Wise Business Leader Blog

If ever there is a subject that has more opinions and more discussions it is probably what is good leadership and what makes a good leader. Leadership is a skill used to realize a vision through the cooperation and contribution of others. The job of a leader is to motivate or influence people; focus is on the vision and the goal is to move people. Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. But what vision?

The theory of servant leadership is not a new one but one that has become more popular in recent years. Servant Leadership is a theory originally coined by Robert Greenleaf in 1970. It involves a leader making a conscious decision to serve the needs of the people within the company. It implies that by focusing on allowing employees to flourish at their very best level the company will flourish. Recently I had someone expand that theory to say that a good leader serves at the pleasure of the people. I am not sure I can agree with this.

The concept of servant leadership can be traced back, at least partly, to Jesus, about 2000 years ago. Many institutions and individuals have adapted the Servant Leadership approach to Christian principles. The theory is fine as far as it goes but I believe that a good leader serves the company, business, or owner of the vision more so than the people. So my question would be; servant to what or to whom? As it pertains to business I would prefer to say that leaders need to serve the needs of the business or shareholders ahead of the employees. The objective is to enhance the growth of individuals in the organization and increase teamwork and personal involvement.
Every organization, circumstance, or business calls for different courses of action. The success of your leadership will ultimately depend on the way you recognize the needs of the business or the strategic plan for that business, and how you can adapt your leadership style to those needs.

When we get together for mentoring sessions I have begun to notice a pattern. For a few weeks now I have tried to figure out just what is going on. The symptoms are; something comes up usually with IT or marketing and no one person is in charge. After some investigation I determine that the owner or senior partner has vendored out a piece of the puzzle and the Firm Administrator or Business Manager are focused on legal cases. So I ask who is in charge of this area and I get blank looks back. There seems to be a few things going on here;

1. I do not find an understanding that the business of law includes all the support elements. The most prevalent understanding I find is that the case is all important. This is great for a general focus but there are a lot of elements that go into handling or settling a "case".


2. I find a belief that marketing and IT support are necessary evils in this economy, but the business is settling client's cases.

I also discover that there is little understanding of what is involved to run this law business. Let's narrow it down a little so I can better convey my point. I was called into a law firm that is totally driven by their case management system. That, to me, would mean that their information technology was a key element to their business. On this day their server locked up and to get out of this problem the battery backup system had been powered down. They thought that this was the server. Anyway, when this happened all the servers powered down and they could not get the system back online. Not only did they not know which "box" was their server, they did not know what it controlled or who was responsible for the system. What I discovered was that they had signed contracts with several vendors to provide support on pieces of the IT system to save cost, but no one vendor or person had total control. The Firm Administrator had no idea what all that hardware did. So as long as everything worked (which was 90% of the time) all was well.
This is one of the elements that should have been addressed in strategic planning. Many law firms today have complex IT systems that support their business. These systems are a marvel of modern technology and include hardware, cables, software and many control tables. The systems are self checking and many times self repairing but if an element fails it is not always obvious to someone that has no idea what that system was designed to do. If this is the backbone of your business why would you have an administrator or a business manager that did not understand that system. That would imply to me that this person does not understand your business. If that were true how would you expect that person to administer or manage your business?
Having someone that understands your business and all the elements of your business is a key role. This is not the place to skimp. If you are going to give this responsibility to a vendor make sure that vendor is responsible and accountable for all the elements. I have had a firm administrator call me up to fix a printer that was unplugged and was holding up a client meeting. Take a good look at your "business" not just your deliverable and make sure that you know what drives your business and who is in control.