Vision, Decision (And Reservations)

Regular readers will know that one of my themes is leadership, and my belief that it's, increasingly, a determinant of which firms are "pulling away" and which are maintaining their position or even seeing it slowly erode.   I might add, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, that this belief of mine in the primacy of leadership has only emerged over the course of my analyzing our industry for "Adam Smith, Esq.:" 

It was not, so far as I know, an innate predilection, or a hypothesis or prejudice going in.  (I will plead guilty to believing that "people make the times" rather than "the times make people," but that applies to the global historical canvas and not necessarily an individual firm.)

So when the Harvard Business Review features "Grooming Next-Generation Leaders," I pay attention.   This is its jumping-off point:  Harvard Business School has a program with the unnecessarily long name of "Program for Leadership Development: Accelerating the Careers of High-Potential Leaders," which they mercifully abbreviate to "PLD," and the article is a discussion with the two professors who lead PLD.

PLD stands outside the MBA curriculum in that it's an "executive" program, available only to relatively senior people with at least 10-15 years of experience.  One of the professors confesses how different it is:

"Yet at the same time, compared to the average MBA class, the PLD class has richness. There are decades of experience in each class. People share contexts; they live many of the problems. It's exciting in that manner in how it is different from an MBA class. I just thoroughly enjoy it."

But back to leadership. 

The key challenges are:

• For starters
  • identifying
  • training, and
  • retaining
    the top people
• Then helping those nascent leaders actually have an impact on the firm, and
• Enabling that "firm-wide" impact by making sure the leaders' training transcends their individual group, practice area, or expertise, and instead reflects a broad understanding of the organization—globally, if that's where your firm is.

True for corporations, but increasingly true for law firms as well, are the forces of (a) globalization; (b) fast commoditization of many products and services; and (c) unprecedented levels of competition.

Given those realities, which are not going to lessen and certainly are not going away, how do we deal with them?

In a word:  Breadth.

Our good professors admit only that "people often have a true deficiency in finance and quantitative methods" (could this be true of lawyers??), but their real focus is on training, encouraging, and rewarding people to ask not just what this or that means for their specific function or practice area, but what it means for the firm in the world.   As they say, a pharmaceutical researcher could spend a 30-year career working on a class of compounds only to see zero products actually reach the marketplace before their retirement.  Unless that person can either understand what their work contributes to the organization as a whole, or can re-envision it to make a marketable product feasible faster, they won't be a leader.

Another aspect of leadership is, inevitably, context. By this I (and they) mean:  How you lead depends on who you're leading.  We all know that we need to react to different client audiences differently, or for that matter differently to our spouse than to our children, but do you behave differently among your colleagues depending on who they are and at what particular communication frequency, at what bandwidth, they're most comfortable? 

But not everyone can be a leader, you're saying at this point?  Well, yes, and no.  Not everyone can be Jack Welch, or Firm Chair, or even practice group leader; but everyone can lead change in their area, can lead ceaseless improvement, can lead responsiveness, can lead excellence, can lead delivering clients surprise and delight.

Finally, leaders need to ask themselves this, confronted with a problem:

• What do you want to do?
• Why?
• What reservations do you have about that course of action?

The what requires decisiveness.

The why tells people if you have a vision, or or are just reacting spasmodically.

The reservations enlist genuine support, changing "We're going to do this so shut up and get on-board," to "We're going to do this so long as...."  It makes  your decisiveness and your vision realistic, in other words.

And, surprise, admitting things might not be perfect enlists support.  You're not omniscient, and claims to the contrary alienate rather than attract.  Decision; vision; reservations; speaking each individual's language.  Leadership.