Practice Management

High Performance Coaching for Low Performing Times

By Ronda Muir

This is the time of year when many of us take stock of our direction and goals and make plans to step up our effectiveness.  This particular year, 2009, many lawyers are facing an extremely difficult once-in-a-century marketplace for which no one has been truly prepared.  So we may also find ourselves questioning our ability to successfully grapple with the challenges ahead.  

How do top lawyers add the necessary skills and improve their leadership in such a disorienting environment?

The old adage of two heads being better than one is born out by the data available on the results of coaching.  According to a research report by Diane Coutu and Carol Kauffman in the January Harvard Business Review, coaching is a business tool most often used to develop the capabilities of high-potential performers or facilitate leadership transitions, and one which produces quantifiable benefits. The Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology has reported that coaching leads to higher interview ratings for individuals. Telecommunications Weekly reported in November that a change program, which included coaching, improved customer satisfaction by 10 percent and call resolution rates by 56 percent at Motorola. And according to a 2008 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, coaching of university faculty improved the writing process of professors who were under pressure to publish.

Coaching is an effective tool for leadership development (when assuming the responsibilities of a partner or shareholder), for enhancing individual business development (deciding how and where to expand your expertise) and planning the next step in your career (whether proactively or reactively), and for effective leadership transitioning (when a managing partner's role evolves or the person in that position changes).  Coaching can also provide to all lawyers the simple but valuable assistance of a supportive but out-of-the-law-firm-box prespective that can be so useful when steering through dangerous waters.

Coaching is to a lawyer what organizational development is to a law firm; they both foster intentional change toward particular goals through a collaborative processt. The goals are those that move the client to a higher level of professional effectiveness.  Coaches work with coachees to build competencies, change behavior and serve as a sounding board. A good coach is one that asks the right questions and listens.

Sheryl Axelrod of Hepburn Axelrod & White, a Philadephia firm, recently extolled the benefits of coaching in a law firm context. "We worked with a coach who had an uncanny ability to not only listen to our needs, fears and desires for our firm, but our own internal dilemmas and concerns about each other."

Of course, after listening, a coach must also be able to help coachees arrive at and implement beneficial changes.  And those changes are sometimes unexpected.  In the Hepburn Axelrod case, "one of our partners...reach[ed] the difficult decision to leave the partnership."

But the proof is in the pudding.  "The result of the coaching is that our firm, on our own, and our former partner, on his own, are each thriving in a market in which most firms are doing worse, not better, than the year before, " Axelrod said.

At RRR, we offer confidential high-performance coaching programs of six to eighteen months that are tailored to your objectives and your schedule.  Contact us for a consultation on how we can help you achieve your goals in 2009.

Happy new year!

Full post as published by Law People on January 13, 2009 (boomark / email).