PD Is the Core Platform To Circle the Wagons

In challenging markets, the overall success of a firm depends on several critical factors: what attorneys know and can do, their ability to adjust and change in the face of adversity, their commitment to and belief in the firm’s goals, and their desire to work together as part of the team. Law firms can use existing professional development components—training programs, mentoring programs, virtual learning systems, peer-to-peer collaboration—to reinforce firm integration, individual attorney security, and client confidence. Partners, associates and clients all need to see that the firm is on solid ground. Use PD to tell your lawyers and clients that everyone is valued, everyone pulls together, and everyone benefits in the end. Use PD to calm the waters, communicate consistent messages, disseminate the firm’s strategic and tactical goals, and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

PD can also be used to reassure your associates that their participation is essential to the firm’s continued success. In this market, associates need to help the firm hold on to existing clients, reduce client costs, re-build practice groups and develop new practice areas. Shift the learning content of professional development programs to match the evolving needs of clients and the firm. Through mentoring and feedback, partners can demonstrate their commitment to their associates. That commitment inspires associate loyalty to the firm even when there are fewer billable hours, workforce reductions, or decreases in above-salary compensation (such as hours-based bonuses). To weather the storm, your firm is going to need that loyalty.

By continuing to offer professional development programs, the firm reassures its clients that it is still focused on developing excellent attorneys and providing high-quality service. Look for new opportunities to add value and cement client relationships. Bring clients in as partners and participants in your PD program. Send attorneys out as partners and participants in client training programs. Use virtual learning and peer-to-peer collaboration to generate new solutions to client problems.

Your PD Function Must Support Today’s Strategic Plan

To be effective, PD must be an integrated, dynamic part of the firm’s strategic planning. The PowerPoints you used years ago don’t cut it anymore. Yesterday’s clinical scenarios won’t help your associates face today’s challenges. All components of your PD program must be tied to your firm’s current tactical and strategic objectives.

Persons charged with PD responsibilities must consider what legal services clients are going to need during the next six months, the next year, and the next two years. Then they must ask: Do our attorneys have the expertise, knowledge, and skills to provide those services? If there is a gap between the two—and there will be—you need to close it so that your attorneys are ready when your clients need them, and are equipped with the necessary skills to do the work you have and the work you want.

Firms that align their professional development with their firm’s strategic goals will gain a competitive advantage over firms that let their professional development programs stagnate, or worse, cut them—or worst of all, do not have any. These advantages will manifest in:

• identification of new client needs
• new expertise and skills
• greater subject matter and practice specialization
• higher efficiency with improved realization rates
• better internal communication
• better resource allocation

Maximize PD In Six Steps

Professional development doesn’t have to be a burden, expensive, or hard. It just has to happen. Most firms already have the subject matter expertise and internal capability to create the professional development programs they need; they just need to strategically deploy their resources.

Here are six ideas for maximizing the use of PD:

1. Focus on industry and practice specific skills. Avoid “just in case” programs and focus on “just in time” programming.
2. Use PD as a substitute for additional associate compensation/bonus to support morale. Even in the best of times, associates are often willing to trade money for greater personal engagement and work satisfaction. Increased opportunities for engagement and satisfaction can offset decreased opportunities for economic rewards.
3. Trim the fat in your professional development schedule. Your firm should not be spending time or money on generic, worn-out programs that are only useful for the MCLE credits they provide (MCLE credits should be a bonus of but not the objective of PD). Make sure that each program is focused on strategic objectives and will allow your attorneys to achieve those objectives.
4. Eliminate expensive extras. Meals, cocktails, travel, and gifts are often used to entice or reward attorneys for attending professional development programs. A good program that engages them and provides them with the tools they need to succeed can be a reward in and of itself.
5. Take advantage of virtual learning tools. Explore and exploit the wonderful world of intranets, webinars, wikis, knols, podcasts, and peer-to-peer networks. You can use outside sources, develop internal sources (or combine the two), and blend traditional and virtual training methods to maximize the PD experience and reduce costs.
6. Use slow times to develop and improve internal programs. If your firm’s partners and associates are wandering the halls looking for something do, grab them and put them to work. Most of them have probably been promising to pitch in for years, and now is the time to hold them to it.

PD is a vital part of every firm’s ongoing health and well being, not an “extra” or an afterthought. Use it to lift morale, to rebuild, and to expand—to not just survive these uncertain times, but to thrive in them.

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But mentoring is not coaching. At its core, mentoring is person- focused. It is about supporting associate participation and career advancement. Coaching is job-focused. It is about improving associate performance and developing skills. Mentors advise; coaches instruct. Both are equally valuable. The big difference between the two is that mentoring frequently happens in the practice of law while coaching does not.

Coaching can be used to improve performance in just about every aspect of the practice of law: writing, analysis, oral advocacy, time management, leadership, and business development. Coaching is time- and attention-intensive, but the investment of both rewards the coach and the associate. Coaching can be used to correct or enhance performance, or both. Firms often turn to coaching to “fix” a problem. For example, an associate with excellent overall performance may have a specific deficit—writing, organization, communication—that needs to be improved in order to meet firm expectations. In baseball, imagine a Golden Glove shortstop who hits under .200 year after year. Although his manager values the player’s fielding skills, the team needs the player to hit more effectively to be of full value to the team so they hire a batting coach.

But firms can also use coaching more strategically to maximize the performance of talented attorneys who are already doing well. In this scenario, incremental improvement can be very profitable in terms of increased efficiency, increased productivity, and higher quality work at higher rates. Think about the baseball manager who brings in skill-specific coaches to improve his shortstop’s batting average from .300 to .325, make him a smarter base runner, and decrease the number of fielding errors by 50%. That’s how All-Stars are made. Do that with enough players and you’ll have a winning team.

To correct performance, firms often bring in outside coaches who have specific subject-matter expertise and well-developed coaching skills. Sometimes, an outside expert is the way to go. But this is not always the most cost-effective approach. Firms that want to use coaching to strategically enhance performance would benefit greatly by incorporating coaching into the roles and responsibilities of senior attorneys. Of course, coaching is itself a skill that, like any other, must be consciously and continuously developed.

A coach begins by assessing lawyer performance, then uses that assessment to identify specific performance objectives, and finally provides step-by-step instruction and evaluation to achieve those objectives.

Begin With An Initial Assessment To Identify Performance Objectives

If you are interested in coaching a colleague, the most important thing to remember is that you have to begin with who, what and where that individual is now. You have to understand the person’s individual history, knowledge, and experience as well as his or her inherent characteristics and talents. First, find out how others view the individual’s performance by reviewing evaluations and interviewing supervisors and peers. Ask questions that get beyond general descriptions like, “He’s a weak writer” or, “She’s not a persuasive speaker.”

Second, look at any objective data: time sheets, realization rates, billing rates, and work assignments. Third, if possible, conduct your own assessment of the individual’s performance by reviewing work she has written, observing her give a presentation, or running her through a role-play or sample scenario. Finally, walk the individual through a self-evaluation. Most people know their own weaknesses: they know what makes them struggle, and what makes them uncomfortable. At the end of this process, you should have a list of specific deficits or performance concerns that the individual needs to work on.

Because coaching is performance-based, you have to know the expected or desired level of performance. Many law firms have articulated their performance standards as benchmarks or core competencies. If the firm has not expressed these standards, use the interviewing process and your own experiences to articulate what performance is expected or desired. You and the associate both need to understand the goal and how performance will be measured.

Next, work with the individual to set performance goals. Here, you play the coach as motivator. The best coaches help lawyers envision the practitioners they might become. The performance goals should be well-defined and designed to move that particular person to the next level of expected or desired performance.

By comparing the desired performance with the actual performance, you should discover the performance gap.

Fix The Performance Gap In Four Steps

Coaching, which is both practical and experiential, begins after the performance gap is identified.

Step One: Identify the functional problem. To do this, you have to break down and examine the mechanics of the actual and the desired performance.

For example, in baseball, a batting coach working with our shortstop will look at the position of the hands, arms, and elbows; the angle of the bat; the distance from the plate; the balance of weight over the feet; the stance; the visual focus; the hand speed; the cut of the bat through the air; and the follow through. Similarly, a coach working with an attorney on legal writing will look at the person’s knowledge of the law, ability to find and understand the law and to gather and understand the facts, use of authority, expression of the facts, articulation of reasoning, as well as the more obvious details of organization, headings, citation format, sentence structure, word usage, grammar, and proofing.

Once you have identified all of the functional components of the performance gap, prioritize the order in which they will be addressed. Anyone who has ever taken golf lessons knows that it is impossible to fix an incorrect grip, stance, swing, and follow through all at the same time.

Step Two: Show and instruct. Having identified the functional problem(s), describe the problem(s) to the individual. He needs to know what needs to be changed, why, and what the new result will look like. Then, tell him how to change it. Even better, show him how to change it. Following your list of priorities, do this for only one or two functional components at a time.

Step Three: Practice, feedback, practice, feedback. Coaching provides high quality feedback that supports the development of skills. True performance improvement takes time and repetition. Just telling a person she is doing something wrong and telling her how to do it right is not enough to create change. The individual must have opportunities to practice what you teach her. As she practices, you need to keep giving her feedback on what is working and what is not. You also need to solicit her input. Does she understand the instruction? Does she understand how to apply it? Is it comfortable? Does it make sense? Does she think it is working? To enhance the coaching relationship, you need to know what the associate perceives as challenges or obstacles to her improvement, and to engage her in the process.

Step Four: Assess and refine. After the individual has had time to work on his performance, step back and assess. Has the performance gap been closed? Is the individual’s performance meeting or exceeding the desired level of performance? If so, great! If not, figure out why. Go back through Step One. Did you correctly identify the functional components of the performance problem? Did you correctly prioritize them? Then, go back over Step Two. Was the change that you suggested the right change? Did the individual really understand what you wanted him to do? Was he committed to making the change? If not, why not? Is there a different correction that you can suggest, or a different way to explain it? Once you have shifted the instruction, go through Step Three again.

Repeat these four steps until the desired performance is achieved. Once the performance has improved, move on to the next performance goal.

Coaching Has Reciprocal Benefits

Coaching is a strategic tool that maximizes a lawyer’s potential in ways that benefit both the individual attorney and the firm. For the individual attorney, coaching increases competence, facilitates the acquisition of new skills, builds confidence and identifies solutions to specific lawyering skills problems. For the firm, coaching improves relationships, demonstrates commitment to associates, allows more efficient use of attorney talents, and leverages experience for increased productivity and profitability.

From a purely selfish point of view, the benefits to you, as coach, are perhaps the greatest. Coaching can make a good lawyer great. Guiding someone else to a level of true excellence is one of the most satisfying professional experiences imaginable. For every Derek Jeter, Roger Staubach, and Mary Lou Retton, there was a Joe Torre, Tom Landry, and Bela Karolyi. But each of those coaches also coached a slew of other players who excelled at their sport thanks to coaching. Even more importantly, in the process of analyzing and improving performance, great coaches make lasting contributions to their fields in terms of strategies, techniques and standards. This is true in sports and it is true in law. That great coach could be you.

Post from: The Complete Lawyer

No related posts.

But mentoring is not coaching. At its core, mentoring is person- focused. It is about supporting associate participation and career advancement. Coaching is job-focused. It is about improving associate performance and developing skills. Mentors advise; coaches instruct. Both are equally valuable. The big difference between the two is that mentoring frequently happens in the practice of law while coaching does not.

Coaching can be used to improve performance in just about every aspect of the practice of law: writing, analysis, oral advocacy, time management, leadership, and business development. Coaching is time- and attention-intensive, but the investment of both rewards the coach and the associate. Coaching can be used to correct or enhance performance, or both. Firms often turn to coaching to “fix” a problem. For example, an associate with excellent overall performance may have a specific deficit—writing, organization, communication—that needs to be improved in order to meet firm expectations. In baseball, imagine a Golden Glove shortstop who hits under .200 year after year. Although his manager values the player’s fielding skills, the team needs the player to hit more effectively to be of full value to the team so they hire a batting coach.

But firms can also use coaching more strategically to maximize the performance of talented attorneys who are already doing well. In this scenario, incremental improvement can be very profitable in terms of increased efficiency, increased productivity, and higher quality work at higher rates. Think about the baseball manager who brings in skill-specific coaches to improve his shortstop’s batting average from .300 to .325, make him a smarter base runner, and decrease the number of fielding errors by 50%. That’s how All-Stars are made. Do that with enough players and you’ll have a winning team.

To correct performance, firms often bring in outside coaches who have specific subject-matter expertise and well-developed coaching skills. Sometimes, an outside expert is the way to go. But this is not always the most cost-effective approach. Firms that want to use coaching to strategically enhance performance would benefit greatly by incorporating coaching into the roles and responsibilities of senior attorneys. Of course, coaching is itself a skill that, like any other, must be consciously and continuously developed.

A coach begins by assessing lawyer performance, then uses that assessment to identify specific performance objectives, and finally provides step-by-step instruction and evaluation to achieve those objectives.

Begin With An Initial Assessment To Identify Performance Objectives

If you are interested in coaching a colleague, the most important thing to remember is that you have to begin with who, what and where that individual is now. You have to understand the person’s individual history, knowledge, and experience as well as his or her inherent characteristics and talents. First, find out how others view the individual’s performance by reviewing evaluations and interviewing supervisors and peers. Ask questions that get beyond general descriptions like, “He’s a weak writer” or, “She’s not a persuasive speaker.”

Second, look at any objective data: time sheets, realization rates, billing rates, and work assignments. Third, if possible, conduct your own assessment of the individual’s performance by reviewing work she has written, observing her give a presentation, or running her through a role-play or sample scenario. Finally, walk the individual through a self-evaluation. Most people know their own weaknesses: they know what makes them struggle, and what makes them uncomfortable. At the end of this process, you should have a list of specific deficits or performance concerns that the individual needs to work on.

Because coaching is performance-based, you have to know the expected or desired level of performance. Many law firms have articulated their performance standards as benchmarks or core competencies. If the firm has not expressed these standards, use the interviewing process and your own experiences to articulate what performance is expected or desired. You and the associate both need to understand the goal and how performance will be measured.

Next, work with the individual to set performance goals. Here, you play the coach as motivator. The best coaches help lawyers envision the practitioners they might become. The performance goals should be well-defined and designed to move that particular person to the next level of expected or desired performance.

By comparing the desired performance with the actual performance, you should discover the performance gap.

Fix The Performance Gap In Four Steps

Coaching, which is both practical and experiential, begins after the performance gap is identified.

Step One: Identify the functional problem. To do this, you have to break down and examine the mechanics of the actual and the desired performance.

For example, in baseball, a batting coach working with our shortstop will look at the position of the hands, arms, and elbows; the angle of the bat; the distance from the plate; the balance of weight over the feet; the stance; the visual focus; the hand speed; the cut of the bat through the air; and the follow through. Similarly, a coach working with an attorney on legal writing will look at the person’s knowledge of the law, ability to find and understand the law and to gather and understand the facts, use of authority, expression of the facts, articulation of reasoning, as well as the more obvious details of organization, headings, citation format, sentence structure, word usage, grammar, and proofing.

Once you have identified all of the functional components of the performance gap, prioritize the order in which they will be addressed. Anyone who has ever taken golf lessons knows that it is impossible to fix an incorrect grip, stance, swing, and follow through all at the same time.

Step Two: Show and instruct. Having identified the functional problem(s), describe the problem(s) to the individual. He needs to know what needs to be changed, why, and what the new result will look like. Then, tell him how to change it. Even better, show him how to change it. Following your list of priorities, do this for only one or two functional components at a time.

Step Three: Practice, feedback, practice, feedback. Coaching provides high quality feedback that supports the development of skills. True performance improvement takes time and repetition. Just telling a person she is doing something wrong and telling her how to do it right is not enough to create change. The individual must have opportunities to practice what you teach her. As she practices, you need to keep giving her feedback on what is working and what is not. You also need to solicit her input. Does she understand the instruction? Does she understand how to apply it? Is it comfortable? Does it make sense? Does she think it is working? To enhance the coaching relationship, you need to know what the associate perceives as challenges or obstacles to her improvement, and to engage her in the process.

Step Four: Assess and refine. After the individual has had time to work on his performance, step back and assess. Has the performance gap been closed? Is the individual’s performance meeting or exceeding the desired level of performance? If so, great! If not, figure out why. Go back through Step One. Did you correctly identify the functional components of the performance problem? Did you correctly prioritize them? Then, go back over Step Two. Was the change that you suggested the right change? Did the individual really understand what you wanted him to do? Was he committed to making the change? If not, why not? Is there a different correction that you can suggest, or a different way to explain it? Once you have shifted the instruction, go through Step Three again.

Repeat these four steps until the desired performance is achieved. Once the performance has improved, move on to the next performance goal.

Coaching Has Reciprocal Benefits

Coaching is a strategic tool that maximizes a lawyer’s potential in ways that benefit both the individual attorney and the firm. For the individual attorney, coaching increases competence, facilitates the acquisition of new skills, builds confidence and identifies solutions to specific lawyering skills problems. For the firm, coaching improves relationships, demonstrates commitment to associates, allows more efficient use of attorney talents, and leverages experience for increased productivity and profitability.

From a purely selfish point of view, the benefits to you, as coach, are perhaps the greatest. Coaching can make a good lawyer great. Guiding someone else to a level of true excellence is one of the most satisfying professional experiences imaginable. For every Derek Jeter, Roger Staubach, and Mary Lou Retton, there was a Joe Torre, Tom Landry, and Bela Karolyi. But each of those coaches also coached a slew of other players who excelled at their sport thanks to coaching. Even more importantly, in the process of analyzing and improving performance, great coaches make lasting contributions to their fields in terms of strategies, techniques and standards. This is true in sports and it is true in law. That great coach could be you.

Post from: The Complete Lawyer

No related posts.

You should think of it as the process by which attorneys acquire, increase and hone the knowledge, skills and attributes (referred to collectively as “competencies”), which you need to effectively “do” the work of lawyering and excel in the practice of law.

The Four Benefits Of Professional Development

Professional development helps us each become the complete lawyer in four important ways. First, and most obvious, it simply makes us better lawyers—more knowledgeable and more skilled. As our competence increases, so does our confidence. Perhaps just as important, our feelings of stress and risk decrease.

Second, because we are more knowledgeable and more skilled, we become more efficient, productive and profitable. We don’t waste time spinning our tires or reinventing the wheel. Even better, clients are often willing to pay more for greater expertise and higher quality work. Whatever the goal, professional development provides the tools that allow attorneys to take command of their work and their work-life.

Third, we create new opportunities and gain choices. We become more selective in choosing the clients and types of assignments we take on, and the people we want to work with. We have a greater ability to say “no” to the work we don’t want and “yes” to the work we do.

The fourth benefit is ultimately the most important: through effective professional development, we become self-actualized as attorneys, thus increasing our peak experience. In other words, we are more satisfied with our work efforts. By becoming more expert, knowledgeable, skilled, competent, and confident, we can dive deeper into each project, transaction, or case and take on more challenging and complex work. Quite simply, that level of engagement tends to make us happier.

Ten Core Competencies For Every Lawyer

As we progress through our careers, we must continually build and hone a range of skills and develop new areas of expertise to improve our job satisfaction and exceed client expectations. Professional development is more than learning the law and keeping up-to-date. As lawyers, we need to focus on a comprehensive set of ten competencies to ensure success and satisfaction.

The first five competencies relate to the legal skills essential to the substantive practice of law. These break down as follows:

Knowledge of the law (researching and finding the law, knowing general substantive and procedural law, developing subject-matter expertise)

Marshalling information (fact finding, questioning and interviewing, collecting and reviewing documents, e-discovery, organizing and categorizing information)

Analysis (critical review, reasoning, problem solving, understanding what facts mean, understanding what the law means, and applying the law to the facts)

Legal Expression (persuasive or objective oral and written communication of analysis, positions, opinions, arguments, and recommendations)

Practice skills (executing practice specific tasks such as, in litigation, taking depositions, arguing motions, and trial tactics; or, in transactional work, negotiating, drafting agreements, conducting due diligence, and counseling clients)

The other five competencies relate to the intrinsic professional skills that underlie a successful practice. These are:

Client service (building client relationships; understanding the client’s business, interests, and needs; providing advice and counsel; and building trust)

Professionalism (maintaining integrity and honesty, diligence, civility, ethics, diversity, mistake management)

Leadership (influencing others, supervising, delegating, collaborating, building consensus, envisioning, planning, giving feedback, and mentoring)

Business Development (creating and maintaining business relationships, networking, marketing, cross-selling)

Management (time management, planning and implementing tasks, organizing and managing one’s own work, organizing and managing others, and running the “business” side of the practice of law)

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