Creating a Collaborative Law Office

Creating a Collaborative Law Office
By Dolly M. Garlo
© 2001

Can you imagine an office environment where work seems to flow effortlessly, extraordinary results are produced with ease, and, at the end of the day, you are exhilarated rather than exhausted? Call it synchronicity, synergy, flow, or magic, but whatever it is called, there are some simple strategies that can be used to recreate that experience consistently rather than randomly — through teamwork and collaboration.

Operating an effective law practice is not covered in the typical law school curriculum. The art of advocacy taught in law school (adversarial in nature) is not conducive to the effective management of time, people, information, finances, or related day-to-day work systems. Nor do law firms teach associates how to develop a successful professional practice and handle the “business” of law. Formal mentoring in these subjects is often lacking, since senior lawyers have little training beyond their own experience, perpetuating tradition rather than promoting business innovation.

Consistent and uniform application of some simple concepts in the four areas of team alignment, responsibility, communication, and operations can promote an effective and collaborative office environment. While these concepts are simple, to work they must be applied with consistency at all levels of the organization. They are basic performance standards applicable to all, a deviation from traditional top-down management style.

Teamwork
Building and working as a team initially requires acknowledgment of the tremendous contribution of each person at every level of the business. The lawyer, although bearing the ultimate responsibility for legal work, is no more important than the firm’s file clerk or office manager if there is not consistent and timely work production and collection of fees. Without synergy,¹ the group is simply a disorganized sum of various parts, rather than a high-performance team.

Law firm culture is the glue that either holds the firm together or doesn’t. It is directly and subtly shaped by the attitudes and actions of the firm’s attorneys. That culture determines the commitment and level of involvement of all members and the overall success of the firm. As a keeper and steward of that culture, it is each attorney’s responsibility to provide the example needed to maintain it.

Collaboration
A focus on teamwork requires a commitment to collaboration. Collaboration involves an effort to work with another to find a solution that fully satisfies the concerns of both. A high level of assertiveness demonstrates strong concern for self, and a high level of cooperation demonstrates strong concern for others. Thus, willingness to both speak up without fear and to listen fully must be fostered among all individuals in the workplace by encouraging those who generally speak to listen and those who generally listen to contribute.

Collaboration is effective when members of a firm seek to:

learn,

merge insights on a problem from people with different perspectives,

gain commitment by incorporating others’ concerns,

work through hard feelings, and

correct or avoid interference with interpersonal relationships.²

These are standard operational goals for a service-oriented workplace. These goals can be thwarted if the competitive nature of law practice is also used as a management style.

Collaboration also supports personal mastery for each member of the organization. Personal mastery is characterized by elements conducive to individual development and excellence:

a sense of purpose,

an ability to work with change rather than resist it,

a commitment to continual learning and creativity, and

a deep connection to others and to life itself.

Personal mastery encompasses both work and personal life, and support of the latter has been shown to contribute to rather than undermine organizational success. Promoting the full development of each member of an organization reinforces his or her commitment to the organization. Further, “intentional or inadvertent pressures that make success at work and success at home an ‘either/or’ proposition violate this [reciprocal] compact”³which is essential for maximal organizational effectiveness.

Team Alignment
Follow these steps to develop team alignment:

Ensure that the organization has a stated, preferably written, purpose or vision and mission statement along with necessary operational rules and policies. If not, it is useful to allow the team to create them or at least have input into the process, rather than having such directives “issued from on high.”

Secure the express willingness of all members of the organization to support its purpose, rules, policies, and goals, and to work together. Include agreements not to abandon a teammate in need and not to let personal issues stand in the way of completing a task. Paradoxically, the latter is best secured by the organization’s express willingness to support the personal lives and needs of its members.

Engage in continuing dialogue with the entire team by way of regular meetings. This may include a practice area in a larger firm (attorneys, legal support staff, and applicable administrative staff) or the entire population of a smaller firm. Schedule meetings with reasonable frequency at a mutually agreeable time to establish them as routine and mandatory. Utilize a fixed duration and an agenda to which everyone may add topics. At the beginning of each meeting, ask each person to “check in” and share something — making sure every person speaks at least once encourages contribution.

Commit to resolution of conflict situations by taking account of everyone’s interests, and avoid compromise where someone must give up something. This commitment takes time, energy, and creativity, but the results are worth the effort.

Responsibility
Promote and support the exercise of responsibility:

Encourage the acknowledgment of responsibility by each person in every situation, and the avoidance of blaming others or justifying a negative result.

Demonstrate responsibility by completing agreements, and in particular, time agreements. While attorneys are keen about this with courts and adversaries, they are less diligent with co-workers and staff (and in personal relationships).

Make only those agreements that you intend to keep. Recognize the power of your spoken word and remember that others count on what you say. Communicate about a potential broken agreement at the first appropriate opportunity. This shows you are a steward of your word and value another’s time. Clear up any broken agreement at the first appropriate opportunity; don’t avoid it or wait to see if you will be challenged. Demonstrate your responsibility with an apology.

Clear Communication
Strengthen the skills of clear communication:

The foundation of sound communication is active listening. Confirm what you hear by repeating or summarizing what was said. Honor that what the speaker says is true from their perspective, whether or not you agree with it.

Practice the art of speaking supportively. This requires the mutual willingness of all group members to tell the truth, with compassion and without making judgments of “wrong” or “right.” Spoken communication is also more effective when clarified through verification of its receipt. Don’t simply assume a message has been accurately sent; seek confirmation of the recipient’s understanding. Agree that when there is doubt, it is appropriate to check feelings, intuition, and the emotional tone sensed behind the words, and to confirm the “whole” communication. Messages are delivered with more than just words.

Use upsets as an opportunity to learn. If an upset lasts longer than 30 minutes, agree that each party will seek input from an objective advisor and return to complete the communication later. Upsets in communication often result from the thoughts, feelings, past experiences, and personal baggage one brings to the conversation, rather than from disagreement over the subject. Agree that each party will do an internal check to see what may be their part in creating or maintaining the upset, and then attempt resolution.

Communicate concerns directly to the person involved rather than others. This contributes to resolution and prevents the potential harms of gossip and ineffectiveness of triangulation. Triangulation involves communications delivered through third parties rather than directly, resulting in inaccuracies, misinterpretations, omissions, and garbled messages.

Honor the importance of another’s work and time by putting communications in writing whenever possible. Production by all members of the law office is hampered by disruptions caused by the need to shift focus from the work in front of them to an oral comment from someone passing by a workstation or doorway. Disrupt another’s work focus only when something is urgent. This applies equally to attorneys and all other staff. Such disruptions are costly to operations, not to mention disrespectful. Use of email, electronic scheduling, voice mail, and a good old memo pad can significantly improve everyone’s productive time, benefiting the organization as a whole.

Exercising this level of honor and respect in communications between members of the organization, regardless of their role, will enhance the contribution of concerns, problem-solving ideas, and information necessary for the organization to grow and flourish. This prevents what is known as “mismanagement of agreement,”⁴ in which people simply agree to things they really think are unworkable because they are afraid to tell the truth from their perspective. That can be an insidious and costly problem often more harmful than disagreement.

Operations
Create smooth operations by demonstrating:

a belief and recognition that each person in the organization wants to do their best and be acknowledged for it,⁵

a commitment to mutually create an environment conducive to that result, and

a basic understanding of systems.

“Systems thinking” involves looking at wholes, interrelationships rather than linear cause and effect chains, and moving pictures rather than snapshots in time concerning how tasks are accomplished. It involves seeing circles of influence and patterns that repeat themselves over time, causing results that improve or deteriorate.

Systems are the “what” and “how” of activities, dependent for consistency and effectiveness upon clearly defined, outlined, and communicated processes rather than on who is doing them. In many cases, problems arise from flaws in the system rather than from the failure of a single individual who may simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time. While a convenient target for blame, this view often misses fixing the problem.

Create and maintain effective operational systems by implementing a few key commitments.

• When problems arise, look to the system for corrections. Are the steps clearly designed to accomplish the desired outcome? Identify which step may have failed and correct that to fine-tune the system and prevent a recurrence. Create an operational environment that does whatever it takes to support all team members and promote their best efforts.

• Encourage individuals involved with a problem to take their solutions to the person who can do something about it. Be open to such proposed solutions if that person is you. Improved operations require change over time, correction implemented without invalidation, and the input of the people most closely involved.

• Focus first on what works. Be positive. Ask: “What’s needed here?” not “What’s wrong?”; “What can we do better?” rather than “Why isn’t this working?”; and “How can we?” rather than “Why don’t you?” Attempt to consciously use language conducive to generating creative ideas, rather than reiterating what has not been effective or emphasizing what went wrong. Law practice hones the art of uncovering potential problems. Effective office systems require a focus on continual improvement.

• Finally, commit to optimize every event for greater effectiveness. Work to add value and simplify the way things are done whenever possible. Ask for input from everyone involved in a particular operation. Each has a certain level of expertise to contribute from a different perspective. Develop those contributions to save time and expense, improve results, streamline operations, and create a more enjoyable workplace.

A true team orientation; a conscious focus on communicating respect, honesty, and appreciation; sincere accountability; and a willingness to look at the interrelated nature of people and activities may be a fundamental shift from current approaches in the legal workplace. That shift does not require an advanced business degree, but rather a commitment to strengthening the character of each team member. The combination will produce extraordinary results. To achieve such results we must move away from the “conventional view of leadership [that] emphasizes positional power and conspicuous accomplishment [and instead to create] a domain in which we continually learn and become more capable of participating in our unfolding future. [This] sets the stage on which predictable miracles, synchronistic in nature, can — and do — occur.”⁶

Synergy is the “behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior or integral characteristics of any parts of the system when the parts are considered only separately.” R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path 251, St. Martin’s Press (1981). “Bucky’s” favorite example was chrome nickel steel, an alloy with 10 times the tensile strength of its weakest component and six times the tensile strength of the strongest. Examples of synergy occur in all of nature, especially human systems.

K.W. Thomas & R.H. Kilmann, Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (1974) available through Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc. at www.cpp-db.com (last visited on May 15, 2001).

Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization 311, Doubleday (1990). See also, Id. at pp. 139-173.

See, Jerry Harvey, The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management, Jossey-Bass (1996).

A survey of health care employees illustrates this important point. They ranked the following 10 job attributes as follows: 1. full appreciation of work done; 2. being included in on things; 3. understanding of personal problems; 4. job security; 5. good wages;6. interesting work; 7. opportunity for promotion and growth; 8. organizational loyalty to workers; 9. good working conditions; 10. tactful discipline. This information was updated with 1985 and 1995 statistics, showing subtle changes in ranking relative to changes in the health care industry. “Job security” rose to number three and was very narrowly behind number two, “being included in on things.” “Full appreciation of work done” remained first. See, Charles R. McConnell, The Effective Health Care Supervisor, 4th Ed., 1997.

Joseph Jaworski, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership 182, Berrett-Koehler Publishers (1996).