Tag Archives: Leadership

PUZZLE PIECES – Part 7

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With the added context of David Brooks’ article on leadership, “The Humble Hound,” (NY Times, April 9, 2010) (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/opinion/09brooks.html), we resume the imaginary cross-examination of a very real senior partner profiled in “Not Done Yet” (ABA Journal, April 2010) (http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/not_done_yet)  

Partner: “If you’re asking me whether we have very talented attorneys who don’t progress to equity partnership, my answer is yes.”

Q: “Compared to you and those who rose those through the ranks with you, it’s a lot of very talented attorneys, isn’t it?”

Partner: “Sure.'”

Q: “That’s because today’s big firm business model requires leverage — lots of non-equity attorneys and other time-billers for every equity partner, right?”

Partner: “Look, big law firms have become businesses. I didn’t make it that way and I can’t ignore the marketplace. If we don’t maintain high equity partner profits through appropriate leverage ratios and other means, we’ll lose our ability to attract and retain the best people. If that happens, the entire institution will be at risk and we’ll endanger the jobs of everyone who works there. It’s called free market capitalism and I didn’t invent it.”

Q: “You didn’t invent the phrase, ‘pulling up the ladder,’ either, did you?”

AND HUBRIS, too

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David Brooks is right on this one — and the legal profession is Exhibit A.

Before resuming my imagined cross-examination of a distressingly real biglaw senior partner in “PUZZLE PIECES,” I want to pause on Brooks’ April 9 NY Times column. He makes my point in a broader context: the pervasive absence of thoughtful reflection that passes for leadership is not unique to big law firms.

Looking at corporate America, he asks, “Who’s in charge?”

Then he answers his own question: “They are superconfident, forceful and charismatic.”

To these characteristics, I would add another: hubris.

Having navigated internal politics to reach the pinnacle of power in their organizations, they don’t revisit their guiding principles. Armed with an MBA (or at least, the equivalent mentality of misguided metrics), they validate their governance using the same criteria that swept them to the top.

As a result, attorneys who enjoyed every advantage as they rose through the ranks have now tied themselves to a mypoic view that encourages them to pull up the ladder on their kids’ generation. Compared to the growing national debt that preoccupies many with concern for our progeny’s well-being, baby boomer greed is wreaking far more enduring havoc.

Brooks argues in favor of an alternative style: the humble hound — a leader who combines “extreme personal humility with intense professional will” and “thinks less about her mental strengths than about her weaknesses…She understands she is too quick to grasp pseudo-ojective models and confident projections that give the illusion of control.”

To save them from themselves, big law firms need more such leaders. But who will mentor candidates through the daunting journey into equity partnerships and then upward?

Certainly not 64-year-old senior partners who don’t think about their own retirements until they receive lists of firm nominees for their management committees, only to find that because of advancing age their names aren’t on them.

What can you say about a leader for whom the approach of a 65th birthday comes as a surprise?