Craig McFadden talks to Lawyers weekly: establishing credibility was one of the key drivers in engaging lawyers in the leadership program that he has run at Deacons for the past three years.

Lawyers Weekly 14 November 2003 by David Hovenden

While lawyers are no doubt among the most academically gifted in our society, that ’ s no guarantee that they will develop into the world’s best managers.  David Hovenden explores the unique problems and opportunities that arise when trying to teach clever dogs new tricks

It’s a common enough phenomenon, yet it is still somewhat paradoxical that smart people are among the most resistant to learning. While it does initially appear a little contradictory – after all, being judged in today’s society as smart certainly doesn’t come about by resisting learning at a school or university level – upon further exploration, the proposal is quite logical.

Smart people, particularly in a highly specialised profession such as the law, have acquired knowledge, competencies and behaviours that have served them extremely well thus far in life. As the old adage suggests, if something isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it. Often opening up new areas of learning and interest for these individuals serves as a distraction from their success.

Another consequence of early success in life is confidence. Having spent their entire academic lives predominantly being right, people can get into the habit of filtering all of the information they hear or read from the viewpoint that they’re right. If a piece of information they receive contradicts what they already know, such individuals are often quick to dismiss this piece of information as wrong rather than question their own data. A second adage: pride before a fall.

While turning a blind eye to skills beyond your own area of expertise was standard practice in organisations a few decades ago, economic rationalism, globalisation and ferocious competition have put paid to this. Given the rough time that law firms have had in the past few years, they too are not immune to downsizing (or rightsizing). Similarly, client expectations of law firms are no longer simply of legal advice delivered in an acerbic fashion. Law firms now have to compete for and win business in a marketplace where customer service is king.

The upshot of all this, of course, is that lawyers now need to include management training as part of their development in their climb up the partnership ladder. The problem, of course, is that lawyers are smart people (see adage number one).

Owing to this environment, Craig McFadden, national learning and development manager for Deacons, says that quickly establishing credibility was one of the key drivers in engaging lawyers in the leadership program that he has run at Deacons for the past three years.

Coming from a non-legal environment, his initial impressions of the law firm centred around the much flatter management structure. For Craig McFadden, establishing close working relationships with business unit leaders and partners was very much part of the engagement process.

“Lawyers are very time poor, so you need to be able to achieve those successes early,” he says.

To be perceived as a valuable partner for the business, early runs on the board are essential. “Once they’ve become comfortable with what you can do for them, it makes it much easier to work with them,” he says.

When asked about lawyers’ resistance to changing their behaviours, Craig McFadden is quick to point to the second of our quandaries above: that lawyers are used to being right and if you tell them that they’re not doing something right, they’re just as likely to dismiss you.

“If you start from the mindset that these people have very ingrained behaviours, then you’re setting yourself up for a battle. If you recognise that these people are very focused, very driven and that can be a positive, then that’s a really good starting point,” he says.

Successfully delivering management training in such an environment largely comes down to the skill of the trainer. By working with the lawyers and their associated norms and behaviours, rather than trying to change them head on, McFadden has met with considerable success.

With these rules in mind, a good leadership course was very much the order of the day. Generally focused around the areas of personal awareness and development, communications skills, development of others and performance management, leadership courses are enormously popular today because the content they contain and the techniques employed to deliver them mean that they have almost instant applicability back in the workplace.

Delivered initially to the firm’s partners, Craig McFadden says leadership was a great course with which to introduce himself to the firm because it’s something that lawyers are very interested in. He found two areas to be of particular interest for the participants: people development and performance management.

“Most of them recognise that a good working environment, development opportunities for their staff, relationships and the quality of work that they are able to provide for their team is going to contribute to the bottom line. So if they have the skills that will enable them to do that, then they are seen as being more successful in their own right.

“So it really was an emphasis on those people skills and helping them to build their skills to lead and develop a team.”

But what about the proposition that smart adults aren’t the easiest people to teach? Craig McFadden says that a direct result of this phenomenon is the leadership course’s focus on self awareness. This can be handled with the use of personality indicator tools such as the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator, but a focus on individuals’ past behaviours and interactions is another useful tool.

“[Lawyers] are very focused and very driven. That behaviour has gotten them to where they are. Therefore you have to look, perhaps, not at undoing those behaviours, but at using those strengths to develop new behaviours. That takes quite a bit of time and that’s where executive coaching really helps,” he says.

Rather than telling these people that what they have done in the past is wrong, the trick is to focus on their success. After all, it’s already been established that they most likely simply disagree with you and dismiss what they’re being told; hardly the training outcome desired.

“It’s about being more solutions-focused. What’s been useful for you in the past? What worked for you then and how can you use that in the future?”

“If you recognise at the outset that these are very astute people, that they are going to grasp these things quite easily, then from there, it’s really just a matter of making sure that those behaviours become part of their everyday practices.”

It’s very easy to hear something new, but to translate that back to the workplace is quite difficult. Action-based learning is widely utilised for this very problem. The basic proposition is that rather than examining management techniques in abstraction, course students are asked think of real-life problems in their work environment that apply to what they are learning and allow them to solve those problems. This way the techniques and models are learnt in practical situations and are therefore much more likely to become part of that person’s daily repertoire.

Craig McFadden employed this technique at Deacons, but he further utilised one-on-one executive coaching allowing individuals’ problems to be explored at length. For example, coaching participants could tell their coach that they were meeting with a certain individual next week and they could use the session to prepare some techniques for how to go about running that meeting.

Having won credibility with many of the decision makers at the firm, Craig McFadden is now cascading the program down the firm to include its senior associates.

“As we build credibility, we’re also building on the core subjects that we’re running as part of that course,” he says.

Management training, however, is more than just leadership. Legal training is very narrow in its focus and managing a practice area calls upon a lawyer to at least gain an appreciation of other key business skills such as sales, marketing and accounting. However, all of these areas are much more easily delivered once somebody has an appreciation of why they need to learn about them.

So while it’s true that smart people are often the most resistant to learning, once these same individuals realise there’s a whole lot more to be gained by broadening their repertoire of skills, their capacity to learn – which got them into the smart category in the first place – kicks in again and they become the most avid and dynamic of students once more. Which is one of the reasons so many of today’s leaders well beyond the law have come from a legal background.

14 November 2003

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