Deal management for legal

How to create outlook signature

[Music] welcome back to lawyers lens today we're going to talk about managing people and this is something I know a lot of lawyers struggle with and find really frustrating and it's not surprising right HR and management is not taught in law school so most lawyers become managers without having any actual training and how to do it well that's me too and I have been managing people now for years and it's been work and you can do it too because the thing is management is a discipline that you can learn it's a skill that you can train it's not just something that you have to just pick up on the fly so if you found it frustrating to manage people one of the first things that I would do is recognize that some of that lives with you and that's a hard thing to recognize it was hard for me too because I was focused in my frustration on the people that weren't doing what I wanted them to do but the reality is that sometimes and probably most of the time the fault lies with me as the manager and so one of the first things that you can do is recognize that there might be some flaws in your management style and maybe a place to start is to do some reading I'll recommend two good books radical candor by Kim Scott and drive by Daniel pink are two very modern good management books to get you started in thinking about these things and then once you read them you will undoubtedly uncover other books and resources and materials and ideas that you want to explore further now another thing that you can do to make management easier is to have really clear values and expectations around the way things are going to get done at your firm and on a specific project now values we've talked about before and I'm going to talk about at more length in a future video but if you are clear on what are the cultural values that your firm has whether it's hard work dogged persistence or collaboration or whatever they are then that will help put some parameters around how the work ought to get done your firm and also being really clear about your expectations do you expect people to bring lots of questions back to you do you expect that there will be regular check-ins do you expect that somebody is going to deliver you perfect work it's probably unreasonable or do you expect that you're going to go through a series of revisions on the work how much coaching and consulting are you going to do with the people who you're asking to do the work for you and then what do you want the final product to look like right have you actually specified what form it should be in and how long it should be and which qualities it ought to have being clear about those expectations can really help you get the kinds of things you want but again I really think the place to start is in recognizing that you could learn more about management and then making the effort yourself to get better at that skill because as you get better what you will find is that the frustrations that you're having with management now will start to drop away as you get better about management as you get more involved in being a manager and doing a good job of supervising and coaching and mentoring the people that you work with and over time I know what can happen because this is what I've experienced instead of frustration you're going to start experiencing delight as the people who you ask to do things for you are going to start working with you and bringing back work product that blows you away it's possible and you can get there but you have to put in some time to improve yourself as a manager and learn how to work better with the people around you now if you want to join the tribe of solo and small firm lawyers who are building future oriented entrepreneurial law practices join lawyers to insider you can find it on lawyers.com click community in the nav menu and you'll get access to free resources and if you're a solo or small for lawyer in the US and Canada you can join our private Facebook group we hope to see you there [Music]