Interpersonal relationships, via Led Zeppelin

December 2015

Communication breakdown, it's always the same,

I'm having a nervous breakdown, drive me insane!

Led Zeppelin – Communication Breakdown[1]

Come with me, back to the time BI (before iPod), when I started my first day of proper work in a law firm. I did not know any lawyers before I started a career in the law, other than those I met on vacation schemes. I did not have any other professional career before I started to practice. I did not know what good (or bad) management looked like, nor did I know what I should expect from my manager.

Over the course of my career in private practice, I worked for and opposite many lawyers. I worked with a number of genuinely inspirational managers – men and women who saw value to the organisation in coaching; in helping a member of the team to grow. Regrettably I encountered others for whom personnel development seemed to be a distraction – a waste of precious time that could otherwise be spent billing clients. In general, soft skills, leadership and management training just weren’t part of the package.

In my column last month, I noted that clear and effective communication is the core of organisational risk management. I concluded that, to lead organisations in legal risk, lawyers need to be effective leaders, managers and communicators themselves.

Now think back through your own career. If you trained in a firm, how did that firm treat soft skills? To the extent your employer gave you training, what was the balance between soft skills and technical know-how? Did you get any management training? How many instances of good management can you recall? And how many instances of bad management do you remember – even basic stuff, like sixty second annual appraisals, micromanagement, or receiving a document covered in red pen without any explanation as to why changes were needed? For many of you, I suspect the answers to these questions are: my firm largely or completely ignored soft skills; training was almost wholly biased towards technical know-how; no; some; and lots.

Perhaps you feel that this isn’t a problem. You’re a senior lawyer, and no-one helped you on the way up! You’re in this game for the technical challenge – to do deals, or argue in court, not to dry the tears of some millennial who wants to discuss their career! Well, that’s one view. Mine is that, as a profession, we should be troubled by these answers. In the US, communication failures are the primary source of complaints among state bars (particularly where a lack of communication results in a nasty surprise when the invoice lands). A recent wide-ranging study by the legal consultancy practice LBC Wise Counsel indicated a crisis of well-being among in-house lawyers, arising from poorly conducted appraisals, the absence of a culture that encourages openness and dialogue, weak internal support networks and a value system that remains centred on the billable hour.

We talk about ‘natural leaders’, individuals who are blessed with high emotional intelligence and the inherent ability to influence. But, as Stanford Law professor Deborah L Rhode notes in her book Lawyers as Leaders, although some natural leaders may be lawyers, not all lawyers are natural leaders. In fact, “the legal profession attracts a large number of individuals with the ambition and analytic capabilities to be leaders, but frequently fails to develop other qualities that are essential to effectiveness”. First among these missing qualities? Communication skills.

To rephrase a Led Zeppelin classic: “communication breakdown/ it [doesn’t have to be] always the same”. If your firm did not give you soft skills training, there are hard reasons why you should correct that now: you cannot get the most out of your teams, properly assist your organisation in managing risk, or be an effective leader, until you are able to listen and engage.

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