I recently read Turning the Mind Into an Ally by Sakyong Mipham, about mindfulness practice. The book on its own is interesting and if you are looking into starting meditation practice, it provides an accessible path to beginning the work towards peaceful abiding. In the book, Mipham begins one chapter with an observation by his golf instructor, who remarked that most of us look to outside conditions for success instead of creating the proper conditions for success from within. This statement perfectly characterizes the goal of in-house work. As in-house lawyers, we are tasked with creating the proper conditions for success from within the organization. Naturally, the definition of success for different-in house groups, even within the same company, will not be identical. However, common threads exist, and can be woven together to create successful in-house work.
What does it mean to create conditions for success from within for in-house counsel? Not everything we do will be an objective success and, many times, a success for in-house counsel may never be fully quantified or recognized, because the “win” consisted of preventing damage, or clearing a path through a web of regulations or requirements necessary to support a new effort. This lack of quantifiable metrics, however, is not a reason to ignore the introspection necessary to create success from within.
In my experience, the following elements must be present to create success in an in-house capacity:
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- Communication
- Known Goals
- Continuity & Laying Groundwork for the Future
- Setting and Meeting Expectations
- Tracking and Evaluating Results
Let’s go through the first two elements:
1a. Communication (issuing communications)
Communication is always important. Whether large or small, organizations have different needs and obstacles to communication. There isn’t much that can get done by single individual in a business. In-house counsel has to work with colleagues in other divisions performing different functions to keep the gears of industry humming. For example, Legal groups regularly must work with finance, procurement, audit, and sales functions to support the individual functions and the organization as a whole. Each of these groups have their own language. To communicate effectively, you must find a common alphabet. You create conditions for success by speaking words your listener understands and avoid the obstacles of confusion, frustration, and irritation. When you clear these obstacles, you can focus on the content of your communications which should be accessible, authoritative, concise, but most of all, clear.
1b. Communication (receiving communications)
Listening. It is so difficult. When a lawyer listens to others, he is not sharing his wealth of knowledge and charm with the world. There is a reason volumes of books have been written on listening and communication. It isn’t easy and it isn’t as fun to listen as it is to speak. By definition, in-house lawyers support their organization’s ultimate business goals. This means that to provide appropriate legal support, we have to listen. We have to listen to the larger objectives of the organization. We have to listen to the discrete needs of specific business functions. We have to listen to our colleagues in different functions to learn what has happened, what needs to happen, and why things aren’t happening. We may receive this information from formal communications that are obviously intended to convey such information, but information can also frequently come as a byproduct of other communications. This type of indirect information can be the most valuable, but also hardest to hear. To be effective, in-house counsel must listen to his colleagues for what is said and hear what is unsaid. The only way to absorb that kind of information is to be silent and present when interacting with colleagues. There are plenty of resources that address listening skills; don’t think about what you are going to say when the other person stops talking, look at the person speaking, repeat what the speaker says. Those skills apply to in-house counsel, but for in house-counsel, even more important is to be in a position to listen. Get invited to meetings, engage colleagues and find out what they are working on, and make it easy for your colleagues to share information, whether directly or indirectly. You can’t hear anything isolated in your office.
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2. Known Goals
In work, just as in life, you cannot succeed if you don’t know what you want. In nearly any endeavor, there must be some sort of end result or benchmark to determine if the effort was worth it. If you know your own goals, you must find a way to communicate those goals to your colleagues outside of Legal. If your goals and theirs do not match up, or are adverse to each other, you can either resolve that conflict and adjust your own goal, or realize that you are operating with an internal obstacle towards a goal within the larger organization. Known goals ties into communication skills because if your colleagues outside Legal do not know what you are working towards, those colleagues may not appreciate that Legal’s goals are ultimately aligned with theirs, and an inherent distrust of Legal by others within the organization can lead to (possibly inadvertent) avoidance behaviors instead of constructive collaboration.
Business organizations can be chaotic, busy, frenetic beings. People have their own jobs and interests to pursue, within or even alongside the overall goal of furthering the organization’s purpose. Time is precious and departments lean. It helps everyone to communicate clearly and concisely, listen well, and have a known objective to use as a compass on the daily trek up the mountain of industry.
Next week: Work isn’t an afternoon talk show. After talking and listening, there is the doing. We’ll go through the rest of the elements in the next column.
Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at [email protected].