Bruce MacEwen posted an outline of a presentation he gave on Leadership for IT Managers. Bruce postulated that law firm leadership means:
- having vision
- creating an environment that allows people to catch the vision
- good communication
- managing change
- and differentiating between implementers, managers and leaders. Leaders focus on culture and the external market in order to manage the change necessary to make the firm successful.
This post implored David Maister to respond with a post of his own, entitled, Dangerous Rubbish About Leadership. Among several debatable claims, David writes,
"Advocating that someone energize a professional firm or group through ‘leadership’ is like advising someone to be talented. You either have what it takes to get people to see you as a leader or you don’t. And by the way, if you’re not yet sure whether you have this ability – you don’t! You would have known whether you had it or not by the time you got out of high school.
For the rest of us who don’t have this innate ability, all is not lost. What we need to do is stop pursuing the mirage of leadership, and start learning the model of how to be an effective manager – helping other people, individually and in groups, truly accomplish their potential. This requires putting the people being helped at the center of the discussion, not the leader. Management can be learned, but not if you’re trying to be something you’re not supposed to be and are probably incapable of being."
I disagree with this. I believe that many leadership skills can be taught, and learned. There is a difference between management and leadership. "Command and control" is not the only style of leadership. Indeed, facilitative leadership that helps teams become more effective and smarter, is critical to growing strong professional service firms. Nearly everything is accomplished (or not) in teams: client teams, practice group teams, industry teams, recruiting committees, diversity committees, compensation review committees. We are a profession built on small groups.
Companies from the Fortune 500 to NGO's and the government invest a lot of money and resources into leadership development and training. Certainly lawyers can learn to be better leaders - particularly in the context of small group leadership - through training, mentoring and coaching.
Maister closes with a clause I do agree with:
"Great leaders (there, I’ve said the dreaded word) get people to focus on the key elements of strategy – the standards on which the firm is going to compete. With a clear ideology to rally around, talented people get the choice of saying – ‘I can believe in that. I think I’ll stick around to a part of that and be a member of a society of like-minded people operating together in accordance with common values.’ That commitment, in company after company, has led to service line and market sector choices not no-one anticipated, because they were not the guts of the strategy, but rather the outcome of the strategy – the firm’s own way of doing things. "
The core issue between MacEwen and Maister, I believe, is a difference in the concept of a firm. Is a firm a collection of individual professionals who choose a platform which to practice as a silo or small, independent practice? Maister seems to believe that talented people choose firms like a society in which to exist.
Or, is a firm an entity like a corporation, which exists because of the synergies and partnerships among its people, create added value for its clients, workers, and society? As a firm, do lawyers and staff work effectively as cross-functional teams to provide solutions and value that individual silos cannot?
If it is the first, all we need is management. If it is the second, leadership is crucial.
--- Mark Beese
p.s. Phil Gott has wonderful insights into this topic on his blog. Phil also has an insightful white paper on managing and leading professionals.
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