We spend a long time at work, and longer still if we include
the time we spend thinking about work and our role in it, including what role
or job we might seek next. But the
amount of time we spend considering what skills or know-how we need to acquire
or develop in order to enhance our current job, or enable us to attain that
other role, and developing those skills, is for most of us, a very modest
proportion of our total work time. The
UK Solicitors’ Regulation Authority requirement for annual training is 16 hours
or two days (currently – the
SRA is consulting on whether to remove the requirement for a set mandatory
amount of training per annum), so
that less than one per cent of a solicitor’s time in a typical year is required
to be spent on formal accredited training, either acquiring new knowledge or
skills, or ensuring that existing knowledge and skills are maintained up to
date.
Spending one per
cent of our working year on preparing ourselves to work as effectively as we
can represents a disappointing ratio.
Sports professionals and amateurs alike spend most of their sport time
in practice and coaching so as to maximise the outcome of the game. Acting without proper preparation puts one in
mind of the position of Flanders and Swann’s amateur English sportsman faced
with foreign nations’ success, founded on a caddish insistence on “practice
beforehand which ruins the fun” (A Song of Patriotic Prejudice).
I am not suggesting
that in business life the proportion of time spent on training or practice should
emulate that which governs in sport. I
am however suggesting that not nearly enough time or thought is put into
training and skills / knowledge practice as would seem likely to give the best
overall result. Even doubling the amount
of time spent training would still leave 98% of the working year left for doing
the things for which we are, after training, better prepared and more
effective.
Given we are
working with limited time on training and development, what steps can we take
to make sure that the limited resources we have are deployed as effectively as
possible? It’s a very broad topic, the
full extent of which is outside the scope of a short article, but I’d like to
offer a couple of general thoughts about training.
Firstly – what sort
of training and development decisions should we take about individuals?
At one level the
choice lies between technical training or personal development training. Lawyers typically undergo training of one or
other of two key types; technical training on particular areas of law (so for
example, a high-level symposium discussing the legal aspects of virtual
currencies, or that well-known format, the competition / property law /
contract law update), or more personal development-orientated skills training
(dealing with difficult people, managing teams and so on).
If a lawyer is
going to undertake technical training then some decisions are easy – train in
an area which is relevant to the lawyer’s current area of activity or one the
lawyer wants to get involved with, rather than in an unrelated area. (I’ve seen, as the deadline for attainment of
the 16 hours’ requirement looms, lawyers go on all sorts of esoteric and
irrelevant courses.) But whether to go
for technical training or personal development is a more nuanced decision. Lawyers must of course have command of the
areas on which they advise, and take steps to ensure that they remain in
command in the face of changes in the law or decaying memory. But more often than not, once a lawyer has
reached a certain level of experience and competence in an area of law, further
training in it will have a modest incremental effect. Personal development has the capacity to
improve the lawyer’s effectiveness across all of the areas where he or she is
active. So general counsel should always
consider whether the investment in having a member of their team undergo more
technical training is going to produce as appreciable a return as more widely
applicable skills-based training. I
liken the interaction between technical capability and personal skills to that
between a car engine and its transmission.
The most powerful engine (technical capability) is no good if the car’s
transmission (personal skills) is deficient.
If the decision is
to invest in a lawyer’s personal development, there are still choices to be
made. It’s not the case that all lawyers
need to be equally competent at the full range of inter-personal, influencing,
leadership and other personal skills.
The general counsel of a betting company once told me that he had a
number of lawyers who were specialists in gambling law in his team, and who
only ever spoke to other lawyers. He
didn’t regard their “client-handling” skills as importantly as he did those of
his team who did work closely with the business when hiring them. Instead, he purely wanted the best technical
lawyers in the gambling area – so for this technical group, time spent training
in business partnering (for example) would be wasted. It is somewhat like the (perhaps apocryphal)
tale of the top salesmen who underwent extensive training in administration, an
area identified as a weakness in their annual reviews. It would have been so much more effective to
have invested in developing the salesmen’s sales techniques and ensuring that
they had good administration support, so that they could concentrate their time
an energies doing the things that made them uniquely valuable to their
employers. Decision-making about
training at an individual level has to be undertaken in the light of what individuals
may personally desire, to support their current and potential future roles, but
also in the light of their role in the team.
Sometimes it is the
role – or more accurately, the status – of an individual in the team which
settles decisions around training. Some
teams have a budget per individual which shapes a level of equality around the
amount spent on each team member (and potentially the amount – assessed in
value as well as quantitative terms – of training received). Others however have an overall amount to be
spent on the team as the team’s leader sees fit. Individual circumstances will often have a
significant bearing on the decision that a general counsel or head of legal may
make on allocating training resources, but they should also think of their team
and its development needs in a systemic way.
Which member of the
legal team has the most significant effect on the overall performance (and the
perceived performance) of the team? Some
reflection on this question may produce some surprising results. It may well be that the legal team’s success
stems from the contribution of the star performer of the team, be it an
individual or a group; their ability to get to the nub of a business issue, to
balance the competing tensions and to provide clear, compelling advice to the
business might be the factor which characterises the legal team to the rest of
the organisation. They might operate in
the area where the skill of the legal team most directly translates into the
operational success of the organisation as a whole, through supporting an
effective sales channel, or successful, cost-effective dispute resolution (or
in the case of my betting company general counsel, perhaps it was the back-room
experts for their ability to get their company the successful first entry into
lucrative, highly-regulated waters). In
these cases, the best bang for the general counsel’s buck may not be realised
in trying to bring the rest of the team up to this level, but in making this
star individual or group the best they can possibly be across all fronts.
In other teams,
however, it is the performance of the weakest individual which will make or
break the team’s success. Back to sport
again – a fascinating study of top-class football (The Numbers Game – Anderson and Sally, Penguin,
2013) found that the biggest
impact on a team’s success or failure was not the quality of their star player,
but rather in most cases, the contribution of their weakest player. This was because the vulnerability became the
focus of the other team’s tactics - if the first team’s weakest player played
on the left side of defence, then their opponents would attack down their right
in order to involve this weakest player as much as possible. The general counsel whose business colleagues
would try to exploit the legal team’s weaknesses by deliberately finding things
to do for the weakest member of the legal team perhaps needs to find a new job,
but the effect is the same even without the calculation of a determined
opponent, if the weakest member (or again, group) ends up characterising the
legal team’s profile and achievement.
The general counsel in this situation will place the majority of the
training effort not with the stars of the first case, but this trailing group,
at least as a preliminary endeavour to see if they can be brought up to scratch
as an alternative to taking more drastic action.
Training and
development can often be left to an organisation’s human resources, or to the
individuals themselves. It can however
unlock the success of the whole team if it is given thought at a systemic level
as well as the individual level. Well
worth that one per cent.
