Part 1: The case for conscious leadership
A recent McKinsey Quarterly Report identifies nine core leadership behaviours highly applicable to leading through global challenges. Its findings are clear; traditional command and control leadership skills don’t cut it anymore and are being replaced by a new dawn of leadership traits that are making impactful difference at board level. In this article, I demystify the shift from traditional masculine leadership traits to more collaborative, emotionally intelligent and people focused leadership.
A McKinsey Quarterly Report of 2019[1], identifies 9 core leadership behaviours highly applicable to leading through global challenges. Whilst these include the traditional twin bastions of masculine leadership – individualistic decision-making and control and corrective action – the remaining seven behavioural traits are more commonly associated with feminine leadership such as participative decision-making, people development and positive role modeling[2].
At the core of any new model of conscious leadership in New Law, I believe that leading radical change in the legal sector means:
From competition to collaboration
Rather than chasing to covert leads in an ever-diminishing pool of limited opportunities, it’s time to look up and out into new horizons of growth and potential. Focusing on strengths, alleviating the burden of weakness and filling that void with outsourced partnerships that complement and enhance your areas of excellence. Why carve up one slice when, through collaboration and partnership, you can grow the entire pie?
From control to influence
The role of the executive leadership team is to set vision and direction for the organization and empower its senior leaders to create the optimum environment for their teams to fulfil their highest potential. This means devolving decision-making to the right people at the right time and dedicating your energies to supporting and enabling them to execute their long-term strategies. In short, financial targets just don’t cut it anymore. Create meaningful goals that connect strengths to vision and empower and enable your leaders to have sustainable impact.
From criticism to encouragement
Lawyers are best at identifying obstacles and creating solutions to the most complex of problems. But this means we chronically suffer from negative reality norm theory[3]; we are drawn naturally to the negative and often treat optimism with excessive caution. And yet we face extinction unless we encourage our people to innovate, ideate and create new ways of delivering legal services. By creating innovative environments within which mistakes are celebrated and experiments rewarded, we shift mindsets from pursuit of perfection to celebration of lessons learnt from mistakes.
From telling to listening
Traditional lawyers are great at telling clients what they do well and what they can achieve. They are great at offering solutions to issues they have seen before and sharing knowledge of what problems their clients should anticipate and avoid. But the traditional lawyer would rather be a hero than a coach. And yet what clients need more than anything is someone to ask, explore and help them think through their problems; step to their side and navigate with them to create a solution that is fit for purpose. This means less talk and more listening and learning, thinking and reflecting and creating space for clients to make choices that are right for them.
From demanding to asking
Lawyers get things done. They strategise, plan, project manage and execute. If things are not going their way, they direct and hustle to get on top. They occupy your space and demand that you listen. And yet, clients often don’t need to be told. They simply want to be asked. Open, powerful questions such as “what do you want?” and “what do you need?”. Leading clients to the right legal solutions becomes less about what you can offer and more about what their problem is, what options are available to address that problem, what success would look like and how we might support and enable that success to become reality.
In truth, staying the same is no longer enough. To earn the same rewards, we have to evolve our leadership traits to think differently, behave more flexibly and open up to uncertainty. Put simply, it’s time to shift from fixed mindset to a mindset where leaders accept they are not perfect, they are human and they are open to greater experimentation and growth.
[1] McKinsey Quarterly, December 2019 “When women lead, workplaces should listen.”
[2] The report concludes that it is women who mainly exhibit leadership traits required to lead through global challenges. It is the opinion of the writer that this is not a gender issue, but rather support for the position that every leader has masculine and feminine leadership traits that they can develop and grow; it is a question of choice when and how a leader chooses to invoke any one of these characteristics.
[3] Of Negative Reality Norm Theory, Carol Painter says: “An accurate picture of reality, according to our society, is considered to be a negative one. Society teaches us that to be positive is to be naive and vulnerable, whereas to be critical is to be informed, buttressed and sophisticated.".