Finding and developing the talent to help your firm flourish and grow is a law firm leader’s most crucial role. But without the right mindset, even the most respected leaders can sabotage their efforts. Here are the mindset shifts you need to make if you want to build a thriving legal business.
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Control Your Thoughts, Control Your Destiny
In a rapidly evolving business landscape, change of any kind often feels like a giant leap into the unknown. It’s easy to fall into the trap of waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect plan, but true growth requires a leap of faith. You don’t gain a competitive advantage by sitting idly, but by doing upfront work that only later translates into increased productivity.
If you truly intend to change how you operate, the first thing to do is examine your mindset.
Shifting From a Fixed Mindset to a Growth Mindset
Employers working in the legal sphere frequently come to me and say:
- “It’s impossible to find good people.”
- “Nobody wants to work.”
- “They must have this precise skill set because I don’t have time to train them.”
- “I am not mentoring anyone because they’ll end up leaving anyway, so why should I put in the effort?”
Each of these statements is made with a fixed mindset.
In a learning environment, people with a fixed mindset believe that talent and intelligence are fixed and that nothing they do will change them. When faced with setbacks, fixed mindset leaders assume failure, place blame, and shut down feedback.
Repeating negative phrases like “nobody wants to work” or “I can’t get anyone to stay at my firm for more than a few weeks” reinforces negative beliefs. In fact, people with a fixed mindset are often incapable of growth.
People with a growth mindset, however, believe talent and intelligence can be improved with learning, encouragement and grit. Leaders with a growth mindset view setbacks as opportunities to learn and improve.
If you find yourself defaulting to negativity, I encourage you to start using phrases like this instead:
- “Everyone in their right mind would want to work here.”
- “There are superstars just waiting for our perfect forever-home company.”
- “Great people exist, and they will come to work at this law firm.”
Of course, no amount of talk will convince a flower to grow without the sun. Growth is also a direct result of action. You need to invest in your team’s growth if you want to entrust them with increased responsibility.
Practicing Mindful Leadership
Mindful leadership — where leaders focus on being present, open-minded and compassionate when interacting with their team — is the rage these days. Ask people in leadership positions if they approach their jobs mindfully, and most will say yes. After all, we all like to think we engage in our work consciously and carefully.
However, mindful leadership does not simply mean having one’s brain turned on. It also means recognizing our biases and taking deliberate action to short-circuit their influence on our decision-making.
A leader’s role is to find and develop top talent. This is only possible if we can assess our personnel impartially. The first step in achieving this is recognizing the biases we are most likely to carry.
Learn to Manage Bias to Build a Better Team
Instead of allowing biases to hijack your most important hiring decisions, learn how to recognize and counteract them.
Halo Effect Bias
The halo effect refers to allowing one positive feature to dominate how you view someone, causing you to overlook negative traits and excuse weaknesses. The halo effect leads leaders to miss growth opportunities and select candidates based on a partial set of characteristics.
Action. A simple solution is to collect multiple viewpoints. Good leadership means recognizing the value of outsider input.
Availability Bias
Unfortunately, people tend to add value to experiences we can easily retrieve. The media capitalizes on this tendency constantly, feeding us soundbites that enhance the perceived meaning of an event by boosting the imaginative space it occupies.
This applies to leadership when you assign undue significance to a major or memorable event simply because it is vivid.
Action. As a counteractive measure, assess performance regularly to prevent the most retrievable experiences from coloring your perception. In short, replace annual performance assessments with monthly or quarterly reviews.
Confirmation Bias
If you’ve been awake to current events, you’ve seen plenty of people selecting information that confirms existing beliefs. This bias plays to our desire for consistency. In a world that sees wishy-washy decision-making as a weakness, confirmation bias is especially dangerous. To counteract its effect, seek out information that challenges your initial impressions. Asking what you need to see to change your mind alters how you look at potential evidence.
Humanity’s secret to evolutionary success is our ability to tell unifying stories. We build narratives that explain our world. Hence, when we evaluate a person, we spin a tale.
However, despite your desires, sometimes the top candidate isn’t the person who best fits your narrative.
Action. By identifying objective criteria for success in advance, you can avoid giving preference to candidates simply because they fit your fantasy. Addressing performance standards openly with employees ensures you reinforce the best behaviors — not those most appealing.
Multiplicative Systems Bias
This refers to the fact that every element of a person’s character influences the other elements. We are not the sum of our parts but the product. For example, intelligence and work ethic don’t matter if a person lacks integrity. Too many leaders search for a well-rounded skill set only to find the results mediocre.
Action. Instead, recognize that personality traits have a multiplicative influence and leverage this to capitalize on available opportunities.
Changing Your Mindset and Creating a Culture of Respect
Recognizing these biases allows you to manage them instead of allowing them to manage you. This means cultivating focus, clarity, creativity and compassion. Doing so allows you to meet employees with the openness necessary to undo inherent assumptions.
Once you are able to see others through new eyes, you will be able to cultivate a culture of respect. Respected individuals work better, manage better and lead more productive lives. And that is key to building and leading a thriving legal business.
Image © iStockPhoto.com.
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