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Coaching and Career Planning for Lawyers
What area(s) of law does this episode consider? | Career Coaching, Professional Development In this episode, executive coach Dimity Brown discusses the importance of good coaching and mentorship skills in the legal profession in creating a healthy and constructive professional culture, and explains how you can use foundational coaching skills when working with your own team. |
Why is this topic relevant? | If you lead a team of lawyers, coaching is a powerful skill to learn – or bring into your team by engaging a professional coach – because it helps you solve problems in a way that empowers the person experiencing the problem to solve the next one themselves. If you’re a lawyer in need of some career direction, coaching from a professional coach or from a mentor could be what you need to find out your own professional values, and the career path that matches them. |
What are the main points? |
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What are the practical takeaways? |
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Show notes | The International Coaching Federation’s 2019 article ‘Using a Coaching Approach for Effective Decision-making’ |
David Turner:
1:00 | Hello and welcome to Hearsay, a podcast about Australian laws and lawyers for the Australian legal profession, my name is David Turner. As always, this podcast is proudly supported by Assured Legal Solutions, a boutique commercial law firm making complex simple. We’ve talked before on this show about the culture of law firms, a set of defined values that guide and influence the vision and direction of the firm, whether that’s hiring, management style, interactions with clients, even the types of clients that a firm attracts and chooses to engage with. Unfortunately, discussions surrounding law firm culture often have a negative connotation stemming from competition among young lawyers, the pressure to meet and exceed unreasonable KPIs, long hours, lack of work/life balance, burnout, and of course, unfortunately, stories of harassment and abuse. The question is how do we change the culture of law firms? Enter our guest today, Dimity Brown. Dimity is a lawyer and more recently an executive coach to lawyers. As a former senior lawyer at some of the country’s top tier law firms, Dimity understands the pressures and challenges that lawyers face. In 2019 Dimity followed her passion for coaching and mentoring and returned to university and completed a Master’s of Science in Coaching Psychology and began running one-on-one coaching sessions and group coaching seminars to help lawyers feel supported and encouraged in the workplace. In this episode, we’ll take a deep dive into executive coaching – what is it? How does it work? And how does it help to empower lawyers and change the culture of the law firms that we work in? Dimity Brown, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay. |
Dimity Brown: | Aw thank you, thanks so much for the invitation. |
DT: 2:00 | Now Dimity firstly, tell us about your experience as a lawyer in some of those top tier law firms, what was your experience of the culture there? |
DB:
| I think it’s different in different law firms, obviously. You know some top tier law firms have a very collegiate culture and make everyone feel that they are welcome and that their opinions count and that their work life balance is important. But unfortunately, I have experienced and have heard stories of some of the top tier law firms where that unfortunately is not the case. And there’s a lot of talk at the moment about mental health, and well-being, and good cultures in law firms, but unfortunately, it’s more talk than action as far as I can see. |
DT: 3:00
| I would agree with that. In the last few years coming out of the Banking Royal Commission, we heard some awful stories of really intense working hours for young lawyers, but we tend to hear about the problem more than the solution. There seems to be a bit of a dearth of resources about the solution. It’s always been my experience, or at least the experience that I’ve had and that I’ve heard about, is that law firms often don’t have a cohesive culture; that some large organizations are capable of cultivating a single cohesive culture, but many law firms have cultures that vary from team to team or even partner to partner. |
DB: | Yeah that’s true. |
DT:
| The work you’re doing now as an executive coach, tell me about how you came across coaching as a concept? |
DB:
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7:00 | It’s actually a little interesting story actually, so I first experienced coaching personally, I was offered coaching as a senior up-and-coming lawyer at one of the firms I worked at. And it wasn’t a positive experience, I’ll be honest. And having reflected on that over time, I’ve now, you know, realised what it was that was wrong with the experience that I had. But what made me actually decide to become a coach and to really use that as the method to change the culture of law firms was my own personal crisis. I guess you could say it was a crisis of career and of life, really. So a few years ago now I was in the process of getting a divorce. I was at the stage in my career where partnership was becoming less and less of an option, and to be honest it was a circumstance where partnership was becoming less and less attractive to me. So I was really stuck trying to work out what was next for me. I tried every method under the sun to avoid leaving the law, and I think ultimately, if I had my own coach I would have sped up that process a little bit more. But having gone through this career crisis and this life crisis, I took a couple of weeks off and I went to India and I had my own “Eat, Pray, Love”, moment with lots of yoga and walks and that sort of thing. I was trying to work out what it was that I loved about my job. And the answer was the mentoring part of being a senior lawyer in a big law firm. And I’d always, always loved the experience of mentoring young lawyers, helping them make their decisions, teaching them. And also I loved you know helping people, you know, I was always the person that would have those closed door conversations when anybody was having a crisis or anything like that. And so I realized that that was a passion of mine and I had to try and work out well ‘how can I turn that into a career?’ And I did some Googling and it turns out it’s called coaching. TIP: What is coaching? Well, have you ever asked for advice from a mentor or supervisor, and instead of just telling you the answer, they asked you questions that helped you find the answer yourself? Finding the answer yourself, instead of being told, is more empowering and it’s a more effective learning experience, and in a nutshell, that’s what coaching is all about. In 2018, PwC reported that the coaching industry was second only to the information technology industry in terms of growth. And in 2020, the International Coaching Federation, the peak body for coaching, published a report in conjunction with PwC to analyse the growth of the global coaching industry, which revealed some interesting statistics including that:
Now that we understand a bit more about the coaching industry, let’s go back to hearing about Dimity’s experience starting off in coaching. So even though I’d had that, you know bad experience of coaching to start with, I realised that you can make coaching whatever you want it to be and so I decided to apply to Sydney uni and quit law and studied full time to do the Master’s and it’s been a life changing experience. |
DT:
8:00 | Thank you so much for sharing that story. It was quite a journey for you to find this path that you’re on now, but as you say, a really effective coach could have helped you find it. And career coaching is one of the many fields in which a coach can help a lawyer, or whether that’s a young lawyer or a senior lawyer, someone who’s on the path to partnership to better focus their efforts. And I also like that you drew out that you had a bad coaching experience, ’cause of course, we’ll talk about what good coaching is, but I think it would be useful to come back to that experience and talk about what bad coaching is as well. Before we go to what coaching isn’t, tell us a bit about what coaching is. How does coaching work in practice? |
DB:
9:00 | Well, at a practical level it can be a one-on-one type of situation where a coach who has experience and you know expertise in certain types of coaching skills will have a conversation. The way I describe it is, often it feels a little bit like counselling, but it’s not counselling from a mental health point of view. For me, coaching is about helping the client flourish. We’re not being problem focused, which often is what counselling is, coaching is supposed to be solution focused conversations where people are given the resources and often different perspectives on things and essentially what we do is we will ask the client questions that they might not ask themselves, which then over time creates different perspectives and opens up different options for people, which then allows them to make different types of decisions, or you know, depending on what the issue is. |
DT: | And I really like that you’ve described it as helping the client to flourish because it is focused on the client making these discoveries themselves through those conversations, isn’t it? |
DB: | Absolutely. |
DT: | It’s really about facilitating their own thinking. |
DB:
10:00 | Absolutely. That’s the sign of a good coach, is to actually ask more questions than to give advice. TIP: One of the hardest parts of being a coach is resisting the temptation to give advice. As lawyers, we’re trained to listen to a client’s problem, and then tell them a practical, applicable solution. When we become more experienced and start managing lawyers, we bring the same perspective – if a team member comes to you with a problem, you tell them the solution – easy, right? Coaches call this the ‘doctor-patient’ model – diagnosing an illness and prescribing a cure – and coaches work hard to train themselves to resist the temptation to give advice and instead use questions and hypotheticals to help the client find the answer for themselves. Coaching is about teaching the coaching client to fish, to borrow yet another analogy, so they have the skills to find their own answers in the future. |
DT:
11:00 | And coaching as a practice I find interesting because like project management for example, it’s a profession, a growing profession, a specialist skill set, that someone like yourself can bring to an organization or to an individual. But it’s also something that our listeners, if they’re mentors to younger lawyers in their firms, it’s something they can do for the people around them as well. It’s a skill set that they can deploy to help in the career development of the people around them as well. isn’t it? |
DB:
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| Absolutely 100%. People can have successful coaching conversations with their colleagues and with their junior staff to help those colleagues, you know, help themselves basically. And I believe that’s part of the leadership role of a senior lawyer and also helps develop those junior lawyers to become more critical thinkers. Technically, coaching is not a profession, so it’s not a regulated profession like the law is for example. And often that is one of the sources of scepticism around coaching is that because it’s not a profession in the traditional sense of the word, it’s unregulated, you can get a few dodgy characters and poorly trained people selling themselves as coaches. Any human being can walk off the street and call themself a coach. So as part of that, because that is the reality, there is a move towards professionalisation of the industry. So there’s a lot of quite you know good international organisations and Australian based organisations that are seeking to professionalize coaching, including, you know, ethical guidelines and things like that which, if anybody is looking for a coach I would highly recommend they use those resources to find coaches who are seeking to professionalize the industry. TIP: As Dimity’s just explained, coaching is not formally recognised as a profession, and it has no regulatory body, meaning anyone can be a coach and there are no rules they have to follow. As we mentioned before, this is a major concern for trained coaches who want the sector to be a more regulated and respected profession. Although there is no one vocational degree to become a coach, the Australian Institute of Professional Coaches and Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership (IECL) offer diploma courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation (ICF). Now if you’re listening to this podcast wondering what is the difference between coaching and mentoring, well:
So the International Coaching Federation is one that I’m a member of which I, you know, would recommend to people. So that’s one source of scepticism for people that it’s not actually a profession. |
DT: | But that growing professionalisation I suppose can give some comfort to the people who might be approaching those organisations that you’ve described. |
DB: | Yes, yeah, that’s right. |
DT: 14:00 | You mentioned you’ve had a bad coaching experience in your career before, tell us a bit about what bad coaching looks like. |
DB:
15:00 | So the bad coaching experience that I had, on reflection I think the cause of it was that I wasn’t clear about what my goal was. So in this particular situation I was sent off to coaching as part of this leadership course thing that the firm had sent me on, and there was no time spent by the coach digging into what I cared about and what was really important to me and whether or not promotion was really something that I was after. There were a bunch of assumptions that she took into the coaching conversation which she didn’t test. And so ultimately what happened is I came into the coaching conversation with a goal which was consistent with what the firm wanted me to have, because I was on this leadership coaching course but I didn’t care about it. It didn’t mean anything to me ultimately. And that meant that I had no motivation to achieve it. And honestly it ended up with a lot of money wasted by the firm because what’s the point in spending thousands of dollars on coaching for a goal that the person has no intention of achieving? |
DT: | It really sounds like that wasn’t a goal that came from you, and it wasn’t a coaching conversation that was driven by you. |
DB:
| Correct, that’s exactly right. And that’s one of the key things about coaching – is that the goal has to be driven by the person who is striving towards the goal. Otherwise, you’re going to have zero success. |
DT: | Now tell us what good coaching looks like? We know it’s solutions focused and we know it’s about the client finding these discoveries themselves. Tell us how you’d start a one-on-one coaching session? |
DB: 16:00
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19:00 | Well, usually I start even before the person becomes a client. So what will happen normally is that somebody will approach me for coaching and we would usually have an initial conversation around what is it that their issue is? What has caused them, what’s the catalyst basically for them to see a coach or to seek out coaching? And you know, having had that conversation for 30 minutes, an hour, we can then work together to decide whether or not I’m the right coach for them. So there’s a lot of different coaches that have a lot of different philosophies and different approaches to things. And just like your GP or your counsellor, you’re not going to meld with everybody all time. So part of having a good coaching experience is making sure that you have that connection between the coach and the client so that it will be a successful experience for everybody. So that’s the first thing I do to make sure that we’re well connected and that what I offer and the philosophy that I apply to my coaching is what that person needs or is looking for. So once that’s all sorted and you’ve worked out that yes, we are going to work together, then we would normally organise to have, usually it’s one-on-one sessions, it goes for roughly an hour and the first session is often around trying to work out: what’s the nub of the issue for the person? So often it’s a little bit like being a doctor that the person will come with all these symptoms and then you’ve got to apply the training and the experience that you’ve got as the coach to try and work out, ‘OK, so what is causing this issue for this person?’ And I would do that by asking lots of questions, trying to understand their mindset around things. Sometimes it’s even around physical experiences as well. So for example, I’ve had this experience a few times, where a client will come to me and say “I’m not presenting myself well in meetings” for example, or in client pitches, or in court, as an example, “and I feel like that’s impacting on my professionalism, what people think of me and how they see me as a lawyer, is that something you can help with?” And then so I would dig into that and there’s often around those sorts of performance issues, there’s behavioural things, so there’s you know “I’m breathing too quickly and so therefore I’m increasing my heart rate and my brain is then going a million miles an hour which then causes my negative thoughts which then makes it worse and worse and worse”, and you end up being nervous and not coming across as clearly or as succinctly as you’d like to in those sorts of experiences under pressure. So it could be something like that. Or it could even be something like having to deal with a difficult personality at work. Are there ways that you can manage your own behaviour and thought processes and things to let that behaviour impact you less? |
DT:
| It sounds like there’s both a performance coaching aspect, those examples that you just described, and the career coaching aspect. Do you ever find that clients come to you and seem to want one thing but really need the other? That they might come to you thinking “well, I’m not cut out for law, I need you to help me find another path.” But actually it’s this skill set that they need to cultivate or the reverse, that if I can just fix this aspect of my courtroom manner, for example, then I’ll feel happier about being a lawyer. But really, they need to be on a different path. |
DB: 20:00
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| Yeah, well actually it’s really interesting, I do often have that experience. So I’ve had clients come to me saying “I’ve just had this really bad piece of feedback and it’s really knocked my confidence and I think I’m done. I want to look elsewhere for a different career because I just don’t think I’m up for this.” But what we can do in those circumstances, and I never force a situation at all, it always depends on the person and what comes out in the conversations that we have, but often it’s really around their mindset and their reaction to the feedback that they received and whether or not they can change their view of the feedback. So for example, unfortunately, lawyers are very bad at giving feedback to each other. And so it’s not done in a way which is the most conducive to creating change in the person who’s receiving the feedback. So if the person who’s received the feedback has been given this poorly delivered feedback, and so the confidence is on the floor, sometimes it’s about “OK, well how can we change the impact of the feedback in the person’s mind so that it’s actually not a criticism but an opportunity for growth?” So, that’s something that I’ve done many times is helping people see that the feedback that they were being offered was more in the case of “you’re a great lawyer, but you could even be better by X”, right? And that’s the way the feedback should have been given in the 1st place. “You’re a fabulous lawyer. You could be better if you did Y.” And so if you change the feedback in the person mind to be of that nature rather than the feedback they actually got, then you can then help then realise that they’re actually not a failure as a lawyer, they can do this job and they are passionate about it, they just need to work on that one area, and that’s something that’s very doable and that that might be something that we’d work on. |
DT: 22:00
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24:00 | I absolutely agree with you that lawyers are not very good at giving feedback, which is a shame because our profession is really based on continuous learning. So it seems like such a critical skill to have to be able to give feedback, but we don’t do it well. At our firm we use the SBI model. Other models include the “Start Stop Continue model.” TIP: Let’s talk about these two models. First up, there’s the SBI model that I’ve just mentioned we use at our firm. SBI stands for Situation, Behaviour, Impact and involves: 1) describing the specific situation in which the behaviour occurred; 2) describing the behaviour; and 3) describing the results of the behaviour and explaining how you perceived it or how it made you feel. Using this model, we might give feedback saying ‘During last week’s team meeting you spoke over me while I was talking and it made me feel like my voice and opinions weren’t valued. Next time, I’d really like it if I could finish what I was saying before you start your point – that would make me feel respected and still give you a chance to say what you want to say.’ Now this is an example of improvement feedback – feedback you give when you want something to change what they’re doing – where the situation is last week’s team meeting, the behaviour is someone talking over you, and the impact is that you felt your opinion wasn’t valued. For improvement feedback in this model, there’s another element to behaviour and impact, which is the behaviour you want to see in the future, and the impact that desired behaviour would have. You can use SBI for recognition feedback too, to tell someone to keep doing a great job – for example “when you prepared that contract for me last week, and then also drafted a covering email with a summary of the document for me to send to the client, it saved me so much time, and it will really help the client understand the key terms of the document.” Situation, Behaviour, Impact. The other model I mentioned was the ‘Start, Stop, Continue’ approach which, just like it sounds, involves collecting feedback to consider what you should start doing, what you should stop doing, and what you should continue to do. Asking your teammates and leader to use this model will help identify areas of improvement, as well as give recognition for the skills you already have. And that’s the great thing about this model, is that it guards against that negativity bias we all have – that tendency to give too much weight to bad news than good news – by building in some good news to the feedback process. It’s also action-oriented because it calls on you to do something with the feedback – Start, Stop or Continue. Feedback should always be about behaviour and always about what we can do in the future – and it should never involve conclusions about someone’s innate personal characteristics or inherent ability. And I also like that you mentioned mindsets because I think a lot of lawyers do have a very fixed mindset about their skills and abilities. That we’re either perfect and we’re innately perfect or we’re flawed and innately flawed, and that’s just immutable. But as you say, it’s about receiving feedback with a growth mindset with that idea that you’re pliable, that you’re capable of change, that you’re capable of adopting and improving a skill, even if you’re not very good at it right now. |
DB: 25:00 | And embracing the learning part of the whole experience and actually measuring success on the learning, rather than measuring success by a fixed outcome. |
DT: | Yes, by some immediate mastery, which is just unrealistic. |
DB: | Exactly. |
DT:
| Now, once you’ve been able to identify what the issue is, talk us through the mechanics of a coaching session. By allowing the client to discover the solutions themselves, how do you achieve that? |
DB:
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30:00 | So what we do as coaches, as a good coach, we would apply various skills, including really deep listening. So that’s not just listening to the words that the person’s saying, but also the body language that they use. And you know what happens with their breathing or that sort of bodily reaction to the things they’re saying as well. Certain themes might come up over and over again, which you need to pick up on as part of your good coaching toolkit. And so as we have a conversation and I ask open questions around the particular issue that we’re discussing, these things will slowly come out. And rather than, you know I might, in my head, have a particular view about what this person should do in a particular situation, for example, but best practice is not for me to say “oh, actually I’ve got some advice for you, I think you should do X”, right? I would say OK, so for example, we might have a situation where somebody says “I’m a failure. I can’t do this anymore, it’s too hard.” And then I might say something like “who would be surprised to hear you say that?” And that then would lead to the person to say “oh” you know “my dad would be surprised to hear me say that ’cause he’s always supportive of me”, for example. And so what that does is that gives that person an opportunity to actually think about their own problems or their own thought processes from somebody else’s perspective. And that then just opens up the opportunity to start thinking about these things differently and seeing that the solution to their problem isn’t just all in one direction. There are a million different options available, all of which we can explore depending on their desires and future goals and all that sort of thing. It’s all about the type of question that you ask. Another type of question that I often use is: where do you want to be in five years? So imagine a situation where every single thing went perfectly for you – what does that look like in five years’ time? That then gets the person out of their problem focus in the immediate situation, and projects them five years into the future in a situation which is absolutely perfect for them. That’s a positive for them from an emotional point of view because it’s positive sort of energy that comes from that and all of the science says that thinking about positive things actually improves our mood and our decision-making processes. But it also allows the person to see a future where that problem is no longer a problem. And then what we do is then work backwards. “OK, so how did you get there?” And then we discuss that. So that’s a couple of the types of things that you can do as a coach. TIP: Dimity’s just given some insight into her practice method as a professional coach, but there are a range of models a coach may use based on the client or on their own personal preference. Let’s explore two of the most frequently used models. First, the GROW coaching model (which stands for Goal, Reality, Options and Will) was created in the 80s by Sir John Whitmore, a leading figure in the executive coaching world and a British race car driver! He developed the model as a coaching tool to help individuals or groups achieve their goals by establishing:
A coach’s responsibility in using this model is to help the client determine what their goals are and then understand the things that will help them achieve them. Another popular model is the OSKAR model, which stands for Outcome, Scaling, Know-How, Affirm & Action, and Review. With the OSKAR model, a client:
The GROW model and the OSKAR model. |
DT: | Coming from a background as a lawyer where we’re not just trained to, but called upon, to give advice sometimes on issues that people don’t realize they have, so sometimes unsolicited advice, it must be very challenging not to give in to that temptation to just say, “well, I think I know what the answer is for you, but this is what the answer is.” |
DB:
31:00 | It’s super hard, it is actually something that is still a work in progress for me. So I’m constantly learning and constantly trying to grow and improve my skills as a coach. And having had almost a lifetime in the law, and being trained to be the advisor to a client, and to have the answers for the client, it’s really, really hard to stop myself from putting that hat on in a coaching situation. So that’s a constant work in progress for me but I’m very conscious of it and I try very hard to avoid it. But sometimes people straight out ask me. I mean the thing about the type of client that I have, because my focus is on lawyers because of my experience, sometimes people will just say, “well have you ever had this experience? What did you do?” And if it’s requested advice then I’ll give it. But I try to avoid it if I can. |
DT:
| I’ve done a little bit of coaching training myself through my MBA and I found sometimes as that temptation to give advice comes in your questions start getting more and more closed and more and more pointed. |
DB: | Yeah, yeah. |
DT: | ‘Cause you don’t want to give it but you kind of do, and so you just lead them there like a cross examination. |
DB: 32:00 | Well what they call it in the coaching training is shepherding. So essentially what you’re doing is you’re trying to steer your client into a direction by asking certain pointed questions. And we are very good at that as lawyers, especially if you’ve got a litigation background as well. So shepherding is something that is very real and something that as learning coaches we’ve got to be very careful of as well. |
DT: | Even the metaphor has some connection to litigation, doesn’t it? You know, after you shepherd the sheep through the gates, you close the gates in the same way that you do in cross examination. Now that’s how a one-on-one session would work, but you also run group seminars for law firms. Tell us a bit about that. |
DB:
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34:00 | Yeah, so. I try to make them as engaging and as interactive as possible, but it can be on essentially a topic of interest to the group. So for example, a couple of weeks ago I did a session on burnout for an industry group of women in shipping. And for law firms, I’ve recently been very interested in a concept called “the HERO mindset” which is a psychological construct around hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism. And so essentially what I try and do, I’ll decide on the topic with the firm or with the group that we’re doing the seminar for, and I’ll just, you know, give a little bit of psychoeducation on a particular topic, whether it be burnout or HERO mindset or whatever it is. And try and make the experience as intimate and as open as possible so that people feel comfortable to share their stories because I feel that the most engaging type of seminar is one where the people who are attending actually are part of the process and share their stories. So that’s the sort of way I like to do my seminars and webinars, but there’s also something called group coaching which is a slightly different thing. So, group coaching is what it sounds like, it’s a group of clients, so you might have a small group, it’s usually better for it to be smaller, sort of five or six people. Usually they have a common goal or similar goals, and it would be very similar to a normal coaching experience although the time that you spend with each person is less obviously than a one-on-one. You will try and coach that person with their particular goal issue, but you will also try and bounce off what’s coming off all the other group members and get everyone to see how their problem might be common to everybody, or they can learn from the experience of the group as a whole. So it’s a bit more of a dynamic process. |
DT: | And I suppose you almost have to teach the rest of the group how to listen and how to ask those open questions before you start. |
DB: 35:00 | Yeah, it’s a good way to start a process to get people thinking about how to have a good coaching conversation so that they can be involved in that process in a way which is conducive to people getting something out of it. |
DT: | Now we’ve spoken about coaching and the methodology of coaching so far, and coaching is used in many industries and indeed you present and coach professionals from many different industries, but what about the legal profession is unique in a coaching environment? What issues do you find that are unique to lawyers or what techniques, as a coach, do you find that you need to use for lawyers that maybe you don’t need to use for others? |
DB:
36:00 | Look I don’t know whether it’s unique or not to be honest, because the law as a profession has a lot of things in common with accounting, for example, or engineers. But certainly in my experience of having coached primarily lawyers, I would say that one thing that pops up very very often and often is the cause of, in my view, a little theory I have is that perfectionism is the cause of all lawyers’ dramas in their lives, and so I have a feeling that pervasiveness of perfectionism in the law, and the fact that our education system and our training actually encourages and seeks to increase perfectionism in us is something that we have to manage and something that pops up in coaching all time. |
DT:
| It’s one of those nature and nurture questions that comes up in legal education often, isn’t it? Whether the law attracts a kind of pessimistic perfectionist or whether it makes them. How do you address perfectionism in a one-on-one coaching environment? How do you use listening and open questions to challenge a perfectionist approach to work? |
DB: 37:00
38:00 | I’m trained in the cognitive behavioural approach to coaching. So that’s, if anybody is familiar with cognitive behavioural therapy, it’s a very similar approach. And what that involves is getting the person to identify the problem, so making a statement, “I’m not good at X,” for example. And saying “OK, what makes you think that?” Getting them to work out what’s the cause of the thought that’s giving them this negative feeling and creating these negative emotions and then asking them to challenge them. Say “well hold on a minute, who would be surprised to hear you say that? Is there any experience that you’ve had that is not consistent with that belief.” Challenging the negative belief and their failure, or the fact that they’re a bad lawyer or whatever it is, that is how the perfectionism is showing up in that person and saying, “OK, let’s challenge that. Let’s test this belief that you have about yourself.” Sometimes it involves collecting evidence as well. So you might say “OK, I want you to make a note of every time that someone says something to you, which is counter to your belief about yourself”, for example. And then what you do overtime is they realise “oh, so this belief about myself is not true” or “it’s not as I believed it to be.” And so therefore they start changing their attitude towards themselves and then also changing that mindset around, what should be expected of them and what’s reasonable to expect of themselves. |
DT: | Do you find that your clients come from a particular stage in their career, or do you find coaching is equally useful for people at every stage of their career? |
DB: 39:00
40:00 | I think it can be used by anybody at any stage of their career, but the issues that will be the topic of the coaching will be different over time. So a junior person might be concerned about whether or not they’ve made the right decision in their life to actually become a lawyer, for example. Or they might have issues managing their time or having you know negative thoughts about the feedback that they’ve received from a senior lawyer, for example. So that might be something that would be the topic of coaching for a more junior person. You might get somebody who’s in their mid-career, who like myself, I got to the point where I was like “OK, well, partnerships are out for me. You know, what are my options? Do I really want to stay with this for the rest of my life? What other things might I be interested in doing?” Coaching can help with that sort of conversation as well, and that decision-making process. Partners or new partners might be interested in understanding “well, how does my behaviour impact on my staff and what sort of partner do I want to be? How do I want to impact on this firm? What do I want my legacy to be in this law firm?” Coaching can help with that and clarifying and crystalising what it is their sort of value and key purpose. |
DT:
| Now, having access to an executive coach like yourself, when someone feels they need coaching to explore some of those issues can be very useful, but for our listeners who might want to use some of these coaching techniques in their own workplaces, with some of their colleagues or some of the lawyers that they supervise, it sounds like it’s difficult to have a coaching conversation unless someone’s approached you for it because coaching is so much about letting the client find these answers themselves and being open to finding these answers themselves. Is there a way to start a coaching conversation or start a coaching relationship with someone who you feel needs the advice? |
DB: 41:00 | Yeah, so I think of a coaching conversation in the context of being part of the everyday conversation that we have with each other, particularly in a developmental context. So for example, you know as a senior lawyer, I might have a junior lawyer in front of me who’s just presented me with a piece of advice which isn’t what I was expecting, for example. Rather than fixing it myself, or giving them the poor feedback and unconstructive feedback around the advice, there are ways you might be able to have that type of developmental conversation in a coaching style. So you might say to that junior lawyer, “OK, what other sources could you have looked at to decide whether or not that was the right way to go?” Those sorts of open questions getting them to identify what their options were rather than telling them what the answer is. |
DT: 42:00 | You’re saying this is a skill set that you can fold into your current conversations around feedback and around growth and around career development as well. |
DB: | Absolutely. |
DT: | And use this as a tool kit in those interactions you’re already having. |
DB:
| Yeah, absolutely. And I actually think it’s to the benefit of the junior staff in the long run and also to the supervising staff, because I believe that the whole point of supervising and seeking to develop and grow a junior lawyer is to make them be able to do a great job without too much influence or interference from yourself. You know you want them to be thinking in a logical and expansive way about things. And why not try and do what you can to encourage that style of thinking at every opportunity. |
DT: 43:00 | Well said. You’ve said that you want to use executive coaching to change the culture in law firms, if there was an aspect of law firm culture that you could change, what would it be? |
DB:
44:00 | I am really, really passionate about the importance of living your values and finding your own meaning and purpose in life. And I have a real issue at the moment with law firms not living the values that they perceive or that they publicly state that they’ve got. So if I could see any change in the culture of law firms, it would be for law firms to really walk the walk when it comes to stated values and to actually make sure that ultimately, money and instructions don’t override stated values and what they say is the key driver of their firm. |
DT: | Tell me a bit more about that, because often these stated values, whether they’re on an internal only basis, or they’re part of the marketing copy, often are quite similar to one another, aren’t they? There’s often some shared values between firms like integrity, for example, tell me a bit more about some of these values that you feel perhaps aren’t lived in the way that you’d expect? |
DB:
45:00 | Yeah, the problem is that they’re spending a lot of money on marketing, and you know, obviously I’m speaking at the sort of top tier end of the spectrum here because not everyone spends a lot of money on management gurus and things to try and work out what the values of the firm are, but they spend a lot of money trying to create these value statements, but then that’s it. It just sits on a website and there’s no change in policies. There’s no change in procedures of any kind, there’s no change at all. And unfortunately, I have the feeling that it is just a marketing copy and it’s something that they can give the big clients and say “oh look these are our firm values” and just tick a box. So they’re not actually intended to be anything but a nice pamphlet which is a real shame because it really misses the opportunity to change the lived experience of lawyers in their careers if you don’t actually believe in the values that you’re sprouting. |
DT:
| Is there a way that, in your work through individual or group coaching, you can help a client to identify and live their own values in the work that they’re that they’re doing? Is that an issue that you often identify in clients? |
DB: 46:00
47:00 | Often when people feel like they’ve got no direction in life or they don’t have any direction in their career, it’s because they’ve lost sight of the reason why they became a lawyer in the first place, or the reason why they became a lawyer in the first place is no longer serving them. TIP: Understanding your core values is an integral aspect of creating a sustainable career for yourself in the law, and that’s where coaches can really help. For those seeking more information on how they can better reflect on their values, after this episode, try Episode 40 of Hearsay with Clarissa Rayward where she shares her insights she’s gained on her own journey to finding success, balance, contentment and happiness as a lawyer. And so one of my absolute key beliefs, and part of my coaching philosophy in general is to help people find their values and their meaning in their life and in their career so that they can make sustainable long-term decisions for themselves. You know if you’ve got a client who’s a partner, for example, someone who is on the path to partnership who is thinking about values and living their values and making sure that they’re making those sorts of sustainable decisions for themselves, then the hope is that they will then apply that skill, that knowledge and their beliefs and their values to their whole system, which includes their law firm as well. And so, over time the more lawyers you have who work based on values and belief structures, rather than billing money, I believe that will change. And my deep deep hope is that even in some small way, if at the end of my coaching career I can say that I have influenced the culture of law firms in some small way, I will feel like I have been successful because that ultimately is the goal for me. |
DT: | Really cultivating that change from the ground up. |
DB: 48:00 | Yeah inside, yeah. |
DT:
| And I wonder if that’s really the issue with some of these value statements in large firms that they’re published at a high level. Perhaps there’s a C-Suite level executive who feels it’s important to generate the value statement, but there’s no communication of that or what it means throughout the rest of the organisation and its importance really just stays up there in this kind of esoteric way. Whereas what you’re saying is by encouraging people to think more about their values and the values that they want to express through their work as they come up through their career, they engender that approach to work wherever they go. |
DB: | That’s my deep hope, yep. |
DT:
49:00 | I want to finish with this idea of personal legacy. It’s something you mentioned in coaching clients who might be partners or on the path to partnership, but I think it’s a fascinating topic for anyone to really contemplate. You’ve just described your own, and when I read that I really thought about what my personal legacy might be, I don’t know that I have the answer to that. Tell us a bit about why you work on that idea with your clients and how your clients or even our listeners could go about identifying what they hope their legacy to be? |
DB:
50:00
51:00 | As I mentioned, for me values and meaning and purpose is the absolute key for us all to have mentally well lives, to flourish and to make a difference in the world in a positive way. And so, what I do is I talk to clients about their legacy in a way of trying to tease out what their values and what their purpose is. So what I try and do is I ask them “if you could sit down at your own funeral, what would you like people to say about you?” And sometimes it’s a bit of an off-centre question and people get a little bit shocked by it, “that’s a bit of a weird thing to ask me”, but what it really does is it clarifies to people what’s really important to them. And often people don’t think about that. They spend their whole lives, especially in this busy world that we all live in, constant distractions all the time, we don’t actually spend time to think about what the next 10 or 20 years or 40 years might look like for us ’cause we’re so deep in the moment and so busy in that moment that we actually don’t spend time thinking about “where am I now and how is that going to get me to where I want to be?” And so, by asking the client the question about their legacy, I’m forcing them to push right through to the future. “What’s important? What do you want people to say about you?” Usually it’s not that they billed 50 million hours a week. |
DT: | Rarely comes up in a eulogy. |
DB: | Exactly! Right! So “OK, so you’ve decided that you want people to say these things about you. Where are you now? How are you going to get there?” That’s what I use that for. |
DT:
| You’re so right that those superficial indicators of success or advancement that we often look to are never really the subject of a legacy. Just as no one ever mentioned billings in a eulogy I don’t know that anyone ever said “and the highest title they ever achieved was Executive Director. Doesn’t that sound cool?” |
DB: | Yeah, exactly. |
DT:
52:00 | You know, we really care so much about these metrics and titles but that I think looking back will place very little stocking. I really hope that our listeners can take some of the tools we’ve discussed today and as you say, implement coaching into the conversations they’re already having with their supervisors, with their supervised lawyers, with their colleagues. If there’s one tip you could give to our listeners to make those coaching conversations go well, what would it be? |
DB:
| I would say be open minded. So, often we as lawyers have a very firm view about what the options are and what the solution to a certain problem is. But what we do in limiting ourselves to that one solution is we’re actually missing out on 50 other different ways that we can achieve the same result. So what I would say to people is to be open minded about what the options might be for a solution and to listen to the person and take benefit from other people’s perspectives on things, because you might find that the solution that you had in mind for this particular problem ultimately is not the best solution. |
DT: | Dimity Brown, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay. |
DB: | Thank you so much. |
DT: 53:00
54:00 | As always, you’ve been listening to Hearsay The Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank my guests today, Dimity Brown, executive coach for lawyers, for coming on the show. Now in terms of further listening, I mentioned earlier in this episode that our interview with Clarissa Rayward on matching personal brand with personal values could be a good one to listen to next. Or, if you’re looking for something completely different, try our interview with the Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG on how judges judge, and his reflections on his own decision in the 2004 High Court decision of Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs v B [2004] HCA 20 – it’s a really fascinating listen. Now if you’re an Australian legal practitioner, you can claim one continuing professional development point for listening to this episode. Whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD unit is self-assessed, but we suggest this episode constitutes a professional skills point. If you’ve claimed five CPD points for audio only content already this CPD year, you might need to access our multimedia content to claim further points from listening to Hearsay. More information on claiming and tracking your points on the Hearsay platform can be found on our website. The Hearsay team is Zahra Wilson, Sadhir Shiraj and me, David Turner. Nicola Cosgrove is our executive producer and is the coach that keeps Hearsay fighting fit. Hearsay The Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Assured Legal Solutions, a boutique commercial law firm making complex, simple. You can find all of our episodes as well as our summary papers, transcripts, quizzes and more on our website, and if you’re a subscriber we’ll let you know by email whenever we release a new episode. And, by the way, our free trial episodes are now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, so if you like it give a rating on your preferred platform and maybe tell a friend to listen to an episode too. Thanks for listening. |
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