Articles Posted in Talent

David Krasnostein, the General Counsel of Australia’s National Australia Bank, went in-houses first as the lead lawyer for Telstra. An article explained that back then, about 1995, he attended Insead to take a “national executive business course for a couple of months.” The course widened his understanding of business (See my post of May 14, 2005 on executive training courses for high potentials.).

When he returned to Australia, he was made head of strategic planning and corporate planning. That assignment further broadened Krasnstein’s understanding of the business (See my post of Aug. 3, 2005 about the GC of Merrill Lynch and her broader experience.).

All general counsel should invest time in learning about their company’s business and more general business practices.

I have long advocated simplifying and reducing the number of titles in law departments. Doing so reduces jockeying for titles, makes easier the decisions on promotion and transfer, and enables more broad-banding of compensation.

Thus, I was surprised to learn that under the laws of at least one state, a lawyer who signs or certifies certain corporate documents, perhaps minutes of the board of directors or corporate resolutions, must bear the title “Corporate Secretary” or a recognizable variation on it. Strange, that is, to find a statutory bar to one aspect of title simplification.

Worried about cheerfulness in your law department? Try one of these low-cost tactics guaranteed to boost morale or double your lost respect back, as described with a straight face in the Manager’s Intelligence Report (Sample issue in Oct. 2005, at 2) (See my post of Oct. 29, 2005 on morale as a symptom.)

Sponsor a “Noon Movie.” Once a week, set up a VCR in the lunchroom and show a funny movie – perhaps the courtroom scenes of A Few Good Men, North Country, or To Kill a Mockingbird?

Set up a Humor Corner. Pick a funny-bone spot, and encourage people to post cartoons, jokes and other hilarious material – perhaps the latest management initiative memo, or law firm marketing material?

If a law department suffers from “low morale,” it is because one or more other elements of the department are out of joint, not that morale fluctuates on its own. Just as personal happiness is a consequence or byproduct, not an independent entity, morale flickers (or blazes) because the law department has a confused role (or a clearly understood one), suffers criticism from clients (or has earned their respect and praise), stumbles through making decisions (or resolves issues expeditiously), has a hodge-podge of titles and compensation (or titles consistently and pays above market), faces layoffs (or enjoys stable growth), and so on.

High morale follows alignment, order, clarity, respect, and purpose; low morale mutters about a law department at odds with its underlying elements.

Never having seen any data on the sources of new hires, I feel obliged to fabricate pseudo statistics:

48.37 percent of all new hires came to the attention of the general counsel from unsolicited resumes; 34.36 come from lawyers the general counsel knows personally; 12.4 percent from executive search firms; 8.23 percent from lawyers other lawyers in the department know, and 1.234 percent simply appeared on the headcount.

Please note that I have reported inflation-adjusted modal weighted moving average medians, with seasonal corrections and an emotional intelligence refraction index of 3.48, not to mention rounding off outlier percentages.

I bagel to differ, but here’s what Rob Vosper of Corp. Legal Times (Oct. 2005 at 14) insinuates: “For its first two years as a public company, Krispy Kreme thought it was a good idea to operate without a GC. During this period, management played fast and loose with the financials. Nobody at the company was willing or able to set an ethical tone and oversee internal controls.”

The quote implies that a general counsel would have kept Krispy Kreme from boiling in ethical oil. I doubt it. Policing the ethical behavior of a company should not fall primarily on the chief legal officer. (To this point, see my post of Aug. 27, 2005; and my post of Sept. 10, 2005 on Chief Governance Officers.)

Just look at my picture and you know that I can’t be writing from the standpoint of sartorial expertise. Nevertheless, I full well recognize that as it influences morale and retention and culture and gravitas, the dress code of a law department makes a difference. What the difference is, I have no idea and no benchmarks report performance differences between departments that are well dressed and those casually attired.

My advice remains simple: while onsite at a law department, everyone should remain dressed.

NLP claims to be a set of techniques drawn from the fields of psychology, linguistics and hypnotherapy, which supposedly help people achieve excellence in learning, business, and other areas of life. A critique in the Financial Times (Aug. 26, 2005 at 6), however, damned it from every angle.

“Many of the founding tenets of NLP are silly.” For example, “happiness is a choice,” and “No failures, only feedback,” and mostly, “Excellence can be duplicated.” After lambasting NLP’s emphasis on body language, the writer continues: “NLP’s insistence on classifying people into ‘types’ is silly.” How useful can it be to classify lawyers as “visual,” “auditory,” or “kinaesthetic.” The clinching blow – “Research into [NLP] is thin on the ground and the little that exists isn’t persuasive.” The 30-year running phenomenon is a “half-baked conflation of pop psychology and pseudo-science.”

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the NLPlay?

A survey of the FTSE 100 companies – conducted by The Test Agency Hogrefe, a psychometric test publisher – received 73 responses, and 59 of them said they use some form of psychometric testing (Fin. Times, July 18, 2005 at 8). Managers are the most common subjects for the tests, with 80 percent of the respondents using tests on that level.

If a comparable survey were conducted among the Fortune 100, the sheer size of those companies would make it almost certain that at least a half have given behavioral style, personality, intellectual power, and other tests to some groups of their employees. (For more on psychometric instruments and law departments, see my posts of April 18, 2005 on MBTI scores of lawyers, April 9, 2005 on Hartman-Kinsel, and Aug. 21, 2005 on MBTI.)

When I ask during speeches on managing talent how many of the attendees have taken Meyers-Briggs, usually a third or so of the law department lawyers have taken it. My sense, however, is that they took the MBTI as part of an offsite retreat, to stimulate talk about teamwork and tolerance, which is more for amusement than to change how the law department recruits staff, evaluates lawyers, guides careers, or melds an effective team.

Pritchard Law Webs has announced that its host (LaVern Pritchard) has created software that prepares a thesaurus/taxonomy. Readers may not appreciate the importance of having a taxonomy if their law department hopes to organize its knowledge, but it is crucial. Or at least that is what I glean from the post.

It notes that “wisely-conceived taxonomies are critical core components of sophisticated expert support systems.” (three nouns and six adjectives!) In other words, if you have no organizing principles for your documents, you will struggle to retrieve them.

Left unanswered for me is whether excellent search engines, like Google Desktop, will do the trick even if there are no taxis in sight.