Law Firm Leadership: How Vision and Communication Create Greater ROI

Only two business challenges make law firm management into a daily headache: ineffective communication and mediocre leadership. I firmly believe that neither is necessary nor inevitable, and and I have seen for myself how some relatively simple strategies and tools can have a huge impact on the people and organizations now hampered by these very common challenges. Ironically, law firms seem to have the greatest difficulty with these two tasks, even though the organizations are full of smart people with above average communication skills.

That "vision thing"... the ROI is huge!

It is now generally accepted that a lack of a clearly articulated, shared vision for the future of an organization leads to results that are at least 30% below the performance of a comparable organization with a well-understood, shared, vision for the future in a typical year. In fact, Kotter and Heskett, two Harvard Business School profs found the difference in corporate performance between businesses with a clear and well understood vision and those without one was more than 900% over a 10 period for Fortune 500 companies that they studied! Here's a link to the book at Amazon; http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Culture-Performance-John-Kotter/dp/0029184673 Vision matters.


Vision + Communication = Leadership

And how does a dream become a shared vision? Through open, constant, repeated, talking and listening-effective communication. The most effective leaders in any domain-business, government, the military, the church-all share this important leadership skill. These leaders have a personal vision for the organization, they have a story, and they tell it over and over again. This inspirational story-telling is always balanced by an equally well-developed ability to listen, not just to the words they hear, but to the emotional themes they sense in the undercurrents of these interactions. Vision and communication create corporate culture.

Being in a position with formal authority does not automatically make the position-holder a leader-a manager, perhaps; an autocrat, far too often; an authority, certainly; a leader, only rarely-when vision and communication come together. This seldom happens by accident, and to be sustained, requires planning, persistence, and purpose.

Send me your stories and questions

For more than 30 years, I have been involved in helping people learn to communicate more effectively-as a therapist, leadership coach, management consultant, litgation consultant, and professor in law, psychology, and business communication. I have had the privilege to learn from many inspirational and insightful people, and some of them were experts, like Peter Senge, while most of them were clients, students, and colleagues. Those generous souls with the courage to talk about both their victories and defeats have taught me the most, and this space is my way of sharing that generosity.

Lead on!