Karen Ngo, In-house Director of Thomson Reuters Legal UK & Ireland recently attended the ACC Europe Annual Conference, where Thomson Reuters was a corporate sponsor. Here in a series of blogs, she shares her insights from some of the plenary sessions, starting with: “What does it mean to lead” moderated by Paul Gilbert of LBC Wise Counsel.
What does it mean to lead?
This was the title of the first plenary session at the recent ACC Europe Annual Conference I attended. As one would have been expected from the stellar panel leading session, the discussions were thoughtful and insightful.
Paul Gilbert from LBC Wise Counsel moderating the session, made this opening comment. “We train our lawyers within an inch of their lives on technical skills but we expect them to gain their soft skills through osmosis.”
As a former leader of an in-house legal team and having earned that position most likely through technical competence than anyone specifically noticing my soft skills, I would agree that relying on osmosis alone is probably not the best way for a new leader to fulfil their potential. But yet, businesses do usually hire their in-house lawyer leaders for their excellent technical skills. For example in Silicon Valley, it is not at all surprising that General Counsels are usually former IP litigators and anti-trust lawyers, probably not the breeds of lawyers that immediately spring to mind as possessing excellent soft skills necessary for successful in-house leadership.
So for leaders of in-house teams who come from the ranks of technical experts, who have been trained within an inch of their lives to measure excellent performance through time sheets and live to deliver ever higher levels of service to their clients, what words of wisdom do the panel have to impart?
Osmosis is not enough, train yourself
- Be a student first before trying to lead. Get the team to teach you leadership skills. Put yourself out there and find out how you are doing and how you are perceived.
- Broaden your non-legal skills. Do something outside of your day job. If you can do two jobs you’ll learn more.
- Invest in your business partners. Take the time when not in crisis management mode to help business colleagues understand the fine line an in-house lawyer has to tread between being a business partner and the guardian of the whole business (and not of individuals).
- Develop those important business relationships. Talk to CEOs and business managers to find out what they expect of their lawyers.
- Find a mentor. Failing which, at least someone who inspires you and then model their behaviour.
Hire the right team and train them well
- Take the time to pick the right team. You need to be able to have fun and enjoy working with them.
- Look for the right behaviours in addition to technical skills when recruiting new joiners. Resilience, for example, is an essential quality for an in-house lawyer to have. There is nothing as constant in business as change.
- Closely supervise young lawyers and embed a teaching role in all levels of your department. Many junior lawyers will not immediately get the difference between what the business wants and what it needs.
- Ensure that your team understand that they must know the law, the business and then the law applicable to the business if they have any chance of succeeding in in-house life.
- Put in place formal opportunities such as project secondments and rotation programmes for your team to learn the business.
- Help the team understand their role. For example, speed is a basic expectation of the management team. Help them identify when to apply the 80/20 rule in order to keep pace with the speed of business.
- Actively challenge your team to inform and upskill themselves constantly. For example, one panellist asks his team at the end of each week to describe what they have done individually to:
- Better understand the business, the market in which it operates and the challenges of operating within the market.
- Learn substantive legal skills that will enable better lawyering in grey areas.
- Network with colleagues and other legal professionals to gather feedback and understand best practice.
- Resource well. Ensure that there are the right levels and types of resources in place to support the agility of your team.
Create the right culture
- Adopt and inspire an agile mind-set. Be a catalyst for your team in a dynamic environment so that together you are able to proactively manage change and not miss important inflexion points.
- Inspire through leading by example. One of the panellist suggested that in the same way that there’s often a lack of connection between political leaders and citizens, business leaders can lack connection with employees of the business. Inspiring leaders have skin in the game.
- Help your team figure out what don’t they have to do and what can be pushed back to the business. Letting go is something that all legal departments struggle with.
- Take a leaf from growing ranks of legal operations professionals who are very good at networking and sharing best practice.
Making leaders
At the end of the day, business are generally better served if leaders are found from within. The panellists were unanimous in their advice that it would behove department leaders to work with HR to put in place a formal succession plan.
It will take time to develop the next generation of leaders, be it for the legal department or the wider business or indeed another legal department or business. Identifying talented individuals and giving them opportunities to fill gaps in their experience means they have a better chance of fulfilling their potential and become effective leaders themselves, as after all “Leaders are made, they are not born.”
