Passion, People and Principles
post # 40 — March 31, 2006 — a Managing post
In my blogpost Why Training is Useless there is a challenge from a reader – David G – that I should not throw out the baby with the bathwater, and should offer some concrete suggestions on how to make training work.
Fair enough. Here goes with some principles of mine for effective training.
- It is usually better to train people in groups formed from the operating units they work in, so that the training can be action- and decision-oriented. (Collective commitments.) Training classes drawn from different parts of the firm force program to be ‘educational’ only. I prefer it when training sessions end with specific action commitments, which are monitorable.
- You shouldn’t overwhelm people and cover too much territory: depth, then breadth! You’re better off with three 2-day programs than one 6-day programs.
- It really helps if the operating group leader attends the training simultaneously, as a participant. In fact, it should be mandatory. This ensures action-orientation, public commitment (‘We’re going to do this!’) Too often, we send the junior people off to be trained, and they continue to speculate whether the seniors or leaders are really committed and serious about all this. Even if they’ve heard it a million times, it’s good for them to be there. If it’s designed to be action oriented, it’s also economic for them to be there.
- To make changes in behavior, there are four key levels to make the change:
System: Does the firm actually encourage, monitor and reward this (new) behavior?
Attitude: Do the trainees want to do this? Do they buy in to its importance?
Knowledge: Do they know how to do it?
Skills: Are they any good at implementing and executing what they know?
- Each of these levels requires a different intervention. But note that skills (ie training, is bottom of the list, not top! As I said in my first blogpost on training, training is a great last step in a new initiative, but a pathetically ineffective first step.
- The best training is done by the firm’s own practitioners. Outsiders should be used only to help develop programs and ‘train-the-trainers.’
- If there is not a monitoring system to ensure that training will be implemented, then you’ll get a low return on your training investment. A full program would have:
a) Scorecards: (New, permanent measures of performance being trained)
b) Coaching: (Continuous monitoring and Follow-up)
c) Tools: (To help implement the training, in place before the training)
d) Training:
e) Rewards and/or Recognition for achievement
- All professionals should be required to both undergo and conduct a minimum number of days training per year, but allow flexibility on what.
- Don’t confuse training with (general) education. Training helps people do their job.(What do I need today) Education expands their horizons (What should I be thinking about for the future?). There’s a role for both, but they’re not the same.
- To ensure discipline, training should have mandatory pre-testing (can’t attend if you don’t pass), and a survey (3 months later) not only of participants but of their supervisors, asking whether the training has been implemented to productive effect.
One of the best recent think-pieces on training that I’ve seen recently is by Mick Cope, a UK-based consultant. His website is here and he tells me he’ll be posting his new article there on April 1 or 2.
post # 39 — March 29, 2006 — a Managing, Strategy post
In the April issue of THE AMERICAN LAWYER, just about to hit the newsstands, I have an article entitled “Are Law Firms Manageable?”
I’ve been asked not to post the full article on my website until April 6, but here are some highlights. [Update: the full-length version of "Are Law Firms Manageable?” is now also available in the articles section of my website.]
My core argument is that the ways of thinking and behaving that help lawyers excel in their profession may be the very things that limit what they can achieve as firms. Management challenges occur not in spite of lawyers’ intelligence and training, but because of them.
Among the ways that legal training and practice keep lawyers from effectively functioning in groups are (i) problems with trust; (ii) difficulties with ideology, values, and principles; (iii) professional detachment; and (iv) unusual approaches to decision making.
The problem of trust
In addition to fighting vigorously to preserve their autonomy, lawyers are professional skeptics: They are selected, trained, and hired to be pessimistic and to spot flaws. Lawyers carry this view into their dealings with their own partners.
It is hard to unbundle which is the cause and which is the effect, but the combination of a desire for autonomy and high levels of skepticism make most law firms low-trust environments.
A low-trust environment has plenty of unfortunate consequences—and they are readily observable in many law firms:
- Initiatives that depend on teamwork and joint efforts will rarely be implemented well, if at all.
- When a firm’s prevailing atmosphere is one of competition, not collaboration, partners rarely make sacrifices for the good of the firm.
- There is low tolerance for ceding power or influence to practice group or firm leadership. The result is that even in the largest firms, executive authority can be so severely limited as to be meaningless.
- Committees proliferate to address all topics, large and small.
- There is a drive to seemingly objective formula-based compensation systems. These serve only to entice partners into gaming the system through hoarding work and bickering over origination credits in order to look good in the official statistics.
- Most important, absence of trust may be a significant contributing factor to the extremely short-term orientations of many law firms.Investments of time or money that don’t yield immediate results are rarely made.
Skepticism about ideology, values, and principles.
The single biggest source of trust in an organization occurs when everyone can be depended upon to act in accordance with a commonly held, strictly observed set of principles.
When this is the case, less time is wasted in internal negotiations and posturing, strategies are implemented, and true teamwork results. Partners allow others to make decisions on their behalf or refer work to each other across the boundaries of practice groups and location because they can be confident that the other person will make decisions using the same values and principles that they would themselves use.
Law firms appear unable to achieve this level of ideological consistency. They will buy into principles—firms can have very high ideals as long as they remain ideals—but they have difficulty with the concept of enforcement. Firms are seemingly willing to adopt strategies and statements of values and mission, but are usually unwilling to specify what the penalty would be for noncompliance. Not surprisingly, that rarely results in effective implementation.
Most law firms say that the idea of tackling a rainmaker on ‘soft’ issues like teamwork, supervision and adherence to firm values is unrealistic, idealistic, uncommercial, and suicidal. While a majority of firms will vote to proclaim standards, they will usually not vote to enforce them.
Professional detachment.
As many researchers have shown, lawyers score very low in the areas of intimacy skills and sociability. They tend to prefer role-to-role interactions with people, inside and outside the firm, rather than eagerly seeking out person-to-person connections.
This can have unfortunate, if unintended, consequences. Consider this e-mail, which I recently received from Marein Smits, a Dutch lawyer:
‘At your recent seminar you made fun of me because I laughed at the idea of being genuinely interested in the industry and business of the people who are my clients. Rightly so: My laughing was cynical… The first thing you learn when you become a lawyer is not to care. The legally sound judgment, the intellectual sparkle, that is what counts. The personal, the emotional, what is right: Throw it away, because it will taint your professionalism. ‘Do not get involved’ is the credo.’
This lack of intimacy eaffects not only marketing and client relations, but also the way in which partners deal with each other and how firms are managed.
Rather than describing a highly interpersonal approach to coaching and helping each other succeed, the term ‘management’ has come in many firms to mean a cold, detached, analytical approach to business. Financial scorecards are put in place, and everyone is told (implicitly or explicitly): ‘Here’s what you will be measured on; see you at the end of the year!’
They are not helped to achieve, merely rewarded if they do, and they live in fear of what might happen if they do not. This can achieve the goal of getting everyone to work harder, but it comes at a significant price in terms of partner morale and cohesion.
Help, teamwork, and mutual support are often absent, since they depend on personal interactions. Instead, there is a system of measures and rewards.
Approaches to decision making.
In a room full of lawyers, any idea, no matter how brilliant, will be instantly attacked. Lawyers are expert loophole finders, trained to find counterexamples of or exceptions to any proposition. Accordingly, within a short time, most ideas, no matter who initiates them, will be destroyed, dismissed, or postponed for future examination.
Frequently, this leads managing partners, committee chairs, and practice group leaders to substantially overinvest in decision making.
They want to be armed in advance with a lengthy memo about every decision, so they can dump it in the lap of the complainer as part of fending off the attack.
Another common management strategy is to keep all proposals ambiguous, so that there is nothing specific to be attacked.
As a result, law firms have a remarkable propensity for half measures, launching poorly specified programs with minimal chances of success.
When lawyers reason with each other, the primary objectives are not necessarily logic, consistency, reasonableness, or fairness.
In their professional practice, whether in trial or deal-making, many lawyers are more frequently rewarded for persuasiveness, rhetoric, verbal agility, and point scoring. These habits of a professional lifetime readily spill over into internal firm discussions.
Lawyers also have a strange view of the concept of risk. In any other business, an idea that was likely to work much of the time would be eagerly explored. This is not necessarily the case with lawyers. A lawyer would say ‘Maybe, but I can construct a hypothetical scenario where it will fail to work. That makes it risky.’ Probabilities do not seem to influence the discussion, only possibilities.
There is no greater condemnation in legal discourse than to describe something as risky. Contracts, deals, and court cases must be bulletproof, not risky.
In other businesses, innovative thinking and action are considered a primary requirement for success. Companies eagerly search for strategic ideas and initiatives that their competitors have not discovered.
Lawyers are usually different. Presented with a new business idea, the first thing they ask is, ‘Which other law firms are doing this?’ Unless it can be shown that the idea has been implemented by other law firms, lawyers are skeptical about whether the idea applies to their world. If everyone has these problems, they can’t be so bad, the thinking goes. As long as we are no worse than anyone else, we don’t need to change! It’s hardly a recipe for a strategic advantage.
What can be done?
If lawyers deal with each other so poorly, why do they do so well financially? My answer is only partly humorous: The greatest advantage lawyers have is that they compete only with other lawyers. If everyone else does things equally poorly, and clients and recruits find little variation between firms, even the most egregious behavior will not lead to a competitive disadvantage.
If firms are to deliver on the visions they have set for themselves, they must address such issues as what behavior partners have a right to expect from each other, what the real minimum standards and values are, and how common values and standards can actually be attained, not just preached.
One of the central things we know about trust and collaboration is that they come mostly from repeated interactions between people who have not only a history together, but also the certainty of a future together.
Trust comes from relationships, and the expectation of continuing relationships. Over time, as they interact with each other, they as partners, practice groups, and offices may actually come to trust each other.
Unfortunately, in many of today’s firms that have been cobbled together from lateral hires and newly merged practices, the personal history that forms the basis of trust is often missing, as is the confidence that everyone will be practicing together for a long time.
In many firms, even solidly successful partners live in fear that they will be among the next group of partners to be ‘let go.’
In such an environment, the natural evolution of trust may be difficult, if not impossible. Instead, what firms need, literally, is a constitutional convention where their lawyers draft the explicit, basic law that is going to govern their firms—the precise behaviors, rules, and principles that will determine what partners have a right to expect from each other.
When thought of as aspirations (which is usually the case), firms’ values are usually explicitly articulated and remarkably similar.
However, if a value is seen as a minimum standard of behavior that all members agree to live by, then the true values remain ambiguous in most firms and vary immensely among firms.
What then will be the force that might create the need for change? Most likely, it will be client pressure on firms to act as firms—delivering seamless service, practice areas that have depth (and not just a collection of individualistic stars), and true, cross-boundary teamwork.
Many firms have collections of great lawyers. The time may be coming when clients will expect them to go beyond this and become effective organizations. Without a prior, explicit agreement on minimum standards, and the resolve to enforce them, many law firms will not function well as firms, but will remain what they are today: bands of warlords, each with his or her followers, ruling over a group of cowed citizens and acting in temporary alliance—until a better opportunity comes along.
For the full article on which this blog post is based, see this month’s AMERICAN LAWYER. [Update: the full-length version of "Are Law Firms Manageable?” is now also available in the articles section of my website.]
Consider the following questions about your emotional states:
(a) How easy do you find it to get started? Do you procrastinate or attack each day with vigor?
(b) How easily do you bounce back from failure, determined to try again?
(c) How well do you handle rejection?
(d) What is your level of optimism? Do you usually have the confidence to try anything, or are you the worrying sort?
(e) Can you cheerfully get along with people with whom you have nothing in common, or do you tend to withdraw?
(f) When unfairly treated, do you withdraw from the game or engage with renewed determination?
(g) Do you forgive yourself your faults, or do you beat yourself up about them?
(h) Are you comfortable with ambiguity, not quite sure you’re doing the right things, but ready to act anyway?
(i) Can you function in a team, without feeling the need to dominate? Can you control your ego needs?
(j) Can you handle the stress that comes from juggling multiple demands on your time?
(k) As Kipling asked, “Can you keep your head when all about you are losing theirs?”
Every single one of these emotional conditions will affect your success. You don’t have to be perfect. Goodness knows, I’ve suffered from being on the wrong side of all of these at one time or another.
But if your emotions let you down, your talent won’t save you.
There’s no point having superior skills if you procrastinate in putting them to use. There’s no point being smart if you give up at the first sign of failure.
Getting control of your emotions, and yourself, is essential to let your true ability shine through.
post # 37 — March 28, 2006 — a Careers post
I recently received this email from Gordon Ross:
I have recently turned 30 years old and have been running my small professional services firm for 10 years.
There have been special challenges being young professional providers. For example, how do you prove or demonstrate to new and potential customers in a short period of time that you are trustworthy when you simply haven’t been around all that long?
Your Trusted Advisor book goes into tactics on how to demonstrate credibility, reliability, intimacy and lack of self-orientation, but competing against much older and presumably) wiser firms was difficult sometimes, especially in regard to credibility and still is. You call experience-based work “grey hair work” for a reason!
Culturally, or perhaps biologically, speaking I believe that you think differently in your 20’s and early 30’s than you do later in life.
I was barely out of adolescence when I started on my professional services career. I kept many of the characteristics and traits of being a teenager: rebellious, enthusiastic, idealistic, oblivious to risk, and in search of instant gratification. Many of those things can be at conflict with the values present throughout your writing (hard work, perseverance, rigor, health and hygiene issues, etc.)
I feel as though a great deal of time was spent attempting to re-invent the wheel as a young professional. We struggled to create a professional identity, much the same as teenagers attempt to create their identities throughout their years trapped inside educational institutions.
All of your books sit next to me and have for quite a few years now, but I didn’t pay much attention to many of the lessons until I needed them. And that was also a function of time passing: I had simply not lived long enough as a professional to really understand the value of what you and other authors had written. The knowing-doing gap in action yet again.
Running a project for your customer as a young professional can feel a bit like asking to borrow the car from your father on the weekend. Many of our customers were old enough to have been my parents, some even my grandparents. I think there’s a healthy dose of respect and even fear that is present in the young professional and an equally healthy dose of skepticism and suspicion in the older customer. While I’ve been lucky enough to develop friendships with those much older than myself, it is certainly easier to develop them with people of our same age.
Ironically, those teenage characteristics were probably what made my company valuable over the last 10 years: willing to question the status quo, do things in different ways, stand by our idealistic beliefs, take risks, and sometimes stretch ourselves beyond our means. We simply didn’t know any better and failure was out of the question.
We also learned how much we didn’t know. The learning curve is steep during that time and we joke about our MBA from the school of real-life business. We had to become experts on topics both for our customers and our employees—if we didn’t, no-one else was going to do it for us.
It’s been a great experience, one that I feel very lucky to have been a part of.
I’m sure there’s many similar stories out there shared by many other 30, 40, and 50 somethings that started young in business and learned a lot.
I think Gordon has raised a fascinating topic. As he asks – does anyone else out there want to share the lessons of launching and running a professional business when you’re young? What about the special challenges of being a young professional, even if it’s not your firm? I’ll hold off on my comments until I see whether this is a topic which interests others.
post # 36 — March 26, 2006 — a Managing post
Adam Smith, Esq. (aka Bruce McEwen) has joined the discussion about what makes managers different from leaders. His comments are here
I keep getting asked about this topic, so here goes my ten cents worth. I think more rubbish has been written about ‘leadership’ than almost any other business topic. A lot of it is patently false, and even more of it is dangerous.
The fatal flaw in discussions of ‘leadership’ is the implicit assumption that we want to be led. Not many of us do, especially not the highly educated, credentialed, well-paid group of us that like to call ourselves professionals.
We want to be helped, we’ll agree to be coached and (with careful definition of the term) we might consent to be managed. But we’ll rarely agree to be led.
I’ve quoted this before, but it’s worth repeating here: the word manager derives from a mediaeval French or Italian word, meaning the holder of horses. It should conjure up the image of the task of getting a number of fiery beasts, each more powerful than the manager, to act in consort.
The word leader, on the other hand, derives from a Chaucer-era word that meant the person who chose the route on the expedition (‘This way, people’!) That image evokes a model that won’t work – trying to tell me where to go, pretending to me more expert than I am, trying to take charge. That’s not how it’s most effectively done.
Yes, the business books and the business schools are filled with descriptions of leaders who inspired others with their ‘visions,’ but such descriptions fail to point out two key facts. First, the number of people in human history who have been able to energize large numbers of people through their vision is very small, and secondly, three of them were Hitler, Lenin and Chairman Mao.
I’m not saying that the leadership model cannot work – just that few people trying the approach of ‘Let’s go this way!’ actually can or do evoke a broad reaction of ‘Ooh, yes. Let’s do just that!’
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.
Another dimension of real-world leadership is commonly misunderstood. Many writers on management (and many real world managers) think that the best way to evoke energy and create a strategy is to articulate (as Collins and Porras put it in Built to Last) BIG HAIRY AUDACIOUS GOALS (BHAGs)
This is a misleading and factually incorrect way of representing what great builders of professional firms (and other companies) have done over the years.
What is distinctive about the truly great professional firm builders is that they did not talk about destinations (number of offices, size of firm, range of disciplines, diversity of services.) None of these things mattered to David Ogilvy, Marvin Bower, Leo Burnett, Sidney Weinberg, David Packard – or Clint Stevenson, the main moulder of Latham & Watkins in the 1970s .
What these firm-builders cared about were the principles that were to be observed as the firm ran its affairs, served its clients, managed its people and invested its resources. The goals, the outcomes, the destinations were not the strategy, and were certainly not the defining characteristics of the firms they built.
Instead, it was the ideology they preached (and enforced) that mattered. They led not by the clarity of their vision of the future, nor even because of their better understanding of finances or marketing, but because they were able to get even highly talented, extraordinarily mobile people to rally around a fervently held, common way of doing things – a world view, a philosophy, a set of principles, values or standards.
These were not soft principles. They had to do with who would be hired, what quality standards would be enforced, how resources would be allocated.
At places like Sony and Hewlitt Packard in their heydays, it was effective processes that mattered – not which product happened to be that year’s hot toy.
Many firms still misunderstand this meaning of the word strategy. They choose a size to aim at, a set of new locations to be in and a set of new service lines they plan to enter through lateral hiring. None of these choices affect the underlying competitiveness of firms, which is about productivity, passion and purpose, not products and places.
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 choicee 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.
If a leader can create THAT – then I’ll agree to use the term ‘leader.’
post # 35 — — a Managing post
Since the 1980s, in the course of both my consulting and seminar work, it has been my habit to ask people to evaluate their leader, manager, supervisor – whatever you want to call it.
One of the things that consistently surprises me is that one question in particular ALWAYS receives low scores – how promptly the manager deals with underperformers.
Managers are always rated poorly on this. According to my experience, different managers have different strengths, but everyone, it seems, has the same weakness.
In a recent article (A Great Coach in Action) I discussed the natural reluctance that all of us have to engage in uncomfortable conversations until we absolutely have to.
That article is also episode 3 in my new 15-part podcast series on Managing Professionals which will be launched on my website on April 14, 2006.
In both our personal and professional lives, most of us don’t like to complain, and we have never been taught the subtle art of offering a gentle critique to another person without eliciting defensiveness and hostile reactions. As a result, we don’t say anything until the minor irritation has turned into an unavoidable problem.
What’s significant, I think, about the fact that most managers are rated poorly in this area is that most people are, implicitly or explicitly, saying that they WISHED their managers were more prompt in tackling this issue. People want standards of the group to be enforced. It is very dispiriting to be trying really hard yourself, only to see that management is letting other people slacken and slide.
No-one wants to work in a place ruled by terror. But no-one wants to be part of a sloppy, ill-disciplined group either. People, I’ve been told over and over again. Want clear guidelines and rules of behavior, and then want everyone to be held to those standards.
We hear a lot about ‘ugly’ managers who are too demanding, but my experience is that the opposite problem – managers who are too easy going to tackle performance problems – may in fact be a more common and more resented situation.
Many managers think they are doing their job when they respond to and deal with egregious examples of bad behavior or underperformance. (‘We cut people’s pay or fire them if they don’t ultimately live up to standards.’)
The truth, however, is that if you have waited until someone has failed (or the problem has become intolerable) before you intervene, you have lost most of your options. The essence of management is not –‘do you respond to problems?’- but rather – ‘do you deal with emerging issues before they become problems?’
Failing to help someone in your group who could improve, but who is not yet a major problem, is, of course, a tragedy all around. The individual fails to improve, the group’s performance slips, morale plummets – because the standards are clearly seen to be set lower – and you have lost the (possibly one-time) opportunity to establish a counseling relationship when the issue is only a minor one.
You are most likely to be able to offer a critique – and have it accepted – if you are doing it with someone who trusts you because you already have formed a relationship. So, the most effective managing takes place if there is a history of talking together before there are performance problems. As the saying goes, the best time to build a relationship is before you need it.
The best time to offer performance guidance, counseling and concern is when someone is already performing well, and you’re only trying to help them get to greatness. Do THAT frequently, and it will be easier to spot and discuss emerging problems with greater ease and comfort. You’ll have fewer performance problems all round.
The test of real managerial skill is the courage, the tact and the art of intervening when there is only the first sign of a performance problem, not when it is obvious to everyone.
Do it well, and your people will thank you for it by raising their own performance – and they will rate you more highly as a manager!
post # 34 — March 23, 2006 — a Strategy post
Legalease, a UK publisher, has just released a report on Corporate Social Responsibility in the UK legal marketplace (copies available from david.burgess@legalease.co.uk), for which I wrote the introduction. Generalized for all profession service firms (PSFs) in all countries, here are the highlights of my remarks.
In the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) literature, many benefits are claimed for effective CSR programs, including better risk and crisis management; improved financial performance; increased productivity; enhanced brand value and reputation; the ability to attract better employees; and (not least) the ability to maintain any licences required to operate.
Deciding on CSR programs and policies immediately runs up against the problem of which audience the program is meant to address. Among the possibilities are clients, recruits, government in all its forms, social activists, media, professional peers and many more.
For all that many major corporate buyers are now requiring their vendors to comply with (or at least report) CSR initiatives (as a cascading obligation under their CSR program), it is reasonably clear that for professional firms, clients are not the primary audience for such initiatives. The buying constituency has a lot of other things to worry about than a professional firm’s CSR compliance.
On the other hand, universities are more likely to be the hotbeds of social responsibility concerns than are corporate boardrooms, and many CSR programs are. Many professional firm CSR programs are, in fact, aimed at establishing a firm’s appropriate credentials to be an employer of choice.
It would be interesting to survey top university graduates and find out the extent to which CSR policies affect their decisions on which job offers to accept. A first guess might be that component of CSR which has to do with employment practices (flexi-time, job sharing, maternity policies, etc.) that directly affect the individuals involved. (I may be being cynical here.)
Beyond the recruiting marketplace, CSR programs can serve to appeal to current employees and staff. For example, just donating money to a charity may not be as influential on employee engagement commitment as organizing a ‘Make a Difference Week’ whereby teams of people from the firm, with partners, associates and catering workers toiling side-by-side, all joining in to clean up a stretch of riverbank or pick up litter from a nearby park.
The chance to work together on a common undertaking outside of normal business roles, while doing something that has purpose can go a long way in forging the collaboration and teamwork that many firms seek back in the workplace.
If it is concluded that a primary goal is to win the trust, loyalty and commitment of current employees and staff, perhaps it would be worthwhile to survey them (or at least consult with them informally) on a regular basis to determine what they would like to see firm CSR resources and attention go. It would be sad for firms to do things that they think will appeal but that are not at all appreciated by those they are targeting (a syndrome that happens all too often.)
Beyond clients or recruits, even before governments or regulatory bodies, one could make the case that it is the media that is the prime audience for CSR initiatives.
Once the media starts asking firms to report regularly on their CSR programs, it may be too late to debate whether or not you should have such a program and what its character should be. The social pressure (or blackmail, depending upon your point of view) is nigh irresistible.
The only question is what choices exist among CSR programs, and which are wise to emphasize?
Taking a Position – Or Not!
A critical dilemma in CSR initiatives is that in choosing on which issues to engage, there rarely is a clear, non-controversial position to take.
The topics of human rights, job creation, support of local community, gender and racial harmony, support for the arts and so on may appear to qualify as appropriate CSR topics, but those who choose to pursue these goals will discover as many opponents as supporters.
The attempt to put in place CSR programs that are non-controversial is doomed to failure.
Consider for example the topic of gender and racial bias. Equality between genders and races can best be accomplished, according to different constituencies, either by treating all people as individuals and not as a member of a group (the meritocratic argument) or by putting in place programs to use their group membership to overcome social or historical disadvantages (the affirmative action argument.)
To suggest that the firm will make only friends and no enemies by taking either of these positions would be foolish.
Similarly, for every person who wants to protect the rights of ‘asylum seekers’, there are those who would want to use the term ‘illegal immigrants’ and want firms to work to uphold the integrity of immigration laws.
For everyone who thinks supporting the arts is an appropriate form of CSR, there are those who question the class-based bias of supporting elite activities that cannot pay their own way, while neglecting the activities that underprivileged people enjoy.
My point is not to argue either side of any of these illustrations, but to point out the obvious: there are at least two (and probably two thousand) sides to every case, and the risk of turning audience segments away is as likely as turning them on.
Because of these perspectives, some firms may attempt to develop a program of CSR activity is, and must be, of the ‘let’s stay out of trouble’ kind.
These programs, which are not based on strongly held causes or inherent values of the firm, are adopted to adapt (or be seen to be adapting) to social shifts.
Obviously, any CSR program based on ‘stay out of trouble’ will be risky. No business entity will ever be protected against charges that it is being biased, particularly as those who participate in debates about CSR cannot always be relied upon to engage in reasoned, logical discourse. Token policies will provide no shield to a determined social group that wants to impugn the motives of a business entity (or anyone else.)
As a result, management of CSR can easily become a protective shield against social blackmail, even among those who do not subscribe to its tenets. It exists not to accomplish anything significant or constructive, but as first-line defense against those who might accuse it of social crimes in the future.
The action advice that flows from this analysis is that appeasement almost never works, and that it is foolish and possibly dangerous to try to appeal to all of the various constituencies.
Firms would be better advised, I believe, to take a position on and support the issues they choose to get involved in (and even those they find themselves involved in but not of their own choosing.)
Trying to have it both ways and accommodate all parties is a strategy more likely to fail than succeed. Symbolic CSR activities provide no defense from attack by antagonistic parties.
Employment Practices as CSR
A case can be made that wise, apparently socially responsible employment policies, are in fact just a sensible response to the shifting supply-demand imbalances in a free-market economy.
As the demand for knowledge workers has grown, it has made sense that the employers that have a special need for them (the professions) have become at least a little more accommodating to those who had difficulties fitting in to the old ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ partnership-track model.
Is it economics or social responsibility that drives firms to be accommodating on flexible time, job-sharing, part-time, maternity leave with no loss of status and numerous other programs?
Some firms offer these programs not as rights, but as options that may be granted if the clients’ interests are not compromised.
Whatever the moral merits of the matter, I suspect that viewing (and communicating) the topic as an economic one and being completely honest that the firm is not inventing new ‘rights’ are both sensible approaches, even if they are less than immediately inspirational.
A more modest standard that you always live up to is better than pretending to hold a high principle that you are seen to be willing to break for self-interest.
It can be dangerous to pretend to be doing things on principle that, in fact, are self-serving. A prime example would be the concierge services (or ‘lifestyle management services’) that many law firms now offer to their associates.
Although touted as benefits to help people get their cleaning done, their dog walked, and so on, more than a few cynical on-line associate chat rooms characterize these programs as ‘one more way to keep us at the office billing hours.That’s fine, but stop pretending to a moral purpose you don’t have.’
In surveys conducted on CSR, charity and community involvement are grouped together (for convenience) as similar CSR activities. They are, of course, quite distinct and it is worthwhile to consider their differences.
While it is always easier to give cash and not get involved, people tend to be more influenced, swayed and impressed by donations of time and involvement than they do of cash.
Cash gets mixed in with other contributions and its identity lost, and is less ‘human’ anyway.
Accordingly, a firm would receive more credit and attention by identifying the causes that it truly supports, and figuring out a way to get involved with time so that they can make a real difference.
As in all things Gerald Weinberg’s raspberry jam principle applies – the wider you spread anything, the thinner it gets.
I cannot prove the following propositions, but I offer as a point of view that a firm will benefit more by contributing time and effort that reflect its special talents and interests.
It would probably be better for a professional firm to contribute the special expertise of its people to help others with substantive issues than, say, helping a school develop and nurture a backyard garden (a real example of, in my view, a misguided CSR program.).
On the same line of reasoning, Wal-Mart, in the United States, probably helped society most by contributing its logistics expertise after Hurricane Katrina than any other CSR activity it could engage in. Not coincidentally, it also received its best publicity.
The lesson probably is that the best way to contribute is to stick to your knitting and contribute what it is that you do best.
Individuals or firm?
For professional firms there is another dimension of conducting CSR to contemplate – Is it better for there to be firm-wide programs, or is the firm and society better served by doing the same amount of CSR work, but letting each person or team decide which issues and activities are most relevant to them?
A good case can be made for both sides, particularly in today’s mega-firms. The larger the firm, the more difficult it would be for the firm to decide all the initiatives on behalf of the whole firm.
Local programs may be better received than those attempting to address society-wide issues.
On the other hand, there are some risks in ‘turning loose’ large numbers of ‘CSR entrepreneurs’ in the firm, each pushing for or pursuing their own private passions and causes.
I have already argued the case for focus, so that the firm can make a real difference in society by concentrating its resources on things in which it can truly make a difference.
However, an equally good case can be made that, as Peter Drucker once wrote about business ‘nothing ever happens except when it is done by a monomaniac on a mission.’
Firms can (and have, very productively) encouraged their people to get involved in community activities, such as church, synagogue or mosque committees, social clubs, opera, ballet and village fete boards and other charitable endeavors.
The lessons of these activities are very clear. Where the individual is engaged in them because he or she has a true interest in that organization’s activities, the individual and the firm can benefit in reputation and even in business opportunities.
However, even the hint that the individual is participating for selfish reasons will be detected immediately by others involved, and the person will be rejected.
Following this logic, perhaps the course of wisdom, to ensure that the firm meets its CSR obligations with things that go beyond dabbling and hence make a real impact on the world is for the firm to throw the challenge of choosing CSR initiatives to individuals and small groups, letting them generate the initiatives.
Top management can then assess and select those programs that make a difference, are consistent with the firm’s ideology and protect its reputation.
post # 33 — March 21, 2006 — a General post
I got tagged by Gerry Riskin
So, here goes:
Four Jobs I’ve had
Serving in a street market, helping my Dad
Bagging groceries (lasted three weeks)
Statistician, Bell Canada, Montreal
University professor
Four movies I can watch over and over
White Christmas
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Singing in the Rain
Four TV shows I love to watch
As Time Goes By
CNN Headline News
Vicar of Dibley
West Wing
Four places I’ve been on vacation
Kashmir
Andalucia, Spain
Valley of the Kings, Egypt
Theater weeks and weekends, London
Four tunes that play through my head
To Love Somebody (Bee Gees)
Hey Jude (Beatles)
God Only Knows (Beach Boys)
Chiquitita (Abba)
Four favorite dishes
Anything prepared by Kathy
Bangers and Mash
Meat pies
Roasted Chicken straight from the oven
Four books I really love
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
Joel Whitburn, Billboard Hits
Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People
Kouzes and Posner, The Leadership Challenge
Four places I’d rather be
Home
Home
Home
Anywhere Kathy Is
Four bloggers I’m tagging:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/
http://blog.lifebeyondcode.com/blog
http://www.bmacewen.com/blog/
http://www.servicessafari.blogs.com/
post # 32 — March 20, 2006 — a Managing, Strategy post
Accoring to the old proverb, the shoemakers’ children always go without shoes.
Accounting firms fail to have effective job-costing systems to track the use of their resources, law firm partnerships do not have up-to-date partnership agreements, management consultants keep appointing people to managerial roles who cannot manage and don’t want to. And of course, Advertising and PR people are really bad about creating favorouble public impressions about their agencies and their professions.
So why is this so common? The most common hypothesis is that professional providers get paid to apply their skills to client work, and they are unpaid when they have to apply them to their own affairs – and the individuals would always prefer to do paid work!
But I suspect something more profound is going on. I’m not sure what it is, and would love input from the readers out there.
There are times when I get the impression that professionals are only too well aware of the limitations of what their craft can actually accoplish, and they sell to clients things they actually don’t think would be benficial for themselves – or at least they would not be willing to do themselves.
In part it’s because of a belief that “we’re different from our clients”, but it’s also in some way a hidden skepticism about the value of their own services.
Why don’t advertsing agencies advertise? Other business-to-business services like Accenture do – what does Y&R know that Accenture does not? (Or vice-versa?)
Most large management consulting firms reject the concept that their group leaders should spend their time managing, instead preferring them to be big business getters. But that’s not the advice they give their clients.
Business School academics are always preaching the need for buisnesses to be client-centric and responsive to markets, but how many actually redesign what they do around the needs of their students or employers? Universities are designed to meet the needs of the providers (the faculty) not their markets.
If any of this is true (and fair), then why does it happen? Why is it so easy to see the fleck of dust in the other person’s eye, while ignoring the plank in our own?
post # 31 — March 17, 2006 — a Managing, Strategy post
In the mid- to-late 80s, the hot management fad was ‘quality,’ driven by the first wave of success of Japanese manufacturers and books like Phil Crosby’s ‘Quality is Free.’ There was a lot of fuss about the Baldridge Awards, and major companies (even professional firms) competed to be singled out for this distinction.
You don’t hear much about the quality movement these days, but it’s still out there. Nowadays, it has (unfortunately, I think) been subsumed into the “Six-Sigma” cult, and re-branded as part of “client-centricity.”
It would be nice if we could return to simpler days of speaking plain English and tackling real issues, instead of launching grand programs and initiatives that are long on idealism but short on real commitment.
The 1980s quality movement had its own jargon, but I still find some of it helpful in working with professional businesses. For example, it is still useful to distinguish between four possible kinds of quality.
- Make the aspirin – conformance (reliability, consistency, dependability) to technical quality
- Nurse the patient – conformance (reliability, consistency, dependability) in interacting with the client
- Do the brain surgery – higher-than-market performance (superior outcomes and value) in technical quality
- Be the trusted counselor – higher-than-market performance (superior outcomes and value) in consultative quality (be the clients family doctor or psychotherapist.
(I first write about these as four different kinds of practice in my book, True Professionalism)
The point, of course, is that each of these four ways of improving quality requires different initiatives.
Improving the aspirin means studying the work processes of how you get things done. Improving the nursing means getting your people both motivated and trained to know how to work with clients and their idiosyncrasies. Improving the brain surgery means getting to the frontier of your field and becoming true innovators. Improving the Trusted Counseling means entering the client’s world and learning how to affect how they think about their problems and issues.
These are four very different initiatives.
Of course, one of the major ways of ending up with poor quality is to think you are providing one of these services when your client is actually trying to buy another!
In a meeting of consultants, I asked people to vote on what they thought were the major causes of quality failure in consulting. Here’s their list, with the most common cause of quality problems listed first:
- Mis-Specification of goals of project
- Lack of Skills in dealing with clients
- Work-teams overloaded / overscheduled
- Poor staffing of engagements
- Overselling
- Shifting client expectations (Mid-engagement changes in client desires or needs)
- Proposing bad project solutions
- Attitudinal or motivational problems
- Engagement budget pressures
- Failure to access expertise elsewhere in firm
- Inadequately trained staff
- Lack of incentive (internally) to do a quality job
- Poor methodologies
- Excessive reliance on standard methodologies
- Inadequate support staff
- Poor management of project mix
- Available skills
I also gave these consultants a list of possible places to ‘attack’ quality problems, and I had them rank the ones they would put at the top of their priority list. Here are their choices:
- Hiring for different attitudes and skills
- On-the-job training
- Client feedback systems
- Management behavior
- Creating the quality culture/climate
- Proposals (negotiating quality dimensions)
- Formal training
- Peer review systems – during projects (are we doing the right things?)
- Reward system – senior professionals
- Peer review systems – end-of-project (did we do the right things?)
- Principal/Partner promotion / admission process
- Managing project mix
- Monitoring procedures
- Methodology development and improvement
- Reward System for juniors
Among the initiatives that came out of the discussions I ran were:
- A need to shift from analytical to ‘client-involved’ consulting techniques.
- A need to assess the client’s sophistication and need for consultative help, not just technical help
- Rehearsals of client interactions, to help people improve skills in a low-risk environment
- Holding upward reviews, asking junior engagement personnel to evaluate the engagement leader on how well the project was managed
- Using outside experts to review project quality
- Formal project debriefings
- Formalized procedures to ensure that all communications with client are shared with those that need to know (including clerical and other support staff)
- ‘Second set of eyes’ review of proposal prior to sale to ensure achievability
- A quality assurance professional on staff and involved in operations
- Use performance evaluations to stress quality.
There are a lot of ideas and good intentions here, but here’s my point: people have been talking about all of this for decades, but how many people are actually doing these things?
In the rush to globalize and build multidisciplinary, megalithic professional businesses, how many truly have in place effective quality processes that truly serve the client?
