Live your values and become an employer of choice

Competition to recruit the best staff can be fierce and for many mid-tier practices the budget will rarely stretch to parallel the recruitment spend of larger firms. Michael Shaw, managing partner at Cobbetts, explains why budget is not the be-all-and-end-all and how firms can enjoy successful staff recruitment and retention by living out the firm’s values.

I detect a change in the attitude of entrants to the legal profession, which is somewhat more sophisticated than the purely financial ambition of their predecessors. These new-age lawyers won’t all be induced into doing cartwheels for the carrot of equity partnership and high earnings some way down the line. They want, and often need, fairly immediate returns on the investment that they have made in their education, while placing a value on personal development and achieving an appropriate work/life balance. They question whether the personal sacrifices, which they perceive equity partnership often demands, are really worthwhile when financial rewards are weighed against unlimited liability in a litigious culture.

My firm, Cobbetts, operates from Manchester and Leeds, which most observers would agree are two of the most mature legal markets in the country. Much larger national competitors operate in both cities and we must compete against them for talent. Throwing enough cash at the problem may enable you to compete for some candidates but won’t necessarily be great for the financial architecture of your business. There is another way and I can say with confidence that my firm no longer struggles to recruit or retain staff.

There was a time when Cobbetts was regarded in our local market, as being ‘nice people’ to work for. There’s nothing wrong with that and, indeed, I would hope that on balance that sentiment is still held by our personnel. The trouble is that, by itself, it doesn’t do a huge amount for your business: there is no competitive advantage. On the other hand being a good employer, an ‘employer of choice’, is a totally different story and is an essential part of the toolkit required to enable commercial advantage and success in your business. Ask our personnel and I’m sure they would say that we don’t get everything right. However, I believe that in striving to live our values, we have made moves to try to ensure that we achieve this.

By the mid-1990s, we began to recognise the importance of being clear in our branding, both internally and externally. We spent time and effort in agreeing what the underlying values of the business were. This wasn’t all that hard as most of us had grown up at Cobbetts together and had experienced the same influences. While I will talk about our values, I do not delude myself that these are unique. However, it is the degree to which they are lived that is the differentiator.

This is not rocket science. Our values are quite simple but underpin our business planning. They are:

Relationships – deliberately managing the quality of internal and external relationships;
Quality – setting a benchmark in the quality of services delivered and internal processes employed;
Integrity – keeping promises and demonstrating openness and honesty;
Teamwork – supporting, encouraging and training all our people to realise their full potential as valued members of our business;
Innovation – continually encouraging innovative solutions to satisfy both client requirements and new ideas to improve how we work with clients and how we operate our business;
Respect – encouraging respect towards all colleagues, recognising everyone’s contribution in the business and taking pride in their achievements.

The values are simple and are born out of the inherently decent culture within which my partners and I grew up. These values were quite easy to articulate but, as you begin to think through the implications you will begin to appreciate the effort we have had to invest in making sure that we live them. Let me talk through a few specific examples so you begin to understand what the implementation might look like.

If you want to manage individual and collective performance upwards then you should be explicit and clear in what you expect from people, not only in their current role but also in what they must be capable of to advance. In some instances, we used to get this badly wrong. Every year we would give pay rises and then we would suddenly realise we had a very unhappy individual, who was struggling to perform in their role and was grossly overpaid for their real abilities and contribution. We failed to confront this type of issue honestly. To combat this, we have invested a great deal of time in developing competency frameworks for all personnel within the firm, partners included, and this has been greeted enthusiastically by everyone.

These frameworks reflect our values and the behaviours that underpin them. So, quite literally, the values form the core competencies for every level of personnel. Depending upon the level, different features evidence the competence (and therefore the value), being displayed. People now know precisely what is expected from them and what competencies have to be developed and demonstrated to gain advancement.

The values are embedded. People understand that the needs of the business will ultimately dictate the opportunities that are available for advancement but still see a huge value in the matrices which have been developed with their input.

We have worked hard on developing our appraisal process, which sits alongside the competency framework. Designing the paperwork is the easy part of the exercise. Extensive training is required for both those giving the appraisal as well as the appraisees. The time input required by the process places a heavy burden upon line management but I don’t think anyone at Cobbetts would question the value either to the individual or the business.

If you are committed to unlocking the potential of the people working in your business then performance management and personnel development has to be supported by an appropriate training regime.

I doubt very many top-100 law firms fail to provide good technical training to their lawyers, however we recognised that more was required. We felt that our values and the strategic objectives spilling out of them demanded something that wasn’t just geared to developing legal skills. Although I could write an entire article on this subject alone, what we are trying to do is provide training for everyone in the business, which will wholly support the competency frameworks and therefore our core values. We are trying to develop people in our business who don’t just give technical advice. Again the reaction from our personnel has been incredibly positive. Young lawyers, for example, want to acquire all the skills that they know will be needed to equip them for their careers. They want management and financial skills, and they want to be able to give commercial advice. We believe that the training we are giving fulfils these needs, differentiates us in the eyes of both clients and personnel thereby giving competitive advantage.

If you respect the people you are working with and value the part everyone in the firm has to play, then effective communication is demanded. You have to appreciate that communication should be a two-way process. Our team-based structure provides an effective conduit for communication so that everyone shares knowledge and has an opportunity to make a contribution to managing the business.

In terms of disseminating information, we start by asking what information really has to be restricted and the answer is usually not very much. Everyone knows what our vision and strategy is and they get reminded on a regular basis. Every single person from the post room up to the management board is supplied with the same graphical representation of our key performance indicators in the form of a scorecard.

When we introduced this, one or two cynics commented that some staff either wouldn’t understand the information or wouldn’t be interested. Well, the same could be said of some partners. At the end of the day, the staff participate in a bonus scheme and, therefore, have a very real interest in knowing how the business is doing and can make suggestions on performance improvement. Just give them the training to understand what they are looking at. I’ve seen some partners struggle to grasp the concept of gross margin and then heard secretaries finding alternatives to additional recruitment because they don’t feel the team’s gross margin should be allowed to deteriorate.

AGMs, periodic business briefings to all and continually restating the strategy also play their part. Meeting everybody who joins the firm, having a chat over coffee with them, and following that up with a talk on our values and vision helps to establish the importance of our approach. In fact, I spend a substantial proportion of my time just talking to people and encourage the rest of our senior management to do the same. I can’t measure the result but know from feedback that recruits often cite this as being a key differentiator. I’m not some super manager, and often think I’m pretty poor, but I do believe in our values.

If you believe in realising potential and you respect everyone’s contribution, then empower people. We have an associate band. Formerly, cynics have remarked that it was nothing more than a badge to try and keep people waiting a couple more years before considering them for partnership. The competency framework itself has helped to demonstrate that it is something far more, requiring a different level of contribution. However, actually giving greater responsibilities has been viewed by the group as reward and recognition in itself and something that is part of their development. For example, we asked them to take a completely fresh look at the issues surrounding work/life balance and have implemented every recommendation made. All recommendations from the group have balanced the interests of the individual employee against the financial and commercial interests of the business, while the associates feel that they are making a big difference and are gaining worthwhile experience that is contributing towards their development.

Given that we place a value on relationships and recognise every contribution, it follows that everybody has a part to play in the development of the relationships that we enjoy with clients and business contacts. This sounds pretty obvious but in many competitor firms, the client partner jealously guards his prize asset. We encourage all personnel, and not just the lawyers, to play their part in contributing towards the planned development of strategic relationships.

Effort is made to foster a culture where we support each other and recognise that the competitors are in other firms and not in an adjoining office. Again, the team-based approach has a significant part to play. We emphasise the importance of the relationships that we all enjoy with the people around us and that a healthy social life within the firm has major business benefits. The financial support that we give in subsidising a social club, hosting monthly drinks and periodic functions is modest but, particularly as we have grown in numbers, it is money well spent in building cohesion, ensuring that people know each other and fostering a sense of community.

People talk and the benefits that our personnel identify from working in our firm are quickly communicated to peers at competitor firms. I know because I’m often told by contacts outside the firm why we are different. I also know because we spend somewhat less than some competitors on recruitment necessitated by staff churn and enjoy high staff satisfaction ratings and can compete on a level playing field with larger competitors when recruiting staff. The approach to dealing with staff is born out of establishing our values and living them. That same approach permeates all that we do as a business and I guess is what constitutes brand.

I have hopefully demonstrated that, by living our values, we have gained business advantage by being perceived as an employer of choice. It isn’t a quick fix, after all, it has taken us six years and nobody suddenly arrives there one morning. It is a never-ending commitment, but one worth undertaking.

Michael Shaw is managing partner at Cobbetts. He can be contacted at: michael.shaw@cobbetts.co.uk.