making the connection: employee evangelism, law firm success and lawyer happiness
Not too long ago, I discussed the making of law firm evangelists - lawyers and non-lawyer personnel inspired to voluntarily shout a firm’s praises from the rafters. In a follow-up post, I explored the interplay of employee evangelism, law firm values and leadership. I concluded that “identification with company values may spark employee evangelism; but it’s up to law firm leaders to fan the spark into a flame” over time.
David Maister sheds some more light on this interplay in a recent blog post titled Dangerous Rubbish About Leadership. Maister asserts that “the truly great professional firm builders [ ] led not by the clarity of their vision of the future, nor even because of their better understanding of finances or marketing, but because they were able to get even highly talented, extraordinarily mobile people to rally around a fervently held, common way of doing things – a world view, a philosophy, a set of principles, values or standards.”
Maister’s words compel us to augment the leadership-evangelist connection by fusing it with law firm success. Advocating the same web of connections is this article on employee engagement. Defining such engagement as “the emotional and intellectual commitment employees demonstrate for the organization for which they work,” the piece offers “the math” that makes “the financial case for investing in high employee engagement.” This is black letter fodder for law firms skeptical about the importance of employee evangelism. As the article states so simply and clearly: High Employee Engagement = Competitive Advantage.
I’ll take it a step further and offer a related equation for the legal profession: High Employee Engagement = Lawyer Happiness. Having inspirational workplace leaders (and managers) and work that aligns with our deeply held values, standards and principles – this is the stuff that career contentment is made of. If more law firms made employee engagement a priority, you’d likely see much less of the lawyer discontent regularly examined here at legal sanity and cited in a recent UK poll - the City & Guilds Happiness Index [flagged by Robert Ambrogi and discussed by Gerry Riskin].
