POWERING BUSINESS PERFORMANCE THROUGH MORE EFFECTIVE CLIENT FOCUS AND TEAMING
3) Ensure that the firm’s leadership and management actively champion and support the change initiatives. For many firms, the shift in emphasis from a practice drive to a full-teaming client drive requires a major internal change in behaviour and attitude. Given how deeply embedded is the practice-based view of the world held by most lawyers, and how many of the cultural factors within law firms tend to support and maintain the ‘my client’ ‘my way’ view of the world, one should not underestimate the degree of change required. Building and sustaining a momentum for change will occur only through committed effort from the top! Embedding the thinking, attitudes and processes to ensure this drive becomes self-sustaining takes a great deal of time and effort and must start with engaging the commitment of the firm’s leadership to the process. 4) Ensure that the roles, responsibilities and working relationships of the client, practice, industry and geographic teams and their leaders are clearly defined and understood, and that they have the authority required. It is important that the position of leading a practice, industry, geography or client team is defined as a strong leadership and management role, one that has a real executive authority, one that has a firm-wide reach and one therefore that requires the firm’s best people. The central purpose of each of the practice and industry teams is to capture and develop ‘cutting-edge’ intellectual capital and insights, to reinforce the marketing and business development effort and service delivery within the specific geography. Combining and leveraging these insights for maximum client impact, be it to support marketing and image build, relationship management and build, business development or service delivery, requires each of the teams to work effectively and in an open way with each other. 5) Ensure that the firm’s performance management systems measure both the investments and returns associated with each initiative. Building a ‘strong’ and ‘fortified’ position with a key client, practice or within an industry takes time and resource investment. These need to be appropriately planned and closely tracked for each of the designated industry, practice and client teams. It is important to evaluate the effectiveness of the firm’s investments in order to make informed strategic investment decisions. 6) Ensure that the firm’s partner performance processes both reflect and support the defined team-based client drives. In any major change effort it is vitally important to ensure the firm’s performance management process supports and rewards the new behaviours and the risks associated with championing the new team-based way. 7) Ensure close monitoring of progress and the collective learnings for firm-wide leverage to enhance differentiation and competitiveness. It is important that progress and performance are monitored, analysed and understood so that ‘wins’ can be shared and lessons learned applied elsewhere. Too often organisations fail to utilise fully the lessons learned from both mistakes and successes, and therefore keep reinventing the wheel.
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