Want to make partner one day? What are you bringing to the table?

The competition for new positions at law firms is more intense than ever before, in part due to an increase in the number of law school graduates and in part because of disruption of the legal services market. Law firms need now, more than ever, a new long-term strategy for business development and staying relevant in a changing landscape. But business development strategy isn’t a major part of the law school curriculum. So what can junior and mid-career lawyers do to make themselves more valuable and contribute more to the business?

Identify strategic business needs

Start with a close look at your existing clients, and identify their pain points and business needs. What are their strategic priorities? Why?

Starting with a client you’re very familiar with is good practice for then practicing the same exercise with prospective clients. If you can enter meetings with new potential clients armed with insights about how your firm can best serve them, you’re already ahead of the game.

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Develop your personal brand

Obviously you want to work within the framework of your firm’s over-arching brand, but your personal brand can make a huge difference. It’s why you have a favourite barista at the coffee shop, or are particular about who at the salon cuts your hair.

Working through a personal branding exercise can give you insights into your personal strengths and identify how best to apply them to deliver more value to clients. What is your unique value proposition and how can you leverage it to the best effect? How can you apply that to lead generation or to creating personalized business development plans?

Learn how to ask for business

One of the most valuable skills a lawyer can have outside of their technical expertise is the ability to bring in new business. Professionals who consistently bring in new business are significantly more likely to be recognized by senior members of the firm for their accomplishments, and to eventually make partner.

Learning how to ask for business is about becoming more adept at spotting and seizing organic networking opportunities, clearly articulating the value you and your firm can offer to clients, and perfecting your personal pitch both on paper and in person.

If you feel uncomfortable networking or pitching business, ask yourself if you’re being too pitchy, too self-promotional, or too self-aggrandizing. If you feel that way, certainly your potential client feels the same. Pitching business should start with genuine, authentic conversations, and learning how to do that will have a transformative impact on your bottom line.

Strategic Business Development for Lawyers is a two and a half day interactive program designed specifically to help junior and mid-career legal professionals learn the difference between strategy and tactics and find out how to use both in order to create and implement a business development plan that leverages their unique value proposition and highest potential opportunities.

You will get answers to the most frequently asked business development questions, a set of business development plan templates, and benefit from the real-world experience of senior legal professionals.

How to Succeed at the Enterprise Level

“What got you here may not get you there.”
Marshall Goldsmith

Last Fall, I had the opportunity to sit with a diverse group of senior managers looking to move from functional management to performing at the enterprise level. They were the latest cohort in Rotman’s Strategic Business Leadership program and came from both the private and public sectors which added a lovely richness to class conversations.

The journey to senior management will typically progress through a number of phases. You begin your career as an individual contributor, progress into roles in which you’re responsible for getting work done through others, and finally transition into a senior position which requires you to think differently about a much broader and more complex set of competing issues.

It truly is different at the top.

Making this transition from function head to enterprise leader involves learning new skills and developing new mindsets — and this can be a seismic shift. It involves moving from:

  • tactician to strategist
  • specialist to generalist
  • analyst to integrator
  • bricklayer to architect
  • problem solver to agenda setter
  • warrior to diplomat, and
  • supporting cast to leading role

An all-star line up of Rotman Faculty teach in Strategic Business Leadership:

Photos of the faculty in the Strategic Business Leadership program

Rotman’s Strategic Business Leadership program is built around a model of leadership that integrates people, strategy, culture and systems. Here are just a few of the topics we covered:

Diagram of a model of integrative leadership

Strategy: As a senior manager, you are responsible for developing and implementing strategy for the business units you lead. However, managers are often confused about what strategy really is and what constitutes a good one. So, the program helped us identify the critical elements of effective strategies, the characteristics of hard to attack strategies and the importance of deliberately choosing where to excel and where not to.

Design Thinking: Over two days, we got to play with Design Thinking: a customer-centered design methodology practiced by some of the most innovative firms in the world (e.g., IDEO, Google, P&G, IBM, GE, etc.). Design Thinking is applicable anywhere in the value chain from the design of new products and services to customer experiences and business strategies. As senior leaders need to nurture innovation at all stages, it is important that they have a strong knowledge of the basic processes and skills of Design Thinking.

First, we looked at ways both public and private sector organizations used empathy to design neat new solutions for the client journey whether it was enhancing the experience of cancer patients waiting for chemo therapy or Delaine Hampton sharing her insights from decades at the helm of P&G’s marketing department. We learned how to reverse engineer the moment of choice to think about opportunities at each stage of the decision process.

We also experimented with a variety of ways to generate ideas so members of your team who may need different approaches to harnessing their ideas can really unearth smart new solutions. Finally, we got to work building a prototype and experienced the benefits of prototyping early and often.

Networking for success: As you move into enterprise level positions, creating new connections becomes even more important since success increasingly depends on coordinating across units and having a broad strategic perspective. To tackle the often unsavory topic of networking, we used the Reciprocity Ring to form more meaningful connections. The Reciprocity Ring is used by major companies and universities such as GM, Stanford, Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Meyers Squibb Company and the Kellogg School of Management.

Leaning into conflict

A  major theme running through the program was leaning into conflict. Rotman believes tension is an opportunity for innovation and transformation. This is a different mindset that requires a curious and open stance.

  • Model-Based Problem Solving: In this session, we were given the tools to discern the different models at play during conflicts, the likely sources of tension and strategies to capitalize on those conflicts. We then applied these learnings to the context of a senior management team.
  • Negotiations: Negotiation is also a problem-solving process and the typical method by which resources are allocated in organizations. The ability to negotiate effectively is a key managerial and leadership competency. Using best practices and cases, we conducted a series of negotiations and group decision-making exercises and then debriefed the results. This way, we explored what is involved in effective negotiation and strategies and techniques senior managers need to do it well.
  • The Culturally Fluent Leader: Becoming what Professor Nouman Ashraf calls an ‘emancipatory leader’means moving from tolerance for differences to embracing differences. Again, using the model-based problem solving approach, this session helps leaders go from ‘oh no, conflict’ to ‘oh, yes conflict’. This approach changes your mindset to see a diversity as a strategic advantage.

As we make the shift to senior management, it’s important to realize that what got us here may actually hamper us at the next stage of our career. To this end, the class drilled down on what they needed to do differently in their new roles, but also what they needed to stop doing to ensure their success for the future. Each participant left with a personal action plan to put their new learnings into practice. They also met with a coach three weeks after class to work through any roadblocks that arose.

After being back at their jobs for two months, the class came together to share how they applied their new skills to increase their impact as senior leaders. They shared ways the program has helped them approach situations differently, tackle complex challenges and even improve their personal lives.

They ended with a workshop on personal productivity to learn how to pivot their time from focusing on tasks that can overwhelm to carving out time to dedicate to longer lasting strategic activities.

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At Rotman, we learn best practices in theory, use cases to apply those theories, and finally create personalized action learning plans to apply your new skills and mindsets as soon as you return to work.  If you’re ready to move from managing people to increasing your impact at the enterprise level, join us March 27-31, 2017 or call me at 416.946.0722.

What you need to know before a negotiation

Negotiation skills may not always appear on a job description, but having them will help you in almost any role. To be an effective leader you need to be able to balance analytical skills with a broad array of decision making and interpersonal skills. This is no easy task. So how do great leaders build or develop their negotiations skills so they can add value to any situation? They practice.

There’s no better way to learn about negotiation than with an experiential, hands-on approach. Models, concepts and theories are helpful, but sitting down face to face with another person (or group of people) will help you truly develop your toolkit.

Senior managers, directors, and executives will face a variety of different types of negotiations during their careers—some significantly more complex than others. The most important thing to do before entering a negotiation is to do your homework. Ask yourself these questions:

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Where is the value?
Putting a dollar amount on an item in a negotiation can be helpful, but there are  other kinds of value. Is it valuable because of time or its impact on other resources? Studying examples of existing negotiations to see where different sides placed value can give you a greater level of insight into both your own position and that of the other party.

What are your goals?
You can’t negotiate if you don’t know what you’re hoping to get out of it. What is your ideal outcome? What are your must haves versus your nice to haves? Aside from the deal you hammer out together, there are other, less concrete elements that might also factor into your bargaining, such as your relationship with the other party. And speaking of that relationship…

What kind of relationship do you have with the other party?
A negotiation that is based on mutual trust will go better for everyone involved. It’s important to establish trust at the onset. Often this can involve agreeing to a fair process regardless of the outcome. Take a close look at your existing relationship with the other party, but don’t forget to do a careful self-assessment, as well. Personality, ethics, culture, even your willingness to use particular strategies can impact your negotiations. If you’re working with a team, are you all on the same page? How will your team react to strategies used by the other party?

Great negotiators have the skills to get the deal done, but they also know how to evaluate the success of a negotiation after the fact, how to lead a negotiation team effectively, and how to create value for their organization.

And those skills are important in any leadership role. By practicing negotiation, you can improve your communication and persuasion skills and learn how to wield more influence in other situations.

Rotman’s Strategic Negotiations program is led by expert faculty and is designed to provide you with a safe but challenging environment where you can develop your negotiation skills alongside other senior professionals.