Encourage Openness With “Working With Me” Slides
Thoughtful, open-ended questions can surface useful information for attorneys working together. But to take this concept a step further, consider having attorneys create a document or slide that answers some common questions about their style and preferences and storing them in the team’s shared drive or folder.
For example, I worked with one client to build this template for their attorneys:
This idea was inspired by my time at Boston Consulting Group. There was a time at BCG when you could look up virtually any partner’s “How to Work with Me” slide and instantly skip months of haphazard trial-and-error-based learning. These cheat sheets can be invaluable. You are welcome to download this template from www.allrisebook.com to use as a starting point. I recommend you tailor it to include information your team finds useful. Talk to a sample of attorneys on your team, get their reactions, and make adjustments as needed.
In my seminars with attorneys, some suggest that only leaders, such as partners and senior associates, should fill out these sheets for the benefit of more junior attorneys. They worry that asking everyone to complete the exercise implies that the partner will pander to the idiosyncratic styles of every junior associate. This concern is perhaps rational, but entirely impractical. I have never met a junior associate naive enough to think that filling out a sheet with communication preferences will translate into partners bowing to those preferences at every turn. And while I do not doubt that such a rare junior associate exists, we are not solving for that outlier.
But if partners are not going to adhere to junior associates’ preferences, why bother asking for them?
Our goal is not to force one side to adapt to the idiosyncrasies of another. If you say to junior associates that only the partners have filled out “How to Work with Me” slides, we unnecessarily reinforce the image of partners as demigods and signal that junior associates’ job is to bow to their individual whims. Junior associates already know partners are on top of the hierarchy; we do not need to double down. Doing so sends the wrong message and undermines our investment in building psychological safety. If anything, we want partners to seem more approachable, not less.
Instead, explain to them that the goal of building these cheat sheets is to increase transparency and skip over months or years of getting to know each other. Once we surface the information, we don’t simply “pick one” set of preferences and act accordingly. We identify potential areas of conflict and talk through them.
For example, imagine a deal team where the partner likes to get back online at 9 p.m. after putting the kids to bed and work for another few hours, whereas the associate prefers to start work early and end by dinnertime. They could talk about the implications of these different styles. Perhaps the partner will say that the associate need not stay up until midnight, just in case an email comes in; any emails sent after 9 p.m. can wait until morning unless accompanied by a phone call. Or perhaps the associate will agree to check in at 10 p.m. on the eve of big deadlines, just in case something urgent requires overnight attention.
Without this two-way conversation—that is, if associates only saw the partner’s working hours in a document with`` no opportunity for discussion and alignment—the associates might unnecessarily upend their otherwise reasonable lifestyle choices. Or the partners might be frustrated by associates’ slow turnaround time, not realizing their team members simply had a different default schedule. These pain points are entirely avoidable, and showing you care enough to have this conversation dramatically increases trust.
Adapted from Chapter 4 of All Rise: Practical Tools for Building High-Performance Legal Teams.
