#8 - Takin' Care of Business
Productivity, part 1 - As Simple as Acquiring Seven Effective Habits?
In the words of a song from 2021: “Checklists all around, ain’t no time for sleeping … whatever I do, it’s never enough1”.
I don’t know whether the writer of these lyrics had friends within the in-house legal community; but from a number of recent conversations, I know that many lawyers at the moment feel that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done.
This week’s email to me is from an Assistant General Counsel in a corporate in Canada. She works for a large banking corporation and raises an issue that I have been asked about on many occasions – how can I achieve optimal productivity? Is there something simple that I am missing?
Spoiler alert: I don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all-solution.
Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits is an excellent book and I often recommend it, but I don’t think it’s as simple as working on Seven Effective Habits, or downloading the latest productivity app.
Read on for what I regard as a key factor in your achieving personal productivity.
And next week a further dive into the topic of productivity.
Enjoy reading, and please comment and contribute to the debate by posting direct on Practical Counsel. Also, please write in with your unique people issues to me (jonathan@middleburghassociates.com) - I unequivocally undertake never to reveal your identity and will change key details of your situation so as to preserve your confidentiality and anonymity (unless you don’t want this). I also undertake to write to you personally with my own thoughts and comments on your situation and am always happy to follow up with a call on Zoom or similar.
‘Dear Jonathan’ … and Jonathan’s Reply
Dear Jonathan,
I’ve read the first few issues of Practical Counsel with interest. I totally related to your comments about the pressure in-house lawyers have been under during pandemic. In my experience, though, there never seem to be enough hours in the day to get everything done.
I’m an Assistant General Counsel for a large Banking corporation in Canada. I lead a team of 8 lawyers and have a mix of functional responsibilities and managerial responsibilities. In addition I sit on various internal groups (for example I am involved in D&I initiatives within the Bank).
I think that I am reasonably efficient, but at times I feel totally snowed under and struggle to meet deadlines. This can make me feel extremely stressed at times.
I’ve been on internal and external courses around time management and read a couple of self-help books. I’m interested in your take on whether there are some best practices around time management that work for all in-house attorneys? If so, what do you think they are?
Best wishes
Sue (she / her)
Dear Sue
Thanks for your email. I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been struggling at times, especially during the pandemic. I hope that it’s provided you with a bit of reassurance to know that you haven’t been alone in feeling overwhelmed at times. Lawyers have told me, again and again, through pandemic, how busy and stressed they are.
Now too, as some countries are tentatively emerging from the worst of the pandemic, senior lawyers are telling me that they are struggling to cope with the volume of work.
This week I’m going to do things slightly differently. I’m going to share with you the GC Expert Insight of the Week, from Jeffrey Pomeranz, and react to that insight, rather than giving you my advice and then providing the GC view.
So here’s the GC view, and I’ll be reacting to that view, and providing some further comments and thoughts of my own.
Jonathan
GC Expert’s Insight of the Week
Jeffrey Pomeranz (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpomeranz/) worked as an in-house attorney for over ten years, including serving as Senior Vice President, Legal & Compliance, and General Counsel of Mortgage Connect LP, and Counsel, Transactions, for Altisource Portfolio Solutions S.A. (NASDAQ: ASPS).
Jeffrey is now Principal of Pomeranz Law PLLC (pomeranzlaw.com), a Florida-based business law and litigation firm representing business across myriad industries and verticals.
Dear Jonathan
The in-house role can be a great platform to develop a robust arsenal of both technical and soft skills. Unfortunately, the process by which such development occurs is often through an (over-) abundance of responsibility, tasks and assignments. Finding efficiencies is the quickest way to improve effectiveness. The following techniques are not novel; however, they may fall outside the standard practices of in-house counsel.
Clean your desk: Clutter consumes attention and is a constant reminder of everything you have to do. Simplify the visual by scanning documents into well-organized folders (see below).
Organization is a must: While no one way exists to maintain documents, emails, files, etc., organization is binary and can be distilled into one question – can you readily find what you are seeking? As an example, I label every version of a contract in sequential order with dates and a description identifying the applicable owner. This may seem like overkill to many; however, I can, with immediacy, both locate a document in its subfolder and identify changes between different versions to understand the evolution of negotiations. The investment into organization pays dividends.
Create an actionable to-do list: Listing out all action items provides the obvious benefit of centralizing open obligations into one document. The real benefit, though, is freeing up headspace. A few suggestions to improve the efficacy of this technique include the following: (i) build a template with excel to organize the action items; (ii) include sequential numbers to prioritize tasks, dates for when you will perform the work, descriptions of what needs to occur, etc.; (iii) create the habit of updating the list every day before shutting down for the evening; and (iv) print out the list and allow it to be the only paper that remains on your desk.
Self-assess your functional and managerial responsibilities: This can be a challenging balance, especially at a senior level of an organization. That said, most managers are likely to feel that they are focusing more on their functional responsibilities than managing and developing their direct reports. Combine the focus on the functional responsibilities with calls and meetings, and the day can disappear. This will compound any feelings of stress. The actionable to-do list I talked about above provides an opportunity to take a holistic inventory of what your day-to-day entails. And from this self-assessment, you will generate opportunities to free up your bandwidth. If you are spending too long on administrative tasks, seek budget for an operations manager to shoulder those responsibilities.
Stay diligent: Creating efficiencies requires discipline. Creating a to-do list on day one is great, but it will be lost if the desk is messy on day two. Likewise, reviewing day-to-day responsibilities and identifying opportunities for delegation only works if you actually delegate. Developing strong sustained habits are integral to this process.
I hope that Sue finds this helpful.
Best wishes
Jeffrey
Jonathan’s Further Comments
Dear Sue
Jeffrey provides some excellent suggestions for how to rationalise your tasks and for how to create some efficiencies.
In one sense, I don’t disagree with a word of Jeffrey’s analysis. Much of what he says makes superb sense, and you will find similar suggestions in a host of books, articles and other content about how to organise your time, manage your mind and achieve greater productivity.
Equally, I am quite sure that these approaches work very well for Jeffrey, otherwise he wouldn’t be recommending them to you.
The danger with Jeffrey’s approach and that of most of the self-help content out there is that – in my view - it assumes that what works for one person will work for everyone. This is not the case, in my experience. And the fact that it is not the case is of critical importance not just to how you work out how best to manage your time. It should also influence how you coach and mentor others to help them to figure out for themselves how best to manage their time.
Most of my readers will have come across Stephen Covey’s seminal work, ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’. If they haven’t I would recommend that they buy a copy and read it.
Covey proposes developing seven habits (see summary below), which he argues will transform your individual effectiveness. Many of these are now well-known, for example being proactive, beginning with the end in mind, putting first things first, and so on.
Covey’s book has spawned a veritable industry of similar self-help books, many of which are also, in their own way, excellent.
And in the same way that I don’t seriously detract from anything that Jeffrey advocates, I don’t disagree with almost anything that Covey says. Indeed, as I say, I recommend the book regularly, and (with attribution) borrow from it.
But here’s the thing.
Individual personality factors will shape and determine what works best for you, productivity wise. For every two lawyers who find the colour-coded, numbered, excel-generated checklist helpful, there will be one or two lawyers who can’t work that way. They will know, often from bitter experience, that the checklist gets started but they just never seem to get round to maintaining it or following through with steady application. These are the kind of lawyers who might end up having two checklists on the go, and then wind up mislaying both of them.
For these lawyers, their desk will not be the pristine, cleared, desk of Jeffrey’s office, with one solitary piece of paper – the checklist – on the desk. They may well envy Jeffrey’s desk when they look at their own cluttered desk – but in their heart of hearts they know that their desk will never look like Jeffrey’s.
Understand. I’m not advocating inefficiency here. I’m recognising that the colour-coded, numbered, checklist and the Six Sigma project plan is optimal.
However I’m also recognising personality-driven reality, which is that not everyone operates in the same way, or is capable, in a sustained and sustainable way, of doing so.
Here’s a case in point. I recently coached an utterly brilliant disputes lawyer, a DGC, who won almost every case he worked on, and who was regarded with awe by his peers and juniors. I had to gather 360 degree feedback for him and the feedback was bi-polar - part stellar, part disaster. The feedback on work product was stellar; the feedback on organisational ability was, let us say, sub-stellar.
The DGC and I spent time together reviewing and processing the feedback. One approach would have been for me to provide this lawyer with the Seven Habits ‘playbook’ and a list of hacks similar to those suggested by Jeffrey. But this lawyer had great self-awareness, knew and understood his personality, and knew that he was never going to be the colour-coded checklist guy. The task for both of us was to find a set of hacks and habits that worked for him – which we (to an extent) did.
I’m going to talk much more about the so-called typology of personality in subsequent newsletters. If I tried to do so in this issue, the newsletter would be of unwieldy length.
So the point I’m going to make here is that some lawyers are linear and comfortable making checklists and project planning – and able to execute in a linear manner on a project plan. Some are more, shall I say, ‘emergent’ – which can at times be very challenging for their colleagues, and for themselves.
In a sense, the Jeffreys of the world need less help with issues and productivity. They are probably (I suspect) wired to figure out how to create a colour-coded checklist or a project plan or a gantt chart – and wired, equally, to follow through on it.
I don’t know your personality type, Sue,and it may well be that Jeffrey’s hacks work for you, in which case, great – job done.
More difficult is if you’re not the naturally linear, planful, type.
I’m going to make a few suggestions for you to think about, and then devote next week’s issue to rounding out the analysis and providing some further thoughts.
Here are some initial suggestions:
1. If you aren’t a natural project manager yourself, recognise this fact and try to partner with someone who is. Make them the custodian of the project plan and owner of the follow-through.
2. If that’s not feasible, and you have to own the plan bear in mind your own imperfections in drawing up the plan. Be self-aware. If you know that you tend to underestimate how long something takes to do, cross-check with a colleague or consciously add some time to the milestone dates.
3. Put in place some reminders or ‘ticklers’ that will hopefully keep you to the project plan. Recognise that you’re not the kind of person who is meticulous in following plans – and build in mechanisms to keep you to the plan.
Sue, I’m going to revert to this in more detail next week, in response to a similar question I’ve had from another correspondent. So watch this space. In the meantime, I hope that what I have already written is somewhat helpful to you.
As always, I encourage members of the Practical Counsel community to write in to me at jonathan@middleburghassociates.com with your people problems and issues that are currently concerning you, or that come up for you regularly. And, as always, I will anonymise your observations / issues and preserve confidentiality and write to you individually in response to any scenario that I use in this newsletter.
Best wishes
Jonathan
Key Takeaways
1. Many in-house lawyers are feeling overwhelmed, both by business as usual, and as a result of challenges caused by the pandemic.
2. There is a plethora of materials that can help in-house lawyers improve their efficiency and become more organised. These include books, apps, project management tools etc.
3. In my view, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the difficult issue of productivity.
4. Many of the books (e.g. Stephen Covey’s ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’), apps, and project management tools are excellent; but different things will work for different people.
5. Self-awareness as to personality type and personality preferences is, in my view, key to achieving better personal productivity and greater personal efficiency and effectiveness.
6. Understanding the personality type and personality preferences of those who report to you and those you coach is also key to helping them achieve better personal productivity and greater personal efficiency and effectiveness.
7. By way of example, someone who is naturally neither a linear planner nor a linear, task-focused, implementer, requires some different strategies to achieve their goals and to attain better personal productivity and greater personal efficiency and effectiveness.
8. In next week’s issue I will be focusing more on some different possible approaches and techniques.
9. This week’s issue has also offered some very useful suggestions and ‘hacks’ from a highly experienced in-house lawyer, Jeffrey Pomeranz.
And Now …
Contribute to the debate and write in with your comments and observations. Also write to Jonathan with any other people issues you face as an in-house lawyer.
Jonathan can be reached by email at jonathan@middleburghassociates.com
A note for you picky lawyers; and a plea for tolerance
I am a British lawyer by background and went to both school and University in the UK. So my English is British English. I have taken a conscious decision to write this newsletter in British English, but to try to avoid phrases that aren’t common outside the UK. Sometimes, though, I’ll use a phrase that isn’t commonly used outside the UK, without realising that it is a Britishism. I also endeavour to use the vernacular spellings of my contributors (e.g. to use US spellings for a US contributor), but won’t always get this right.
My plea is for you to tolerate the British spellings and grammar and the occasional Britishism. And to focus on the substance of the newsletter rather than the occasional (to you) annoying turn of phrase, bit of grammar or unorthodox spelling, or the occasional inconsistency in spelling as between, for example, UK and US ‘standard’ spellings.
Thank you and best wishes,
Jonathan Middleburgh
Strategic Partners
whatever-i-do by Ordinary Guy.