Finding meaning: How personal truths can improve firm energy

The partners in your law firm set the tone. They are the leaders; the people at the top of the hierarchy whose behaviours, actions and words show everyone else what to do to make the firm successful.

The best are go-to leaders in a crisis but also know how to celebrate a success or ignite others to achieve success themselves. And, they establish the work ethic for the entire firm with their own work ethic.

But there is something that separates the greatest leaders from the rest: the very best leaders in the most successful firms have a very special energy – a sustainable energy that resonates through other leaders and permeates the entire organisation.

It’s this resonating energy that gives a firm a powerful culture. When resonant energy permeates the culture of an organisation, starting with the leader and flowing through other key members, it creates a synergising effect. This effect brings out the potential of all the individuals it impacts within the organisation – from the highest-ranking partners to the newest interns.

There is enormous value to this energy. The leader of the high-energy culture is able to marshal the collective intellect and capability of all stakeholders and align them with his or her impassioned vision. In this culture, people are self-motivated to do their very best and have an extraordinarily high commitment to the firm. People flourish and excel.

Moreover, there is an attractive force to this energy. It attracts the best talent, because these people want to play on your winning team. It creates marketing gravity and draws in clients. Organisations with this kind of energy have an enormous competitive advantage and will have sustained, consistent high performance.

Does this describe your law firm? If so, congratulations, as energy can be a precious but rare commodity at many practices.

Many organisations now face a 21st-century energy crisis that has nothing to do with the price of oil. While the world’s economy has bounced back to some degree, many leadership challenges have become magnified and elevated in importance, particularly as workforces have been trimmed to the bone and leaders taxed to their limits. A major one is in the area of employee engagement.

Engagement is not the same as job satisfaction. According to Scarlett Surveys, employee engagement is a measurable degree of an employee’s positive or negative emotional attachment to his job, colleagues and organisation that profoundly influences his willingness to learn and perform at work.

People who are engaged truly care about the firm and feel a connection to it. As a result, they are willing to invest the energy to be great instead of having the attitude that it’s good enough to be good enough.

A September 2010 Gallup survey on employee engagement turned up some startling findings. At world-class organisations, there was a ratio of roughly ten engaged employees for every one that was disengaged. But, at average organisations, that ratio plummets to only two engaged for every one disengaged.

The survey also found that disengaged employees cost companies in the United States roughly $800bn in productivity annually. Meanwhile, engaged organisations have 3.9 times the earnings-per-share growth rate compared to that of organisations with lower engagement in the same industry.

The report notes that “the best-performing companies know that an employee engagement improvement strategy linked to the achievement of corporate goals will help them win in the marketplace”.

Creating a high-energy culture is not just a feel-good enterprise: it’s a crucial differentiator between the best firms and those that are average, or worse.

So, where should you begin? The underlying principle of resonating leadership is that each of us is a potentially powerful source of energy. The goal is to create an atmosphere within your organisation that:

• promotes self-motivation within its people;

• attracts capital resources (both human and financial);

• creates synergy; and

• synchronises all stakeholders to generate enormous economic value.

Here’s the key: when leaders define, clarify and act in line with their own personal truths, the vibrating energy inside them is enhanced and the potential for resonance is present.

Identifying your personal truths

How do you go about defining your personal truths and how will you know if your definition is accurate? Reflection is the gateway to personal understanding. It’s also the route to personal and professional fulfilment if you are to ever simplify your life, slow down to speed up and become more effective.

The key lies in understanding the four obligations to identifying your personal truths:

1. understand what you would die for;

2. clarify through doubting;

3. commit yourself once and for all; and

4. behave in alignment with your personal truths.

The word obligation is used to describe each critical step in the process of defining your personal truths because an obligation is a requirement to take some course of action. Undertaking this process will give you critical insight into your personal truths.

1. Understand what you would die for

Understanding what you would die for might sound melodramatic. The issue here is to identify the things you believe so strongly in that you would put your life in peril to protect them.

Imagine the passion and conviction you could articulate when something is this important to you. The frequency of the vibrating energy inside you becomes palpable when you are living a life consistent with it.

You could also flip this coin and view it from another perspective: what mission or purpose do you live for? What makes you forge ahead and persevere, even when your efforts are like those of Sisyphus, who was doomed to push an immense boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down repeatedly?

2. Clarify through doubting

Leonardo da Vinci’s extraordinary skills are well known and he excelled at many specialties, including as an artist, inventor, mathematician, botanist, cartographer and scientist. One of his personal truths was dimostrazione, the discipline of always testing what he thought and believed.

Da Vinci held that truth and wisdom come from experience, and that an important aspect of experience is testing your beliefs. Da Vinci trained himself to look at a particular conclusion, whether it was the subject of a painting, an idea, or a concept, from three separate and distinct points of view.

Similarly, you are obligated to clarify your own personal truths with the same rigour. To do so, make an argument against one of your beliefs as a second point of view.

Consider soliciting input from a close friend or family member – someone who can give you insight that you may not have considered. A third perspective may involve focusing on your feelings as you deliberate on the personal truth.

The intention is to clarify your personal truths and eliminate any false beliefs that you may have up until now accepted as truths. This takes time, effort and intense observation. When done correctly, it can result in a sudden realisation that is quite jolting.

3. Commit yourself once and for all

Personal truths are actionable; they aren’t just nice ideas. A primary reason a personal truth is defined as something you would die for is to ensure that you commit yourself to acting upon it. Suffice it to say that the act of committing is not as easy as the word may imply.

A great example is Mahatma Gandhi’s application of the concept of satyagraha, a Sanskrit word roughly translating to soul force. Breaking down the word helps to show its connection to this process:

Satya = truth

Graha = insistence or firmly holding to

So, satyagraha literally refers to an insistence on the truth. This principle is fundamental to Ghandi’s concept of passive resistance, which ultimately resulted in the end of Britain’s colonial occupation of India.?

4. Behave in alignment with your personal truths

As a leader and as a human being, when you are clear on your core personal truths, you have a foundation on which to build your leadership and legacy. Your behaviours are witness to the outside world of your defined personal truths. In an organisational context, this trait is sometimes referred to as walking the talk.

Say what you want, but if you do not do as you say, your people will see through your words. It’s that simple. Courage and discipline are the keys to behaving in alignment with your truths. You are eminently more likely to be courageous and disciplined when you are clear on your personal truths.

An audience of one

Imagine you are listening to yourself describe your personal truths to an audience of one: yourself. Do you sound genuine? Does it feel authentic? Are you moved to action?

Communicating your personal truths is a valuable litmus test. Your ability to clearly communicate your personal truths is imperative to creating a culture of high energy as a leader, but it is also imperative that you are able to communicate your personal truths to yourself and feel their impact on yourself.

Rehearsing the articulation of your personal truths helps to verify their authenticity. Only you know how they feel to you. Once they are identified and understood, your personal truths will energise you, centre you, empower you and marshal you to action. If this is not the case, keep sifting for gold.

Communicating effectively

Communication is the great unaddressed issue in most firms today. As a leadership competency, communication is more powerful than all other competencies combined.

Powerful communication skills not only address the ‘so what?’ questions but translate all the hard work you’ve done up until this point into real, tangible economic value. All the great work you’ve done to develop yourself as an elite attorney is for naught if you, as a leader, cannot communicate effectively. This means using the collective means available to you to connect with another person or group to promote understanding and marshal action.

In a professional setting, communication is fundamentally the means by which two or more parties connect. The best trial lawyers get this. Yet, leading the business that is your firm is different to creating somatic markers in the minds of a jury.

Similarly, communication at the leadership level involves specific capabilities at each level of expertise. At the lowest level are skills and behaviours that are the price of entry for leaders.

The next step is learning presentation skills: the basics of understanding the members of your audience, connecting with what’s on their mind and identifying your big idea. Presentation skills are just as important in a law office as they are in a courtroom.

Creating a presentation that engages the audience, hits the key points accurately and succinctly, and delivers it consistent with your personal leadership brand is a first-level skill to drive results within your firm.

From there you can continue to work up, honing new skills like projecting authenticity and passion, winning trust from your audience (the entire population of your firm), telling a great story and inspiring people to action.

The bottom line is that it is your ability to communicate that has the greatest impact on engagement. In the organisational symphony, your voice is a powerful instrument that can inspire energy and emotion in your listeners.

Communicate meaning, not just information, and see what power your words truly have to create the economic results you seek and distinguish you and your firm as best-in-class.

David Casullo is the president of leadership consultancy Bates Communications