denotes premium content | Sep 3 2010 Feature
posted 2 Jul 2009 in Volume 3 Issue 5
Question time
In 2008 Mills & Reeve produced a guide to what it considers to be the core values behind its collaborative culture. Duncan Ogilvy discusses the subsequent set of interviews with people across the business, which were used to ascertain how such ideas were, and could, be usefully applied and monitored in a busy practice.
Mills & Reeve has set out its stall internally and in its public profile as a firm ‘renowned for its collaborative culture’. We have recently taken the time and trouble to articulate the firm’s values, one of which is ‘working together’. We did so as a result of extensive discussion and not lightly, but what does it really mean? How does it manifest itself in everyday Mills & Reeve life? Where it happens, what are the beneficial business consequences? What happens when it is lacking? What are the inhibiting factors that get in the way when things go wrong? If we can understand those, we should be able to spread best practice, leading us to even better performance.
In an attempt to get to the bottom of these issues I interviewed 36 Mills & Reeve people, from all offices, at all grades, and in all groups and support teams. While some of the findings are specific to my firm, this article summarises others that could be of wider application.
To set this in context, Mills & Reeve is an 89-partner firm, number 46 in The Lawyer UK 200 Annual Report in 2008, with a total headcount of around 800 and with offices in
My findings can be broken down to three main strands.
Leadership – generating a shared sense of purpose and mutual respect
Gratifyingly I encountered very many stories of really effective shared working, within teams, across teams and across offices. Where we are at our best, support departments and fee-earning teams pull together for the common good. Analysis of those success stories often led to one named person who has influenced the project or team. Sometimes that is the official leader (‘X got behind it and his visible enthusiasm for it has spread to everyone else’). It is not always a person in obvious authority that has that effect, however. There was one story of an accounts clerk who eradicated a billing inefficiency simply by taking the trouble to explain the whole process to fee-earners, learn about their perspective, and thereby generate respect, resolving the problems. A member of a support team described the pleasure it is to be part of a new initiative that is well led by an enthusiastic partner “really leading from the front”. That same person told of a “why bother?” feeling about a very similar project that did not have the same leadership. She describes tasks getting to the bottom of her “to do” list as a result. A trainee was praised for the lengths to which she went to sort out a problem that did not concern her at all, but simply found its way to her telephone extension! A ‘can do’ attitude makes a big difference at all levels in an organisation, and the trick must be to make sure that this sort of behaviour is noticed and rewarded.
Hallmarks of all these success stories are mutual respect and the taking of responsibility. Contrasting quotes include the confidence one particular individual generates when he says “leave it with me”, with another unhappy story of a team who always seem to my interviewee not to take ownership of a task, claiming “it’s not my fault” or “it’s not my responsibility to do that”. On delving deeper into that particular story it is said to work much better “now that we have got to know them”. I heard a lot about confidence growing with personal experience of working together, and physical proximity obviously makes shared working easier. “Their attitude changed completely now they are located near to us,” I was told. At least Mills & Reeve is only based in the
Mills & Reeve sets great store by not being a hierarchical organisation, and respect for one another is a core value of the firm. By and large that is exactly what I encountered, and it is certainly an aid to collaborative work. A newly-qualified solicitor, who trained with the firm, said: “Helping each other out is the culture. Mills & Reeve is very good at crossing rank boundaries.”
As the firm has grown, both in scale and in the sophistication of its complex work, so the project-management skills of our people have improved to match. I was told about the skills of one partner who routinely involves other teams in deals and sees it as his job to keep abreast of the whole transaction in broad terms and ensure that everyone does what is required of them. I know others are less effective, and maybe this is a skill our firm should be developing consciously to improve effective shared working. A related skill is effective delegation and supervision. Where this is lacking, collaboration is inhibited. These are skills that can be taught, and the business benefits of getting it right are considerable.
We seem to be at our best when a high-profile project is involved. For example, we recently took on a whole team, resulting in us opening two new offices. People involved in that project commented on how well it had gone, possibly because it was treated as a formal project with appropriate accountability built in. We are also good when everyone is similarly motivated, such as for charitable and fundraising activity – a notable strength of our firm, where I was told that ‘everyone pitches in’.
Irrespective of the formal structures of the firm, however, I was able to gather stories of reciprocal deals between individuals. In return for giving help one is entitled to expect it, and these informal loyalties clearly play a bigger part than I had previously realised. The negative version of this is a lack of co operation “when politics come into play”, or even a lack of trust between people or teams. One story was told of a new matter being handled by the team into which it had come, even though another team had the specialist skills to do it better. The job was eventually transferred, but not as quickly as it should have been because, as it was put, ‘people protect their fiefdoms’. Mercifully these examples are few and far between, and egos are normally kept in check for the greater good! Returning to geography, there were many examples of great collaboration among colleagues in one office, where ideally a wider group would have been involved. Perhaps this is inevitable but I was left feeling strongly that the prize of overcoming that geographical horizon would be considerable. Indeed, I found several examples of great cross-team, cross-office collaboration involving lawyers who have never met. It can be done.
Systems of reward and performance measurement
It is often said that what gets measured gets done, and I found plenty of evidence both of the benefits of our formal and informal performance management, and, occasionally, of instances where it generates behaviour which is not helpful in practice. For a number of years we have concentrated on team fee targets rather than individual ones, and that has played its part in the generation of good collaborative behaviour, shifting work to the right level and spreading capacity effectively. I found examples (isolated ones admittedly) of teams ‘hogging’ work rather than sharing it with other lawyers, perhaps in another office, who had capacity.
Our performance-review documentation has been extensively revised over the past few years, requiring good all-round behaviour, not simply financial performance. That will have played its part in the generally encouraging evidence I received. In practice this is only as good as the conduct of the reviewer, of course, and formal performance review is a small part of performance management. Someone said that when her contribution was not acknowledged it left her with a feeling of “why should I?”
Articulating the firm’s core values has helped significantly in my view. The values aren’t surprising (‘openness and integrity, working together, respect for each other and strong client relationships’) but the fact that they emerged from a credible consultation process, and have been brought to life by setting out the behaviours we do and do not expect to see in relation to each one, was widely praised by my interviewees.
As a partnership we reward our partners on a pre-determined lockstep basis, and this may incentivise collaborative rather than selfish behaviour. Certainly that view was expressed to me, and if that behaviour permeates from the top it can only be helpful.
There was a view that fee-earning gets ahead of all non-chargeable activity, sometimes to the distress of support teams who struggle to get fee-earners to play their part in a shared activity. It is hard to fault responsiveness to client demand, and I don’t think our firm is different from others in this respect, but we have had some success recently with specific projects being opened up within our practice management system as matters (albeit non-chargeable), with the result that fee-earners feel as accountable for their performance on those as for their client work. I suspect the answer lies in communication and leadership rather than reward or performance management systems.
Technology
I was surprised how prominently technology featured in my discussions, both as an enabler and, occasionally, as a constraint on collaborative work. On the plus side there was praise for our firm-wide intranet as a vehicle for people to know what is going on, and for our document management system that enables an electronic file to be viewed remotely. On the other hand, several of our systems have poor search capability, which was blamed for some wheel re-inventing.
We have introduced so-called social software (blogs and wikis) to a limited extent over the past year or so in an attempt to enable groups that need to collaborate to do so, even though they do not work in the same city, or may not be working on the project at the same time. I was sorry not to hear more about that in my interviews, prompting me to investigate further. I suspect the problems lie not with the technology itself, but with insufficient energy being spent on what is a change-management requirement if we are to maximise the opportunity. One or two conspicuous success stories indicate that it would be worthwhile.
We have a very heavily used video-conference facility, which one or two people mentioned as an aid to cross-office team working.
We are about to launch a new enterprise search system too, which should address some of the issues people criticise. It features a database of expertise, pulling information from a range of sources. A Turkish speaker only happened upon the opportunity to help out by chance recently, whereas language skills will now be easily searchable. Those inefficiencies can easily be resolved, but we are hopeful that we can unlock a much more sophisticated trawl of our talent to bring it to bear as appropriate as a result of this investment.
I have spent all my working life in this firm, yet even I learned a huge amount from the exercise. It was reassuring and encouraging to hear stories of infectious ambition leading to great shared work to win and look after clients, and I shall use those stories to encourage our best practice to become the norm. I have found examples of us letting ourselves down but those are mostly isolated, and have been easily dealt with. Good technology can certainly help collaborative work, but if your reward and performance management systems don’t incentivise the behaviour you want to encourage, you won’t get that behaviour from more than an enthusiastic few. By far the biggest cause of collaboration, in my firm at any rate, is good leadership (at all levels, not necessarily from a person designated as the leader), generating a shared sense of purpose and underpinned by mutual respect.
This is not an Earth-shattering conclusion, but it has given us some good pointers to areas on which to work if we want to be even more effective.
Duncan Ogilvy is knowledge management partner at Mills & Reeve. He can be contacted at
