As I client, I want my lawyers to be polite, co-operative, mature and pleasant (at least to me!). It makes them easier to talk to, it's less distracting, and the halo effect means that I will also think of them as more competent, which is comforting. But in the early stages of your career, you are unlikely to get much face time with clients. So shouldn't you just focus on being good at looking up the law, explaining the law, and staying up late to redline documents?
Students getting ready to join the world of work think that they are being hired because they can do a specific set of things. You want to join an accounting firm? Make sure you can add, subtract and prepare T-accounts. You want to join a law firm? Make sure you can look up the law, use a word processor, and cite cases properly. You want join a software company? Make sure you understand how a programme works, and how to decompose a problem. And so on.
And that's a very sensible thing to do! Having a grasp of the basics will signal your interest in the field, as well as your ability to add some value soon after you join. Being really good at the basics may well get you a job. But once you are in the job, your progression will depend on an entirely different set of skills.
One of those skills is the ability to operate effectively inside an organisation, and within a system. And however those organisations and systems might appear on paper as a set of rules and roles, they are in fact networks of human beings. Those networks exist alongside organisational relationships and hierarchies. They can reinforce official structures, or subvert them. They can enable the transmission of knowledge, or they can create islands of affiliation that prevent ideas and opinions from propagating. And they can make or break a career. So it is absolutely worth figuring out how human beings make decisions, and learning how to influence those decisions.
Manners do matter
As suggested at the start of this post, you can start by being polite, co-operative, mature and pleasant. You are part of a team, part of a practice, and part of a firm, and you will need the co-operation of everyone around you to get anything done. On your first day, you need help getting your e-mail set up and figuring out where the good coffee is. Then you'll need help figuring out where the templates are, how to format documents, and when it's OK to take time off. And as time goes on, your dependence on others will only increase. Since people are more likely to help you if they like you, it is worth mastering the art of social interaction.
From manners to management
But being polite, pleasant, and co-operative is just the beginning. If you want to really start getting things done, you need to go beyond manners and start thinking about management, specifically people management. That means building relationships, navigating power structures, and understanding what makes people tick in the context of organisational life.
"People management" goes by many names. Depending on the context, you may hear it referred to as Organisational Behaviour or Corporate Psychology, or perhaps as a dimension of Behavioural Science or Human Resources Management. Whatever it is called, it is fundamental to building, running and working within an organization, and it is a core skill for anyone who joins an organization and hopes to get things done. It is therefore typically part of the core curriculum at many management programmes.
Ironically, it is also one of the most underrated. From my own experience as an MBA student, I know that many students failed to take the art and science of dealing with people seriously. Their arguments (which they have long since left behind) may resonate with you:
- "It's obvious" - meaning there is nothing new, interesting or useful to learn here
- "It's innate" - meaning you are either born with it or you aren't
- "It's not a priority" - meaning "hard" skills are more valuable, so spend time acquiring them instead
- "It's fluffy" - meaning that even if it's worth learning, there is no way to do it systematically
But, ten years after graduation, those same classmates all acknowledge that these skills are in fact crucial to their success, and have only increased in importance as their careers have progressed.
What guides behaviour in organisations?
As with so many areas this blog covers, there are excellent resources out there for anyone who wants to learn more about organizational behaviour and people management. What follows, therefore, is a simple framework to help you get started.
Incentives:
One of the core tenets of economics is that people respond to incentives. These are often financial, but many incentives are not. Prestige and perks can be equally powerful motivators. Incentives can involve the avoidance of pain or loss as well. Remember that an incentive doesn't have to manifest immediately, or with certainty. Opportunities, options and prospects can also be used to motivate people.
Culture:
Every organisation has a culture, and cultural norms can exert a powerful influence on individual behaviour. What might be acceptable behaviour in one organisation might be considered outrageous in another.
Personality, bias and heuristics:
Incentives and culture set the scene for decisionmaking, but ultimately the individual makes the choice. Behavioural science has a lot of useful things to say about how individuals experience and process incoming data from the world. People have sensory and cognitive filters that can create vastly different perceptions of the same information. People make use of cognitive shortcuts to make assessments and take decisions. Understanding how these heuristics work, can help explain the wide variation in how different people react to situations.
A practical framework for assessing whether someone is likely to co-operate with you
There's a lot to learn and a lot to think about. Indeed, understanding human beings is a lifetime's study. But let's boil this down to a simple "So what?" that you can take with you into your next organisational interaction with a desk-based homo sapiens.
Question 1: Can they do it?
Organisations are collections of rules and roles, overlaid on humans of varying levels and types of ability. Let's say you go to the accounts department and ask the payroll manager if they can provide you with a salary advance. The payroll manager probably has the necessary account access, the required authority, and (crucially) knows how to set up and execute the payment instruction.
Question 2: Should they do it?
For of all the activities that a person is empowered to carry out, there are implicit or explicit rules about when to act. This is where the purpose and definition of the role becomes important. The payroll manager's job is, on the surface, to get peoples' salaries paid. But at a higher level, they have a responsibility to maintain an orderly process and to protect the system from abuse. At a still higher level, they are also supposed to help make the organisation a fair and supportive place to work. And beyond that, there is some kind of duty as a human being to be compassionate, helpful and kind. The decision whether or not to provide a salary advance will depend on the specific circumstances of the request, and on balancing the ethical and organisational imperatives that are salient in the situation.
Question 3: Do they want to do it?
OK: So they can provide your salary advance. They should provide your salary advance. But will they actually use their discretion to make it happen? The truth is that it might just depend on whether they like you. Depending on your own personality and background, you may find this horrifying or hopeful. Whichever the case, it's worth you understanding it as well as you can.
What next?
This is just the beginning. In future posts we will look in more detail at how the human dimension of management plays out in organisation design, hiring and compensation. For now, though, I'd be delighted if this post gets you to take people management seriously, and make it part of your career development plan.