‘Delegate Now to Supercharge Your Profits’ – read our second exclusive extract

In a series of short excerpts from a new book, Dan Warburton shares his insight on how law firm owners and senior managers can increase their profits by being better at delegating their workload. Over the course of the next three weeks Today’s Conveyancer is serialising Delegate Now to Supercharge Your Profits with a weekly extract providing practical advice and guidance for firms. 

In our second extract Dan shares some guidance on how firms might think about approaching the management of their teams…

 

 

A law firm owner who succeeds in building a highly profitable business – while having the free time to focus on what matters to them – implements proactive management, not reactive management.

So, what is the difference between proactive and reactive management?

I’ll give you a set of examples of what it looks like when a law firm owner is reactively trying to manage everything in their firm:

  • They make themself available and contactable at all times.
  • They don’t set and communicate boundaries.
  • They usually give answers to issues.
  • They advise instead of leading team members to find and offer solutions to the challenges they face.
  • They don’t schedule regular one-on-one calls with key team members or heads of departments.
  • They don’t make clear requests by including a measurable result and a time frame that’s agreed upon.
  • They don’t have regular set times to train their team members to become aware of their mistakes so they can stop repeating them.

Law firm owners who look like the list above leave themselves constantly ‘reacting’ to situations as they arise. They often have to stop what they are doing to handle something. This causes them to break their concentration repeatedly across the day, so they often need to stop and restart what they are trying to do.

At the end of a day’s work like this – trying to do billing work and continually being interrupted with urgent matters from associates – most law firm owners end up absolutely exhausted and with a feeling that they haven’t done anything productive with their time.

Let’s explore two of the above examples.

Communicate your boundaries

It’s important to let your team members know what your boundaries are, and it will sometimes take some self-enquiry for you to determine what they are before you can communicate them.

One boundary could be that as soon as they know they can’t meet a deadline, they need to text you so that you can make new arrangements.

Another boundary might be scheduling particular times when you are not to be disturbed. Put them on a shared calendar and ensure that everyone knows to leave you be during these periods. Now, you have carved out sacred, quiet periods when you can get your most important work done.

Another boundary might be requesting that half-finished work does not get submitted to you; you expect work to be completed before it is shared. Instead, associates are to tell you when they can’t finish the piece on time. On the next one-on-one meeting, you can then investigate what has happened with them, and support them to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen again.

Set regular one-on-one calls with key team members

Scheduling regular one-on-one calls is one of the first things I work on with my clients.

When they are not in place, it’s very difficult to give associates and managers the time they need to become truly valuable team members. This is because it’s impossible to consistently distinguish what each team member’s challenges are, or to help them find and implement the solutions to overcome those challenges.

I’ve come to see that there really is no other way than leading regular one-on-one calls to lead and manage team members effectively.

Before working with me, some of my clients said they had regular weekly group meetings, but such meetings never offered the support the associates needed to become superstar fee-earners, which is why they contacted me.

The benefits of leading regular one-on-one video calls or in-person meetings are extraordinary when it comes to increasing the reliability of team members hitting their billing targets and taking the weight off your shoulders.

You might be thinking that you speak to some of your managers and heads of department many times a day already, so don’t see the value in this. Such regular conversations about meeting client needs, or to work on some aspect of a project, are not the same. In these conversations, there is rarely any extra time to re-evaluate the broader picture, which is why this needs to be regularly scheduled.

Next weekWhen team members don’t feel loyal to you or the success of the firm, it’s probably because they don’t feel they are getting what they want from their position in the company. As a result of this, you’ll likely experience team members breaking their contracts and leaving their employment positions early.

 

About the author

Dan Warburton has spent more than 25 years developing and implementing advanced leadership and management strategies and helping business owners achieve new levels of success. Since 2020, Dan has specialised in guiding law firm owners on how to use delegation skills to gain extraordinary results in their firms. It is not uncommon for Dan’s clients to gain a revenue increase of more than 100% in less than a year while more than halving their workloads. In Delegate Now to Supercharge Your Profits, Dan brings those decades of expertise together in a must-read, practical book.

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