Laws of leadership

The tradition in the legal profession is to appoint its leaders from the most senior partners in the firm, a strategy that generally results in promotion for those with the biggest client wins. Some firms, however, are beginning to realise that the best fee earners do not necessarily make the best leaders. By Caroline Poynton

Wiggin LLP has gone through some changes of late. Not only has the firm converted to limited-liability partnership, but it has also re-branded, adopting a bright logo that is more in keeping with its niche media and entertainment focus. Indeed, its slogan, ‘Think Media – Think Brighter – Think Wiggin’, is declaration enough of the firm’s message following the demerger from its tax and private-client arm in November 2003. However, take a look at the new Wiggin website and you’ll see an illuminated FHM cover featuring the impressive cleavage of the magazine’s ‘Honey of the Year’. This has been combined with a split-screen countdown feature reminiscent of television thriller ‘24’, which all together gives a strong sense that we are no longer in the realm of the legal profession. A niche media and entertainment firm might be expected to be a little more imaginative in its creative design, but there is still something about the new image that belies any familiar concept of lawyers or the practice of law. It will be of little surprise, therefore, to hear that the man behind the change was never a lawyer, but actually started his career in the navy, where he was given his first leadership training job at the tender age of 21.

Since then, John Banister, chief operating officer at Wiggin LLP, has held a variety of leadership roles in firms including Merrill Lynch, Linklaters and Klegal, but it was back in the navy that his potential was first spotted. “I was training guys who were in their forties and had been in the navy for years,” says Banister. “The last thing you do at 21 is march in and start to tell people what to do because you’re just going to fall flat on your face.” He had a team of senior warrant officers who were working alongside him and who had been in the navy for 25-30 years, so he says that he was able to use their experience and approach the job in a team-oriented way. It nevertheless must have been a formidable task; that he was chosen so young may, as Banister suggests, have been the result of the navy’s ‘sink or swim’ attitude, but it seems more likely that Banister had all the markings of a natural leader right from the start. And now, he is using that ability, together with the practical experience of years on the job, to drive through fundamental change in his firm. That he is not a lawyer also brings the added advantage of outside-industry experience and, perhaps, a bolder approach than you might expect from a partner in the business. After all, he says leaders need to be outgoing and aggressive. “You need to know the people you’re dealing with and how far you can push them, but you have to aim for something that is new, exciting and different.”

In the legal profession, however, many leaders are lawyers, who, through success in their fee-earning work, have risen through the ranks to positions of management and seniority. Some, like Banister, will have the benefit of natural leadership skills, which will enable them to perfectly fall into, say, the managing-partner role. But others will struggle. “I have seen it in law firms, where you can take a very traditional lawyer who, through the fact that he is mature, is put in a leadership position with which he is blatantly uncomfortable,” says Banister. Such firms may need to give urgent attention to the way in which they appoint their leaders, but an important question also lies in how far leadership skills can be learnt. After all, internal promotions may be a ‘nice to have’, but many firms, like Wiggin, might do better to appoint good leaders from outside the profession who can drive business strategy while leaving the lawyers to do what they do best, that is, practise law.

For Tony Griffiths, who was managing partner at Nicholson Graham & Jones (NGJ) and is now London administrative partner at K&LNG, following the merger of his firm with Kirkpatrick & Lockhart in January 2005, the art of leadership is not so complex: “There are leadership traits in all of us and you just need to work out what best works for you.”

As an important management figure during the firm’s transatlantic merger, he knows all about the challenges of leading a firm through change. For instance, he had to guide the firm out of NGJ’s lockstep structure and into the meritocratic system of K&LNG. That involved not only convincing the partners of the value of such a change, but also implementing structures, such as an annual partner-assessment process that would become an essential part of deciding remuneration. “Part of the challenge is getting as rounded a picture of partners as possible.

That includes measurable criteria, such as what work they have brought into the firm, but it also comes down to knowing your partners, understanding what they have gone through, and being able to translate that into their relative contribution for the year,” he says. Griffiths makes it sound easy, but measuring partner performance has been regularly raised as one of most significant challenges in the modern legal business. Success requires highly effective interpersonal skills and an ability to make lawyers face up to the often tough realities of change.

Perhaps both Banister and Griffiths have found their roles more manageable because of the variety of work they have experienced in their backgrounds. Griffiths, for example, first started his legal career in a four-partner practice in his home town in South Wales. “It was fantastic training, not only in learning how to deal with legal issues, but also in the ability to deal with people, because you just didn’t know what was going to come through the door,” he says. He admits that there are times now when he misses the immediate feedback of dealing with individuals rather than corporations, because he says there is nothing like the look on somebody’s face when you manage to sort out a domestic-violence issue or the feeling of satisfaction when you have done something good for the community. That he now focuses on people skills as the essential component of good leadership seems a natural consequence of this early experience.

Banister has also benefitted from his work experience to date. Merrill Lynch may not receive his most hearty praise (he describes the organisation as very hierarchical, exceptionally driven and, hence, not necessarily too caring about its staff), but he is grateful for the time he spent there. “It was a great culture in which to practise your people and influencing skills, and your tactical ability to get things done,” he says. In contrast, he describes Linklaters as something like a Cunard liner: “Everything is polished, shiny and in control. There is brass on the main deck and everything is sailing along beautifully.” During his time at the firm, however, he felt that it had a very traditional set up, led from the top, which meant that the partners often didn’t feel very involved in the overall business. He adds that managing partner Tony Angel has made a huge difference to Linklaters since then, but Banister’s experience convinced him of the importance of bringing partners into the decision-making process. “In terms of managing and leading Wiggin, it is done by true partnership,” he says. “All the partners are involved and all feel that they have a part to play. As a result, things can happen fairly quickly, because there is that drive and enthusiasm to get involved in what Wiggin is going to be.” Whether Banister will be able to maintain this form of consensual management as the firm grows remains to be seen, but his style of leadership has clearly been honed by this variety of roles.

While both Griffiths and Banister may be able to use their experiences to lead more effectively, an important aspect of becoming a good rather than adequate leader is to be able to sell a vision and inspire people to follow your ideas. In this respect, Griffiths had his work cut out, as he was involved in leading the partners at NGJ through a merger process, which would fundamentally change the nature of the business. His job was perhaps helped by his own view that people had lost sight of where the firm was going and what the real vision was going forwards. “Once you started talking about growth and about people being able to develop their practice areas because of the merger, then you could just see the confidence coming back,” he says.

The firm may indeed have been well in need of a boost that a merger would bring, but NGJ was no stranger to merger problems, having previously been through failed negotiations with UK firm Pinsents. With the Kirkpatrick & Lockhart merger looking good, however, Griffiths made a presentation to his partners and staff at NGJ. “I told them that what had gone on before was in the past and that the merger was all about growth. You could see the lightbulbs going off above people’s heads,” he says. In the light of the many internal tensions that merger activities inevitably raise, it is a comment that seriously understates Griffiths’s ability to sell the message.

Banister, of course, has also succeeded in selling the new vision of Wiggin LLP. He describes the process of convincing the firm’s partners of the merits of the rebranding, which included holding interviews with everybody in the firm about the vision and values of the business. Having agreed the rebranding remit, he worked with a consultant to get about 90 per cent of the work completed. Then about a month before the launch he gathered all the partners together and presented the rebranding by DVD, which included loud music and lots of bright colours. “It was big bangs. It was in your face. It was slightly more wild than what we ended up with,” he says. But it went down well and he says that nearly everybody understood the message and could relate to it. “There were a couple who struggled to get it first time, but all I had to do was spend some time with them afterwards, treating them more like lawyers and asking them if they recognised the firm’s vision and values in the new image.” For a change that Banister describes as “dramatically different”, he did well to secure such firm-wide buy-in.

Both Banister and Griffiths seem well able to cope with the remits of their roles, based on their natural abilities combined with useful career experience, but they do not both have the same outlook on leadership in general. Griffiths is a strong advocate for leadership through an understanding of people and their different motivations, but thinks there is no set template to doing this well: “Effective leadership comes in a number of different sizes and descriptions. Playing to your own strengths is what it is all about, and being yourself. You don’t have to be the great communicator or the great listener or even the great inspirational leader - you just need to work out what is best for you.” Banister is more critical, however, saying that there is often a problem in smaller firms because there is not always a natural leader. “You can’t just force somebody to become a leader just because they are the most senior partner; seniority doesn’t always equate to good leadership, although maturity and experience can often help,” he says. In contrast, he thinks the larger firms have well addressed succession and leadership issues.

“The big firms now have partner-development programmes and associations with schools like Harvard. They identify their leaders early and put them through programmes to ensure that they are trained up and exposed to the right sorts of issues. Succession is built in.” This could well explain the development among many smaller firms, including Wiggin, to recruit non-lawyer chief executives while the larger firms continue to favour internal recruitment to the top roles. As long as firms are giving enough weight to the importance of leadership, however, then it seems reasonable to assume the validity of both strategies.

Not all firms are so forward thinking in appointing their leaders, however, and there will still be lawyers that find themselves in leadership roles for which they are not best suited. Banister admits that he leans more to the philosophy of the born rather than made leader, but even he thinks that skills can be learnt. Indeed, he describes having seen technical lawyers, who have been put in inappropriate leadership positions, come through training and mentoring to become better, if never natural, leaders. He even describes helping a lawyer who struggled with leadership duties. Banister would book meeting times in the lawyer’s diary during which time the lawyer would have to get up, leave his desk and go and talk to his people. If the time was not booked as a meeting, Banister says the lawyer would just not do it. “The amazing thing was that everybody noticed that it was a huge improvement: he seemed much more interested in the teams, and they found it more comfortable to relate to him and were more interested in what he had to say.”

In today’s legal business, there are plenty of options for improving leadership skills: internal coaching and mentoring and external leadership-development programmes, for example. This may be an ideal solution for those firms that are large enough to have a pool of potential leaders from which to choose. For smaller firms, there are also options, either in finding the right person internally or looking to external non-lawyer business managers to drive the firm forwards. Griffiths is also right in saying that there are different types of leaders and some may be better for a firm at a particular time than at others. For example, an outgoing, authoritative leader is often needed in times of crisis, while a quieter leader who is excellent at dealing with people might be better for periods of consolidation. What both Griffiths and Banister demonstrate, however, is that it is not sufficient to assume that your biggest client winners will inevitably also become the firm’s best leaders. At a time when firms have to compete at the highest level, firms must ensure that their leaders are chosen wisely and are given the best opportunities to succeed at what is a highly demanding and crucial role.

John Banister is chief operating officer at Wiggin LLP. He can be contacted at john.banister@wiggin.co.uk

Tony Griffiths is London administrative partner at K&LNG. He can be contacted at agriffiths@klng.com