Who are you? Find out if you are a routine or an innovative managing partner

Are you a routine or an innovative managing partner? Dr Ad Kil reveals how to assess where you fit within the legal sector

 

Most people see the legal sector as static and evolutionary in character. There are few rebels, revolutionaries or innovators because everyone is busy working for clients. People working in law firms have different, often conflicting, roles: business owner, manager, adviser and lawyer.

Lawyers typically have an individualistic state of mind, where professional aggressiveness, rivalry and legal antagonistic behaviour is commonplace. Of course, those are also the competences needed to be successful in client work.

However, law firms consequently have problems with trust, ideology, values and norms, professional distance and decision-making. Although there are teams and colleagues, in actual fact, collegiality, team spirit and commitment to the practice seem to be more of an ideal than a reality.

As such, law firms have five big obstacles to overcome.

1. Partners are notoriously difficult to manage – in fact, if you can manage partners, you can manage anyone and anything!
2. Few people go into the law to become a manager, so many aren’t interested in learning about management.
3. The culture, language, problems and concepts of management are alien to lawyers.
4. The managing partner is usually the first among equals, limiting the extent of his power.
5. The managing partner is often tasked with managing not just the people but also the entire business.

Law firms are regularly out of balance. Internally, they face growing pains, personnel issues and the like. Externally, they face pressure from regulatory changes, the labour market, financial crises and new client demands. While external factors are beyond a managing partner’s control, both internal and external challenges demand an answer, an action, a response.

This is the arena of the managing partner: to manage the continuity of the firm, internal changes and change management processes; and to direct the firm’s strategic response to professional and commercial demands from clients, who themselves are influenced by external forces. Figure 1 illustrates this modern ‘torture machine’.

A managing partner needs more than one pair of hands to handle any one of these forces, let alone all of them altogether. So, what competencies does he need to meet these challenges?

 Evidence-based competence

A good, simple definition of competence is this: competence is the ability of a person or an organisation to achieve a certain performance.1

A person’s competencies consist of:

• integrated performance skills, which are constructed with clusters of knowledge structures:
  • 
    cognitive;
  • interactive;
  • ability to effect change; and
  • psychomotor skills (where necessary).
• attitudes and values, which are prerequisites for:
  • 
    performance of tasks;
  • problem solving; and
  • effective performance in a specific profession, organisation, function or role.

Competence is contextual: being a successful managing partner of firm A is not a good predictor for success in firm B!

There are two types of law firms: the routine and the innovative. This differentiation is important because the behaviours connected with the competencies for each are almost opposite.

There are three clusters of competency for managing partners, each of which has its own time horizon and level of abstraction (see Figure 2).

To put the complete profile in a scheme, see Figures 3, 4 and 5. Using these competency frameworks, it is easy to see big differences between the behaviour of someone managing a routine firm and someone managing an innovative firm.

There can be a dramatic mismatch: imagine, for example, the newly-chosen managing partner who favours innovation but joins a successful routine firm. Trying to manage the routine firm with the competences in the right-hand column or to manage an innovative firm with the competences in the left-hand column will result in tension and difficulties.

 

Need vs. practice

Management can most definitely be learned. Knowledge is not the problem: the problem is self awareness and the desire to learn. It is the survival of the fittest, survival of the one who best fits the environment.

The first step is to know yourself and your weaknesses before someone else (clients, competitors or the market) does. At what stage are you and your firm currently? To make this analysis painless, try a little competence test based on the competencies portfolio (see Figure 6). You can do this on your own or with colleagues, as follows:

• Round 1 – fill it in with this question in mind: what does the firm need?
• Round 2 – fill it in with this question in mind: how do I personally score?
• Round 3 – compare the two and find the gaps. 

 

Change management

It is perfectly normal to discover gaps in competency: gaps create a direction for change. Since it easier to change yourself than the firm, you know what to do.

Innovation has nothing to do with taking risk, it is about developing a well thought-out strategy. Radical change does not work in law firms: the most robust change management strategy involves incremental but determined steps.

And keep the golden organisational rule in mind: you can achieve more with, as we Dutch say, ‘temporary approximate’ action. Because you cannot anticipate everything that will happen, you can achieve more with temporary agreements (“let’s try this for a certain but defined period”) and with an outline working plan. This is a hedge against doing nothing or the wrong thing, but also prevents paralysis through analysis.

 Dr. Ad Kil is the director of executive doctorate programs at Nyenrode Business University and the transformational change module leader for the MBA in Legal Practice at Nottingham Law School

Endnote

1  See Competentieontwikkeling in Organisaties: Perspectieven en Praktijk,  Martin Mulder, Reed Business, 2001