Where there is no vision, the people perish.
— (Proverbs 29: 18)
Do not quench your inspiration and imagination;
do not become the slave of your model.
— (Vincent Van Gogh)
Good leadership is about making things happen. The starting point is for you to help your team to develop a clear sense of direction together with a few important objectives and a strategy for achieving them. It is also helpful to gain agreement on the values that will underpin the ways in which team members will tackle their jobs and the nature of their relationships with clients and colleagues. Whatever is decided must be congruent with the mission, objectives, values and strategy of the firm as a whole.
The purpose of engaging your team in this activity is to formulate a number of actions that will give you a competitive advantage by making your team’s services more valuable to clients than those of other firms. It will probably also involve identifying new services to promote, new markets to enter and new clients to target. Profitability will be the watchword. If you lead an in-house professional team in a corporation then the purpose is to develop an action plan for providing new and improved services to your internal clients.
Notice the emphasis here on the leader involving the team members in formulating a clear sense of direction. The fashion, these days, is to talk of outstanding leaders providing a captivating vision of the future to which everyone can readily and happily sign up. My experience of working with them is that the best leaders of professionals do not impose their own ideas on their colleagues. Nor do they ‘sell’ them to their colleagues. Rather they work with them, through a subtle blend of encouragement, helpful questions, thoughtful suggestions and the bringing together of useful ideas to generate a clear and agreed picture of the desirable future for the team. I suspect that this approach is one that not only suits the temperaments of most professionals but also produces the best results.
At DLA the process of business planning involves leaders and their teams at the corporate level on the one hand, and among the practice groups (such as commercial, litigation, real estate and banking), geographical locations and support functions on the other.
Managing Partner Nigel Knowles explains it this way:
We establish the vision for the firm at corporate level. This involves brainstorming sessions and discussions with members of the DLA board, the practice group heads, the managing partners of the offices and the support function directors. We also have a number of clearly articulated values, covering people, service and quality. At first they were aspirational but increasingly they reflect reality.
We get the practice group heads, regional office partners and support function directors to work out, in close consultation with their team members, strategic plans to achieve the vision, as it applies to their parts of the business. It has to support the firm’s values. The process of consultation by the various team leaders is a genuine one of involvement. Team leaders write up draft plans after, not before, thorough brainstorming discussions and agreements among the team members themselves. This is important for ownership and commitment. Draft plans are coordinated by me. My board colleagues, the support function directors and I then prepare a DLA strategy which takes account of the goals and plans prepared by teams throughout the business. We finish up with integrated corporate and unit plans for achieving our vision over a three-year period and which also support our values. We believe that such a comprehensive planning process is unusual for a law firm. We have now been through this process twice and we are well up the learning curve. We have had to work hard to get people to believe in it.
We encourage relatively short plans with a few significant goals and some well-constructed action points. They must be realistic and deliverable and must be followed up. People inside and outside the business can now see that DLA is focused and has a clear corporate personality. Our business results have been excellent and our progress has been outstanding. Internal cynicism has evaporated and we get grudging admiration from at least some of our competitors. We reckon that we are now the leading UK law firm.
None of this would be possible without having good leadership throughout the business, in our practice groups, in our regional offices, in our support functions and at the corporate level. Our leaders have to be good at getting their teams to contribute their thinking. They have to work towards a consensus. They need to get commitment from everybody. They need, finally, to encourage everyone to stay focused and turn the plans into action. In other words, the team leaders throughout the firm have to make it happen.