People

When people are the problem, make them the solution

The partnership had a performance program in place, but the partners themselves weren’t following it. They were promoting people in their teams who hadn’t been meeting expectations, let alone exceeding them. It had become an accepted practice driven by the fear of losing people in a tight employment market. The firm’s leadership knew this was not the road to excellence.

The solution was to work with the partners themselves. The first step was to listen to the partners individually to determine the underlying problems, then to feed an assessment of those problems back to the partnership as a group to gain a shared understanding. A workshop was then able to gain agreement on the approach so an implementation plan could be put in place.

The plan addressed the underlying problem of poor performance on the part of the team members. Partners were coached on how to hold effective performance conversations with their team members and staff received training to upskill them in their areas of need.

The program reaped huge rewards for the partners as well as staff, and especially firm’s overall performance.

Ten policies, one strong foundation

The law firm was growing fast but had no dedicated HR team and no formal set of People policies - just informal practice and whatever precedent had built up along the way. Left unaddressed, this created real exposure: nothing to point to on workplace behaviour, leave, conflicts of interest or performance issues, and no consistent starting point as the firm kept hiring.

The solution was a structured policy program that began with a collaborative session with key stakeholders to clarify exactly what the firm needed, ensuring whatever was built reflected both its legal obligations and its values. Ten core policies were drafted covering the essentials - from workplace health and safety and respectful behaviour through to grievance resolution, privacy and conflict of interest - written in plain, accessible language rather than dense legal text, and delivered in a ready-to-use format for onboarding and day-to-day reference. A staff information session, and a post-implementation review made sure the policies were understood and not just filed away.

The firm gained a compliant, practical policy foundation it didn't have before, along with a clear framework of further policies to add as it continued to grow.

Personal brand vs. firm brand

The firm leadership knew the importance of the personal brand and the need for partners to have an individual presence in the marketplace and were worried that some partners were doing this at the expense of the firm’s overall brand. They wanted to strengthen the firm’s public image as well as that of individual experts and needed help to find balance between the personal brands of their partners and consistency with the firm’s brand.

The solution was to work with the partners as a group to clearly identify and articulate the firm’s brand and how this should be used going to market. Once this was shared and understood, it was possible to work with each partner to create a personal plan that included key messaging, a content plan and individual coaching. This created not only effective messaging for the firm, but injected enormous confidence into its partnership that saw people achieving more individually and together.

A guiding hand for leadership

The firm valued its culture and took pride in how its values guided everyday behaviours. But they had noticed that this didn’t always help the more senior people in the firm when they needed to step up in new management roles. They wanted a program that would guide leadership behaviours and help make leaders more effective in line with the desired culture.

The solution was an assessment of the current situation – what was working and what wasn’t. Then a workshop with the leadership group to distil their perspectives of what was important, what they wanted to create for the firm, and the behaviours they felt would create that. The result was a robust set of leadership principles to complement the existing values. The team felt they had created these themselves and were happy to own and follow them. The principles were supplemented by a coaching program to help the new leaders get the most out of their position and their people.