7 minute read

How a collaboration metric can drive the right behaviour.

What defines a Partner’s success? Traditionally, billable hours. It’s quantifiable, easy to understand and lends itself to ranking or comparison. However, rewarding Partners based on this metric alone creates a competitive, individualistic environment with short-term thinking on success and financial gain

In recent times, a number of firms have moved away from rating skills and overall performance. Meanwhile, other firms are just beginning to look at how a ratings system could start to help them with measuring and rewarding the right behaviours within the business.

Men and women have always found different means of achieving the same ends. 

Partner remuneration is a complex process for any law firm and one that firm leaders are often looking to improve.

It is difficult to refute Dr Heidi Gardner’s findings in her recent book SMART Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos.

Increasingly complex client issues, “VUCA problems – volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous”, demand comprehensive solutions that integrate highly specialised, diverse expertise. Most importantly, clients pay more for these solutions and stick with the firms that provide them.

Streamline your remuneration process.

Partner remuneration is a complex process that goes to the heart of your business, and is subject to competing pressures from within and outside your firm. Download our white paper to find out how to ease your remuneration process and ensure that you’re driving the right behaviors.

“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex…” – Steve Jobs

Historically all but non-existent, Client Planning at legal and accounting firms has gone through a rapid metamorphosis to become one of the primary focus points for most businesses. Now, more than ever, Professional Service firms must tune into their clients’ business needs if they hope to survive in this increasingly competitive market.

However, in an effort to make up for lost time, many firms have jumped straight to complex planning processes. The plans often have limited relevance to their clients, take an inordinate amount of time to administer, and bear little fruit at the end of all that labour.

Taking it back to basics, and incorporating the following 5 steps, will ensure that you have a Client Planning process that improves your long-term client relationships and drives revenue growth:

Annual appraisals don't work. On some level, everyone in HR knows this.

Lawyers deserve better. Associates need to learn and grow. Partners need to align their goals with the firm's strategy. Everyone deserves good, timely feedback.

Download our guide to learn why a continuous feedback approach can deliver dramatic improvements. Learn:

• Why annual appraisals are ineffective
• The benefits of continuous feedback
• How to make it work

It's time to re-appraise appraisals and ObjectiveManager's white paper is a great place to start.

Download 'Appraisals for Lawyers' white paper

About ObjectiveManager

At ObjectiveManager, we have developed goal-setting software to help professional services firms and their people define strategy and improve performance through continuous feedback to power growth.

By simplifying the way firms conduct the entirety of their strategic planning from Sector/Client progammes to Partner Remuneration, we help them improve collaboration and optimise conditions for growth. Our innovative software turns individual gains into big business impact by making individual and firm-wide objectives visible, constant and actionable.

• Client expansion
• Leadership
• Collaboration

Firms that invest time in objective-setting and managing performance against those objectives see increased revenue, happier clients and greater profitability.

Start setting the right objectives today.

Download the 'Six objectives every Partner should have' white paper

About ObjectiveManager

At ObjectiveManager, we have developed goal-setting software to help professional services firms and their people define strategy and improve performance through continuous feedback to power growth.

By simplifying the way firms conduct the entirety of their strategic planning from Sector/Client progammes to Partner Remuneration, we help them improve collaboration and optimise conditions for growth. Our innovative software turns individual gains into big business impact by making individual and firm-wide objectives visible, constant and actionable.

At ObjectiveManager we know that while setting objectives can be hard, actually achieving them is the real challenge.

We’ve all worked in law firms and understand that when you’re short on time, doing things right now often trumps doing things right. But if you aren’t heading in the right direction, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re moving.

• First, objectives are a necessity, not a luxury. For a firm to succeed there has to be a clear strategic plan in place, which includes its people achieving their personal objectives.
• Second, working towards your objectives will make you more efficient because objectives are there to keep you focused on the right things and avoid distractions.

‘In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensible.’ – Dwight D. Eisenhower

For a law firm to succeed it needs a good business plan and SMART objectives. Completing a sequence of tasks will get you so far but you have to know what you – and the firm as a whole – are trying to achieve. If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you’ve got there? And, more importantly, how do you know what difference your work has made to the firm?