When it comes to attracting and retaining talent, money is obviously important, but it’s the easiest part.
Have you ever tried to express your appreciation to someone, but been frustrated when it seemed to land on deaf ears? Or have you ever felt disappointed that your own actions haven’t been met with the show of gratitude that you expected?
The recent talent wars are the result of too much legal work and not enough talent to manage it. But when it comes to attracting and retaining talent, many firms seem to rely on a single enticement: more money. Might they be overlooking something key about human nature?
Kate is a highly regarded counsel at a major law firm. The partners in her group wanted to support her for partnership, but Kate had demurred. She had three young kids and worked part-time, and she told them she just didn’t want to be put up for partner now. But one of the things we’d been discussing confidentially in coaching was whether or not Kate wanted partnership—ever. She’d requested coaching to help her gain clarity.
Kate came to one coaching session clearly angry. Despite her reduced schedule, she’d been working basically full-time for months. She’d gone above and beyond at work, sacrificing time with her family and adding significant home responsibilities to her partner’s plate, resulting in lots of stress for everyone.
When I asked what specifically had caused her to get so angry, Kate responded, “The firm just gave me an extra $40,000 and thinks that’s supposed to make me feel appreciated. I can’t believe they think they can just buy me off like that. Not one person in my group ever bothered to actually say thank you to me.”
I confess that, as a leadership coach, it required significant self-restraint to bite my tongue on this one, as I’ve found that it’s more common for lawyers to feel miffed when they get a thank you in lieu of compensation.
So I asked Kate what the $40,000 meant to her. She said the money made her feel fungible, as if any warm body could have done the work and been valued equivalently.
“That is a terrible way to feel,” I agreed. “Nobody likes to feel fungible. But would you be up for exploring a different way of looking at this?”
When she agreed, I asked, “What do you think is the main motivation in big law firms? What’s your firm’s overarching goal?” She answered, “To make money.” I said, “Certainly many lawyers would answer that way. For that reason, to an awful lot of lawyers, rightly or wrongly, money is how they say thank you. To many people, the paycheck, the bonus, whatever other compensation they get—that is the show of gratitude. You obviously see it differently, but what do you think about that?”
Kate responded, “Well, this money doesn’t say thank you to me at all. I wish they’d actually considered me as a unique individual and thought about the impact of this on me, and what I’m sacrificing for the benefit of the firm, my team and our clients. And then actually tell me how much they value me and appreciate me.”
While Kate’s story is a particularly stark illustration, I see variants of this all the time. Because people are unique, we’re all motivated by different things.
The pandemic has taken a toll on employee well-being and has even led to burnout for many. The increasing mobility of talent—at all organizations, not just law firms—is a byproduct of the new pressures in work and home life.
How can organizations motivate talent to stay? Know that being part of a team working toward a common goal—wanting to belong to, and meaningfully contribute to, something larger than oneself—is one of the major sources of professional fulfillment and satisfaction for most people.
Kate’s law firm failed to appreciate that, and, more importantly, Kate (at least as she saw it). She felt not only unappreciated but also unseen and unknown, which squarely contradicted her core value of wanting to be an integral member of a team who is valued for her unique contributions.
When it comes to attracting and retaining talent, money is obviously important, but it’s the easiest part. People want to feel appreciated for their efforts, seen and valued for their unique skills and talents, and recognized for going the extra mile. So often in my practice I see how organizations’ failure to do these things causes talented people to jump ship, often leaving senior management shocked and feeling a bit betrayed.
How can this be prevented? In my experience—and confirmed by research—the people who feel the greatest loyalty believe their employer has their back as a human being, not just a worker. One firm won the allegiance of a young partner by offering her unlimited time off to care for her dying mother, with no penalties for reduced billables. Another lawyer was touched when the firm surprised members of his team and their families with vouchers for a mini-vacation. One Texas partner told me his firm earned his complete devotion because of the support they gave his family when they lost their home in the catastrophic flooding.
Such enlightened leadership always starts at the top. Then it can permeate the environment and morph into a wholesale cultural shift. But effecting this change requires that senior leadership hold middle management accountable; a culture shift can’t happen if leadership relies again and again on the same group of go-to people to be the ones to show appreciation while accepting lip service from everyone else.
In Kate’s situation, the group’s leadership could have made a point to check in with each member regularly to ask how they were feeling and what each person needed to feel supported. Some employers do this via “stay conversations.” If leadership had built a culture of trust and transparency, they would have learned that Kate wanted to be thanked for her sacrifice in going above and beyond her part-time commitment to support her colleagues.
Leadership also would have had the self-awareness to correct for potential blind spots. In this case, the blind spots included not just the usual hegemony of leadership roles historically having been occupied by more stereotypical “thinker” types than “feeler” types. Here, there was also an increased risk of blind spots due to a lack of diversity—in terms of gender, age and parental status—among the group’s senior partners.
Curiosity about others’ motivations is the bedrock of effective leadership. Getting curious can also help the bottom line, and communicating a heartfelt thank you costs a whole lot less than $40,000.
Read more:
Reprinted with permission from The American Lawyer. © 2022 ALM Media Properties, LLC.
Further duplication or distribution without permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.
