60-second interview: A question of leadership

Earlier in the year, Caroline Armitage, partner and head of the commercial division at ASB Law, attended a week’s residential course focused on leadership skills. In this 60-second interview, Caroline Poynton finds out why.

What was your motivation for going on the leadership course?

Lawyers don’t get any management training - you learn on the hoof to a greater or lesser extent and you certainly don’t have any theory to back it up. In a busy practice when your mixing client work and managing a part of the business, you have little time to think. I recognised that I would be more effective if I took time out to assess how I’m doing things, look at some alternative models, do some theory and improve the skill set that I had.

What happened on the course?

There were about 80 people doing the course as a whole but you’re broken down into groups of about eight. In my group, I was a lawyer sitting next to an Arab oil sheik, a couple of guys from B&Q depots and two guys from TXU Energy – it was a fascinating range of people. We covered a number of different areas, everything from team roles and team skills through to leadership styles, and matching your style to the person that you are leading, their position and need within the organisation. That was an interesting area because I learnt about where people need low direction but high interaction and so high support levels, and also about people who can manage with low direction and low support levels. We were also warned against leaving people who weren’t at the low direction, low support level so that you didn’t do what they delightfully called “dump and zap”. I think this is a traditional law-firm management technique, for example: “I will dump this on you and when you’re not doing it like I think you should be doing it, I will zap you, steam back in and take the whole thing off you to deal with it myself while making you feel as small as I possibly can.”

There were some very interesting workshops and a lot of benchmarking and sharing, which you were also doing in the context of very different types of businesses.

I learnt a lot from the other people who had been through a lot more management training than I had and so probably had a better handle on the people skills issues than the average lawyer can get because of the environment we work in.

Did you look at the kind of leader you are and what did you discover?

Because you’re out of your office environment on this residential week, only logging in to check your e-mails once or twice a day, you have some time to look at how you’re handling things and where you’re not doing it as well as you could. You also have some one-on-one interviews before which you have to get your direct line manager, one peer and a subordinate to answer a very comprehensive questionnaire. This provides a profile as to how you’re perceived within your organisation, although on the whole, it probably confirms what you knew about yourself but didn’t think about. Opening yourself up to that kind of 360- degree appraisal is scary but hugely valuable.

Several people have since said that it has had a very beneficial effect on me and that it has assisted me in the way that I deal with people. As a result of that, we are looking at what we can do for other people in the business. I’ve talked to my CEO and the functional managers who do training and we’re trying to develop some form of leadership- development programme in house for our top operational team.

How have you since improved your leadership skills?

It’s fairly simple things like sitting and listening a bit more. We did active listening exercises so that you’re not coming in with your solutions before you’ve heard other people’s problems and their ideas. I’m doing that much more than I did, which is good because I manage partners who are all senior lawyers themselves. I’m much less directional and I’m listening far more to what they want to do.

Caroline Armitage is head of the commercial division at ASB law. She can be contacted at: Caroline.Armitage@asb-law.com.