Growing your own talent

Now, as much as at any other time, legal service providers are evaluating how they are resourcing their business and planning for the future growth and structure of their business. Businesses have varying strategies of developing their own people such as through continuous professional development (CPD); using a bespoke legal practice course (LPC) to develop future solicitors; and the legal services apprentices programme.

But, being more strategic with your workforce – particularly understanding the advantages of growing your own talent and having systems in place to develop that talent – can lead to long-term costs savings and greater stability for your business.

Regulators stipulate the CPD provision for some regulated roles. Authorised bodies are responsible for quality assurance within their business, but how that is demonstrated is largely left to the business. The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) is completing a consultation about the future provision of CPD in the UK (’Training for Tomorrow’). There has been general apathy in the profession to feed into that consultation process. CILEx recently published its revised provision for CPD, with additional professionalism elements to be included for some grades.

But, CPD is not a tick-box exercise or merely about updating knowledge. Rather, it is about developing your workforce and talent in the business.

What kind of talent do you want to develop?

The most obvious answer is developing key knowledge for the delivery of legal services so that staff become high-level specialists in their field.
But, it is also about developing the workforce to move into new areas of work, acquire new skills or become future managers and leaders of the business. Overall, it is about avoiding the need to have to look outside the business to fill knowledge or skills
gaps and maximising the talent within.

So what are the advantages of growing your own talent?

Having a transparent and robust culture of developing your own people has a range of benefits. It:

• increases morale – the workforce sees that the business is investing in them as individuals and their role in the business;

• takes advantage of the potential of skilled and talented staff so that the business is reaping benefits from its own;

• maximises the productivity and potential of staff who have new challenges, learning and opportunities because they are valued;

• results in higher levels of staff retention and engagement, reducing the impact of unplanned staff losses or the loss of valuable staffing resources to rival businesses;

• feeds into succession planning – developing the future managers and leaders of the firm based upon their talent rather than their fee income or level of influence in the business, enabling long-term planning to develop management, leadership, behaviour and business skills to run the business; and

• supports governance of the business.

Is the talent spotting and staff development process embedded in the strategic plan for the business and are the systems
in place?

To maximise the benefits of developing and managing in-house talent for the business, there needs to be a strategic plan for the business. This involves horizon scanning for what workforce, knowledge and skills the business
needs for today, next year and in the 2020s. That business plan needs to align with other strategies, such as performance management and succession planning.

The most obvious way of spotting your in-house talent and then planning and developing it is within a robust and effective personal and career development review process. So, those processes need to be constructive, feeding from the firm’s short and long-term strategic business plan.

The resource implications of growing your own talent

There is a significant resource cost. Someone needs to lead on planning, monitoring and managing this strategy – it will not happen on its own, so there
is the management cost. There is also the cost of ongoing development and skills training. You need to allocate time to ensure your workforce is kept up to date with developments in both knowledge and skills. Systems are needed to track and measure success.
A budget is needed to pay for and support the strategy.

In conclusion

There are significant changes taking place in the legal services industry. Maximising your own ‘jewels’ to benefit the workforce and the business seems so obvious. The consequences of failing to develop your own talent means the business will need to recruit individuals or full teams, which carries significant costs, although it may bring in new blood and ideas. A culture of growing in-house talent and the benefits of having a vibrant and stimulating workforce takes long-term planning and investment. But the benefits are significant and failure to do so can
be costly.

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