Whispers and secrets: 8 leadership truths for managing partners

The very concept of leadership is elusive and tricky. It is hard to define leadership in a way that
is satisfactory to everyone, although
most professionals believe that they
know it when they see it. What these
same professionals may not appreciate
is how difficult the job of leading a firm
can actually be.

There are some aspects of leadership that aren’t identified in any guidebook but are only whispered about by experienced leaders, who know that the art of leadership is always a work in progress. What follows are eight leadership truths that managing partners should be prepared for, based on anecdotal evidence gleaned from countless discussions and interviews with firm leaders:

1. be prepared to become unpopular;

2. be prepared to be afraid;

3. be prepared to always be on stage;

4. be prepared to purposely mislead;

5. be prepared to be kept in the dark;

6. be prepared to drive with your head out of the window;

7. be prepared to dispense tough love; and

8. be prepared to be forgotten.

1. Becoming unpopular

Many professionals become leaders by virtue of the fact that they have some popularity amongst their peers. They take on leadership roles in the belief that they can make a difference and make their firms even better. They soon realise that making the changes and progress they were so excited about comes at a price.

One of the most important tasks of being an effective firm leader is making decisions. Every decision you make will serve to earn you the favour of some partners, while simultaneously suffer the disfavour of others. Your decision blesses one group but alienates another.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, you need to remind yourself that your job isn’t to make everyone happy or even to satisfy the interests of certain power partners, but rather to progress the best interests of the firm as a whole.

It is to be expected that any good leader will make enough decisions to eventually disappoint everyone at some point in time. And, as it is impossible to lead partners who doubt or despise you, you will be constantly anxious about making decisions that are the least offensive to the greatest number.

As Harry Trueheart, the former chair
of Nixon Peabody, put it: “You know your time is up once you have had to say no
to enough of your partners.” Thus, your job
is to make decisions until the decision
is eventually made to get rid of you.

2. Being afraid

Most leaders will go out of their way to hide their fears. In fact, there is a popular myth that, to be a good leader, you must be fearless. But, that is not what some
of the best leaders would quietly tell you.

Any leader professing to have no fear may well lack sound judgement. Any leader who refuses to admit his fears may well be imbued with hubris and self importance. Fear does not make us weak, nor does it mean that you have a lack of faith in your capabilities. Fear is necessary, cannot be eliminated and is a natural part of being a leader. You do not have to overcome your fears; rather, you need to know precisely what you are afraid of.

Consider the perspective of CEO coach Mike Myatt: “It has been my experience that the greatest fear most professionals struggle with is the fear of failure. In fact, it is oftentimes this fear
of failure that governs how much risk they will take on and, in turn, how successful (or not) they are likely to become.”

Fear of failure can be far more damaging than failure itself. It can paralyse any firm leader who holds the view that anything short of perfection is not even worth attempting.

If, as your firm’s leader, you don’t ever fear that you are in way over your head, you are not spending enough time in the water. It is how you learn to overcome your fears and manage risks that will determine how successful you will become.

3. Being on stage

Imagine yourself projected on a 50-foot screen by a video camera. Every move you make as your firm’s leader is subject to discussion, review and interpretation. And, your presence must always be visible. Your microphone is always on and every message you give – verbal and non-verbal – is open to misinterpretation.

A study by Harvard University psychologists found that, on average, people have wandering minds for 46.9 per cent of their waking hours.¹ Being present means simply having a moment-to-moment awareness of what’s happening. It means paying attention to what’s going on, rather than being caught up in your thoughts. In the middle of a conversation, if your mind is somewhere else, your eyes will glaze over and you’ll start making facial expressions not typical of a person who
is really listening. It is guaranteed that
your partners will notice.

No matter what you are dealing with, who you are talking to or where you are, you must never let your guard down.
The job of being firm leader means always being under a microscope.

4. Purposely misleading

People frequently tell what might be called social lies. For example, in order to maintain a good working relationship with a fellow partner, you pretend to be busy when he asks you for lunch rather than have to admit that you find his company boring and would rather not spend time with him.

Of course, leaders need to set an example of honesty and integrity for their firms. But, part of the art of leadership is knowing when untruths have to be told. It is about being able to distinguish deceptions created for unselfish reasons from the purely self-serving kind.

Leadership is like a theatre and the firm leader must often behave as an actor on the stage. Thus, being the face of the firm and the image presented to the outside world is not the true self but an edited version. This edited self takes into account how one wishes to be seen by others.

Who, then, wants to willingly reveal personal inadequacies, errors or performance problems to the rest of the profession? So, while you endorse the belief that complete honesty is important, you will nevertheless conceal, deceive and exaggerate to make a positive impression on others.

If social honour, damage control and survival can justify deception, the central task for any firm leader is this: distinguish between the situations that your motives would justify falsehood from those in which deception would still be wrong.

5. Being informed

From the day you take on the role of firm leader, you are flooded with information ranging from some partners wanting
to meet with you to others wanting to
let you know how things really work
in the firm. But, reliable information is surprisingly scarce.

Much of the information that comes to you will be filtered, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes with not-so-pure intentions. As one managing partner phrased it: “The issue is, after you become the firm’s leader, how do you get a good grasp of people’s candid views when it seems like all of your partners, and indeed the whole firm, is conspiring to tell you what you want to hear?”

Effective leaders get out and about within their firms, hold informal gatherings to receive input, promote openness and show interest in colleagues’ opinions.
They consciously promote diversity of opinion and discreetly keep the confidences of others.

6. Looking ahead

Time is your most precious resource. One mistake that some leaders make is spending far too much of their leadership time looking in their rear-view mirrors.
You cannot obsess about what happened last year or over what actions your competitors have been taking. You need
to look at the road ahead.

Look at the issues that are currently consuming your time. What proportion of your time is spent solving problems versus exploring new opportunities? Usually, about 80 per cent is spent solving problems and 20 per cent is devoted to exploring opportunities. This means that,
as the firm leader, you are spending
80 per cent of your time and energy looking backwards and fixing things, and only 20 per cent looking forward and creating things. Firms operating in this mode will never lead in their marketplace.

Of the time you spend on exploring opportunities (20 per cent of the total) how much of that time is directed toward pursuing billable production, winning the next big transaction or responding to a competitor (the present), versus pursuing the development of entirely new skills, services, technologies or revenue streams (the future)?

The average firm leader spends about 60 per cent of this time exploring present opportunities and 40 per cent on future opportunities. So, what kind of a future is likely to be created by a firm leader spending about 8 per cent of his total leadership time and energy focused on
the future?

Remember that this is in firms that have full-time firm leaders who spend all of their available time on leadership and management matters. Those managing partners who are less than full time usually have next to no time to prepare their firms for the future – except, of course, for that one day they spend at the firm’s annual planning retreat. Is it any wonder why so many retreat-generated ‘strategic plans’ are dead on arrival? Managing partners should favour the future over the past and focus on opportunities, not problems.

7. Dispensing tough love

Sometimes, being courageous requires confronting friends who have furthered your career and know your secrets. It can be hard to admit that there is a problem when you have a long-term working relationship with a particular partner or think that, if only you could spend some time coaching your administrative director, everything could work out. The best leaders know that tough love is all about helping professionals to take charge of their own careers.

Sometimes this can mean letting a top performer go. You may need to suggest to a partner who has been a brute to his colleagues that he would be better suited taking his practice to another firm. Or, you may need to reduce the compensation of a star biller who doesn’t share clients with partners in his practice group.

It’s very hard. Yet, as the firm leader, this is one situation that you cannot avoid. It requires courage.

8. Being forgotten

One of the tragedies of anyone in a leadership position is making some decision or taking a course of action based on a belief that it will be your legacy – you will be remembered by this brilliant initiative. Here’s the cold hard truth: much of what you do will not be remembered a year after you step down from office – unless, perhaps, you really screw up!

Leadership is not about you, your ego, your pride, or your personal legacy – it’s about caring for and serving your partners. The best leaders believe that what really lasts is not the bricks and mortar or grand strategies, but rather what is intriguing to those who had the good fortune to come into contact with them.

What survive beyond your term are the parts of your career-shaping ideas, inspiration, guidance and character that stay with people after you depart. How do your influence and attitudes continue to shape people’s actions in small ways, even decades later? Hidden in tiny exchanges are profound messages that shape people’s lives; that is the real essence of a leadership legacy. So, what do you want to be remembered for?

That all said, as one firm leader pointed out many years ago, “this job ain’t for wimps. You can’t live in the short term, put off painful action, allow problems to fester and pray the day of reckoning will arrive… after you have left!”

Patrick J. McKenna advises law firms internationally on how to manage and compete effectively
(www.patrickmckenna.com). He is co-author of First Among Equals and co-leads the programme ‘First 100 Days: The New Managing Partner’s Master Class’ at the University of Chicago.

Endnote

1. See ‘A wandering mind is an unhappy mind’, Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, Science, Vol. 330
No. 6006, 12 November 2010