How the best leaders align their firms values with strategy

In the first part of a series, Nick Humphrey explores how law firm managers can champion their firm’s values while encouraging behaviours that ensure those principles become more than mere lip service.

Accountability, loyalty, community and compassion – such values represent a moral compass that can help guide people through tricky ethical dilemmas.

Similarly, in the context of the legal sector, a firm’s values are the collective beliefs or convictions held by its partners and employees that determine how they must conduct themselves in the accomplishment of the firm’s vision and mission.

The merit of values should not be underestimated. As business consultants and authors Jim Collins and Jerry Porras argue: “Core values are the essential tenets of an organisation. A small set of timeless guiding principles, core values require no external justification; they have an intrinsic value and importance to those inside the organisation.”¹

There are many values and beliefs which may be important to you personally and to your firm collectively, including:

One of the most innovative – and successful – businesses of our time, Facebook, provides an inspiring example for law firms seeking to use values as a platform for achievement. The values for employee and company success at Facebook are:²

• Focus on impact: “If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems.”
• Move fast: “We have a saying: ‘Move fast and break things.’ The idea is that if you never break anything, you are probably not moving fast enough.”
• Be bold: “We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.”
• Be open: “We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact.”
• Build social value: “We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.”

Having such unambiguous values provides clarity of purpose for Facebook’s leaders and employees. While the appropriate values at your firm are likely to differ from those of a technology firm, it is important to nail your colours to the mast.

Negative values

You may find that negative values have crept into the culture of your firm. They are typically the opposite of the positive values listed above. So, rather than transparency (which implies openness, full disclosure and accountability), a firm may have a culture in which information is tightly held by the executive and released selectively, or management may not hold itself accountable to its stakeholders.

Similarly, rather than teamwork, the culture of the firm may be based on silos, with individuals taking credit for work, people doing work that others are better suited to do, or leaders directing their team rather than listening to feedback. Instead of being ‘nimble and moving fast’, firms risk becoming bureaucratic and introspective while generating endless policies and procedures and making decisions by committee.

Rather than being bold and having the courage to back a new strategy to address a dynamic and complex market, firms can become stagnant and complacent. They stick to the old way of doing things in the belief that it ‘ain’t broken’ (which is probably what the board of Kodak said about the threat of digital photography).

You may also find that you personally exhibit some of these negative values. It may well be you have always worked in a firm where the culture was toxic and the senior partners showed little integrity, no transparency, and fostered mediocrity rather than excellence. It requires introspection, emotional maturity and a high level of self-awareness to realise you personally exhibit these values.  It is even harder to change.

Enshrined behaviours

After you have ascertained key values (both individually and collectively) you will then need to clarify the key behaviours to be linked to those values. These behaviours will arise from the intersection of your values (or the firm’s values) with your (or the firm’s) critical success factors. To have the most impact, ensure you pick only three or four values and prepare a succinct statement of the expected behaviours which support those values.

For example:

Smart examples

Some of the major professional services firms provide an insight into how expected behaviours can support values. At Deloitte, one key value is to “have fun at work, and celebrate our achievements and personal milestones, both big and small”.³ The necessary behaviours that ensure this value is meaningful include:

• embracing a playful culture with a serious intent;
• rewarding and recognising positive behaviour and successes;
• encouraging colleagues to strive to produce their best work;
• providing opportunities to contribute to the community; and
• celebrating the diversity of its people.⁴

Likewise, at Boston Consulting Group ‘partnership’ is a dearly held value, with partnering involving people working together for a common objective and mutual benefit. To achieve such an objective, BCG says: “We take a long-term view in our relationships. We strive to build bonds founded on respect, caring, honesty, mutual support, and investment. We work together in a manner that is team-oriented, constructive, and challenging. … We know that teamwork and cooperation are essential to our success both as a company and as individuals.”⁵

At Accenture, stewardship is a key value that acts as a caretaker of the interests of all stakeholders, including staff, other partners and the community. Accenture defines this as: “Fulfilling our obligation of building a better, stronger and more durable company for future generations, protecting the Accenture brand, meeting our commitments to stakeholders, acting with an owner mentality, developing our people and helping improve communities and the global environment.”⁶

Time to act

As a means of ensuring that values become more than just words, author Simon Sinek suggests: “We remind ourselves of our values by writing them on the walls … as nouns.  Integrity. Honesty.  Innovation.  Communication, for example.  But nouns are not actionable.  They are things.  You can’t build systems or develop incentives around those things.  It’s nearly impossible to hold people accountable to nouns.  … For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs.  It’s not ‘integrity’, it’s ‘always do the right thing’.  It’s not ‘innovation’, it’s ‘look at a problem from a different angle’.”⁷

By taking such action, law firms have the opportunity to truly become values-based organisations – to the benefit of their employees and clients.

Nick Humphrey is a partner and head of corporate at Sparke Helmore. He is the chairman of the Australian Growth Company Awards and author of several books on business and law, including the Australian Private Equity Handbook.

www.sparke.com.au

Footnotes

¹ “Building your Company’s Vision”, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Harvard Business Review, September-October 1996, page 3.

² http://deliveringhappiness.com/facebooks-5-core-values-for-success-at-work/#sthash.vyWOyeO3.dpuf

³  Deloitte Culture and behaviours: http://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/culture-behaviours-signals.html

⁴  Ibid

 ⁵ Boston Consulting Group, “Values – Partnership”, http://www.bcg.com/about_bcg/vision/values.aspx

⁶  Accenture, See “Core Values”, https://www.accenture.com/ng-en/company-corporate-citizenship-diversity.aspx

⁷  Simon Sinek, “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Action,” Penguin, 2009, pp66-67.