Softly Softly Catchee Monkey
In my previous two contributions (on personal branding and leadership), I guess the message should have come across quite clearly that I believe in-house lawyers are more than just the sum of their technical legal (hard) skills.
“While your technical skills may get your foot in the door, your people skills are what open most of the doors to come. Your work ethic, your attitude, your communication skills, your emotional intelligence and a whole host of other personal attributes are the soft skills that are crucial for career success.”[1] Simply put, in the universe that is your company, excellent technical skills make you good, but add on top of that a generous dollop of excellent soft skills and you immediately go from good to great.
Examples of these soft skills which are essential for the legal profession, but which we sometimes take for granted are as follows:
Relationship building – the ability to build and maintain (positive) relationships both within your company and with that company’s clients and counterparts;
Effective Communication – being able to communicate effectively, not only in negotiations, interviews or investigations, but also in internal meetings, with clarity and focus, making you a trustworthy source of advice and information;
Empathy – being able to relate to others by understanding and appreciating their point of view. Sometimes it is not just about winning the point or the argument in a win-lose dynamic, it can be about engineering win-win situations through empathy;
Teamwork – the ability to work collaboratively and effectively with others, offering solutions and sometimes reasonable compromises to be seen as a resource within the team not a roadblock.
Being a valued member of management who is seen as an asset in helping the company develop and execute a corporate strategy while steering clear of risk and regulatory issues, is a role most of us aspire to, many of us are working towards, but which few of us unfortunately, already fulfil.
For those who are there, fantastic! Be a beacon, share your experiences, mentor, coach and give back to the legal community so that more of us can get there. For those who aren’t there yet, being “good” is not going to be good enough. We (mostly individually, but also collectively as a profession) need to be seen to be “great”. And without investment in soft skills, the path that gets us to “great” is a much longer and harder path to tread. That investment need not be cold hard cash. Given the opportunity, time and effort can often be enough.
One such opportunity is now being presented to the in-house legal community in the UAE. Recently launched, MentorMeet is a programme for in-house counsel comprising both mentoring and soft skills training. Born of an unflinching belief in the talent and potential of the in-house legal community, MentorMeet is meant as a tool for each and every one of us to develop further, to open more doors, to move from good to great and from great to even better.
I look forward to seeing many of you using that tool and grasping that opportunity. MentorMeet is a means to an end, not a panacea … but as we all know, softly softly catchee monkey.
(No monkeys were hurt in the writing of this article.)
(Find out more about MentorMeet and our programme at www.mentormeet.me)
Columnist:
David Galea, head of legal and company secretary, Drydocks World
Footnotes:
[1] https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_34.htm
