Lead by example.
It’s about communication; it’s about listening. It’s about reaching out to people and being willing to hear somebody say, ‘You know, I think you’re wrong.’
It doesn’t mean that you necessarily agree you’re wrong, but it’s good to hear it every once in awhile and be willing to have a discussion about that. Demonstrating how you have incorporated that responsibility into your own day is the most powerful thing you can do.
Make that a topic of discussion, and make it something that is presented as a priority every opportunity that you can. What you talk about matters. It’s a signal, and the things that you spend your time talking about tend to be the things that people focus their energies on.
You want to make sure that your own leadership by example is consistent with what you’re saying is a priority.
Develop a vision consistent with employee values.
The vision has to reflect the aspirations of the people who you lead, their capabilities and professional values. The vision, the strategic direction, isn’t just something that gets dictated from the top down. We don’t, as an executive committee, sit around, think great thoughts, write them down, deliver them down and expect people to embrace them. It’s a bottom-up process.
You can synthesize it, sift through all the ideas, see the commonalities, start to put together a plan that’s cohesive — but the raw material with which you’re working comes from the firm and what they’re able to achieve. And then you have to add in what clients need going forward.
Then you move over into implementation, because the greatest plan in the world doesn’t mean anything unless you’re effective at implementing. You need to be committed, you certainly need to be disciplined about it, but you also need to be agile.
Nothing ever goes as precisely as planned — client needs will shift, market conditions will shift — and you need to be able to adjust as you go. A client and a good friend of mine taught me a long time ago, ‘Look, if you’ve got a problem, do something, and as a matter of fact, do more than one thing. The things that work well, do more of those. And the things that don’t work so well, you might want to stop those.’
That’s what I mean by agility. You can be the greatest planner in the world, but there’s always going to be contingencies that develop that you can’t fully anticipate, and you may need to make adjustments. The real test of leadership is understanding where it’s appropriate to make an adjustment and where it’s not. And if you’re going to make an adjustment, what kind and how far do you go?
There is no strategic holy grail. A strategic vision needs to fit the organization’s professional value structure and capabilities. What works for us probably would not work for other law firms — at least not as well.
There is little reason to believe that in order to be successful we have to mirror the paths of others.
HOW TO REACH: Schiff Hardin LLP, (312) 258-5500 or www.schiffhardin.com
