Confidence and communication - The building blocks for a successful collaborative culture (Part 2)

As we face up to continuing global turmoil and change, all of which is likely to impact our businesses directly in the months ahead, what can we do to improve leadership in this complex world?  

As outlined in the earlier introduction to this series of articles, collaborations in the business world can bring new knowledge and audiences, push industry boundaries, as well as solve sticky issues.   

And while there may be some resistance among law firms in getting too close to their competitors, being open to finding routes to engage with sector peers and cross-sector connections can have a significant and positive impact on business strength.

We see our SME law firm members use the LawNet community to share solutions, best practice and knowledge, peer-to-peer, whether in person at our learning events, or through online discussion sessions and community forums. 

Exciting examples of collaboration across our network, with firms working together on issues ranging from AI to HR, give clear evidence that openness encourages reciprocity. 

The cornerstones of such collaboration we have identified among our members are: confidence, communication, creativity and critiquing. In this article I will focus on building trust in relationships to instil confidence in collaborative partnerships and how communication counts. 

Confidence

Trust can be the biggest single arbiter of how successful a collaboration will be as it can influence how openly you will share confidences or vulnerabilities. 

This makes finding the right setting crucial from the start. Sometimes trust may be implicit in the environment you’re joining - our members know they can speak candidly with their LawNet peers as they are operating in a non-competing environment with a long-established ‘Chatham House Rule’ culture, whether informally one-to-one, or with managed interactions through our forum programme. But even without overt reassurance, there is an opportunity for greater co-operation in the sector generally, with the right outlook. 

Firms interested in setting up collaborative structures with others in their sector, or from a range of business sectors, should ask themselves some basic questions. Would you be best served by an open or closed network of collaborators? Should you be all-inclusive or hierarchical in defining those taking part – will you enable a firm-wide multi-disciplinary approach to learning outside the firm or identify a leader to join with other leaders?  And do you have a clear route for bringing problems or feedback to and from the table?  

These questions hold true whether you have decided to join forces with a single firm, perhaps because you feel there is only marginal direct competition between your businesses and you can be open with each other, or taking part in a larger, legal sector grouping.  Maybe you are hoping to use a general business networking group to find ways of working more closely with potential partners, or to tackle more generic business issues with those from outside your sector.   Or perhaps you simply want to overcome a silo mentality in your own firm and encourage greater cooperation internally in pursuit of learning across teams and a streamlined service for clients. 

Whichever route you choose, what counts is having clear boundaries and expectations to inspire confidence from the outset. 

Communication 

Once trust is in place, there is the potential for open communication and here the distinction between transactional and collaborative attitudes is perhaps most evident. 

Transactional relationships, a place where everyone is seeking a sale rather than looking to share, can be a shallow pond. 

To collaborate successfully, it’s important to get to know people first.  Those connections don’t thrive when we’re simply focused on execution of a task, they happen when we relax and disclose things about ourselves and tease out the things we have in common, which brings us back to having the environment of trust where such interactions can thrive. 

Relationships built on trust and mutual respect can provide the foundation for tangible gains in ongoing networking and collaboration, because of the enhanced and open communication engendered.  

As Blaser Mills Law partner Hiren Gandhi explains:

When there’s an openness to sharing ideas and information, it helps you see that you're not the only one facing challenges, and the problems you have aren't unique.  To understand how others are dealing with things, hearing their different perspective, means you're not doing it alone. 

Building deeper relationships may also help in tackling one of the big challenges facing the sector – people.  As Andrew Allen from chartered accountants PKF Francis Clark, whose team compiles LawNet’s annual financial benchmarking survey, says: 

Recruitment and retention remains the leading concern of law firms at present.  Demand for services remains strong and it is most commonly the challenge of delivering the work which exercises firms rather than winning it in the first place. 

Having open conversations can help identify future candidates, as you get to know the person, not the cv, and by creating interesting opportunities for staff through collaborative activities, you can support retention. 

As one of our young lawyers said after spending two days at our annual conference: 

“I gained so much, not just in learning from the guest speakers, but also from meeting such a range of people. Every person I spoke to was very supportive and encouraging.”

Check back to read the final article in this series which we will be publishing next week, considering how the power of collaboration may help firms to break through to better business performance.  

A longer version of this article was previously published in Solicitors Journal