining Lawyers:
Innovative Strategies to Attract, Develop and Retain Legal Talent
The competition for talent that leading experts started to describe in the 1990s has now become a reality in the legal profession. Like most industries across the globe, the legal industry is facing a shortage of exceptional people. Although in some jurisdictions there are more lawyers than the market can absorb, the reality is that the number of lawyers with the right skills is limited and that organizations are fighting to attract and retain the best professionals in a legal market that has become globalized and where mobility is now the norm. The ability of law firms to adopt innovative and tailored recruitment and retention strategies for their size, culture and market has become a strategic priority and one of the biggest determinants for a firm’s competitive success.  This practical handbook, coordinated on behalf of the International Bar Association, explores the opportunities and challenges for adopting effective recruitment, development and retention strategies.
http://www.globelawandbusiness.com/books/recruiting-and-retaining-lawyers-innovative-strategies-to-attract-develop-and-retain-legal-talent

The Changing of the Guard: Selecting Your Next Firm Leader - 2nd Edition
[My Newest Book]
Fully revised and updated in 2017, with exclusive NEW content and even more contributions from current firm leaders, the second edition of The Changing of the Guard: Selecting Your Next Firm Leader is packed with useful exhibits, thought-provoking questionnaires, and advice direct from new, current, and past firm leaders, this is a straightforward, step-by-step guide to leadership succession planning, which will help firms establish what they want their future to look like – and find the best person to lead them there. 
https://www.ark-group.com/product/changing-guard-selecting-your-next-firm-leader-2nd-edition#.WTrA6leE1OE

Post #775 – Thursday, June 15, 2017

Technology is Constantly Accelerating

Every year, it’s getting faster and faster, developing and expanding exponentially.  And when it does this, it also impacts the pace of change.  For example: 

• Here is What Is Happening Online in Only 60 Seconds:

149,513 emails are sent

3,300,000 posts are added to Facebook

3,800,000 searches are conducted on Google

65,972 photos are uploaded to Instagram

448,800 tweets are posted on Twitter

1,440 posts are added to WordPress

29,000,000 messages are sent via WhatsApp

500 Hours of video are uploaded to YouTube

 . . . All in the time it took you to read this!

The world has fallen in love with social media and now automatically turns to online platforms to research and buy products and services.  Meanwhile, across the globe, the United Kingdom has the fastest mobile internet speeds, averaging about 26 megabits per second (Mbps). The data — which was pulled from Akamai’s State of Internet report — shows that Germany (24.1 Mbps) and Finland (21.6 Mbps) round out the top three spots.  The United States failed to make the top 25 and secured the 28th spot at 10.7 Mbps.  OUCH!

• And Here is The Next Trillion Dollar Industry

Virtual Reality is going to create an opportunity like we’ve only seen twice before. First there was the Internet. This was a trillion-dollar opportunity. It’s still ongoing, but the Internet is the present — not the future. The app store was the second trillion-dollar opportunity. The entire ecosystem of smartphones and tablets and the cloud and applications moved computing into our hands. And now the third trillion-dollar opportunity has finally arrived: virtual reality.

This year, 2017, for virtual reality is like 1994 for the Internet. The first commercial AI headsets will be launched. The chips are being developed. The storage is getting prepared. The entire infrastructure for the third trillion-dollar opportunity has been created in the past 20 years. Many of the companies creating the technology and hardware are private. Which ones will be the winners?

Post #774 – Wednesday, March 22, 2017

The Spring-Summer Issue of International Review Magazine is Now Available

Two of the articles contained here are the result of a collaboration with my good friend and colleague, David Parnell whose regular Forbes column is avidly read by leaders throughout the legal community.  The Burning Issues Facing Firm Leaders in 2017 and Leaders Get the Behavior You Tolerate are the product of extensive surveys we have conducted during the past six months and should provide you with intersting data and substantive counsel.

With Becoming The Firm of Choice, I am pleased to feature an excerpt from a new book (by the same title), authored by old friends Robert Lees and August Aquila.  I commend both this article and their new book as insightful and very worthwhile reading. 

From coping with the stress involved in looking like you know what you are doing to the enormous time demands imposed by partner requests, The Five Challenging Paradoxes of Firm Leadership identifies the top tensions that every leader has to contend with at some point in their leadership role.

Get Your Clients To Do Your Talking offers some practical advice for how you can meaningfully differentiate who you are and what you have to offer clients.

Our final selection, When A Firm Leader Hangs Up The Crown, represents an except from the newly revised and expanded second edition of my The Changing of The Guard: Selecting Your New Firm Leader, destined to be published in April 2017.

Click on the cover to download your complimentary PDF copy of this magazine

Post #773 – Wednesday, March 22, 2017

The Challenges Inherent in Assessing Firm Leader Performance

In a recent article I was reading, the former chair of Hinshaw Culbertson wrote about How To Evaluate Law Firm Leaders.  While I concur with the overall theory of his message that law firm leader should receive feedback, from my experience it is critically important to recognize that there are some real-world hurdles to implementation.

To Read the rest of my article in Legal Executive Institute - Click here  

ALSO, in an article I wrote some years back (2010) Evaluating Your Performance As A Managing Partner, I wrote “There is an old adage in managing a client’s expectations that states, whether we like it or not, we are going to be measured.  If we take a very passive approach the measuring stick against which we will be measured will be exclusively a creation of our client.  Alternatively, we can help create and shape the measurement criteria.”  My message was that as the firm leader you should take the initiative and I provided a quick-and-easy sample of 29 evaluative factors that any firm leader could use to elicit feedback from their colleagues. 

Post #772 – Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Delighted To Have Contributed to a Number of New Books

Rise of the Legal COO – published by Ark Publishing
For law firms considering restructuring their business to meet the demands of a highly competitive market, hiring an experienced chief operations officer (COO) is sure to be a consideration.  However, the reassignment of duties and shift in perspective this appointment will require may prove challenging for some firms.  Finding the perfect match for a firm’s unique culture and requirements is a difficult yet essential task.  With input from a number of current law firm COOs and executive directors, alongside some of the most respected and sought-after consultants working in the legal space, Rise of the Legal COO examines the scope and variety of the legal COO role and how the challenges and demands of the position have altered as law firms have evolved over the last two decades. 

For more details - https://www.ark-group.com/product/rise-legal-coo#.WK4R-VeE1OE

Recruiting and Retaining Lawyers: Innovative Strategies to Attract, Develop and Retain Legal Talent  - published by Global Law and Business.
The competition for talent that leading experts started to describe in the 1990s has now become a reality in the legal profession. Like most industries across the globe, the legal industry is facing a shortage of exceptional people. Although in some jurisdictions there are more lawyers than the market can absorb, the reality is that the number of lawyers with the right skills is limited and that organizations are fighting to attract and retain the best professionals in a legal market that has become globalized and where mobility is now the norm.  This practical handbook, coordinated on behalf of the International Bar Association (IBA), explores the opportunities and challenges for adopting effective recruitment, development and retention strategies.

For more information - http://www.globelawandbusiness.com/RRL 

Post #771 – Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Is There A New Science To Teamwork?

As a very long time subscriber and member of your HBR Advisory Council I cannot tell you how shocked I was to read your March-April cover article: “The New Science of Teamwork.”

“NEW?”  Are you kidding me?  Where in the world do the folks at Deloitte get away with suggesting that anything in this supposedly research based article is “new” other than modified labeling of their four primary styles and a fancy product name: “Business Chemistry.”

Back in 2002, when Dr. David Maister and I authored our book, First Among Equals: How To Manage a Group of Professionals, we devoted a 22-page chapter, “Deal Differently With Different People” to (these same) four distinctive work styles and provided in-depth guidelines to assist our readers in understanding and working with each.  But even more importantly, we cited our primary source, the extensive research of Dr. David Merrill (Personal Style and Effective Performance, St. Lucie Press) whose work on this subject was first published over 35 years ago.

For these authors and the folks at Deloitte to make claims that they have built this assessment tool and that it is the product of over 190,000 individual assessments is, in my opinion, a blatant infringement in intellectual integrity and I guess goes to prove the adage that if one waits long enough the old becomes the new once again.  Very Sad!

This is a copy of the letter I recently sent to HBR Magazine - https://hbr.org/archive-toc/BR1702

Post #770 – Wednesday, January 18, 2017

What Leadership Messages Are You Sending?

One of the more profound things I’ve learned and try to pass along to new leaders (be they managing partners or practice heads) is to “act like you are on stage at all times… because you are!”  Everything you do and say will send messages, set a tone, establish expectations and communicate direction about what is of priority to you.

With that in mind, you need to carefully orchestrate what symbolic acts you may want to execute to create a lasting impression and convey what you stand for in 2017. In other words, you need to always think through the following items.

Read the remainder of my latest column on Legal Executive Institute.

Post #769 – Wednesday, January 11, 2017

What Do You Know About BlockChain?

In 2015, Virgin’s Richard Branson hosted a “blockchain summit” on his private Caribbean island.  In that same year, while addressing a Conference of managing partners and legal marketing professionals, I asked the audience, how many of them had heard about BlockChain and to my surprise not a single hand was raised.  And that has been the pattern throughout all of 2016 whenever I broach the topic with some group of lawyers – including in December when I raised the topic again amongst the partners of a significant I.P boutique.

Well, for what it’s worth, I received a note the other day from Gerald Celente, Publisher of The TRENDS JOURNAL, updating me on a few of the latest developments.

Groups ranging from Wells Fargo to the London Stock Exchange are getting ready for a blockchain-based future.  Overall, more than $1.5 billion has been invested worldwide in blockchains’ possibilities so far.  Goldman Sachs has put $50 million into startups creating their own blockchains.  And the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada have all announced plans to examine the pros and cons of digital currencies.  Perhaps as early as this year, your bank or investment manager could be managing your money with blockchains.  But blockchains will reach beyond banks — it’s good for much more than logging payments. They can be used to validate the security of anything with value.

Gem, a blockchain entrant, has partnered with Capital One and healthcare giant Philips to smooth and speed payments for medical insurance claims.  The Cambridge, Massachusetts, company Learning Machine has partnered with MIT’s Media Lab to create a blockchain that stores and verifies academic degrees and professional certifications. A college graduate can store diplomas and certificates electronically on a smartphone.

In June, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security gave a $199,000 grant to Factom, a company in Austin, Texas, to figure out ways to use blockchain designs to maintain the integrity of the so-called internet of things.  With every device connected to every other one through the internet, the potential for hackers and malware skyrockets. Blockchains may be a new tool for cybersecurity.  And with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Factom is setting out to apply blockchains to secure electronic medical records as well.

It’s not only about keeping snooping insurance companies from prying into your health history.  There’s also the problem that medical records in developing countries or remote regions aren’t always accessible and sometimes not updated quickly.  Blockchains resolve those problems.  Using the blockchain’s options, people could decide who may see their medical records. People could even have ready access to their own records, instead of wrangling with a doctor before getting a look.

Major companies are betting big on blockchaining’s future.  To set a standard, more than 30 major companies — including Hitachi, JP Morgan and Intel — have formed Hyperledger.  That project aims to settle on a general-purpose blockchain structure that can be used by any enterprise in any industry. IBM already has chipped in tens of thousands of lines of software code to the venture.  These companies, like so many others, invest in the effort because they foresee the benefits.

I believe that Blockchains will transform the way we exchange value in our digital, cyber-insecure future.