Modifying Actions and Attitudes to Enhance Geographic Integration

Publikováno: 23. 6. 2011, Kategorie: Ze světa,

Here is the latest in a regular series of articles based on the work of the Managing Partner Leadership Advisory Board (“LAB”).

LAB was created by international law practice management consultant Patrick J. McKenna and Baker & Daniels Chair Emeritus Brian K. Burke to offer recently appointed managing partners a forum in which to pose questions on issues of critical leadership importance. LAB responses derive from its members' many years' experience as law firm leaders.

Along with McKenna and Burke, the LAB includes the following distinguished current and former law firm leaders: Angelo Arcadipane (Dickstein Shapiro LLP); John Bouma (Snell & Wilmer LLP); Ben F. Johnson, III (Alston & Bird LLP); Keith B. Simmons (Bass Berry & Sims PLC); William J. Strickland (McGuire Woods LLP); Harry P. Trueheart, III (Nixon Peabody LLP); R. Thomas Stanton (Squire Sanders); and Robert M. Granatstein (Blake Cassels and Graydon).

QUESTION

I’m about to become (in two months) the new Managing Partner at a firm where approximately one-half of our lawyers are in one city (where my office is), while the rest are dispersed over four smaller locations and across three states. A sense of us-and-them has unfortunately developed. My being yet another managing partner from the firm’s largest office doesn’t help. One of my priorities is to implement actions that would serve to make our long-distance working relationships more cohesive. I am planning to visit each of the offices before I assume leadership and on a regular basis thereafter.

Yet I suspect that such well-meaning activity on my part does not really address the core issue here. What has been your experience handling such situations? What specific strategies and initiatives, would you suggest I implement?

RESPONSE

Here is a topic that members of our group have all worked at for some time, with reasonable success and to good purpose. Integration of multiple offices is very difficult, particularly if they come from different backgrounds through mergers. It takes constant attention.

While as Managing Partner you can solve some problems on your own and make an important personal contribution, in the end it is a matter of molding a "one-firm" culture, inclusive at many levels of all geographies. Here are some steps that we would recommend:

Identify and Address “Us-and-Them” Warning Signs

As you visit with people in each of your offices, see if you can begin to identify the various specific factors that may contribute to the “us-and-them” as you’ve perceived it. LISTEN for: how your partners talk about issues and problems? Is there a lot of finger-pointing? Do lawyers and staff use words like, “you” and “your” instead of “we” and “our?” For example, “You aren’t making your expected revenue numbers” sounds much different to those involved than, “We aren’t hitting our budget.”

LOOK for: what the firm might inadvertently be doing to promote us-and-them mentalities. You may observe a few behaviors that either promote unhealthy competition between offices or drive people to resent one another. For example, the firm may:

· Give each office separate identities or goals, such as office budget targets, etc.

· Acknowledge or reward people for contributions made at their office level rather than for contributions that benefit the entire firm.

· Isolate lawyers physically without encouraging or allocating the budget dollars necessary for your professionals to communicate and meet face-to-face on any kind of regular basis.

· Make it more difficult to communicate because there’s only limited technology tools (e.g., state-of-the-art video-conferencing) available to use when people cannot meet in person.

When these negative factors are at play, it becomes inevitable that lawyers will, at best, only tolerate those in other locations and, at worst, ignore or even disrespect them. An us-and-them mentality can perilously accelerate during times of change and economic pressure in the marketplace. In turn, the internal embattlement saps capacity, distracts professionals from properly serving their clients, and subverts your firm’s ability to develop a strong unified market presence when it’s needed most.

There are some positive things that you can do during your visits to help stem the centrifugal tide:

· Remind your partners of some of the heroes in your firm who come from the various offices, what they’ve added to the firm’s profile and reputation, and how proud you are of their contribution.

· Describe some of the firm’s long-revered traditions (that may have been forgotten); some of the deeper values that lawyers from across all offices share in common; some of the goals that you believe everyone shares; and pointedly ask your partners if they think those cultural commitments are still worth preserving.

· Ask your partners to help you identify the common challenges that they believe everyone in the firm must work together to resolve.

When you begin your term of office speaking the language of inclusion, it sets a tone and creates an environment in which everything that you believe to be most important can indeed prevail.

Ensure That Your Firm’s Structure Supports the Culture

With such outreach as your starting point, it is then absolutely essential that you ensure that you have firm-wide practice groups, and that the leadership of those practice groups is dispersed firm-wide.

Look at your firm’s business plans. Are there practice objectives that go beyond local office-based goals and opportunities? If not, should there be? Most firms have a mix of local opportunities and opportunities without a strong geographic component. The latter could include clients with needs in more than one of the cities where you have offices. They may likewise be matters that require a nationally or regionally competitive expertise, such that one office will need to draw on the specific substantive skills and knowledge-sets of the others.

In other words, building plans around work that naturally requires the integration of the firm will help drive the result that you want. To be sure, we believe most decisively that firm-wide practice groups are essential to integration and that the representation of various offices among the leaders of the practice groups is likewise critical.

As managing partner, you may need to force the issue. Your message to the partnership is that practice groups, not offices, define the firm, both as management entities and in terms of day-to-day substantive client work. If not practice groups per se, industry groups or client service teams serve the same integrative purpose. Anything but “offices!”

Our LAB members believe strongly that office centricity is the great “divider and conqueror” in any law firm structure. There should be no "branch offices" or "branch office" terminology. Be sure that your entire staff understands the "one-firm" message and strongly deter them from talking about offices any more than is necessary in their internal and external communications.

If feasible, you should think about locating some of your senior staff leadership in your other offices. Be certain to minimize office-based intra-firm reporting (e.g., financials, sales successes, partner promotions, etc.). Any publication of office profitability statistics can be counterproductive.

Of course, firm management will still need that information, but releasing it for general consumption can create divisions among partners. Part of your role is to always review intra-firm communications to ensure that they reinforce the one-firm message, or at least do not inadvertently compromise it.

Yet firm-wide practice groups are, in and of themselves, not enough. You must also encourage your practice group leaders to invest greater effort than usual to create team identity and purpose. Each group needs to have specific written operating guidelines determined by the members of the group. You likewise need to encourage cross-office matter staffing, as there is no better way to bring people together than to allow them to work in harmony to meet client requirements.

Your firm-wide group members need to have as much face time with each other as possible so that people connect at a human, not just functional, level. Whenever possible, the practice group leader should be strongly encouraged to travel to one of the other offices to personally be there for monthly group meetings. Each group should also conduct a bi-annual practice group retreat to discuss and shape its long-term direction.

As managing partner, you should schedule frequent, formal feedback sessions for times when you can gather the practice group leaders from all offices. Specifically ask about what’s working and what’s not.

Ensure That Your Systems Support the Culture

If the culture is deeply dug in as an office-based configuration and the us-and-them atmosphere is toxic, it may be necessary to openly address the issue of disunity and get people directly on board with a program to change the culture. It may, in fact, be necessary for you to overdo the lobbying and exhortations, at least for awhile until the firm begins to palpably change direction.

In the interim, examine some of the levers that you have available to shape your firm’s culture. For example:

· Put more money and time than you might prefer into communications and travel among offices in order to bring partners, associates, and staff together. Meetings should include not just other lawyers and staff leaders but anyone significantly involved in marketing and sales activities, training programs, etc., that involve the entire firm. Be sure that others besides the people from the main office help conduct these meetings.

Ensure that committee memberships and other firm leadership roles are distributed fairly among partners across the various geographic locations.

· Develop some metrics to track the flow of work back and forth between offices. It is not so important that there be an exact "balance of trade." What is important is that work is indeed flowing back and forth.

· Make certain that your compensation system explicitly values and rewards activities that show a firm-wide perspective, including activities that your partners specifically undertake in order to achieve the firm-wide integration you seek.

· Use small prizes or awards that allow your partners to recognize their colleagues in other offices besides their own for efforts to ensure that a client matter was executed properly, an important task was completed on schedule, etc.

Shift the Focus

In their famous book on negotiation, Getting To Yes, Roger Fisher and William L. Ury tell us to focus on interests, not positions. Us-versus-them reflects opposing sets of interests. One key action that you can take is to seize on opportunities to refocus collective energies on something of common interest to all the partners. To foster this we’re-all-on-the-same-team mindset, some firms:

· Target a common enemy.

· Help lawyers and staff stay focused on the big picture, the external challenge, and salient competitors. Firms have often found that there is nothing that can unify diverse interests faster than working to beat another law firm that shares a common footprint and continues to be a formidable market rival.

· Create a common foundation of pride in what you can achieve together.

· Work together on pro bono campaigns of one sort or another. By uniting to build something of general benefit, lawyers forge bonds of friendship and trust. In similar fashion, many firms that have purposively targeted best-places-to-work awards report that the effort required, the energies invested, and the satisfaction of being recognized have done much to invigorate the collective team spirit.

Whether you decide to create a new shared performance metric, rally around a shared threat, or aspire to a shared ambition, the central task is to find common ground and a context in which everyone can contribute. Everyone in every office needs to understand what’s at stake and what can be achieved together. Once they do, it shifts the focus from being on different sides to being on the same team.

As someone once put it very eloquently, in order to put an end to us-versus-them, us must become them, and them must become us.

Contact the Managing Partner Leadership Advisory Board (LAB) by emailing Patrick McKenna at Patrick@patrickmckenna.com.

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Tento článek (publikovaný v časopise Of Counsel č. 7/2010) byl otištěn s laskavým svolením naší partnerské společnosti Aspen Publishers (USA)

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