Executive Coaching for Lawyers
What company executives have used for ages has finally hit the legal industry
Top managers in all industry sectors know that executive coaching is most valuable for strengthening their leadership, helping them stay on track and achieve their goals. While executive coaching has been best practice in most companies, lawyers were reluctant to adopt it. Most important reason, I believe, is that lawyers – even if in a managerial role – perceive themselves primarily as lawyers and not as managers. The professional identity of lawyers is a strong one. How many law firm partners or general counsel define themselves primarily as managers?
However, times are changing. – Over the last years international law firms have started proposing both internal and external coaching programmes to their partners and more and more lawyers start to experience the beneficial results of coaching work. – Gone are the times where lawyers believed that going for coaching would be like admitting that something was wrong with them and they had to go to fix it . Coaching is today recognized for what it is: the most effective way to make “great people even better”. It is a strategic tool to achieve results.
Lawyers belong to the most educated and skilled professionals. They are proud of their extensive legal training. But, legal education has overdeveloped analytical thinking, logic, structure, confrontation, competition, detail and evidence focus, as well as emotional detachment. Legal training has transformed law students into ideas competitors with a win-lose mindset since the best graduates are the ones that come up with the most compelling reasoning and s of law firms and legal departments. Precisely, executive coaching allows senior legal executives to change and develop their skills. We work not win the argument. This has, of course, led to many great results such as excellence in legal analysis, in spotting flaws and contradictions in any reasoning process and in identifying risks and worst-case scenarios. Nonetheless, it has had some unfortunate effects because management and leadership also require different strengths. The abilities of lawyers to create vision, innovate, inspire, infuse team-spirit, build trust and collaboration as well as relationship skills like empathy have yet been underdeveloped. When lawyers take on a leading role in an organisation they need to build up these crucial skills.
At SAMIDA we have identified these needs and designed specific executive coaching programmes for leaderonly on enhancing technical skills but also work around changing beliefs, internal blockages and identity. Our programmes are in particularly designed in a way to help lawyers making a crucial shift in their mindset which allows them to tap into their unused potential and develop their entrepreneurial, management and leadership skills.
Our tailor-made development opportunities offer the feedback, awareness and self-understanding needed to succeed in today’s uncertain and challenging leadership environment.
