building law firm leadership
A while back I wrote about law-firm sponsored leadership programs. Here’s a new article on the same subject. It relates that many rapidly growing firms are “partnering with top universities to implement management training for their current leaders and younger attorneys who show management promise” in order to populate the “helm for the next generation of law firm workers.” Duly acknowledging that these programs fill a void left by the typical law school curriculum, the piece notes that “whether a crash course in Management 101 can help turn a lawyer into a leader remains uncertain.” Among the obstacles fueling this nature v. nurture uncertainty “may be the personality types of lawyers themselves.” According to one authority quoted in the article, “the qualities that make good lawyers are not the same as those that make good leaders.” Lawyers usually survive and thrive on traits like “skepticism; high cognitive thinking; urgency or impatience; autonomy; sensitivity or defensiveness; and a lack of sociability.” By contrast, leaders “tend to be more sociable” than the average lawyer and “usually are less skeptical or distrustful of others. In addition, they have high urgency in their eagerness to reach closure on issues.” This observation echoes the view of lawyer personality traits espoused by other researchers, as I previously discussed here. It may well be that practitioners with traits atypical of most lawyers – those most dissatisfied with the traditional, adversarial practice of law – are the very best candidates for becoming the effective and respected firm leaders of tomorrow.
