Randy Crispen - PartnerLuce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps LLP, San DiegoWhat is CultureShift®?
The Current Reality
Firms often talk about creating a culture of business development, but in most firms, that culture exists more by default than design. Historical events, powerful leaders and oversized personalities often influence behavioral norms more than an intelligently crafted strategy. Without the right culture, you risk a future where you lose lawyers, revenue, profitability and clients. To thrive, firms must develop effective leaders who create environments that encourage the right behaviors.
The Future of Leadership
One of the hardest jobs in a law firm is managing and coordinating the business development efforts of lawyers. In this new economy, the next generation of leaders will be defined by their ability to increase client loyalty and generate profitable growth. To succeed, these leaders must create a self-sustaining culture that attracts and retains great clients, appeals to top lawyers and inspires high performance from talented staff.
Creating a CultureShift®
As a law firm leader, one of your major roles is to raise performance and focus energy in ways that get lawyers to deliver a solid flow of new matters. Creating such a culture, however, requires exquisite finesse to align people, processes, training, and technology. With the help of the CultureShift® process, you can develop customized, high impact approaches that will radically accelerate growth and profitability.
The CultureShift® Process
The experts at Law Firm CultureShift® help leaders ingrain a culture of business development into the fabric of their firms. Our mission is to act as catalysts to instill new habits that attract, retain and grow new revenue. We help firms build customized blueprints for self-sustaining growth through the intelligent integration of leadership and business development training and coaching, retreats, accelerated cross-selling, client teams, strategic planning, and client service programs.
Leadership Challenges
It is extremely difficult to effectively manage the vast array of marketing, selling and client service initiatives that must blend together to create a higher performance culture. No doubt you’ve faced internal obstacles such as low motivation, silo mentalities, dysfunctional groups, weak implementation, ineffective leaders, poor cross-selling, inadequate communication, lack of trust, inefficient teams, ineffective leaders, misaligned compensation, inconsistent client service, unclear goals and measures, underdeveloped selling skills, minimal accountability, and a general lack of follow-through. These barriers must be overcome if you are to unleash the business development potential in your firm.
The Solution
The CultureShift® approach helps firms uncover their obstacles to higher performance, collaborate to remove those obstacles, implement “Key Accelerators” of success, and develop approaches for locking in new behaviors. Working in tandem with your in-house Marketing, Business Development, Professional Development teams, and Group Leaders, Law Firm CultureShift® can help your firm:
- Recognize and address key “Culture-Killers”
- Change undesirable behaviors and remove dysfunctional habits
- Achieve higher levels of lawyer engagement, motivation and implementation
- Develop senior leadership buy-in and commitment
- Turn key leaders into more effective “sales managers”
- Generate greater revenue and profitability
- Increase collaboration, teamwork, collegiality and retention
- Accelerate cross-selling between groups and offices
- Enhance rainmaking skills for more of your lawyers
- Create higher performing client teams
- Receive client feedback and deliver higher levels of client service
- Improve lateral integration
- Enhance strategic and collaborative planning within groups
- Conduct action-oriented, revenue-focused retreats
- Choose the proper goals and measures
- Develop tracking, reporting, and measuring systems to drive ongoing implementation
- Make business development as ongoing part of your culture
Law Firm CultureShift® was founded by award-winning consultant and multiple best-selling author David H. Freeman, J.D., CEO of the David Freeman Consulting Group. For three consecutive years, David was recognized as the best “Law Firm Business Development Consultant and Coach” in nationwide National Law Journal surveys, and for over twenty-four years, he has worked with nearly 200 law firms world-wide, including almost half of the AmLaw 200.
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Getting Started
The first step in any transformation process is self-awareness. To that end, you can identify your existing culture of business development by inviting your lawyers to utilize our complimentary survey tool – the Culture Xray® – which is designed to uncover your lawyers’ perceptions of your firm’s business development strengths and weaknesses. This can be your stake in the ground to get your firm’s CultureShift® started.
