What’s your value to your organization?
Dave, a law firm partner, was nearing total burnout—working late most nights, disappointing his family, interrupting every weekend with work. Last Friday, the associate on his team dumped a brief on his desk and left for vacation. The brief was a mess, and Dave spent his entire vacation rewriting it while his associate was out of town.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Dave is a partner, yet he’s still working as if he’s an associate trying to make partner. His value to the firm has shifted, but he hasn’t yet recognized that.
Today, for better or worse, a partner’s job is some combination of the following: counselor, legal technician, subject matter expert, rainmaker, builder of client relationships, manager of other lawyers, brand ambassador and, especially since the pandemic, psychotherapist. It’s a broad job description.
Which part of this job description is yours? Chances are it’s shifted as your career has grown. Have you made the necessary changes in your daily work schedule to reflect these changes in your value?
I often coach leaders, partners and other senior lawyers who aren’t 100% clear on what it is that they’re fundamentally being paid to do. While many organizations develop and implement sophisticated compensation formulas to incentivize the behaviors they want, sometimes an individual’s value proposition is still fuzzy. This question—What am I being valued for?—is something every lawyer needs to consider. The recent war for top talent has done little to diminish this confusion for many partners.
Every lawyer is obviously being paid to generate revenue for their organization (in the case of for-profits), or to further its mission (in the case of non-profits), but the underlying questions are always:
- What specific tasks and skills is my organization paying me for?
- How does that support my value to the organization?
- How will my success be measured?
In Dave’s case, he’s being paid not only to manage more junior lawyers, but to mentor and train them. His other jobs include generating new business, keeping clients satisfied and informed, and setting long- term goals for his practice group, while ensuring that they are adequately staffed.
It’s clear that Dave, harried as he is, is not fulfilling many of the tasks that his job demands. A top priority remains client satisfaction, but unless Dave can develop a better match between how he spends his time and his value to the firm, he’s shortchanging them both—at great cost to his relationships and his mental and physical health.
Too often, lawyers who are struggling are caught in crisis management when they need to be managing their time with intention. Dave is like the lawyer version of a hamster on a wheel: Unless he develops an effective strategy to slow himself down enough to jump off, he’ll keep doing the same thing and will get the same frustrating results.
How to fix this situation? First, Dave must develop a better, more cost-efficient and effective way to manage his associates. Instead of losing his entire weekend, he needs to consider the practice needs and whether his current team can meet them. If there’s an imbalance between his group’s needs and the team—whether the personnel and their specific experience levels are up to the tasks they must fulfill—it’s Dave’s job to identify that and take steps to remedy the problems.
Next, he must figure out what he can delegate. Senior associates can meet with and review the work of more junior associates periodically to make sure the junior is on the right track. And practice managers, assistants and paralegals should do whatever work they’re capable of doing. In my experience, that’s both appreciated by them and sometimes more than they’ve been doing. Not only will this lead to efficiency, but it will lead to greater engagement as people get to contribute their maximum capabilities.
Most importantly, Dave has to take charge of his schedule, stop covering for others and start managing them. If he can reserve two or three hours per week to meet with his team to review interim progress, make timely course corrections, and make sure his team members are learning to apply what they’ve learned in the future, he’ll be making better use of his time. And he’ll be giving associates valuable training and feedback, assuming they take advantage of the opportunity. While two to three hours per week might sound impossible to carve out, the return on investment for those hours will save Dave many more hours in the future.
Dave’s other value to the firm is to be out generating business—interacting with clients and potential clients. The firm is not paying Dave to remain the driven associate, billing thousands of hours. He must realize that his value to the firm has shifted. He’s no longer valued as a foot soldier fighting the ground battle; he should be looking down at the ground game and developing a better strategy.
Dave’s value to the firm will not be measured by the strength of the brief he re-wrote; it will be measured by his leadership. That value needs to be his priority, since that’s his chief responsibility and what his firm needs most.
This reevaluation of your value to the organization will have benefits to both your life and your performance. I recently talked with Dave; he’d just returned from a sailing vacation. He’s more productive because he now spends his time exercising his best attributes: generating business, developing the talent in his group, and being a trusted adviser who keeps his clients coming back for more.
Read More:
Reprinted with permission from The American Lawyer. © 2021 ALM Media Properties, LLC.
Further duplication or distribution without permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.
