Get a life!

Building the career you want

We all want to enjoy life but it’s not easy to see a way forward in our careers just now, particularly for those who took gap years and sabbaticals and were able to float in and out of work.  The market has hardened and if you don’t have a plan you will be part of someone else’s.  It’s not possible to just join a firm and wait for it to happen. The fact is that individuals need to identify their goals just as firms do; and this is about defining your future, not predicting it.

Most of us are clearer about what we don’t want than what we do, but what’s the point in moaning our way to retirement?  Planning a career isn’t easy and for that reason many of us spend more time planning our holidays. There are several ways to identify goals:

·        Creative visualisation

·        Using words and pictures

·        Writing our personal definition of success

Creative visualisation involves sitting quietly, visualising the future and asking the following questions: Where will I be? Who will I be with? What am I doing? What can I hear round me?  How am I feeling?

Using words and pictures means listening to yourself when you describe to someone else where you would like to be, or, if you are visual, cutting out pictures and drawing or creating a collage of a successful future or, thirdly, simply writing goals to define our personal definition of success such as achieving material success and describing exactly what that would look like.

Having overcome the hurdle of deciding what we want the next stage is to establish where we are now – before you can get to point B, you need to establish where point A is.  Many find the wheel of life useful.  Just type ‘wheel of life’ inot Google and you will have many to choose from. Simply take each segment and colour in your level of satisfaction; the centre being very dissatisfied and the outer edge very satisfied.  Do you achieve a balanced circle?

 If you don’t enjoy colouring circles, consider answering the following questions:

What are you trying to achieve from your career?

What is most important to you in life?

Who is most important to you?

What goals have you achieved so far?

What goals have you set aside as unachievable?

What are your natural gifts and abilities?

What aspects of work do you enjoy most?

What aspects of work do you enjoy least?

What do you feel you are putting up with?

Once you have identified your starting point and are ready to make changes, it is important to remember you can only change yourself.  Make a list of your values and be sure that any choice you make is in line with them.  Focus on the positive for example; rather than, ‘I don’t want to lose my job’ concentrate on ‘I am doing the following aspects of my job well’.

Finally, set SMART objectives; specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound.  You are then ready to look for a career that is compatible with all the above.

There are three things on most lawyers’ minds:

• the economy
• the Legal Services Act
• the competition

None of us knows what will happen in the future and so it is harder than ever to plan.  However, planning is essential and New Year is a good time to think about it.  So whether you are planning the future of the firm or your own career, it is time to get on with it. All the firms I am working with at the moment, once they have dealt with general housekeeping including cashflow, are looking again at client service.  Whatever happens, client service needs to be at the top of the agenda.

Consider

1. Why should tomorrow’s clients choose you?
2. What makes you different and how can a client tell?
3. Solicitors and clients have different perspectives
4. Clients are sometimes unfamiliar with legal services
5. Clients want to feel reassured, in control and in receipt of good value

Do you know how your clients would rate you?

Client service is high up on the legal agenda at the moment with all the new Rule changes and firms fighting for business in a difficult market.  So how come firms are still letting down their clients?  Are solicitors still of the opinion that if they are technically good, clients will stay with them? 

I have had a recent experience as a corporate client with an employment solicitor who I believe is technically reliable.  Having received instructions, he promised to come back to me by a given date with costs estimates.  He missed the deadline and I heard nothing.  When I rang two days later, he said he planned to ring me that very afternoon. 

The next stage was for him to forward a written advice to us.  He suggested a deadline and said I would not hear later than that date as he was out of town the following day for 3 days.  Again I heard nothing on the day of the deadline.  I emailed two days later having heard from my co-directors that they were losing confidence.  I received an emailed apology saying he was unexpectedly out of town for three days and I would hear the following week!

The result is:

• we have lost confidence in his technical ability through poor service
• I feel I have let down my co-directors although the fault isn’t mine
• we have to start all over again with someone else
• our initial legal problem is magnified through the delay
• I dread recommending another lawyer as this isn’t the first time we have been let down

If our experience is typical, then go ahead firms can easily differentiate themselves from the competition!

Firms which pride themselves on being nice places to work sometimes forego good profits believing that the two are incompatible.  However, this is not the case and in the current economic times, firms need to be sure they are performing as well as they can.  In many firms senior people now have more time on their hands than they had a year ago.  It is an ideal opportunity to help more junior fee earners improve their financial performance.  It can often take no more than two coaching sessions for vast improvements to take place.  To quote an assistant solicitor, “I realise that I can do six chargeable hours a day relatively simply using the techniques we have discussed.  I always believed this was something I was incapable of.”

• Ask people to volunteer confidentially for coaching
• Understand that any time you spend on it will be rewarded many times over
• Train senior people in coaching techniques

I’ve never been a fan of bonus schemes set up in the hope that people will work harder than they would have done without them. It’s a waste of money – particularly now, when people need to save it. While this applies to individual transactions, it applies even more to client service and business development matters on which firms especially need to concentrate now.

Why?

There are various reasons depending on the way the scheme is set up:

• What happens if there is a downturn in the work and the firm can no longer afford to pay bonuses?
• If bonuses reward individual effort, they discourage cooperation and team working
• Such schemes encourage short term thinking and so discourage long term activities such as business development and building relationships both within and outside the firm
• They encourage people’s attention away from finding any inherent meaning and interest in the work itself including the clients
• Clients notice if you are interested in them and are concerned about the outcome of their matter. They also notice if you are concentrating on getting as much money as possible!

If we want to get our people to think long term, and that is what is needed now, we should encourage them to build their profile (prospective clients can’t come to you if they don’t know you are there!) and relationships with existing and prospective clients.

We don’t need to pay bonuses to get people to do this, but we do need to give them our time.

There isn’t the time, the money or the energy to make business development complicated at the moment, and yet law firms still face the challenge of how they are going to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Well, questions are the answers. You need the answer to these three questions from your clients after their matter has finished:

• Were you completely satisfied with the service provided?
• Are you coming back?
• Will you recommend us to colleagues, friends and family?

We need to email our clients from time to time to ask the above three questions. If the client is not completely satisfied, then a senior partner should find out why not and do something about it. The whole organisation from the junior to the senior partner needs to be focussed on client service so that appraisals, partner reviews, promotions, pay rises and everything else, concentrates on this hugely important matter. 

If your firm really did this relentlessly and everyone participated with enthusiasm to make sure that clients thought the firm was fantastic, differentiation wouldn’t be a problem. Most firms are still not taking client care nearly seriously enough. What about yours?

Trying to second guess the economy at the moment is challenging for most firms.  Many practices are in trouble as a result of the fall off in property and corporate work.  So, why not concentrate on what you know will be necessary:

• Improve the cash collection cycle
• Give clients what they really want rather than issuing bland statements about client care
• Performance management.  Insist on what you want and help people get there
• Ensure expertise in areas of work which will be in demand in the short and long term
• Either reduce or move capacity in areas of work which are no longer in demand
• In your planning take into account the Legal Services Act

All these things require considered decisions made by those on the firm’s board or in smaller firms, in the partnership, and then a written plan and a coordinated, serious effort by those who intend to implement them.  They really do bear fruit when it comes to client satisfaction, motivation and fees.

For many, autumn is the time of year when half yearly progress with the business plan is reviewed. Most of you will find underperformance in some area of the firm. What are you doing about it? Many underperformers do not realise that they are underperforming. Some know that they are not achieving goals but have no idea what to do about it. Others think if they lie low, no one will notice. It is essential that firms deal with underperformance otherwise the problem will continue, and worse still, those who are performing, tired of carrying others, may leave. I hope you find the suggestions below helpful.

Facilitating change

Underperformance could be defined as a failure to achieve predefined goals. Frequently partners in law firms do not know what is expected of them except in terms of billing.

• Get agreement across the partnership concerning performance goals for all partners
• Agree with individual partners at the beginning of the year what goals they need to achieve
• Ensure the goals are SMART and written
• Help them work out how they can achieve them
• Provide training if necessary
• Meet them monthly to review progress
• Encourage them!

For people I have met recently, the idea of a blog is to draw your attention to matters which I have come across in professional firms in the past few months. Below are my thoughts on how to manage partners within professional firms.

• Partners in many professional firms are not held accountable for anything other than financial performance
• Managing partners are frequently overworked
• Many senior and managing partners feel isolated
• Many partners are behaving like sole practitioners running separate businesses
• Firms need a simple practical business plan holding individuals accountable for their role
• Managing partners need to coach such partners at least quarterly if not monthly to ensure goals are met

In firms where partners are coached, there is a greater likelihood of that firm achieving its plans. They don’t feel isolated, morale improves and the progress of the firm is under control. Initially managing partners frequently do not have the time to do this. Having a background in the professions, I am able to do this to assist in the short term. Please do ring me for a free telephone session to find out what’s involved. For practical articles on coaching, please see the ‘articles’ section.

Now we are entering summer, your business plan will probably be complete and I hope it is assisting you in the running of the firm. Effective complaints handling not only helps to build client and colleague relationships, but also assists in the business planning process the following year. It is free information for the organisation. Do you keep comprehensive records? Could you see your complaining clients as people who want to help the firm? I make a few suggestions below which I hope will assist.

Facilitating change

Clients complain because you have not met their expectations of what they think is a good level of service. This is often because you have not considered what level of service they wanted or expected.

• Have you written down what all your clients can expect from you?
• Could everyone in the firm tell an outsider what this is?
• Is your complaints procedure simple to use?
• Does everyone know how it works? (They don’t in most firms)
• Have they all had training? Complaints handling isn’t common sense
• Do you always tell the client the timescale for dealing with their complaint?
• Does your procedure allow clients to appeal to someone who isn’t involved in the complaint?
• Do you document the complaint and outcome for use in the following year’s business planning?