Give your legal team a competitive advantage entering 2023

Leader at Company A

The Legal team is exhausted - it has been a hard few months. Key people have left for competitive roles, others have been the victim of layoffs. With no backfill on these roles, the volume of work is huge. Your team is feeling stressed, overwhelmed, and overworked. Every task that comes in the door is a fire drill; last-minute, poorly planned, and marked as “urgent.” Your team is trapped in a reactive cycle which is fueling burnout. You implemented legal tech a few weeks ago. But you did not have time to properly onboard the team - everyone is too busy to use it.?

Leader ar Company B?

It’s been a hard few months; there have been layoffs. But you saw this coming and invested in your team. You onboarded tech months ago and insulated your employees from work, so they had time to learn it.? As a result, they are feeling seen and supported. Through tools and strategy you have developed in coaching, you carved out time each week for strategic and proactive (operations-centric) exercises. Workshops have elevated team trust and communication. Employee experience data shows energy, trust, and communication within the team are at an all-time high. There’s a feeling of alignment. Collaboration. You have clarity of vision and a strategy for the future. You’re a team. You're in it together.?

Which leader is most poised to succeed??

You guessed it - Leader B.?

Let’s explore why. Was Leader B just luckier? Did their success come by chance??

Leader B succeeded because they viewed success through a different lens.?

They understood that retention and mental well-being were key to avoiding burnout and building a proactive team that could ensure the ups and downs of the world together.

They actioned this by trading hours of productivity (a.k.a. “document production”) to put coaching and operations programs into place - building a strong emotional and operational foundation for their team.

Today - team health isn’t a “nice to have” - it is a necessity.?

Without it, your team will crack under external and internal pressures - meaning poor retention, unfinished projects, frayed internal relationships, and high operational costs.

Your people are the essential asset to creating a high-performing, successful team.?

Give Your Team A Competitive Advantage

Now more than ever is it crucial for General Counsel to be investing in the performance of their team.?

During 2023 GCs can expect to:?

• Be operating with fewer team members (layoffs and resignations).?
• Experience a higher amount of leader and team member burnout - there’s the pressure to do more with fewer resources.
• Experience pressure to invest in legal ops and implement legal tech team-wide, to create agility and efficiencies.?
• Struggle to retain top talent - caused by dysfunctional team dynamics (i.e. poor communication or distrust).
• Struggle to maintain (or reach) high performance as a team.?

So How Do We Do More With Less??

How do we get the best out of our people –?to maximize performance, and create efficiencies??

• Growing your legal organization in accordance with the CLOC Core 12 principles - with a particular focus on Organizational Optimization and Health.?
• Rolling out top-down leadership coaching, team development, and growth programs.?
• Investing in the team’s well-being and energy - to build a foundation that can withstand challenging times, and change.?

GCs, CLOs, and/or Legal Ops Leaders –?Here Are 5 Steps to Building a High-Performing Legal Team

Energy is Everything?

You’ll hear us at L7 say this a lot. Energy really is everything.?

Let’s start with YOUR energy. How do you feel? To perform at our best, we need to feel good. That starts with our physical and mental well-being. Taking care of ourselves.?

When we operate from our stress profile (when we are chronically stressed) it can impact our health, decision-making skills, and performance. Energy attracts like energy; when we are angry, frustrated, or volatile it creates a ripple effect, influencing those around us.?

Conversely, when we act from our natural energetic profile (our stress-free response) performance science shows we are creative, effective at navigating challenges, and able to inspire and motivate others.?

As a leader, one of the biggest advantages you can have is investing in your energy. Put your oxygen mask on first, so that you can lead your team to success.?

Vision - What Are Your Goals?

Once you have decided to invest in building a strong foundation for yourself and your team, the next step is to solidify and align with your vision.?

• What do you hope to accomplish as a leader??
• What is the mission statement for you and your team?
• What’s your plan for the next 6 months? 1 year? 3 years??
• What do you want for your team in terms of professional growth?

Create clarity around your vision.

Build a strong mission statement and KPIs to help guide your team forward.?

Evaluate your Team’s Energy

Yes, we are back to energy!?

After you’ve put the work into yourself - take a look and observe how your team connects and interacts.?

Evaluate energy. Do you think your team is high-energy? Are they typically renewed and energized? Do they appear stressed? Often having to work reactively, with little time, space, or bandwidth to be strategic?

Evaluate communication. Is there an environment of effective communication, accountability, and buy-in? Or is there an environment of confusion, lack of buy-in, and distrust??

Evaluate relationships. Who does your team regularly interact with? What are those relationships like? Are there any recurring points of conflict??

In order to align the team on your vision and ensure performance, you will need to diagnose their existing state. Until there is a complete understanding of strengths and weaknesses, it is impossible to fix cracks in the foundation.?

One of the most effective ways to do this is through energy and skill assessments.?

Assessments provide the data required to create custom redevelopment programs. Bringing in coaching to align the team on a common vision, and give customized support and training to each level of the team so they can mitigate burnout and feel supported. This opens the door mentally and emotionally to change.?

Remember There Are No Silver Bullets?

Change management takes time, especially when the team is affected by burnout or a lack of trust (both commonplace in the legal profession).?

Rolling out new processes and tooling (creating efficiencies) are great steps to take - but are ineffective if the team is not operating at peak health.?

Trust can be rebuilt. Team health can be cultivated. But it takes work - particularly buy-in and commitment from leadership.

To set your team up for success and innovation, trust and psychological safety must be restored and created.?

The right coaching partner will implement workshop programming to rebuild trust and frame the pathways for individual success.

Through Diagnostics, Team Energy Assessments, and Skill Assessments you can capture key data surrounding the health and performance of your team - numbers that you can apply to prove the successful impact of coaching programs on retention, performance, promotions, culture, and management.?

Through these data points, your coaching partner can create customized plans which maximize the benefits of 1-1 coaching hours, mastermind circles, webinars, and skill modules, based on your individual team needs.?

L7 fuses coaching with tech, to offer a complete data-enabled solution to navigate team coaching journeys. Our solution provides tangible reporting metrics to support legal leaders with elevating team culture–boosting satisfaction, retention, performance, and productivity.?

Get The Edge - Invest in Your People

As a leader (and a team), the events of today make some weeks seem insurmountable. Now more than ever, it is important to feel empowered and to be able to lead teams with empathy and foresight.?

Eliminating turnover and building a diverse, healthy team.?

While that sounds like a huge task, with the right partner it becomes as natural as going to an afternoon workout class.

Your coaching partner will roll out a comprehensive, customized coaching and professional development program for you and your team. You will see that the costs of investing in a program far outweigh the costs of poor retention, demoralizing team conflicts, struggling to maintain institutional knowledge, and constantly searching for new top talent.?

Our philosophy at L7 is that life is too short to be unhappy at work - we are on a mission to elevate the culture in law.?