As power in your law firm changes generational hands, the firm's culture naturally evolves. That's fine, so long as you identify and preserve your firm's human, professional, and societal core values.
Jordan — right on target, especially with regard to your insightful observation that habits aren’t principles — these are not core beliefs. They are, however, behaviors that should reflect those core beliefs. Most firms, indeed most enterprises talk about “their culture” but they really cannot define that culture. They may point to a list of nouns they call “values” such as “integrity”, “excellence”, “quality” and “people” — but absent a definition of what these words really mean in the context of the enterprise, they are just words — just corporatist pablum. No, the values must be defined with specificity and clarity. They must be pressure tested for both comprehension and deep collective consensus — otherwise they are not truly shared, not truly embraced by all. Once defined, they must be deployed and further tested by identification of behaviors that are consistent with the values, and required through demonstration — by actually walking the talk. But behaviors that are inconsistent must also be identified and rigorously deployed to ensure that the inconsistent behaviors are not tolerated. These deviations must be addressed either through changed behavior or those that exhibit the inconsistent behaviors must be exited. As so often is the case, the rain-maker’s abusive and selfish behavior towards others is tolerated due to the need for continued precipitation — even though that behavior is inconsistent with lofty incantations about the importance of people, collaboration and the collective. Indeed, if tolerated, the only true principles are “results” & “compensation” — in other words performance to revenue, to PPP, to weirdly contrarian law-firm concepts of leverage — but not to any other salient metric regarding people. As such, the culture is not about people — except insofar as people are the instrumentality to create and bill hours of activity to produce revenue.
But these concepts can be reconciled — and I would argue that culture does not, indeed should not change. If you have a principle-driven enterprise, the culture should, indeed must reflect those principles. Behaviors, however, can change — because as you point out, these aren’t principles — they are habits, activities. Review of the principles, the core values, should take place regularly — but not to change them, rather to validate and reinforce that these are the things the team, the enterprise, truly believes. That these are what all team members commits to and willingly embrace — not by words, but by action. This review by both necessity and practicality also involves a deep review of the behaviors associated with the principles. This is a regular inquiry into “If we truly believe A, then we always do this and never that.” These behaviors can and should be clarified and, at times, modified and even redefined or replaced. Behaviors previously consistent with implementation of the principle might no longer be appropriate given technology, focus, practicality or simply changed circumstances. An easy contemporary example is that if a team value is “collaboration”, an associated behavior was once required office face time and in office hours. This perhaps was because our experience taught that other tools such as email, telephones and 1st gen cloud-based “collaboration platforms” were insufficient substitutes for that in-person experience. It was hard to build trust or have an “ah ha” moment when there wasn’t a water cooler available for casual interactions. If COVID taught us nothing else, it taught us that where one works has little to do with teaming and that today effective platforms can replace the brick and mortar water cooler host facility that’s no longer necessary. And that change happened almost overnight — those once sacrosanct behaviors were jettisoned immediately because they were simply no longer available. The principle of teamwork and contribution didn’t change — it was the behavior associated with location that changed.
This is precisely why in the teams I’ve formed and run, we did the hard work of defining our principles — our beliefs — and then the associated behaviors. We then, and only then, considered the tools we used to achieve our objectives based on those principles and consistent with the required behaviors. Each year we did a PRT Review (Principles | Rules |Tools) and we invariably found that our principles changed little if at all. Our rules, our behaviors, changed from time to time to reflect what we learned about our principles and what we had to do to maintain those principles. Our tools, well, now those changed quite a bit due to effectiveness, efficiency and experience. In other words, our tools holistically reflected our principle core value of Delivered Value.
So I agree, cuture is what matters — but I disagree that it changes and evolves. No, it’s the behaviors consistent with those principles are can, should and indeed must change and evolve.
Jordan — right on target, especially with regard to your insightful observation that habits aren’t principles — these are not core beliefs. They are, however, behaviors that should reflect those core beliefs. Most firms, indeed most enterprises talk about “their culture” but they really cannot define that culture. They may point to a list of nouns they call “values” such as “integrity”, “excellence”, “quality” and “people” — but absent a definition of what these words really mean in the context of the enterprise, they are just words — just corporatist pablum. No, the values must be defined with specificity and clarity. They must be pressure tested for both comprehension and deep collective consensus — otherwise they are not truly shared, not truly embraced by all. Once defined, they must be deployed and further tested by identification of behaviors that are consistent with the values, and required through demonstration — by actually walking the talk. But behaviors that are inconsistent must also be identified and rigorously deployed to ensure that the inconsistent behaviors are not tolerated. These deviations must be addressed either through changed behavior or those that exhibit the inconsistent behaviors must be exited. As so often is the case, the rain-maker’s abusive and selfish behavior towards others is tolerated due to the need for continued precipitation — even though that behavior is inconsistent with lofty incantations about the importance of people, collaboration and the collective. Indeed, if tolerated, the only true principles are “results” & “compensation” — in other words performance to revenue, to PPP, to weirdly contrarian law-firm concepts of leverage — but not to any other salient metric regarding people. As such, the culture is not about people — except insofar as people are the instrumentality to create and bill hours of activity to produce revenue.
But these concepts can be reconciled — and I would argue that culture does not, indeed should not change. If you have a principle-driven enterprise, the culture should, indeed must reflect those principles. Behaviors, however, can change — because as you point out, these aren’t principles — they are habits, activities. Review of the principles, the core values, should take place regularly — but not to change them, rather to validate and reinforce that these are the things the team, the enterprise, truly believes. That these are what all team members commits to and willingly embrace — not by words, but by action. This review by both necessity and practicality also involves a deep review of the behaviors associated with the principles. This is a regular inquiry into “If we truly believe A, then we always do this and never that.” These behaviors can and should be clarified and, at times, modified and even redefined or replaced. Behaviors previously consistent with implementation of the principle might no longer be appropriate given technology, focus, practicality or simply changed circumstances. An easy contemporary example is that if a team value is “collaboration”, an associated behavior was once required office face time and in office hours. This perhaps was because our experience taught that other tools such as email, telephones and 1st gen cloud-based “collaboration platforms” were insufficient substitutes for that in-person experience. It was hard to build trust or have an “ah ha” moment when there wasn’t a water cooler available for casual interactions. If COVID taught us nothing else, it taught us that where one works has little to do with teaming and that today effective platforms can replace the brick and mortar water cooler host facility that’s no longer necessary. And that change happened almost overnight — those once sacrosanct behaviors were jettisoned immediately because they were simply no longer available. The principle of teamwork and contribution didn’t change — it was the behavior associated with location that changed.
This is precisely why in the teams I’ve formed and run, we did the hard work of defining our principles — our beliefs — and then the associated behaviors. We then, and only then, considered the tools we used to achieve our objectives based on those principles and consistent with the required behaviors. Each year we did a PRT Review (Principles | Rules |Tools) and we invariably found that our principles changed little if at all. Our rules, our behaviors, changed from time to time to reflect what we learned about our principles and what we had to do to maintain those principles. Our tools, well, now those changed quite a bit due to effectiveness, efficiency and experience. In other words, our tools holistically reflected our principle core value of Delivered Value.
So I agree, cuture is what matters — but I disagree that it changes and evolves. No, it’s the behaviors consistent with those principles are can, should and indeed must change and evolve.