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M. Diane Vogt is an "AV" rated lawyer licensed in Michigan and Florida who has represented Fortune 100 companies as local, lead, national, counsel in litigation for more than 24 years. Her peers selected her as a member of the inaugural 2004 Florida Legal Elite, an honor bestowed upon fewer than 2% of practicing Florida lawyers. Ms. Vogt provides consulting, coaching and mentoring services to individuals and organizations. She is a principal in PeopleWealth, providing retention services to lawyers and their practices. To contact Ms. Vogt or for more information, visit her web sites: www.peoplewealth.com and www.mdianevogt.com.
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How Coaching And Mentoring Help Create Job Satisfaction And Retention
By M. Diane Vogt
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Five years ago, I co-authored a book for the American Bar Association's Law Practice Management Section entitled Keeping Good Lawyers: Best Practices To Create Career Satisfaction. The premise was simple but seemed novel: that job satisfaction is the key to attracting and retaining the best lawyers in law firms, law departments and the legal profession.
Emotional Engagement With The Practice
Equals Job Satisfaction
Job satisfaction for lawyers means many things including interesting work, exciting clients, adequate compensation, and strong training among others. But primarily lawyer satisfaction depends upon the emotional engagement with the practice in which the lawyer finds himself or herself. Where such emotional engagement exists, the lawyer will stay with the practice and be well satisfied with it. Where emotional engagement is absent, the lawyer's performance declines, job satisfaction evaporates and the lawyer sooner or later finds a new job, within or outside the practice of law.
Find An Appropriate Coach At Every Stage Of Your Career
Keeping the responsibility for career development squarely on the shoulders of the lawyer herself is the only way to ensure that someone with a serious stake in the outcome remains in charge of career satisfaction through all stages of a legal career. But lawyers don't come out of the womb of law school knowing how to manage their careers. Career design and development are skills that every lawyer should master and every practice should proactively support. The most effective way for an individual lawyer to learn career design and development skills is through mentoring and coaching. Most lawyers think that mentoring and coaching are only for new or very junior people, but they are wrong. Every lawyer should identify an appropriate coach at every stage of his or her career. If a lawyer wanted to become a federal court judge, wouldn't having a Supreme Court justice as a coach make a huge difference? Rainmaking is a learned art. Who knows better how to generate business than a lawyer who's been successful doing it?
There are many ways to accomplish life's goals. Of course one can proceed through the exceedingly difficult and expensive school of hard knocks. But I would want to have a guide who can tell me how to avoid the potholes, washouts, construction zones, and traffic jams along the way. Wouldn't you?
Study Finds Mentoring #1 Key To Success Of Professionals
On the management side, the most effective way to ensure that lawyers are emotionally engaged with the firm's practice is to take a personal interest in them. And the best way to do that is to provide them with effective coaching and mentoring at all levels and stages of their legal careers. Some of the most disaffected lawyers are mid-level partners. But good coaching, such as with an outside consultant who understands the legal business, can turn the situation around and revive the commitment, and thus the career, of a professional who would otherwise be lost to a firm that had years of investment in his skills.
In 1998, the cutting-edge research and consulting firm Catalyst published a study called Advancing Women in Business. The conclusion it reached after a great deal of research was that, for both men and women, having a mentor was more important than any other single factor favoring their success in work or in life. This is nowhere more true than in a personal service business such as the practice of law.
Lawyers Leave The Firm When They Emotionally Disengage
Lawyers leave a firm either because they never became fully affiliated, i.e. emotionally engaged with the organization, or because they've become disengaged. That is, they don't feel a part of the organization and therefore have no emotional stake in its success. When they suffer this disaffection long enough, lawyers leave the profession altogether.
At the junior associate level, a program designed to encourage engagement must begin immediately. The moment of acceptance of a job offer is not too soon to start. In successful practices, junior associates are made part of a practice group, assigned a good mentor and given a role in firm or practice group management from the first day on the job. Within the first six months, every partner in the practice group has had lunch with the new associate at least once. New associates are regularly included in informal practice discussions. No new associate is ever left to question whether the firm cares about him. Thus begins the process of lawyer engagement, because engaged lawyers are loyal and committed.
A Law Firm Of Partners Only?
For years, it has been suggested that firms should make all lawyers partners. The joke was, "Then we can pay them less." In reality some large law firms have understood that making all lawyers partners on some level is exactly what is required. They have placed even junior lawyers on committees responsible for significant decision-making, including offers of partnership.
All lawyers must be partners in making the firm a success but they must have personal reasons to do so. Too often law firms are like shopping malls where groups of individual lawyers and profit centers operate under one roof, but don't act like a team working on the same goals. This multiple enterprise approach encourages the formation of portable practices that can easily be moved from one location to another, almost at the whim of the lawyer. The decline of institutional clients and institutional goal setting also contributes to this rootlessness.
Ownership Is Not An Adequate Incentive For Lawyers
Given the shallow loyalty of many partners, it would appear that ownership alone, even combined with substantial economic incentives, do not suffice to keep lawyers engaged with a firm. Many studies show that money may be a hedge against unhappiness, but it doesn't create happiness either.
The second important factor in lawyer engagement is trust in leadership. Lawyers have to believe in their leaders and buy into a common goal beyond profitability. If management isn't trusted by the lawyers in the enterprise, either it will be voted out by the membership or replaced when individuals vote with their feet by leaving for "new opportunities."
"My Mentor Told Me If I Wasn't Voted In, He Would Resign."
If the essence of engagement is an emotional stake in the enterprise, one of the most effective ways to engage lawyers is with proper mentoring. A senior lawyer once recalled to me:
On the day of the partnership vote, I was pretty apprehensive about it. My mentor told me if I wasn't voted in, he would resign. I think he would have, too, but neither of us ever had to find out. His support meant everything to me.
Mentees rarely leave their mentors without some encouragement to do so. And the close relationship created by true mentoring will usually keep a lawyer engaged, or encourage her to leave when her mentor does. Developing networks of mentoring relationships within a firm and encouraging the best mentors to stay, powerfully affects retention of talent. Needless to say, lawyer retention at all levels is critical to the continued viability of law practices, so pro-active retention programs are usually a wise investment in a law firm's future.
Aligning Strategy And People
To Achieve Extraordinary Results
Lawyers are trained to be independent, even Lone Rangers. In the best professional sense, they are used to being in control, giving advice to a client and expecting the client to listen and act on their directions. As legal careers progress, good lawyers develop client bases, which enable them to be even more independent. But remaining interdependent in an association of lawyers is the choice that must be encouraged by a firm that wants to grow and prosper.
The importance of "managing the talent", as they say in sports and entertainment circles, was highlighted in Edward L. Gubman's ground breaking book, The Talent Solution (McGraw Hill 1998) -- subtitled Aligning Strategy and People to Achieve Extraordinary Results. Gubman for many years led the global organizational effectiveness practice of Hewitt Associates LLC, an HR management-consulting firm that serves 75% of the Fortune 500. Gubman's view is that getting your talent engaged with your enterprise is, "Much more about creating an environment in which people feel energized to do the best work of their careers." Gubman identifies seven factors in employee engagement that I suggest apply equally well for lawyers:
- Shared values and sense of purpose.
- Quality of work life, meaning satisfaction with the work environment.
- Job tasks that are challenging and interesting.
- Relationships with managers, coworkers and customers.
- Total compensation including pay, benefits and financial recognition.
- Opportunities for growth in learning, additional responsibility and advancement.
- Leadership, defined as trust in and credibility of the organization's leaders.
Why Mentoring Programs Often Fail
Many law firms have mentoring programs in place that are not fulfilling their purpose of career development for their lawyers. Where these programs usually fail is in the level of commitment by the firm to the goals of the program. If there is no budget or reward for mentors and the culture of the firm views the assignment as just another task to be done on personal time, the efforts of even the most devoted mentors are unlikely to be rewarded. Younger lawyers placed with less dedicated mentors will not for long maintain any illusions about the firm's commitment to their careers beyond the short term. No one wins that game.
Satisfied Lawyers = Satisfied Clients = Higher Retention Of Both
An active combination of consulting, mentoring and coaching can make the difference between success and failure for individual lawyers and firms of all sizes. The quality and quantity of work performed by satisfied lawyers, well coached and mentored, in any organization is significantly higher. Satisfied lawyers create successful and long-lasting practices, generate more business, and are simply more pleasant to work with than discontented ones. Create a practice environment that allows lawyers to engage and grow on their own terms, and your organization's rewards will multiply exponentially.
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