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Meet Monica Parker.  Monica is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former unhappy lawyer who now serves as coach and guide for lawyers who want to leave practice (more information available at her website,LeavingTheLaw.com).  Thanks to her recently-published book, Monica’s assistance is now available to an even broader audience of lawyers.

The Unhappy Lawyer: A Roadmap to Finding Meaningful Work Outside of the Law is an amazing offering for any lawyer who’s ever wondered about a career change.  Down-to-earth, funny, with gentle but firm “hard truths,” Monica shares her own story along with case studies (for the notoriously hard-to-convince legal crowd) and exercises designed to help an unhappy lawyer make the leap out of practice into a satisfying career.  I’m delighted that Monica is “stopping by” today as a part of her blog tour, to answer a few questions I posed.

Julie asks: I’ve received emails and blog comments from unhappy lawyers who can’t see a way to leave the law and maintain their income, and they feel huge resistance from a spouse or partner about making a career change. And yet, they’re unhappy in practice. What can you say to someone who’s an unhappy lawyer making a great income on which s/he and his/her family have come to depend?

Monica answers: You’ve got 2 major challenges here: one, you’re afraid you won’t be able to support your family if you leave the law and two, your family disapproves of you making a change.

Here are my thoughts about both challenges:

First you should know that you’re not alone in experiencing these challenges. These are the major hurdles for a lot of lawyers. And, yet, they do find ways to overcome them and pursue the careers of their dreams.

I’ve got lots of good tips about these challenges in my book but let me give you some quick and dirty answers:

Can you change careers and make the same income? It’s possible. It’s not the starting point for career exploration though. Why? Because as you’re experiencing, focusing on this issue is like a door slamming in your face. I have my clients start with a “check-up.” Where’s your money going? Is it going where you want it to go? For example, if you do this exercise for a few months and discover that a lot of your discretionary income is going out the door for “retail therapy,” well, it’s worth considering, are you buying all this stuff because you want it or because you’re miserable? Would you want it/need it if you were doing work you love? Probably not.

It’s about trade-offs really. What are you willing to trade for career satisfaction? Maybe it’s a portion of your salary (at least to start) but it may also be frustration, anger, stress, migraine headaches, ulcers, the list goes on and on. That might be a worthwhile tradeoff.

As for your family of “doubting Thomases,” of course these folks are worried. They want you to be happy but not at the family’s expense. It may take a series of difficult conversations but over time you can work to build understanding between you and your family that the move will be a good one for all of you. Your kids may be willing to forego ski vacations and fancy toys if it means Dad/Mom will be able to make their soccer games and dance recitals or heck, actually go on vacation with them for a change.

What you have to avoid is the temptation of trying to convince your family to agree with you that you should leave the law. You can’t make people agree with you, as wonderful as that would be. What’s really underlying that urge is your need to get permission to make the change. No one can give you that permission…but you.

Julie asks:  Some of the lawyers who say they want to leave the law don’t have any idea of where to begin to figure out what they want to be when they “grow up.” How do you recommend an unhappy lawyer might explore career options?

Monica answers:  Start with the basics. What interests you? One, make a list of career possibilities that appealed to you as a child, young adult, and what appeals to you now as an adult. Don’t censor yourself. Two, if you have absolutely no idea what you might like to do, go on a field trip for a couple of months. Keep a little notebook handy and jot down anything you see or hear that catches your attention. See a bakery and wish you could spend your mornings making exotic cookies? Jot it down in your notebook. After a couple of months, you should have lots of ideas. See if you can categorize them into 5 – 7 categories. Now you’ve got a sense of some of the areas that might appeal to you.

Once you know what interests you, it’s time to get out and start exploring! There are lots of ways you can do this without giving up your day job. Interested in owning a dirt bike racing shop? Take some dirt bike racing classes; see if a store owner will let you shadow him for a day. Fascinated by event planning? Offer to plan your grandmother’s surprise 85th birthday or a friend’s wedding. Your goal here is to “try on” the career and see how it fits. Let your gut tell you what it thinks. This isn’t the time for intellectualizing.

Julie asks:  Everyone has frustrating days at work, and sometimes when a job is a bad fit, the entire career can feel wrong. How do you know when to say enough is enough?E

Monica answers:  The answer is as simple as, when the bad days outweigh the good. I actually list 7 reasons you know it’s time to leave your career in my book. I’ll share the “Top 3″ here. First, if you’re fantasizing about everyone else’s job. I mean from the postal worker to the landscaping crew. In other words, you’re romanticizing their jobs. Second, if you’re doing the Sunday night countdown. That means every hour on the hour you’re watching the clock on Sunday and dreading the week starting. Third, you’re either consistently bored or overwhelmed at work. You’re not engaged or you can’t see over the piles at your desk. If this is happening to you all of the time, this is not what work is meant to be.

Too monotonous for Michelle, who, White [the partner in charge of the firm’s advertising group, of which Obama was a member] says, complained that the work he gave her was unsatisfactory. He says he gave her the Coors beer ads, which he considered one of the more glamorous assignments they had. Even then, he says, “she at one point went over my head and complained [to human resources] that I wasn’t giving her enough interesting stuff, and the person came down to my office and said, ‘Basically she’s complaining that she’s being treated like she’s a second-year associate,’ and we agreed that she was a second-year associate. I had eight or nine other associates, and I couldn’t start treating one of them a lot better.”

White says he talked to Michelle about her expectations, but the problem could not be resolved because the work was what it was. He is not sure any work he had would have satisfied her. “I couldn’t give her something that would meet her sense of ambition to change the world.”

 Those who dislike the Obamas will likely find a prima donna attitude here, and those who like the Obamas will likely nod and agree that she was destined for much greater activities.  Let’s set politics completely aside, though, and ask instead: What’s an ambitious young lawyer to do when dealing with work that appears to be unduly mundane?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, I suspect.  If I were to coach someone feeling this level of dissatisfaction, I would ask questions like:

• What do you want, ultimately, from your career?  What’s the traditional path to get there, and can you identify alternatives that might be more pleasing? 
• What do you want your day-to-day practice life to look like?
• With whom do you want to work?  (General descriptions of colleagues, though identifying specific individuals might be quite telling.)
• What kind of organization will be a good fit for you?  How well do you work within a hierarchy?  How do you feel about firms that blend hierarchy and meritocracy?
• What does it mean to you to “pay your dues” in your career?

Many others, of course, but I’d likely start with those questions.  The goal would be to figure out the end-game first (because if the lawyer in question wanted to be a partner at a large law firm, the path to getting there would likely look quite different from the path she’d select if she wanted to teach law, just for example.)

The article, though, and my imaginary coaching session with Mrs. Obama highlights one comment that I often hear from ambitious large-firm lawyers: making it through the first few years can be difficult and frustrating, and those who stay the course may need a clear reason for doing so, to keep in mind that the boring work ultimately serves a purpose.

1.  Rushing.  Making an assignment before thinking about the critical aspects of delegation (which are set forth in the next section) is almost a guarantee that you won’t get the end result that you want.  Without sitting down to think about what the finished product should be, you may not even know what you really need.  Rushing means that you may not select the best person to whom to delegate the task or that you don’t describe exactly what you need to know and/or how you want the results.  When you rush, you’re highly likely not to get what you need.  You end up frustrated and even more in the hole time-wise than you were when you started: now you have to do the work (or re-delegate it) and you’re starting late.

An example: Paula, a partner, asked Evan, a third-year associate, to draft a deposition outline.  She told Evan that she didn’t want the outline to include questions, and that instead she wanted a subject matter outline.  Evan took Paula’s direction literally and prepared an extensive outline organized by topic, with issues set out below each topic and supported by well-organized, highlighted, and flagged documents.  Paula was livid, however, when she discovered that the outline didn’t include any questions.  She had wanted Evan to skip the opening questions but to include questions that would get to the heart of the factual and legal issues – but because what she said was, “no questions,” Evan misunderstood.  Should he have clarified before completing the outline?  Absolutely.  Paula, however, bears responsibility as well for a problem that could have been avoided had she simply paused to think about how best to describe the work product she wanted to receive.

2.  Delegating too little.  Lawyers are highly skilled and self-reliant, and too many of us believe that we should be in control of every aspect of our practices.  But here’s some news: you are not the lone ranger.  Failing to delegate costs you time.  What’s worse, if you don’t give your staff and junior colleagues stretch projects that challenge and engage them, they won’t advance professionally.  They’ll get bored and probably move on to another position, or worse yet you’ll find yourself surrounded by “zombies” who show up to the office everyday but are completely disengaged from their work.

3.  Delegating too much.  The first problem with over-delegating is, of course, that it presents numerous ethical issues.  You cannot delegate legal work to non-lawyers without adequate supervision, and you should not delegate legal work to other lawyers without appropriate supervision.

Even when you’re delegating administrative tasks only, over-delegation results in poor practice management.  You should not perform the day-to-day administrative tasks required for your practice, but you must be able to do so if you find yourself short-staffed.  This doesn’t mean that you should be as skilled as your assistants at everything from filing to document formatting to mail room procedures, but you should know enough to muddle your way through.

4.  Micromanaging.  Micromanaging produces problems similar to those encountered with under-delegating, though the problems arise even more quickly and tend to be more acute.  Micromanagement undermines the confidence and/or morale of the person to whom you’ve delegated because it sends the message that you don’t trust their judgment.  That person may leave or become a zombie as previously described, but more likely he or she will become frustrated and resentful.  Micromanagers often have a reputation as being impossible to please, and those who cannot be pleased often find that those who work with them quit trying.

Equally troublesome, micromanagement prevents the person doing the work from exercising his or her own judgment and expanding his or her professional development.  Those who are micromanaged don’t have the opportunity to bring their perspective and ideas to the table, which means that the micromanager doesn’t have the chance to be wowed by what those who’ve been assigned the work could do if only they had the freedom.

5.  Not managing enough.  Failure to manage results in the same problems that rushing and over-delegation can produce.  You may encounter ethical issues that could have been avoided with proper supervision, and you may not receive the work product that you wanted and expected. 

You can learn some delegation tips here.  Delegation is also covered extensively in 5 Foundations of Time Mastery for Attorneys – check it out and order by visiting http://www.FiveFoundations.com.

Systems are present in client representations. Imagine that you’re representing a client on a tax matter. Isn’t it natural to recognize that the outcome of the matter may affect not only the client’s tax liability, but potentially his business, her marriage, or its employees as well? Lawyers are trained to recognize the ripples that flow from client matters, but what about other issues?

Your practice, your office, the personnel serving your clients – all of these are systems. Make a change in one area, and it’ll impact other areas as well. As a leader, it’s up to you to recognize the effects of your changes, both prospectively and retrospectively. Doing so will help you to anticipate and avoid problems and to design outcomes that positively impact a particular system.

A few years ago, the executive committee of a law firm decided that a live person should answer all calls received during business hours. To implement that policy, the office manager created a detailed system that regulated which secretaries could go to lunch or on break at what time and which lawyers’ telephones each secretary would cover. Seems sensible, right? Unfortunately, some lawyers didn’t want to have “strangers” responding to client inquiries, and morale among assistants plummeted since they were no longer free to take lunches and breaks together without careful planning. In other words, the system was disrupted. The plan failed miserably, and the hours spent in creating it were wasted – all because no one considered what impact the planned changes would have on the attorney/assistant system.
Systems awareness is also useful in evaluating how to accomplish professional and personal goals. Barbara hired me to improve her client development activities for her family law practice. She found it difficult to get in her billable hours and her rainmaking activities, much less optional interests like exercise and visiting with friends, or even being involved in her children’s extracurricular activities. As we reviewed Barbara’s activities, she remembered that she’d received a number of referrals in the past from people she’d met when she served as den leader for her daughter’s Girl Scout troop. We discussed a variety of activities she could add in, but Barbara kept returning to her prior Girl Scouts experience and finally decided to get involved again.

By resuming Girl Scout activities, Barbara deepened her connection with her daughter, put herself in a situation to meet parents who might need help with family law matters or know others who’d need help, and even got in some exercise. Barbara added extra time to her schedule to do this, but because the time yielded payoffs in several areas, she was able to leverage the time to get benefits that she might not have realized otherwise. Barbara became aware of the “system” formed by the intersection of her personal and professional life. (You might remember a recent review of Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, which suggests experimenting with 4-way wins, which takes advantage of systems awareness.)

To increase your own systems awareness, consider the ripple effects of changes you make or action you might take.

1. Do excellent work. First impressions are often lasting impressions and fumbling an early assignment creates great difficulty. If you make a mistake, you can recover, but so much better not to need to try.

2. Focus on internal networking. Get to know as many people as you can. You’ll be busy with work (we hope!) and it’s important to keep your “business social calendar” hopping as well.

3. Find a mentor within the firm. Especially for those who’ve made a lateral move, you must find someone who will tell you how your new firm’s culture operates.

4. Establish a fantastic working relationship with your assistant. You will likely need some time to get into the groove with someone new. Have regular meetings (they need not be long) to talk about what you need, what you assistant needs, and how you can work well together. Be sure to listen to your assistant’s input as well; he or she may have valuable input for you about how the firm operates.

5. Look for ways you can contribute beyond your work product. You’ll bring a new perspective and may have useful input on all sorts of situations. It’s impossible to list what they might be, so keep your eyes open.

Did I miss anything that you think belongs in the top 5? Please let me know if I did!

Daniel Goleman gained notoriety in the mid-1990s for identifying competencies related to “emotional intelligence,” or the ability to perceive, regulate, understand, and work with emotions to enhance leadership. Those competencies are self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill. Based on research by the consulting firm Hay/McBer, Goleman identifies six distinct leadership styles, each of which uses a unique combination of the emotional intelligence competencies.

The selection of a leadership style influences not only the outcome of a particular situation, but the overall organizational climate as well. “Climate” is defined to reflect the organization’s flexibility, workers’ sense of responsibility to the organization, the level of standards set, the degree to which performance feedback and rewards offered are considered accurate, the clarity those in the organization feel about its mission and values, and the level of commitment they hold toward a common purpose. Each style affects each component of the organizational climate as well as the organization’s financial results, and each may be used effectively in certain situations. Highly effective leaders draw on multiple styles:

The styles, taken individually, appear to have a direct and unique impact on the working atmosphere of a company, division, or team, and in turn, on its financial performance. And perhaps most important, the research indicates that leaders with the best results do not rely on only one leadership style; they use most of them in a given week-seamlessly and in different measure-depending on the business situation. Imagine the styles, then, as the array of clubs in a golf pro’s bag. Over the course of a game, the pro picks and chooses clubs based on the demands of the shot. Sometimes he has to ponder his selection, but usually it is automatic. The pro senses the challenge ahead, swiftly pulls out the right tool, and elegantly puts it to work. That’s how high-impact leaders operate, too.

Goleman describes the six styles as follows:

• The coercive style, in which the leader unilaterally directs action and requires compliance, summarized as “Do what I tell you.”
• The authoritative style, in which the leader identifies a vision and motivates those responsible for achieving the resulting goal to choose their approach to it, summarized as “Come with me.”
• The affiliative style, in which the leader focuses on building harmony and strong working relationships, summarized as “People come first.”
• The democratic style, in which the leader seeks to build consensus among team members by giving each a voice, summarized as “What do you think?”
• The pacesetting style, in which the leader sets and adheres to high standards for performance for him- or herself and the team, summarized as “Do as I do, now!”
• The coaching style, in which the leader focuses on developing team members’ performance, summarized as “Try this.”

Although each style can be used well in a particular situation, the authoritative, affiliative, democratic, and coaching styles have a consistently positive effect on organizational climate and results. (The article includes a fascinating table that shows quantitatively the effect that each style has on each component of the organizational climate as well as the overall positive or negative effect.)

An effective leader selects the appropriate style based on the situation he or she faces. For example, immediately following a natural disaster, the coercive style would likely yield a positive effect (the leader would identify and provide direction as to what actions must be taken for the organization to weather the crisis), whereas a democratic style would be ineffective in such an emergency, as team members would waste valuable time reaching consensus.

Becoming aware of the six leadership styles may permit leaders to develop those styles that come less naturally and to choose consciously when to employ each style. Leaders may develop styles that don’t come naturally by studying the emotional intelligence competencies that underlie the style, as set forth in Goleman’s article. Although emotional intelligence may seem like a flighty buzzword, each competency contributes meaningfully toward an individual’s ability to motivate, encourage, and lead team members to high performance.

What’s in it for lawyers?

Unlike many corporate leaders, lawyer-leaders frequently lack training in or vocabulary to describe what creates effective leadership. Studying Goleman’s article is a good first step in understanding the empirical study of leadership styles and the circumstances in which each is effective. For example, though the pacesetting style is not a consistently effective model, it may be quite effective for teams composed of high-achieving, highly motivated lawyers.

Most lawyers have had the experience of working for a talented, demanding (perhaps even “obsessive”) senior lawyer who sets high standards and expects everyone to meet them as well as he or she does – someone who exhibits the pacesetting style, in other words. A pacesetting leader might learn about the drawbacks and dangers of using only the pacesetting style, including low morale that results from overwhelm in the face of unreachably high standards and fear that results from the need to second-guess what the leader wants rather than what might be most effective.

By learning to use other leadership styles masterfully, the pacesetting lawyer may round out his or her leadership repertoire and find more effective ways to evoke high performance from every member of the team. While such development requires consistent effort over time – simply reading the article will not, without more, produce meaningful change – learning the vocabulary and seeing that leadership is a science as well as an art will enhance every lawyer’s leadership abilities.

How often do you find yourself doing one activity and thinking about another?

It’s so common to do this, and when we do, we generally think we’re making good use of the time by multitasking. And yet, most of us have also had the experience of getting “busted”:the person who’s talking realizes we aren’t listening, or we make an error because we’re juggling two (or more) tasks simultaneously. At a minimum, our stress level goes up because the brain isn’t wired for multitasking.

Instead, try being fully present with what you’re doing. If you’re in conversation, close your email and put your phone on “do not disturb” so you can direct all of your attention to the discussion. Conversations tend to go more quickly when you’re fully present because you’re at full attention, and you’ll notice that you catch not only what’s said, but also what is going unsaid that should perhaps be explored.

For instance, imagine that a colleague is briefing you on an expert witness deposition prep session and the words say all is well. If you are fully present to your colleague, you might notice tension in his face that you would miss if you were looking at papers or email while he’s talking. Seeing the tension, you’d have an opportunity to inquire and learn that although he can’t put his finger on the issue, something isn’t right about the testimony or the way the expert is presenting it. That’s valuable information that could go undetected. (Should your colleague raise the concern without being asked? Absolutely. However, many of us are uncomfortable bringing up a concern without any evidence to back it up, and so he might well not mention it.)

How to become fully present? I recommend a quick centering exercise, which can be as simple as taking 3 or 4 slow, deep breaths. Bring all of your attention to the present activity, and if you find your attention wandering, breathe deeply again and bring it back. This level of focus will allow you to be more effective and less stressed.

As Malcolm Forbes said, “Presence is more than just being there.” Being fully present focuses all of your senses on the task or person at hand. It’s a learned skill. Try an experiment: resolve to be fully present for a couple of hours a day and see what you notice. I’d love to hear your feedback!

If you’d like help in gaining awareness about your professional goals, perhaps we should get acquainted. More information is available here, or just hit “reply” to schedule a telephone consultation.

September 16th – 12:30 PM ET

Please join me on Tuesday, September 16th for a special complimentary teleclass, Beyond Time Management, that presents advanced techniques to help you avoid overwhelm and stay on top of your tasks — using skills that you can apply in your professional and personal life. The 55-minute teleclass will be offered on September 16 at 12:30 PM ET.

All registrants will receive an MP3 recording of the call, so you can access the information even if these times aren’t convenient.

Visit this page to learn more and to register.

One of the problems lawyers have with their practices is that we rarely take time to reflect on our goals and our progress toward them.  Instead, we tend to be in fast forward motion, moving forward all the time, but not pausing to ask whether our motion is getting us toward what we desire.  Michael Gerber, author of E-Myth Mastery and related books, argues that entrepreneurs must work on their businesses as well as in them.  It’s the same for lawyers, because even those lawyers who are working at mega-firms are, in a sense, leading their own businesses.  We too must stop and reflect on how our business, our practice, is running.

A retreat is the ideal way to do this evaluation.  Not the typical law firm retreat, replete with meetings and cocktails and chatter, but a private retreat.  A retreat can be enormously useful in as little as 3 hours, though a longer retreat is restorative as well as better suited for deep reflection.  Depending on what you need, both personally and professionally, you might consider retreating at home, at the office, or to a hotel/retreat center.  Consider what you need, both in terms of what creature comforts will facilitate your turning inward and also in terms of what support you need.

What questions should you ask yourself on retreat?  The list is truly endless, but here are some good ones:

1.  How well am I functioning in the office?  What changes do I need to make either in the office environment or in how I prepare myself for my workdays?  Complete The Lawyer’s LifePosts assessment, (available to those who subscribe to my free email newsletter Leadership Matters for Lawyers via this link: http://www.lifeatthebar.com/MenuFreeProducts.htm) to help with these questions.

2.  What is my business vision?  What kind of practice do I want, and how well am I developing that practice?

3.  Who are my clients?  How is client development working for me, and what changes do I need to make?  What new activities do I need to undertake?

4.  How satisfied are my current clients?  How can I better serve them?

5.  Am I an active member of the legal community?  Am I meeting my own expectations for pro bono work?

6.  Am I maximizing my energy through good self-care? 

7.  How is my work/life integration?  Am I honoring what’s most important to me?

8.  How am I performing as a leader?  Who must I be to become a better leader?  Where do I want or need to step up into a leadership role? 

9.  What one change can I make in my life or my practice that will create greater satisfaction for me?

As we move into fall and toward the end of the year, it’s an ideal time for review and revision.  Give yourself — and your practice — the gift of a retreat.  Please contact me if you’d like support in designing a retreat or in helping with strategizing to help you reach your goals.