legal sanity

I just finished reading a Knowledge at Wharton article on Managing Emotions in the Workplace. It summarizes the latest thoughts on how affect (a/k/a emotion) impacts “job performance, decision making, creativity, turnover, teamwork, negotiations and leadership.” Evidently, due to an “affective revolution” over the last 30 years, academics and managers have come to recognize that people’s emotions – both short-lived displays and more enduring moods or personality traits – “are integral to what happens in an organization.”

The piece considers two topics I’ve covered here before: emotional contagion and emotional intelligence. First, it acknowledges how our negative coworkers can deplete us and the entire workplace because they’re energy suckers. Like a virus, their half-empty vibe passes from person to person. Realizing the toll that emotions can exact on the job, more business schools are teaching executives emotional intelligence skills.

It’s great to learn that emotions are getting mainstream attention in the business world. Law firms and their leaders would benefit from acknowledging and managing the emotions that impact practice group dynamics, relationships between lawyers and attorney-client connections.

We all bring our feelings and affect to work. While we may be able to suppress their public display to some extent, our emotions usually manifest in one way or another during the work day. Our workplace interactions would be much healthier and more effective if we had license to admit and address the interplay of our own and others' emotions.

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I’ve written a few posts describing lawyers as user-innovators -- the front-line (and, perhaps, most important) consumers, challengers and creators of their firm’s business culture. I’ve also posed the related inquiry: What would law firms look like if they considered their lawyers a potential community of user-innovators and actively nurtured that potential? What positive shifts in the firm’s environment, service model, and employee commitment and morale would result?

If we take in the data presented by objective observation, blogosphere dialogue and mainstream media coverage, it’s clear that our world and profession are experiencing clarion calls to change. The change drivers at the macro level take the form of environmental crises, global conflicts and widespread deprivations of human rights. On the micro level, there’s the emergent generation of people who are unwilling to devote years, let alone a lifetime, to meaningless work. Whether you label them Generation Y, The Millennials or Echo Boomers, this cohort of workers born in or after 1978 are coming to the service professions with expectations and values that challenge the status quo.

Some law firms respond to the call to change with a resounding: “Hey, this is what the law and law firm life is all about. If you’re looking for meaning and the easy road through, here’s the door. Leave the firm, leave the law, it’s up to you, but we’re not changing.” Other firms, however, see that their business model needs updating to meet the changing needs of present and future lawyers. They understand that the problems they’re having with retention, attrition and succession are harbingers of a growing misfit between the firm’s environment and the people that inhabit it.

Change is an inevitable part of life. Sometimes we refuse to do it until we’re sufficiently jolted by an event or experience that leaves us with no other choice. After meeting and talking to Harvard law students last week, I’m more convinced than ever that the time is ripe for law schools and law firms to welcome and engage the conversation about changes they need to make to sustain the legal profession into the future. There are plenty of current and pending lawyers who are ready, willing and able to share their ideas and insights on the issue.

Since I’m being asked to develop and present more programs for law students and young practitioners, I’ve gathered a list of articles and commentary on the next generation of lawyers and what they’re seeking in the workplace. Feel free to share your thoughts after you look through them:

Gen Y Lawyers on Career/Life Balance

Gen Y Lawyers Shunning Big Law

The Gen Y Equation

The Young and the Restless

You Say You Want a Big-Law Revolution

Who Says Being a Lawyer Has to Suck?

Re-Designing the Career Ladder

Call Them Gen Y or Millennials: They Deserve Our Attention

Making Work Work for Gen Y

Bridging the Generational Divide

One of the most interesting and telling perspectives comes from Brazen Careerist contributor Ryan Healy. In a post for the blog’s Twentysomething feature titled I’m in 17th Grade, he describes how he’s come to see the first years of business life as a learning lab. He captures it best when he writes: “I try to learn something from everything I do. This so-called 17th grade is just what it sounds like – an educational opportunity for me to master before I graduate to the next phase of my life or the next “grade.” What that grade will be, I have no idea, but I hope to figure it out while I’m here.”

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In preparing for an upcoming Harvard Law School program, I was reminded that today’s students are much more discerning consumers of information and ideas than they were back in my day. They take nothing at face value. And, thanks to the era of instant gratification, you must be prepared to capture their attention in just a few sound bites. If you don’t capture it, or if you otherwise fail to meet their consumer needs and expectations, they’ll check out on you, figuratively and, often, literally.

Although I enjoy engaging the energy brought by this new generation of lawyers, my guess is that it will present big issues for law firms built on a be quiet and pay your dues model of employee retention. I’ve previously discussed how the pay more, bleed more approach to law firm management and sustainability is flawed because fewer and fewer incoming lawyers will be willing to sacrifice the quality of their present lives for the possibility of a future partnership (especially when they can so readily see the personal toll that the partnership track takes on many firm leaders).

Penelope Trunk echoes this point in a post called Paying dues is so old school. She writes that, while people in leadership positions think that it’s important, “[p]aying one’s due is an antiquated idea in a workplace where few people aspire to climb the same corporate ladder for 45 [or, as in the law, even eight or nine] years. There’s simply no incentive to stick around and toil away in the hopes of one day attaining a life that seems rather lifeless.

Just as the up-and-coming generation of lawyers will likely shun dues paying as a viable business tenet, they’ll also refuse to tolerate any jerks they encounter in their law firms. Back in October, I wrote about Robert Sutton’s much-discussed book, The No Asshole Rule. Bruce MacEwen continues the conversation with a terrific post called The Care & Feeding of 800 Pound Gorillas. In it, he points out that, to date, the legal profession has largely tolerated “the jerks and a**holes in our firms” despite the morale sapped, loyalty eroded and careers derailed as a direct result. He also aptly notes that, while being a jerk may be contagious, each of us has the power and opportunity to stem the spread of this disease.

I agree with MacEwen. And I venture that, as the new generation of lawyers takes its foothold in the profession, the jerks and worse among us – and the firms that harbor them - will find themselves losing out due to natural selection.

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While I was away on a business-family trip last week, I took a little time to vet the online hopper where I store fodder for my blog posts. Although it’s all worthy of more in-depth attention, I decided to present the hopper’s article, post and other content to you here in condensed form so that you can consume it sooner rather than later. Enjoy!

Addressing one of my favorite topics, happiness, are the following:

What is “happiness,” anyway? and What is happiness? are two great posts from Gretchen Rubin at The Happiness Project;

Debbie Call’s commentary Make Money - Get Happy - Not? and link to an underlying Mother Jones article on human well-being called Reversal of Fortune;

Tom Peter’s take on Passion or Indifference;

Pamela Slim’s provocative newsletter feature entitled Is your inner tiger choking on a short leash?  and her related blog post;

Last, but certainly not least, my friend Michael Cohen posts on the science backing the positive effects of meditation.

The next set drawn from the hopper considers workplace matters. They are:

Forbes’ coverage of work-life balance;

Views on employee engagement provided by Curt Rosengren and Motto Magazine in What is employee engagement (and why does it matter)?;

A two-part posting at Be Excellent on Employee Engagement and Generational Differences and employee engagement statistics and tips;

Fast Company’s insights into Caring, the Corporate Way.

This last group offers valuable guidance to newly-minted lawyers:

Blogger and Edge International consultant Patrick J. McKenna writes about ways to ask for business;

Dan Hull shares his philosophy on the same subject in a post titled Asking Clients for Work: “Why are Lawyers So Shy?”;

Rounding out the offerings is an article highlighting how law schools are not preparing graduates for solo practice. The piece quotes blogger and solo-advocate Susan Cartier Liebel.

On that note, this coming Monday, April 16, 2007, at noon, I'm speaking to Harvard Law School’s graduating class about fearless networking. This program is part of the school’s pilot effort to better prepare students for the real-world practice of law. If you’re in the Boston area and would like to attend, please let me know.

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