November 27, 2024

Consulting best practices legal innovation law firm

Anyone seeking to effect strategic change at a law firm should remember that culture does more than ‘eat strategy for breakfast’ – it can also devour innovation, collaboration, optimisation, talent proposition, systems transformation and more.

The impact of culture on law firm initiatives is especially critical given the imminent, unprecedented disruption in the legal sector. For law firms to thrive, any attempt at operational transformation must be accompanied by a fundamental change in mindset and behaviours. But how ought a firm’s leaders effect the cultural changes essential for any strategic initiative to succeed?

First, it’s essential to understand culture. It’s multi-layered, with some layers easy to change and others not – in fact, some elements may be impossible to change within a defined timeframe. Leaders must, therefore, concentrate on a limited number of cultural changes that are within their power and will have the most impact.

A model for understanding organisational cultureCulture’s outer layers – its highly visible, tangible manifestations, or so-called ‘artefacts’ – are relatively easy to change. For example, through

• incentivising desired behaviours through recognition and reward policies;
• fostering collaboration by ditching single offices in favour of open and communal spaces designed for teamwork and creative problem-solving
• instituting systems and processes to facilitate client relationship management, collaboration, and knowledge sharing

However, unless efforts to change artefacts are accompanied by changes to behaviour, the impact of those efforts can be limited or even backfire.

Obviously, you must change artefacts when embedding a new cultural norm. For example, if you want to instil knowledge sharing, you need to put in place the people, processes, and technology to enable that. But this alone will have limited success in a culture where people do not believe there is any benefit in sharing knowledge. This brings us to values – the deep-seated beliefs that drive decisions and behaviour. Values can’t be changed by telling people to believe in something different. Instead, we must change the culture’s ingrained patterns of behaviour – more correctly referred to as ‘behavioural norms’ and less formally dubbed ‘the way we do things around here’. By shifting behavioural norms to align better with desired values, people will repeatedly experience and witness the benefits of acting on the new belief and learn to embrace the new belief. Behaviour change is hard, but it’s the key to successful culture change.

There are four critical components to successfully shifting behavioural norms:

1. Provide a compelling reason for change.
   Just as with trying to kick a bad habit or adopt a new, ‘good’ one, people need a compelling reason to depart from deeply entrenched behaviours.
2. Be clear about what good looks like.
   You must be specific about the behaviour you want to instil and the results you want to achieve. As for the former, you should make it as easy and straightforward as possible for people to grasp the exact difference between what they are currently doing and what you want them to do. Regarding the latter, do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If most people, most of the time, practise the desired behaviour and persistent deviations from that behaviour are noticed and addressed, that often is enough to achieve significant positive impact.
3. Adopt a multifaceted approach.
   There is no single ‘magic bullet’ – instead, utilise a combination of approaches and techniques, such as:
   • Training and Development (necessary but not sufficient)
   • Incentives (ditto)
   • Feedback (ensuring feedback is specific to the desired behaviour. This may not be covered adequately by the firm’s current feedback practices)
   • Campaigns (best thought as an internal marketing campaign, ideally with a memorable phrase that encapsulates the desired behaviour)
   • Leadership Role Modelling (the firm’s leaders must set the example)
   • Viral Change (whereby high visibility individuals with high levels of social influence model the new behaviour)
   • Nudges (small but consistent cues and incentives built into processes and designed to make people choose the desired behaviour)
4. Build strong sponsorship among leadership.
   Because behaviours persist only to the extent that they are reinforced (even if only tacitly), changing them requires eliminating the reinforcement. This is a challenge when one of a firm’s sacred cows (e.g., the remuneration policy, the push for billable hours, deference granted big rainmakers, etc.) is reinforcing undesired behaviour. In such instances – and even when no such sacred cows are at stake – you must build robust sponsorship among the firm’s wider leadership. That will enable you – and them – to challenge the status quo, hold people to account, and become effective drivers of change.

Remember:  Innovation and strategic change are not self-executing. The first step is to attend to the cultural changes that must occur for strategic change to take hold. Otherwise, the existing culture may well devour whatever plans you attempt to implement.