Business Ideas from One of the Country's Top Consulting Firms

October 20, 2018 by MollyandLaney

Creating a Culture of Employee Development & Empowerment

We talk a lot about the importance of employee empowerment, and for good reason: when employees have more contribution in the way your small law firm or business operates, you stand to reap such rewards as increased productivity, improved employee engagement, satisfaction and loyalty, and the ability to deliver stellar client services—all of which contribute positively to your bottom line.

However, improperly coached or underdeveloped employees may not have the tools they need to be a valuable part of the conversations and decisions about business operations. Before you empower your employees, you need to be sure they are adequately prepared. Creating a culture of employee development at your firm will not only show you what your team is made of, but also instill confidence that your team members are capable of stepping up and taking the lead!

Here are some ways to ensure your corporate culture evolves in the right direction: away from dictating and commanding and towards development and coaching:

1. Practice the art of listening. Listening to your employees, and asking the right questions, is a surefire way to keep your team members motivated. When you can step back from shouting orders and start to tune in to the factors that are impacting productivity, you’ll get a full 360º view of what’s working—and what’s not—at your firm.

2. Remember, there’s no “I” in “Team.” As a leader, you are not an “I.” You are part of the collective “we.” Taking a team-centered approach to running your firm means you’re in the trenches with everyone else—listening, collaborating, and providing feedback to keep projects moving steadily forward. This doesn’t mean that you should forget about providing feedback on an individual level, but it does mean that some of this feedback will be provided as part of the daily dialogue as opposed to formal reviews or surveys.

3. Leverage the strengths of your employees. It’s easy to give employees a list of tasks that need to be completed. But it’s more beneficial to give employees tasks based on their unique skillsets, and ask for their input in how to best tackle those tasks. This challenges individuals to develop creative solutions, unlocks their potential, and ultimately bolsters their confidence while increasing their level of engagement.

4. Implement a “don’t tell” policy. Don’t dole out orders and commands; ask your team members for input and listen to their responses. You’ll draw out some amazing characteristics, unveil some hidden talents, and foster the development of a collaborative “we” culture that makes everyone feel valued, respected and empowered.

At a small law firm or business, it’s so important that every member of the team—leaders, employees and support staff—be capable, engaged and empowered. This is what will give your firm a competitive edge, and ensure its continued growth. Our Team Empowerment Academy guides leaders through the process of becoming coaches rather than commanders, and also offers hundreds of tools and techniques to help employees of any level become well-rounded professionals, prepared to step up and make important decisions for their firm or business.

Contact Hiring & Empowering Solutions

To learn more about the Team Empowerment Academy, or to find our how we can help with employee empowerment, training and development, contact us using the brief form below. We’re happy to provide a demo of our Team Empowerment Academy, or to learn more about what your law firm or business needed to improve performance—and its bottom line.

October 14, 2018 by MollyandLaney

Employee Empowerment, Leadership Development & Other Telltale Signs of an Innovative Law Firm

Innovation and lawyering don’t always go hand-in-hand. However, any business growth guru (us included) will tell you that any business, in any industry, needs innovation to thrive. It’s through innovation that businesses gain and maintain a competitive edge, and law firms are not an exception to this rule.

In the legal sector, innovation ultimately enables firms to deliver better quality client services, more efficiently. It keeps law firms relevant in the rapidly-changing legal services landscape. Today, clients don’t just appreciate innovation—they demand it. So let’s give the people what they want! Here are five elements to help you create a culture of innovation at your firm:

1. Empowerment, empowerment, empowerment: We love employee empowerment. We love employee empowerment so much, in fact, that it’s part of our company name. When it comes to driving innovation, there is no faster way to stomp out the sparks of ingenuity than by failing to empower your people. Firms spend thousands of dollars finding, recruiting and hiring top legal talent—don’t waste your investment by telling these highly qualified people where to go and how to get there.

Download Our Free e-Book

Empower your employees to follow their intuition and lead your firm to success—download our free e-Book, Intrapreneurs in an Entreprenur’s World: How to Empower Your Employees to Step Up and Lead and take the first step towards creating a future of innovation at your firm.

2. Acknowledge hard truths: Not every innovative idea is going to be a success—and if they were, how would you learn and grow? Failure is not the problem; failing to recognize when a project or initiative is dead in the water…is. Cut your losses, stop hemorrhaging resources, analyze why the project failed and what your team has learned as a result, and move on to the next innovative idea.

3. Foster a sense of community: Often times, innovation leads to change—and that is a scary prospect to many employees and leaders alike. However, when your team takes a collaborative approach to brainstorming or problem solving, the feeling that they are all in it together can overcome the fear of impending change and propel your firm towards game-changing innovation.

4. Set challenging goals: Simply stated, challenging goals push employees to perform at extraordinary levels. Challenging goals force innovation. Any firm can set goals that are realistic and easily-achievable. Truly innovative firms, however, will push their people into that sweet spot where a difficult objective results in the development of nontraditional solutions to traditional challenges.

5. Invest in leadership development: Without great leaders, innovation is sure to stall out. The leader(s) at your firm must be passionate about and capable of empowering employees. They must be able to humbly and graciously accept failure. They must be able to bring a team together, and set aggressive goals for them to reach. Do you trust your leaders to make decisions in the ambiguous situations that innovation will most likely create? Do your leaders have what it takes to make spur-of-the-moment choices, without much data to support those choices? Our Team Empowerment Academy is a virtual training and development program designed to equip leaders and employees with the tools and techniques they need to bring their careers and your firm to the next level—learn more about this one-of-a-kind program here.

If you think your law firm is exempt from the need to innovate, think again. Innovation is a requirement in today’s ever-changing legal environment, and your firm’s ability to gain competitive advantage and remain relevant absolutely depends on it.

Contact Hiring & Empowering Solutions

Hiring & Empowering Solutions offers recruiting and staffing services for small law firms and businesses. In addition to legal staffing solutions, we also offer employee empowerment, training and development programs designed to induce innovative thinking and, ultimately, improve your ability to deliver client services in a highly effective, highly efficient way. To learn more about how we can support your small law firm or business, contact us today.

October 4, 2018 by MollyandLaney

Crying Solo: Understaffed, Overworked & Other Unnecessary (but Common) Complaints of Today’s Solopreneur

Earlier this month—and maybe you’ve followed the story—a careless attorney, wanting to appeal a contempt order issued against his client, was forced to seek an extension of time due to a Microsoft Word failure. Trust us, we completely understand how quickly an unexpected technological setback can send even the most well-organized plan south without a moment’s notice. But as the legal world chided this attorney for his incompetence, this attorney felt the need to make an excuse to defend his actions: I’m a solo practitioner with limited resources.

What’s worse, is that he is not the first solo practitioner to use this as an excuse for ineptitude. In 2018 alone, there are dozens of cases where solo lawyers cited being understaffed or overworked as a reason why their representation was inadequate, or why their filings were late, etc.

We partner with solo and small law firms across the country, helping these hardworking attorneys with recruiting, staffing, employee training, leadership development—essentially everything they need to never have to complain about being understaffed or overworked. As we’ve worked with literally thousands of lawyers, we know only too well the real struggles that come along with being a solo practitioner: work-life balance (or the lack thereof); developing the willpower to be accountable to yourself (it’s so much harder than it sounds); and the sheer amount of stress that comes along with going out on your own. The last thing a talented and capable solopreneur needs to add to that list of challenges is having to prove that they can handle a big case…and it’s much harder to do that with so many less-than-competent attorneys running around crying solo.

Knowing when you need legal support staff—and how to find, recruit, hire and pay for a new employee—is the first step in never having to cry understaffed or overworked again. The right hire will not only be able to take loads of work off your very full plate, but can be empowered to become an efficient, resourceful and profitable asset to your firm.

For all the challenges that come along with being a solo practitioner, there are twice as many benefits: having full control over your legal services destiny; creating a niche-specifc practice vs. taking on all types of clients with a wide variety of legal needs because it is all about the billable hour; designing the work environment of your dreams; the flexibility of setting your own (sometimes unconventional) work hours…the list goes on. Having Hiring & Empowering Solutions in your corner can make the benefits of solo law practice even sweeter. We take the guesswork out of legal staffing and employee training and development, which can save a solo practitioner from feeling understaffed and overworked—not to mention thousands of dollars and countless hours of lost time.

Contact Hiring & Empowering Solutions

If you find yourself crying solo, maybe it’s time to reach out and contact our team. We’re happy to offer a complimentary consultation to discuss your pain points and find a solution that could save you time, money, sweat and (sometimes) tears. Contact us today to learn more.

September 25, 2018 by MollyandLaney

Why You Lost That Great Employee: Two Secrets to Employee Retention

You’ve gone through the hassle of hiring a new employee. You’ve reviewed overwhelming stacks of resumes, conducted countless interviews (most of them a complete waste of time), and made a final decision. You’ve invested time and energy training this person, developing them to the point where they can finally begin to free you up…

…and then they quit.

Why does this happen? And no, it’s not any of the reasons your employee tries to convince you of: it’s not that the job is a poor fit; it’s not that they’re unqualified for the position; it’s not because their spouse or their kid or their dog needs more attention. Why does this really happen?

Let us share a brief anecdote that perfectly explains why you’re losing great employees. We hired Beth as the key assistant to our lead entrepreneur. She started while the entrepreneur was on vacation, as that gave us a week to train her on the client management system and prepare her to hit the ground running upon his return. We expected that, when he returned from vacation, Beth would be up and running and in a position from which she could actually support him.

Beth was fantastic. She was a fast learner with a positive attitude. But the day after the entrepreneur returned from vacation, she quit. “I just can’t work with him,” she explained. “He’s nice, but I have no idea what he is saying, what he wants…I just can’t keep up!” This is what so many great employees try to say, but don’t. Fortunately, Beth’s honesty allowed us to stop and restart her training experience, and gave us the opportunity to revisit two important secrets to employee development and retention.

Secret #1: Kolbe

If you’ve used Kolbe, you love Kolbe. It’s a fun exercise that helps people understand how they operate. However, a valuable use for Kolbe is oftentimes overlooked: it can help team members understand where their (and each other’s) point of overwhelm and shut down is, thus preventing unrealistic expectations and miscommunication amongst teams. We would safely estimate that 99% of office communication problems are because of a lack of awareness in Kolbe.

Secret #2: The Gap® (The Strategic Coach® Concept)

The Gap® is a concept by the Strategic Coach® that explains how we, as individuals, become stressed out or discouraged…stuck in the gap between where we are, and where we want to be. When you’re on-boarding a new employee, it’s important for them to understand that it’s completely normal to be discouraged and overwhelmed by the learning process that lies ahead of them. The Gap® also provides specific strategies to help new employees along their journey, such as training plans with explicit target dates, etc. This is an effective tool for keeping new employees on track while reducing the amount of overwhelm they feel along the way.

In our years of experience helping boutique law firms and small businesses find, recruit and hire top-notch talent, we’ve found these two concepts to be crucial. Our Smart Hire Solution™ process leverages the power of Kolbe, encouraging all team members and leaders to review each other’s Kolbe and determine what it means for each person, in each role.

The hiring process is time-consuming, energy-draining, and expensive…especially just to have your new hire quit on you! Implementing one of both of these employee retention secrets can help prevent this from happening, and ensure a more seamless on-boarding process.

If you’d like to talk to us about any problems your company or firm is experiencing through its hiring and training processes, we encourage you to schedule a complimentary 30-minute discovery session with one of our lead management consultants.

September 19, 2018 by MollyandLaney

4 Employee Training and Development Secrets to Ensure Long-Term Success

In small law, oftentimes the biggest differentiator between firms that “make it” and firms that don’t is one simple thing: employee training and development. The value a firm places on finding, recruiting and hiring the best-of-the-best lawyers, paralegals, and legal support staff is directly proportionate to its future success. In addition, firms that offer regular training, and that provide employees with the tools they need to truly make a positive impact on the firm’s performance, find their employees to be more loyal, happy and hardworking.

Human resources are hands-down the most expensive asset a firm has. That’s why it’s so, so important for this investment to generate a positive return. But building a team of rock star staff members, and empowering them to step up and lead your firm straight to its business or revenue goals, isn’t as easy as it sounds. Trust us, we’ve spent our careers working with firms on staffing, team training and development, and employee empowerment. There’s an entitlement mentality that needs to be eliminated, office drama, balls dropping left and right, generational gaps, a shortage of great (not just good) people…and the people who are in the market for a job seem to have such narrow skill sets!

We can’t snap our fingers and make these inevitable legal staffing obstacles disappear, but we can share some of the employee training and development secrets that we’ve learned over the years. Here are four tips for effective employee training and development:

1. Take generational gaps into consideration…but don’t make assumptions! A 2016 Activia Training study found a surprising disparity in the way different generations of workers prefer to learn: the younger generation actually prefers an onsite learning environment, while more mature workers—those who are more likely to be balancing their professional life with a family and kids—enjoyed virtual training and development experiences. Of course, every individual prefers to absorb information in their own way—ask your people how they prefer to learn, and be willing to offer training options that meet a variety of lifestyle demands.

2. Keep employees engaged. A great training and development program will keep employees engaged with the material—they’ll feel connected to it, and have an easier time recalling what they’ve learned later on. It goes beyond engagement with the material, though. Finding an engaging way for employees to practice what they’ve learned is equally important. Some employees will prefer hands-on practice, while others will appreciate time to think about and absorb what they’ve learned before implementing the skills at work.

3. Be flexible; address the needs of both teams and individuals. When you enroll your team in a training and development program, it’s safe to say that not every individual will be starting off at the same level. Watch the performance of individuals as they undergo training. Recognize when certain people need extra help in certain areas. Tailor the training each employee receives to make them more well-rounded team members.

4. Ask for feedback. The best way to show an employee that you care whether or not their training and development program is valuable…is simply to ask! What was confusing? What resonated? Where are there holes in the material? Asking for feedback ensures that your employees receive effective training that actually fosters their growth as professionals, and your firm’s growth overall.

We can’t emphasize the importance of employee training and development enough. In fact, we’ve developed a virtual program—the Team Empowerment Academy—designed to equip employees and executives with over 200 tools and techniques to make them more empowered, effective leaders. The flexibility of this program is that employees can access workshops on an as-needed basis, based on what they want to learn, or on what they, as individuals, need to learn. There are also weekly masterclasses, led by our team of expert staffing consultants, that offer more personal, face-to-face learning experiences.

Hiring and Empowering Solutions also offers onsite training and development programs for those firms who prefer a more hands-on learning experience.

Schedule a Call and Get Started on Success!

Wherever your firm is—just getting started, thinking about hiring your first (or tenth) employee, how to get your existing team to step up and take ownership (care) in their role, how to create consistent monthly cash flow, or how to support that struggling employee—we can help. For 20 years we have taken over the staffing, training, development and empowerment for 500+ small law firms across the country. Schedule a call today and let’s talk about your firm’s goals…and how we can help you get there!