Performance Managing your Legal Workplace

Warning - this piece challenges you the reader to turn conventional thinking on its head. And to be open to the reframing of performance management.

There is a lot of focus these days on performance management and cultural fit. For the benefit of the employing organisation. The formal Leadership and HR (or People and Culture) Teams partner to achieve their recruitment, performance management and talent fast tracking objectives (organisational leadership).

But Who Performance Manages the Legal Organisation?

Excuse me for a minute as I ask a cheeky question;

Who performance manages the organisation and its leadership team?

The conventional answer is usually“The Directors, Senior Management, Board, shareholders and/or the public, community or government you say”.

Well that is the conventional approach.

Organisational and Professional Leadership

Legal organisations are complex. In legal organisations, there is not only organisational leadership there is also professional leadership, Hann,D., (2007). The formal leadership structure sits primarily in the organisational leadership space and it is here where the formal performance management functions also occur.

But what about the professional leadership aspects that also exist in a legal workplace? How are these understood and reviewed? Are work colleagues empowered to value and interrogate the personal and intellectual (Professional Leadership) growth of themselves and others?

Some Annoying Questions

Do modern legal workplaces provide the opportunity for their people to develop their relational skills of divergence, i.e., opening up to the ideas of others?
Do they have time to engage in slow, non-assumptive thinking?
And why is this important?

Reframing Performance at Work

What if we turned our thinking around and provided lawyer workers with a means to “performance manage” their workplace? I am not talking about a 360 degree process. These are created by the organisation for the organisation to measure or assess what its formal leadership structure and HR believe is important. And what the organisation is able to, or is prepared to notice and reward.

What I am suggesting is that a focus on the learning at work and the work of learning, of legal workers in their workplace will lead to a richer healthier working culture. And thus organisatinal culture. Because the invisible work, the better practice work, the non-canonical work, whatever we choose to call, it will be recognised. Finally.

Some More Annoying Questions

What of the important performance issues that the organisation is unable to or unwilling to notice?
What if we could understand what is and what is not working well within a legal organisational structure and culture?
That is, how is an organisation performing, in terms of supporting its people to do better work?

Better Work (Practice)

The concept of better practice was developed by workplace learning educators twenty years ago to describe the kind of work a professional performs when they are a “master practitioner” (Beckett and Hagar 2002), able to unite their learning with their work by integrating the cognitive, psychomotor and affective aspects.

Put simply the master practitioner is able to create and communicate new working knowledge that is relevant in their workplace. With adequate workplace learning scaffolding provided they can make this learning explicit, to themselves and to others, utilising co-operative and productive reflection and thus building a repertoire of working knowledge to contribute more effectively to both professional and organisational outcomes.

I have led the build and delivery of a national enterprise curriculum in which the working knowledge of business efficiency and quality experts, the master practitioners, in the Business was codified. And so I know it can be done.

The Challenge

But is today’s legal organisation interested in this hard work? There's no getting out of this dilemma. To do this well you have to engage with your people at a deeper level and employ effective productive reflection EQ skills and strategies. This will produce a more holistic learning @ work foundation. And a healthier working culture. What I call Legal Working Culture (LWC).

Even More Annoying Questions

Do those with formal authority even recognise the existence of such working knowledge as being relevant to the health of the organisational culture and the development and wellbeing of its people?

Dr Deb 8 December 2023

References

Beckett, D & Hager, P., (2002) Life, Work and Learning: Practice in Postmodernity, Oxon, New York: Routledge.

Boud, D, 'Relocating Reflection in the Context of Practice': Keynote Paper delivered to Standing Conference on University Teaching and Research in the Education of Adults, Leeds University, 9 July 2006.

Hann, D (2007) PhD Lawyers Practising Learning; Reshaping Continuing Legal Education.