If trainees are to stay well motivated and enthusiastic about working for your firm they need to develop their skills and knowledge quickly and effectively. There are two processes that are central to this need. The first is the way the people are assigned to their tasks and the second is the quality of supervision that they receive. It is the team leader’s job to see that both of these are working well and that they satisfy the needs of the team, the firm and the individual trainees concerned.
A good scheduling system requires an appropriate balance between profitability, client service and skill-building considerations. It is clearly necessary to keep everyone busy, as otherwise profitability will suffer. It is also important to try to match staff with clients’ needs. This will often go beyond the deployment of people with the technical skills that are needed by particular clients to matching the ‘personal chemistry’ of individual professionals with the client firms’ representatives. Good assignment decisions often influence the possibility of follow-up business. However, the needs of professional development must also be met and not least those of trainees, who, by definition, need to learn as rapidly as possible. The assignment process is a major determinant of both the amount and the nature of skill development. The mixture of assignments, at an early stage in a professional’s career, will determine how far that individual will become a functional expert, a sector expert or a generalist. As far as skill development is concerned it is also helpful for trainees to be assigned to a variety of senior people with different talents and styles. They are likely as a result to have far richer experiences and to learn more through undertaking a wider range of tasks in different ways. They will have the opportunity, also, to observe different approaches to interviews, negotiations, meetings and so on.
So that a good balance can be struck between keeping people busy, providing a good personal match between professionals and clients and providing skill development it is a good idea for the team as a whole to meet regularly to allocate trainees to assignments. It need not take too long. It is a good way of ensuring that all angles are covered. It also fosters collective responsibility among team members for ensuring that the three objectives of the scheduling process are achieved.
In some firms the quality of supervision of trainees is a hit-and-miss affair. This is for two reasons. Sometimes supervisors are not trained to do the job. Some may be good because they have an appropriate personal style and they may have learnt the arts from having been supervised well themselves, when trainees, by people who were talented leaders. Others may be found wanting. The second reason is that agreed guidelines for supervising trainees do not exist. Good team leaders ensure that those responsible for supervising trainees receive some training or coaching in the skills involved. They also engage their team colleagues in defining appropriate guidelines that everyone concerned commits to putting into effect. Teams will want to choose their own guidelines, but here are some possibilities to help you to think along the right lines:
- Trainees are told how their particular tasks fit into the objectives for the assignment.
- Supervisors receive effective coaching to help them to improve their performance ( Helping Team Members to Get the Best Out of Themselves for the skills involved).
- Supervisors provide regular and prompt feedback on performance (see Creating the Conditions for Outstanding Performance and Helping Team Members to Get the Best Out of Themselves for the skills involved).
- Supervisors are available without long delays when questions need to be asked.
- Trainees are encouraged to make their own decisions about their tasks.
- Trainees are encouraged to offer their thoughts on improving the ways that assignments are undertaken.
- Objectives, target dates, standards of performance and so on are agreed with trainees rather than imposed.
- Trainees are exposed progressively to more interesting and challenging work.
- Discussions are held regularly between supervisors and trainees on progress, perceptions, anxieties, career aspirations and job satisfaction.
- Supervisors encourage trainees to participate fully in team discussions.
- Supervisors provide help with skill development, outside the assignments themselves, by seeking out appropriate training programmes and reading material and providing opportunities for trainees to meet and talk with senior colleagues or useful people outside the firm.
- Supervisors give trainees the opportunity to accompany them at interviews, negotiations, meetings and so on and to discuss processes and outcomes afterwards.
- Supervisors let colleagues know about particularly effective pieces of work undertaken by trainees.
- Supervisors give trainees the opportunity to redo work that is not up to expectations, after discussions about what needs to be changed. Supervisors do not redo the work themselves.
- Supervisors show at least as much care and concern for trainees as for the assignments.
- Supervisors use delegation as a way of helping trainees to learn.
- Supervisors don’t second-guess trainees; they ask them to explain.
- When trainees come to supervisors with problems about their work, the supervisors ask the trainees how they propose to handle them.
Many of these guidelines will appear obvious to those supervisors of trainees to whom the activity comes naturally. For others, they will, if followed, enhance supervisory performance. Good team leaders who chat informally with all members of their teams, including the trainees, will quickly discover if the supervisory guidelines are being followed. If they are not, it is the job of the team leaders to remind colleagues that the guidelines are in place and have been agreed by everyone. As time goes on, and if people are reminded about the importance of the supervisory guidelines, they become embedded in the culture. When that happens most professionals do their best to observe them.
There is a systematic and effective process for supervising trainees at DLA. Human Resources Director Robert Halton has this to say:
We use associates (usually lawyers with a minimum of five or six years’ experience) who have excellent technical skills to supervise trainees. This we believe is good news for the trainees and good news for the associates who develop their leadership skills in preparation for partnership. We teach associates how to supervise. The main stages are first to give good briefings for assignments with explanations of purpose. The second is to be available to clarify, and the third stage involves monitoring and the provision of feedback. We encourage trainees to go with associates to meetings with clients and colleagues to observe and learn.
We are very keen on the idea that if things go wrong then trainees should not be torn off a strip. We want them to own up to problems early. The aim is to help them to learn from mistakes so that they don’t happen again. We encourage them, if in doubt, to check and we tell them that there is no such thing as a stupid question as long as they don’t ask it more than once. I think that it is an important part of a team leader’s job to see that the associates undertake this supervisory role in the way, the right way, that I have described.