Culture Eats Strategic Planning for Lunch
LAW FIRM CULTURE
T
How the Mighty
Rise: Building a
Law Firm Culture
of Infectious
Excellence
By Alycia Sutor, Partner,
Akina Corporation
Alycia Sutor is a partner at
Akina Corporation, a consulting firm that helps lawyers and
law firms rethink relationships
to grow their practices. Akina
provides consulting, training
and coaching services in the
areas of leadership, culture
development and business
development.
ime and again, firm leadership teams spend precious
hours and resources carefully crafting an analytically
sound, shrewdly calculated and market tested strategic
plan, only to have it quickly die on the vine once it leaves the
laboratory of conference room thinking and enters the realm
of day to day execution. Initially, the usual suspects often get
fingered as the culprits: inadequate vision casting and follow through by leadership, not enough buy in to overcome
organizational inertia, lack of communication throughout the
organization and too little emphasis on accountability. While
all of these elements frequently are present, they are merely
symptomatic of a deeper organizational disease: lack of culture
cultivation. When it comes to strategy, firm culture eats strategic planning for lunch every time.
“But wait,” you say, “our firm culture is collegial, unified in
solidarity by our desire to produce high quality work product and
deliver a superior client experience. Our website and brochure
even say so!” And for most law firms, this verbalized commitment to culture is actually true. The rub – and pitfall – is that
culture must be intentionally cultivated in word and action
every single day.
What character is to an individual, culture is to an organization, and too often in both cases, we spend very little time
developing them with any deliberate attention or thought. The
result is that our firms have a culture; unfortunately, it’s often
poorly nourished and underdeveloped at best or hypocritical and highly toxic at worst. In the body of an organization,
culture represents the ligaments that hold the individual parts
together, helping the various organizational bones and muscles
move together smoothly, harmoniously, and in an integrated
manner. Lack of culture creates a disjointed, handicapped or
paralyzed firm that has trouble executing with excellence on
the day-to-day tasks, let alone the big, overarching strategic
endeavors.
So, if culture is so important, why is it neglected? Often it’s
because culture cultivation requires that we bring a disciplined,
methodical approach to five simple, but not easy, elements:
• tenacious commitment and alignment to a few core values
• deep and continuous skill building in leadership built
upon service to others through generosity and humility
• fanatical discipline to preparation, planning and practice
of culture building habits
• avid advocacy for reality through regular sobriety and
truth testing
• courageous celebration of failure as an opportunity for
continuous learning and innovation
How Mighty Firms Rise
These five core elements are the basic recipe for how mighty
firms rise and stay on top. Each requires a few key disciplines
to ensure that a firm’s culture is developed with purpose and on
purpose.
Tenacious commitment and alignment to a few core
values:
• Know, articulate and study your core organizational
strengths and firm values and why they matter
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• Raise the bar by translating the firm’s values and standards into a few simple team rules of operation that are
reflective of where you are and where you want to be
• Walk the walk by continuously minimizing and eliminating the saying-doing gap, starting with leadership
Deep and continuous skill building in leadership
built upon service to others through generosity and
humility
• Infect your organization through a passionate investment
in future generations by developing other-centric leadership
at all levels of the organization
• Count your blessings through regular acknowledgment
of the many factors that contribute to a firm’s success, let
responsibility trump rights, and invest generously to build
relationship value capital
• Lead and manage with windows (when things go right,
point out the window) and rear view mirrors (when things
go wrong, look in the rearview mirror and figure out how
you can do better)
Fanatical discipline to preparation, planning and
practice of culture building habits
• Utilize preparation as a sign of honor for others and their
time
• Leverage planning (best case, likely case and worst case)
to maximize opportunity no matter what outcome actually
occurs
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• Practice, practice, practice…it’s what makes perfect (or
close to it)
Avid advocacy for reality through regular sobriety
and truth testing
• Double the questions to statements ratio
• Replace blind faith with facts through disciplined and
ongoing measurement, metrics, feedback and data
• Be productively paranoid by regularly generating a list of
brutal facts that frame the reality of your landscape
Create consistency in performance
through discipline, intentionality, and
accountability because the signature
of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency
Courageous celebration of failure as an opportunity
for continuous learning and innovation
• Eliminate shame and blame by attacking the message, not
the messenger
• Kill sacred cows and bust old habits while protecting your
core values
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NOVEMBER 2013
continued from page 6
• Create consistency in performance through discipline,
intentionality, and accountability because the signature of
mediocrity is chronic inconsistency
In his 2009 book, How the Mighty Fall, author Jim Collins lays
out five stages that great organizations follow that signal a
predictable decline from greatness, including: hubris born of
success, an undisciplined pursuit of more, a denial of risk and
peril, grasping for salvation, and finally, capitulation to irrelevance or death. For firms looking for an alternative, a conscious choice to cultivate a high performance culture leads to
multiple paths to greatness, including greater financial results,
deeper client loyalty, higher employee engagement, and last but
not least, more meaningful work.
New Member
Management Section Meeting
O
n October 22nd about 20 of our peers met for the Office
Operations & Management section meeting for a topic
that weighs on each of our shoulders. With recent incidences
in the news two of our ALA members decided to join forces
for a tabletop exercise on how to respond to an active shooter
situation. This session was led by Adrienne Corrothers, the Facilities Office Services Manager at King & Spalding and Tonie
R. Davis, III the Operations Manager at Mayer Brown. They
started with a powerful video enactment of an active shooter
situation and lead us through some critical decision points.
The discussions were lively and we all walked away with new
knowledge and a better understanding of some of the critical
thinking needed during a crisis. Thank you to all those that
participated and a special thank you to both Adrienne & Tonie
for this powerful presentation.
Tamblyn M. Franklin
Director of Administration
Cooley
1299 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Suite 700
Washington, DC 20004
Helping firms realize their vision for the future with innovative solutions
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McDermott Will & Emery
Photographer: Michael Moran Photography, Inc
Contact Sandi Shenas 301.395.9333
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