legal sanity

"We want employees to have an experience that revitalizes them and changes their thinking – that brings them back with brand-new ideas and perspectives. If they're not growing as people, we're not growing as a company."

When you read and re-read this quote, what does it trigger for you? What kind of business leader do you attribute it to? Most likely, you can envision the statement coming from the top tier of a progressive, worker-centric company like Apple or Yahoo.

But, these words were spoken by lawyer Lee S. Rosen, CEO of the Rosen Law Firm. Rosen is one of the employers featured in a recent Christian Science Monitor article on the benefits of employee sabbaticals.

Borrowing a custom from academia, some corporate employers are offering these paid and unpaid time outs as part of their employee recruitment and retention efforts.

Rosen encourages his employees to use the time to “do something that’s meaningful to them” (the link is mine). Lisa Angel, a Rosen lawyer who’s profiled in the piece, says that she “needed a change from the rigors and emotions” of her work in divorce law. She spent her 3-month sabbatical traveling solo in China and Southeast Asia. The time away, she asserts, changed her “perspective about the balance of work and life and “enabled her to continue practicing law.”

Offering sabbaticals is one way that law firms can foster a culture of meaning and nurturing. Complementary avenues of cultural change in the legal profession will be explored at Touro Law Center’s upcoming conference on Law as a Healing Profession.

The conference takes place on November 4-5, 2007 at Touro’s campus in Central Islip, New York. I will be there as a keynote speaker and panelist. To see the roster of other presenters and for more information, you can view the event brochure here (pdf).

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I’ve explored the connection between self and work in posts like this one on avoiding self-less lawyering and this one on valuing your self in the practice of law.

Last week, I received an email from career coach/lawyer Michael Melcher announcing the “birth” of his new book, The Creative Lawyer: A Practical Guide to Authentic Professional Satisfaction. I have the book (thanks, Michael!), am eager to read it and will review it here soon.

In the interim, you can sample a bit of The Creative Lawyer’s offerings in a post by Gretchen Rubin that asks: Do You Know Yourself? “Lightly” adapting a quiz from the book, Rubin poses seven questions to help us pinpoint what interests us. While they’re all important self-inquiries, the one that really resonates for me is: What types of activities energize you?

I believe that we can learn a lot about ourselves and our relationships by exploring what energizes and depletes us. This is an anchoring premise of my training and development programs for lawyers. It’s also a point that I highlight in an article on Critical Relationship-Building Skills For Associates that appears in the current issue of The Complete Lawyer.

Someone who has taken affirmative steps to connect her self with energizing work is this blog’s co-producer, Lori Herz. Lori started her own business writing and communications consulting venture a year ago. Last week, she launched her companion blog, Write for Clients. As she explains in this LexBlog interview, the blog aims to help service professionals better understand how business writing can be a powerful relationship tool that connects you to people you work with and want to work with.

I encourage you to visit Write for Clients and join in the conversation about writing for your business success.

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Over the years, when considering how law firms can fix their client service problems, I’ve looked to different sources of ideas and inspiration. I’ve tracked the movement to educate medical doctors on treating the patient as a whole  – body, mind and spirit. I’ve also looked to the marketing world to gauge the latest thoughts on creating client evangelists (pdf) and avoiding negative word-of-mouth.

One often-cited key to building successful and enduring client relationships is authenticity – the desire and ability to lay down our shield, open up and let our clients get to know who we are, what’s important to us and where we stand.

Steve Pavlina offers a great post on authentic communication. In it, he points to John Kinde’s commentary on the power of authenticity. Kinde, in turn, forms his message around inspiring footage of the late Fred Rogers speaking at a 1969 senate hearing about funding for the newly formed Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Click here to watch the clip. As Kinde points out, what’s remarkable about this interaction is how Mr. Rogers’ authenticity affects the hard-nosed politician he’s addressing. It’s moving and, yes, instructive, to see a person who's so genuine and crystal clear in sharing why he’s here and what he stands for.

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I just finished reading a great ClickZ article by Pete Blackshaw on the interplay of emotions and customer service. Blackshaw notes that we’re in a “new era of consumer control” marked by the rise of Consumer Generated Media (CGM) -- also known as User-Generated Content (UGC) and User-Created Content (yes, it’s the other UCC). These platforms include:

• Blogs

• Podcasts

• Web Forums

• Discussion Boards

• Wikis

Citing Dan Hill’s new book Emotionomics: Winning Hearts and Minds, Blackshaw explains that “nothing else is more emotional for the consumer” than customer service. So, with this new shift in control over publicity and reputation, businesses are at risk if they don’t “get a handle on consumers' (read clients') emotional needs and wants” as they play out through the multi-tiered service dynamic.

I’ve discussed this issue before in posts on:

• Client experience management

• Lawyer experience management

• Fallout from our failure to listen to clients

• Client happiness and the power of mea culpa 
  

But, as Blackshaw makes clear, it’s getting more and more imperative for lawyers and law firms to be cognizant of our clients’ emotional response to our services. After all, we aren’t immune to the kind of viral backlash that millions of disgruntled consumers spread across the Web every day.

The question remains: how do we monitor and manage how our clients emotionally experience our services?

As this article called Love the complaining customers suggests, we start by paying close attention to client complaints. As the piece highlights, “the person who complains is doing you a favor, because he or she highlights the problems that silently cost you customers.”

Before you’re tempted to think of this as the exclusive province of firm marketing departments or management committees, it’s good to remember that each and every one of us can make or break our clients’ emotional experience.

This point is well made in a Wall Street Journal article about United Airlines Capt. Denny Flanagan, who regularly “goes out of his way to make flying fun for passengers” (tipped at Church of the Customer).

On this same note, I heard renowned restaurateur Danny Meyer speak 10 years ago. He said that the key to creating a 5-star restaurant is to field complaints about the dining experience before the customer leaves the restaurant. By being proactive in this way, you gain the priceless opportunity for an on-the-spot fix and can make other improvements going forward.

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