Products in Development

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.