Last week I focused on how to encourage great people to want to join your team. This week I want to look at 8 things you can do once you’ve hired them.

These include:

- remembering the wider team, not just the lawyers;

- working hard for your team;

- focusing on the individual;

- considering whether you are contributing to any struggles they are having;

- using Hackman & Oldham's Job Characteristics Model as a framework;

- including them in the business, while remembering they care about more than just business; and

- use technology wherever possible to help them do a better job.

1     Remember - It’s not just the lawyers!

It’s very easy as a lawyer to think only in terms of your legal staff, but of course there’s a wider team in any law firm, and you need all of them to be working at their best for the overall system to work.

As a partner I felt that whenever anyone from our management or support staff approached me needing some assistance, I should give it to them as quickly and helpfully as possible. Help them to do the best job they can to help you!

2     Work hard for them

Employment is a two-way relationship, and the best people have more choices than you do. They can get other jobs, often on better pay. When someone chose to work with me, they were putting their future in my hands to a large extent. I had a responsibility to repay that trust, work hard for them, and treat them as I would want to have been treated.

Help them develop a plan for themselves and their career, and to avoid the mistakes that you and others have made in your careers. Knowing that you are looking out for them makes a big difference.

With this general framework it is not too hard to work out the right thing to do in any situation.

3    Start with the individual (which is them, not you!)

Young lawyers are very difficult to manage. They’re typically very smart, analytical, ambitious and opinionated, yet risk averse and prone to self-doubt. As one of my early managers, Justin Toebes, once told me,

“When they first start they think they know everything. After two weeks, they realise they know nothing. But after two years, they think they know everything again!”.

They tend to worry a lot about whether they are “on track” for their level of experience.

Recognising where the lawyer is at in their progression is important. Overconfidence needs to be addressed, and usually is very quickly after their first woeful attempts at writing a letter enclosing some documents, but there’s also the need to let them know when they are struggling that they’re doing fine and it’s normal, and will get better soon.

Everyone’s different, and it’s important to understand each individual, how they prefer to work and how to get the best out of them. While you can try and force everyone to work around you and your unique preferences, you’ll get more value if you can adjust to them. You hired them for their strengths – use them! It’s actually not that different from coaching a sports team. Steve Hansen recently said:

There's a blueprint for it but what I try to do is look at the individual first and foremost. What is it that makes this guy tick? Is he a family person? Is he an individual who likes his own company? Once you find that out, you can help them achieve what they want to achieve within the team.

Steve Hansen

For example, if you know that a person usually likes to read something and think about it before being put on the spot, it’s not a lot of effort to accommodate that by planning some time for it. They’ll appreciate it, and you’ll get much better performance as a result.

Consider something like DISC profiling, which I have done with Catapult Consulting and am a fan of. It is surprising how much people engage with it, not so much in understanding themselves, but their colleagues and how they could work with them better and avoid past issues.

4     If the employee is struggling, check that it’s not you, rather than them, that is causing the issue

In The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome Jean-François Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barsoux describe how often an employee’s poor performance can be traced back to his or her boss, through creating a reinforcing dynamic that essentially sets up perceived underperformers to fail.

By taking a number of actions which are actually intended to boost performance and prevent a subordinate from making errors, the subordinate perceives lack of trust and confidence. This can cause them to doubt their own ability, and lose the motivation to make decisions themselves (or take any action at all – as they assume the boss will just question everything they do or do it themselves).

This withdrawal just serves to confirm the boss’s assumptions, and so the pressure increases further. Manzoni and Barsoux say that numerous studies have confirmed that people perform up or down to the levels their bosses expect from them, or to the levels they expect from themselves.

If someone in your team is struggling, don’t assume it is entirely their fault, and check that the things you are doing to help the situation aren’t actually making it worse! I’ve seen plenty of people who have been identified as underperformers move into new roles and immediately thrive under a new boss.

5     Have a blue print

As Steve Hansen says, there is a blue print – in fact, there are many of them. One that I like, because I think it makes practical sense, is Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model. They’ve suggested that job satisfaction is driven by 5 key characteristics:

-    Skill variety: enough variety to keep learning, without being overwhelming;

-    Task identity: experiencing a significant part of the whole job, not just a small component of it;

-    Task significance: experienced meaningfulness of the work;

-    Autonomy and Responsibility: having responsibility for the outcomes of the work; and

-     Feedback:  knowledge of the actual results of the work.

Each of these is a topic in its own right, and I’ll talk about each of these in more detail in subsequent articles as they’re important.

6     Include them in the business

Although they don’t always run like one, a law firm is a business, and the sooner you can start to include young lawyers in the business of law the better. You’ll be surprised at how interested they are, and how much they can contribute in areas such as scoping, pricing, project management, marketing and recruitment.

Get them early while they’re still passionate about making a difference. These business skills are the ones that you’ll need them to have as senior associates, so get them started early.

7     It’s not all about the business

In my experience, the current generation of lawyers are very socially minded – more so than the cohort I started with. They actively seek out opportunities to volunteer with community law centres, and on pro bono work. At Victoria University, the students have set up the Wellington Community Justice Project to make a difference while they are still at university. Encourage it. They’re looking for ways that they can make a difference, not just help partners or their clients get richer. If you can facilitate or accommodate those opportunities it will be very powerful.

8     Use technology

This generation of lawyers are the first that are real ‘digital natives’, having grown up with ubiquitous access to the internet and mobile computing. That means they are much more focused on applying technology to doing their job faster and better.

In this context to remain an attractive employment proposition you need think about whether you can:

-    Use technology to show an intent to keep developing their skills in ways that they will need to be successful in the future. Nobody wants to be falling behind their peers in other firms.

-    Provide your team with mobile work devices, or let them bring their own devices, so they can work more flexibly away from their desks (whether at home, coming to and from work, or from client premises).

-    Be flexible. If people can work from home, and don’t let you down while doing it, let them. A lot of partners do it now, so why not the wider team too? In many cases they’ll get more done without distraction in the office, and the benefits can be huge for those with young families and limited childcare support.

-    Remove the drudgery from work. Investigate digital dictation, and proof reading tools. Just because it didn’t do you any harm is no reason to inflict it on another generation if you don’t need to!

-    Keep abreast of updates in search technology. This is an area where there will be real improvements over the next few years as it becomes possible to search based on the meaning and context of documents, not just key words. It could turn all your documents and emails into a fantastic asset and make lawyers’ jobs so much easier.

-    Use word document automation, with built in guidance and checklists, to systematise work. You’ll enable more of the whole transaction to be delegated to lower levels, while still generating work fast and of higher quality, and freeing up time for more interesting and valuable work.

Talk to us about how you can make document automation part of your employment proposition to young talent, or request some free trial credits to use a LawHawk document.