April Edition: Micro-transitions, macro satisfaction.
InView Community
The community for in-house legal professionals to learn, connect and share.
Kia Ora InViewers!
Intuition has been a common talking point amongst our InView community recently. Specifically, listening to and following your intuition. Yet doing that isn't always easy, especially in a professional sense.
The reality is that most people work for two reasons - to earn a living and to spend time doing something that interests us. However, both these are juxtaposed in many ways; finding the balance between what we love and what earns a good living is a constant juggle.
Oscar Wilde famously said, "If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward."
I'm not sure if a state of perpetual unknowing is a reward as Wilde believed, but it does pave the way for exploration.
I've met two types of lawyers - those who decided to dedicate their lives to bringing about justice and those who want the intellectual challenge. Of course, there are also the financial rewards of working crazy hours and taking on enormous amounts of responsibility.
Yet many lawyers find themselves five or ten years into their line of work and deeply unhappy with how they spend 50-plus hours of the week. Which is where intuition comes in handy.
If you are unsatisfied with your current role, I highly recommend taking the time to thoroughly understand what you intuitively need. This can be scary, especially in a world that promotes productivity over self-care and financial success over happiness. We all born are in tune without intuition, yet the logic-based rationale of legal decisions can see many lawyers lose touch with it during their training.
What we need and want from life is wholly individual, so there is no blanket rule for switching things up for success. Yet often, there are small incremental changes we can make within our professional and personal jobs to maximize our satisfaction. These are called micro-transitions. As you may have guessed, they don't have to be huge - just micro, in fact we actually have a session on exactly this at our up-and-coming community conference in London (and online) with Helen Doukas showing us exactly how to do this.
Simply stating to your manager that you want to pick up more work in a particular area or joining an employee resource group are small changes you can make that will have a huge impact. Taking control of your career in this manner puts you in the driver's seat and allows you to slowly make incremental moves in the direction of your choosing.
Remember, change isn't always drastic and it doesn't have to be immediate. My dad loved telling me, "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard." Figure out where you want to be and begin to make the small moves to get there. Baby steps work.
Member story - forging a better legal culture
"Working to make corporate Australia a little bit better for every Australian is my tribute to my parents. They came to Australia from Fiji 39 years ago, faced discrimination, and were taunted for how they spoke," says Darshana Parekh , Head of Partnerships at Cultivate Sponsorship. An ex-lawyer herself, Parekh is using her DEI skills and passion for positive change to pave a better legal future.
"The legal profession has come a long way since I started practising 15 years ago," says Darshana Parekh. She notes that more women and people of color are entering the industry. In fact, women are overrepresented.
"In the Urbis report 2020 National Profile of Solicitors, each state and territory in Australia reported an increase in female lawyers, and at a national level 53% of solicitors are female," she states.
Despite these figures, we are not seeing equality at partnership or upper management levels, and Parekh believes there is a reason for this. "A clear systematic barrier is the billable hour in law firms. Designed to maximise profits, the billable unit does not account for research, pro-bono work or mentoring of younger lawyers. It barely factors in the nuances of a working day for most lawyers and fails to recognize that a lawyer is a human being who has a life outside of work."
In-house counsel are freed from the pressures of the billable hour, but as Parekh notes that doesn't mean they are pressure-free. She believes there are huge expectations placed upon in-house counsel by the wider business. For example, being constantly available and knowledgeable of all legal matters (even those requiring specialist advice), as well as being worked to their maximum capacity due to being seen as a cost center, and perhaps having to conform to non-inclusive company practices.
Parekh believes these biases cause unnecessary burnout and fatigue, resulting in attrition. "Good business units will work with their in-house counsel. Even better business units will learn from their in-house counsel and ensure they are briefed about upcoming negotiations and partnerships early on."
So how do we change the biases? Parekh believes a cultural change is required. "The legal profession was (and arguably continues to be) based on presenteeism. It was impossible to bill clients otherwise, and this made some sense before computers, the internet, and equal rights."
Parekh says the systemic and cultural barriers rife within the legal system are based on "the assumption that cis, heterosexual men make up the workforce to the exclusion of others".
"This foundation has not evolved and is harmful to inclusionary endeavours. Today's lawyers consist of women, people of colour, people with a disability, indigenous peoples, parents and carers, and people from the LGBTQ community."
Basically, the makeup of today's legal community is very different from that of 50 years ago, and its culture needs to evolve to mirror that. When companies invest in DEI, they are helping to achieve this.
"DEI is a key investment for the future success of an organization," says Parekh. "Implementation requires support from the top down. Further to that point, leaders must co-create their workplace’s DEI practices with their employees. Launching a large-scale DEI project is tempting, but the most successful change is incremental."
Sponsorship is a fantastic way to implement genuine DEI values into an organization. When a leader (sponsor) and emerging leader (sponsee) form a close relationship, the sponsor can begin to see the challenges the sponsee faces. This allows them to advocate for their sponsee and elevate them into an emerging leader, thus creating genuine change.
Deep reads, best paired with a cup of coffee
领英推è
Unprecedented times have called for new ways of leadership. Lauren Zajac , Chief Legal and Compliance Officer of ExtraHop, shares her leadership style - choosing to focus on authenticity and vulnerability, aiming to truly connect with her team and the business.
Creating equitable organizations doesn't happen overnight. Aubrey Blanche-Sarellano , Senior Director of People Operations & Strategic Programs, offers advice on how to tackle the challenge of diversity within an organization.?
She delves into the equity component of DEI work and the complexities of unstitching thousands of years of historic inequities in the workplace, not to mention the law.?
Community top of mind - Justin Moses
Justin Moses spent over 30 years working as an in-house counsel in the banking sector. A desire to do his part in making the world a better place saw him take up a position at AIME (Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience). Moses had to leave his corporate self at the door and pivot and relearn what it means to be a lawyer in a not-for-profit focused on social outcomes rather than financial metrics.
"What I have found tricky as AIME's in-house lawyer has been shifting my mindset away from the perfectionistic, precedent, and risk-focused approach we often apply as lawyers," he says.
Moses describes AIME as an "unconventional" organization governed by 18 organizational values that employees are regularly asked to assess their performance against. Some of these values are typical of the corporate world, for instance empathy, initiative, change, brave goals, hard work and discipline. But some values are far more bold: failure, rebelliousness, no shame and, even, kindness.
"What's challenging about working with a broad, values-based approach is starting from the proposition that anything is possible, when as a lawyer every fibre of your being is screaming that's not necessarily the case," explains Moses. "You predict regulatory hurdles, stakeholder reservations, and business partner hesitations, but your role is to explore every possibility and evaluate the outcomes as inputs to a final decision. And, interestingly, often more is possible than I have thought would be the case."
Moses applies these values to his work as in-house counsel abstractly. For instance, he embraces the "yes… and" approach to building on the foundations of others' ideas rather than the "yes… but" mindset that lawyers sometimes use to dilute innovation with supposed logic.
Working within the parameters of AIME's values has been both liberating and rewarding for Moses. "When your organization, out of a fundamental belief in the value of kindness, simply doesn't believe in negotiating every contractual point to the death. Or out of a belief in the value of rebelliousness, is happy to occupy the grey space in an area of new regulation, there is relief from the burden of believing that everything has to be right in all circumstances all the time."
How are you really feeling?
Ahhh, perception really is everything. ??
We've all been there... #neveragain ??
Literally. ??
Trending InView articles this month
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April marks the shift to warmer months for our northern hemisphere InViewers and the time to hunker down for us down under. Remember to listen to your intuition wherever you are - it shouldn't fail you.
Talk soon,
Deanna Hinde ??