How to build the ship while sailing it, Mark Rigotti
‘The Covid-19 crisis is creating a lot of learning and insight across the legal sector and the wider communities in which we work and live. Much of this revolves around actions that organisations and their leaders are taking to navigate the crisis – including what leaders should do to manage uncertainty.
A key feature of law firms is that many people are leaders – not just those in formal senior leadership roles. A high degree of distributed management serves a range of teams. That is a real strength of our industry. Empowering those leaders to act in a way that helps their teams and drives the wider business forward is key.
It seems to me that there are three things to do in a crisis:
- Look after yourself
- Look after the future
- Look after today
There is a temptation to look after today, neglecting the future and yourself. This can be costly. We are in an uncertain world. Many people recognise the need to develop new skills to navigate both the current crisis and the future. However, the comfort of honing skills in the classroom and then subsequently applying them in the work context no longer applies. Leaders need to lead, learn, act and improve, all at the same time.
‘There is a temptation to look after today, neglecting the future and yourself. This can be costly.’ Mark Rigotti, Herbert Smith Freehills
I call this “building the ship while sailing it”. In a rapidly-changing world, you have to learn as you go in order to prepare your business, team and yourself to thrive. I learned this the hard way.
In previous crises I confronted (albeit on a smaller scale), the unexpected occurred periodically. I would hear that a team was preparing to leave or a colleague had passed away. With no time to prepare, feelings running high and the business plan in tatters, I often jumped in. Many times that initial action failed or had limited success, as I didn’t have my mindset right first – I was reacting and not acting.
So look after yourself so you can look after others today and in the future.
Why start with yourself? Because your knowledge, skills and vision can be shared with others, and investing in yourself enables you to do this more effectively.
Along the way, I have also learned to:
- Pause. To be a better leader, lift up out of the detail, work out how you’re reacting and managing your emotions. You might be inadvertently transferring your anxiety onto those you serve.
- Reflect. Figure out what is and isn’t working and learn on the run. It doesn’t take long, but you need to make time for it.
- Leverage. Capture what you’ve learned and then make the most of it.
This can sound obvious. It is – and that’s the good news. But in the heat of a crisis when the pressure is on to act, these things often get ignored, deferred or put to one side.
Also deliberately understanding your own emotions, let alone managing them and getting your mindset right, is seen by some as a distraction from doing what needs to be done. However, I have found a more useful way to think of this is to be doing these things and taking action in parallel.
Here are a couple of ideas:
- Dust off any psychometric testing. I cringe when I read mine, but there are truths in there. It’s a good reminder of your strengths, preferences and weaknesses, which emerge and can be exaggerated under pressure. One of my strengths is around harmony – bringing people together. Its flipside can be avoiding conflict. Being aware of this and developing better skills and strategies, such as taking a colleague who is stronger on conflict to high stress situations, worked for me. A healthy reminder of your strengths, weaknesses and preferences can help you understand why you are reacting the way you are to the crisis.
- Record insights daily and schedule time to think. Doing this helps me figure out what works and what doesn’t work. Conscious reflection captures your learnings. It takes time to see patterns – but I have found these insights invaluable.
The challenge of our Covid-19 world is an opportunity to learn at pace and slingshot into the future. Law firm leaders, in their many guises, should not let this moment pass.’
Mark Rigotti is partner at Herbert Smith Freehills and served as chief executive from 2014 to 2020
Talking sheds – why the personal touch is critical in a crisis, David Morley
‘In March last year – as the Covid-19 crisis gathered pace – I wrote in Legal Business that if you’re a leader when an emergency happens, you need to act like one. I added that, as the leader, you are also communicator-in-chief.
Talking to leaders over the last few months, it’s striking how acting like a leader has meant adapting their style as this crisis has rolled on. A more approachable, informal and open mindset that connects more personally with their people has become key.
One managing partner of a London-originated law firm told me how he had shared with partners and staff his love of his garden shed and all that was in it. He discovered that people reacted surprisingly well to him sharing some of his personal life with them. Messages inundated his inbox, responding to his cheerful, down-to-earth shed stories, creating a real sense of emotional engagement.
Sharing shed stories may sound trivial, but it had a tremendous impact on the firm and him. He was enabling people to connect with him and hearing directly from them. He short-circuited the management layers that usually blur the connection between leaders and the led. It became a source of power for him. People are more willing to go along with you if they feel they have connected with you.
Another senior partner of a global law firm explained how he’d started posting a regular blog talking about the pressures in his own life during the lockdown and the firm’s challenges as a whole. “I’ve had hundreds of warm messages from people responding to my blogs and personally responded to every one of them. It helped create a feeling of connection,” he told me. He gained a better understanding of people’s real concerns and felt able to make better decisions.
A senior leader in a large global professional services firm said she missed the ability to “feel the vibe” in the office – the mood or morale to their people – with everyone working from home. She said she had taken to calling staff randomly just to see how they were doing. She soon realised that she was terrifying some people. They thought a call from her could only mean one thing – dismissal. But she persevered. Word got around, and the conversations became more comfortable. She came to enjoy the interaction and ability to hear directly from the shopfloor.
So, what is going on here?
Those who dismiss this openness as a “touchy-feely” confection that detracts from the “real work” of leadership miss an essential point. In this crisis, many people have felt genuinely and understandably frightened at a profoundly personal level. They want to feel their leaders understand their worries and fears. They want reassurance that they are not alone in having those feelings.
At the same time, there is a welcome trend towards increasing openness about mental health issues. For example, Charlie Jacobs, senior partner of Linklaters, was reported last year as sharing with staff that he had experienced a “dip in spirits” during the lockdown and what he was doing to deal with it.
Of course, this is not to suggest that over-sharing, extravagant displays of emotion or hand wringing are what is needed. No-one wants to be led by someone self-obsessed or “woe is me”.
First and foremost, they want an honest and transparent assessment of the situation and direction of travel from someone they trust. Neither Cassandra nor Pollyanna. They want to feel there is a steady hand on the tiller. But leaders who can combine that with a genuinely personal touch find it easier to inspire loyalty, confidence and bring people with them.
The best leaders have demonstrated an almost chameleon-like ability to adapt their style to the different phases of an unfolding crisis. In the early stages, the consensual leadership model, familiar to a greater or lesser degree in most law firms, had to go. Leaders needed the confidence to make timely and effective decisions. The crisis permitted – indeed demanded – actions that would usually be difficult, if not impossible. The priority was to steady the ship. It’s no good being empathetic if the business is going down the plughole.
But as the crisis evolved into a long grind, the best leaders have changed their style again. They realised they had to be sensitive to the change in the balance of power in the firm. The inevitable damage from the earlier phase needed repair. It was knowing when to be decisive and when to be empathetic. When to assert power and when to be more accommodating.
These kinds of nuanced judgements are particularly challenging because no one can predict this crisis’ duration. That’s why it’s all the more important to pace yourself – to recognise you need to keep handling the problem day-to-day long after the situation had used up your initial surge of adrenaline.
When the chairman of Dewey & LeBoeuf, Mort Pierce, was reported to say “Management is not my passion” shortly before the firm went into bankruptcy in 2012, it summed up an attitude of antipathy to leadership and management at law firms belonging to a bygone era.
If this crisis has shown anything, it has demonstrated the best-led firms have thrived, and the poorly led have suffered. Smart firms are already investing in leadership skills and preparing their future leaders for the responsibilities of leadership. In doing so, they are baking in a sustainable competitive advantage over those who don’t take leadership seriously.’
David Morley was senior partner of Allen & Overy between 2008 and 2016 and is now managing director and head of Europe at Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ). He jointly presents a new podcast series with Professor Laura Empson: ‘Empson & Morley – Leading Professional People’