Any woman who graduated from law school and passed a bar exam is capable of developing all the necessary skills to lead her organization. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. Do not buy-in to the idea that you need charisma or a particular temperament. Do not let anyone convince you that you must be magically endowed with the right leadership traits or style. Good leadership flows from continually learning and refining the right set of skills for the unique context of your law firm, practice group, in-house law department, law school, or other legal organization.

Leadership is a process with three components: leader(s), follower(s), and goal(s). Leadership is goal-driven. Simply put, leadership skills are what enable leaders to identify the right goals and then develop and implement action plans to achieve those goals.

In my last post, I explained why women lawyers have an inherent leadership advantage for today’s legal landscape. It’s a complex landscape. The best way to lead in the face of complexity is with elegant simplicity. Here it is. There are only four skills that you need to worry about. I’m going to identify the four skills (other than the obvious need for technical excellence as a lawyer) and explain them. Let’s begin.

Skill #1: Identifying Goals

Goals fall into two categories. There are goals, which are necessary to solve problems and goals, which are intended to cause growth. An easy to understand and quite useful process for identifying goals is the B-school SWOT analysis. A leader must be able to think about her group, organization, system, and herself and be a first-class noticer of
internal Strengths and Weaknesses and external Threats and Opportunities. She must then be able to analyze the circumstances and decide upon and implement an action plan.

Is there a weakness that needs a solution? Is there a threat that is really an opportunity in need of innovation? Regardless of the type of goal, an action plan is the series of steps; which, if chosen appropriately and executed properly, leads to an intended goal. As you should have guessed, if they teach this in Business School then you, too, can learn this skill and with practice, hone it.

It’s helpful to have diversity of perspective to improve the process of noticing problems and opportunities and diversity of thinking to improve analysis and decision-making. Diversity rests in diverse groups, not in individuals. This brings us to the next leadership skill.

After the jump tips on leading diverse groups, understanding system dynamics, and leading through shared learning...

Skill #2: Leading Diverse Groups

The ability to lead diverse groups flows from one’s ability to build and encourage relationships among people so that they can collaborate effectively to reach group goals. In a law firm that requires building groups of people from different social identities, practice groups, hierarchical level, offices, client representation, and industry groups for the purpose of identifying strategic goals, developing action plans, and implementing them. It is about finding, organizing, and coordinating the passions and efforts of others to achieve goals.

Relationship building requires: (1) a genuine curiosity about other people and their differences and (2) strategic communication skills. Strategic communication is a combination of effective listening and giving effective feedback. Click here for an article on effective listening. Click here for an article on giving effective feedback. Strategic communication is particularly important for women lawyers, who often are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Unfortunately, there are myriad micro-inequities that exist around leadership communication and women and create a thin tightrope for women that women are expected to walk. Women are judged harshly for being tough negotiators or emotionless decision-makers and also judged harshly for being too soft, emotional, and people-focused. A woman’s messages may not be properly weighted just because she is a woman. Click here for an example.

Leading diverse groups also takes an ability to inspire others to take risks, which they will only do if they feel psychologically safe. Creating psychological safety happens when a leader creates a culture that supports and encourages learning from taking risks, making mistakes, and trying something different. This is the essence of learning. Learning is encouraged when leaders model the behavior and the system rewards its appearance. Creating a culture of learning is a strategic goal. Creating a culture of inclusion, a culture, which values diversity, is also a strategic goal. Effective listening, giving effective feedback, and building relationships through genuine curiosity are skills that anyone can learn.

Leading doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in law firms, in-house law departments, law schools, or other legal organizations. The system dynamics of each are complex and unique and a leader needs to understand how all the moving parts of her system fit together to produce its system’s goals. This brings us to the next leadership skill.

Skill#3: Understanding Your System’s Dynamics

All systems have their own performance dynamics. Leaders need to understand how their system performs. If you are leading a law firm, you need to understand how it generates business opportunities, creates a work product, and makes a profit. You must understand both sides of the balance sheet, the human dynamics and social systems, the explicit structures and roles, the processes, and the implicit sources of power including the political dynamics. The more a leader knows the better able she will be to analyze how well or poorly her system is working. Click here for an analytical model and example for analyzing law firm performance.

The purpose of understanding system dynamics is to be able to intervene in those dynamics with strategic goals and action plans to improve the performance of the system. As with every other skill mentioned in this post, understanding and intervening in system dynamics is a skill that can be learned.

Leading doesn’t happen without learning. This brings us to the final skill.

Skill #4: Leading through Shared Learning

A leader must be skilled at learning with the group she is leading. She is not driving or directing the group. She is participating with the group in a process of collaboratively figuring out how to implement a creative vision or other goal. As she leads the implementation process of any action plan, she learns which actions work and which do not. She views mistakes as opportunities to improve the implementation process because she is resilient and knows that it is through a series of experiments that one realizes one’s goals.

So, you might ask: How do I learn the skill of learning? The answer is simple.Just like learning to walk, you do it and when you fall, you get up and try again.