Tips for Successful Leadership

Marshall Goldsmith (Author of the NYT & WSJ #1 Bestseller Triggers)

Being successful as a leader can be hard. As demands on leaders increase, there is less time to focus on making the changes you need to make to do the job successfully. It’s a significant challenge to overcome because as more is expected of you, you find you have less time for development, and yet, improving your leadership skills is more important than ever.

You have to learn on the job, make the most of your surroundings, and ask those around you for help. You have to enlist their support as you do your best to develop yourself, your people, and your teams. And, this is why I call leadership a “contact sport”.

Leadership Is a Contact Sport is a leadership development model that has worked for hundreds of thousands of people. The original study, published in 2004, included 86,000 people. We now have research from 250,000 people who confirm that this model works. It helps them become highly successful leaders.

How does it work? The Leadership Is a Contact Sport model is just eight steps: Ask, Listen, Think, Thank, Respond, Involve, Change, Follow Up. Following is a short description of each step.

1. Ask:  Ask people "How can I be a better _______ (manager, partner, team member, etc.)?
2. Listen:  Listen to their answers.
3. Think:  Think about their input.  What does it mean?
4. Thank:  Thank people for sharing this valuable feedback with you.
5. Respond:  Respond positively when receiving input.
6. Involve:  Involve the people to support your change efforts.
7. Change:  Change isn't an academic exercise.  Act on what you learn. 
8. Follow-up: Follow up regularly and stakeholders will notice the positive actions you’re taking based their input.

Lawyers Should Practice Their Humanity

Kenneth Grady (Speaker, Professor, Consultant & Legal Future Evangelist)

I spend a lot of time speaking with lawyers around the world and writing about what the future of the legal profession will look like. Whenever I go through ideas about how lawyers will need to reshape what they do and say that the best strategy is to start the reshaping process now, I get that "WIFM" look. For those of you who have not encountered WIFM, it means "what's in it for me." Lawyers obsessively focus on that question nowadays, because each minute spent on something other than revenue generation (outside lawyers) or the production of legal work (inside lawyers) is considered a minute lost.

The WIFM phenomena has driven many things out of the profession. Certainly the view that being a lawyer should also involve time spent on things that benefit society has been challenged by WIFM. Pro bono services, never the strong suit of lawyers, doesn't benefit when lawyers are trying to squeeze another six minutes of billable hours into the day.

Another unfortunate side effect of WIFM is a stronger reaction action modifying the way lawyers deliver legal services. If you have used a formula for 20 years and you have succeeded with that formula, then why change it? Change means risk and risk mean WIFM may be negative. In fact, you suffer twice -- first by taking time to learn the new way of doing things and second because unless the new way immediately yields big benefits, you don't get a bang for your investment.

Two negative WIFMs don't equal a positive in the eyes of most lawyers.

When you focus your skills on analytical tasks, then grinding away at improving them makes some sense. The recent history of lawyering (okay, the past 150 years), has been skill development. The skill development focus intensified over the last 100 years as law has increasingly become a profession of specialists. If it is your job at a large firm to be the expert in a certain provision of the tax code, then you better spend your time being the expert. If your solo practice is focused on a niche, then you better know that niche.

For Lawyers, The Future Is Not The Past Repeated

But the future of law that I talk about requires something different. As computer technology advances, it will take over more of the analytical work humans do. This will be true for lawyers just as it will be true for other knowledge workers. Lawyers can fume and stew and grumble about the change, but nothing lawyers do will stop it.

Lawyers can, however, adapt to it. The greatest adaptation for lawyers and other knowledge workers will be learning how to work collaboratively with technology. Tony Schwartz wrote an interesting article about humans and technology over on The New York Times. As Schwartz covers the article, and Geoff Colvin covered in his recent book, "Humans are Underrated," the trick for people is to leverage the one strength that no computer can match - being human. 

What Is Being Human?

Being human doesn't mean what you probably think it means. Computers can read emotions and respond to them (and are getting better at doing so). Computers can analyze fact patterns, "read" legal materials, and "form opinions." In some of these areas, computers already have greater skill and accuracy than humans.

So being human is something different. Until we reach a time when a computer (robot) can so expertly mimic a human that no human can tell the difference between the computer and the human, humans have an edge over computers. Humans are, as Colvin relates, uniquely wired to relate to humans. In fact, that wiring is so powerful that humans will opt for interactions with humans even when interactions with computers would yield more consistent and accurate results.

Humans prefer humans over computers.

Right now and for the foreseeable future, the edge lawyers have over computers is that lawyers are human. So, lawyers need to use this unique attribute to their advantage. That means being the best they can be at all that is human -- empathy, collaborative skills, group problem solving, and on through the list. 

I'm not suggesting that you let your analytical skills slide. I am suggesting, however, that if you want to benefit from your skills, if you want to get to the WIFM, then you need to focus on leveraging your humanity. The lawyers who will be most successful in the coming years will be adept with analysis, and superb in humanity. The good news if that happens is we all know what's in it for us.

About: Ken Grady is a Lean Law Evangelist for Seyfarth Shaw LLP and an Adjunct Professor at Michigan State University's College of Law. He has been recognized by the Financial Times for “chang[ing] the rules of engagement with external advisors” and as a legal innovator by his inclusion in the Fastcase 50. He helps lawyers better understand how technological, social and business forces are creating disruption in traditional service industries and works with them to develop and implement solutions to take advantage of untapped opportunities.