Your Genius Law Firm

If you believe law-firm marketing, you would be persuaded that the legal industry is filled with geniuses, and that your firm has more geniuses than most other firms. After all, the lawyers in your firm are star performers, the best in their practice areas who go above and beyond to beat the competition and achieve success for the client. Right?

Right.

While this marketing copy may appeal to the egos of the people in charge, it can also be a red flag pointing to serious problems in your law firm’s organizational cultural. Your Genius Law Firm may in fact be a Fixed-Mindset Law Firm.

Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset Framework

When Professor Carol Dweck first articulated the differences between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, we found a useful new way of thinking about success in the workplace and in life. We realized that our earlier emphasis on seeking perfection had created generations that were scared of risk because they were terminally terrified of failure. They believed that either you were born smart and talented or you were not. So early accomplishments were valued.

• Fixed Mindset: a person’s “belief that their intelligence is a fixed, immutable trait.”
• Growth Mindset: a person’s “belief that their intelligence can expand and develop.”

As these concepts penetrated society, educators rushed to encourage growth mindset among their students while employers sought ways to assess current and potential employees for their mindsets. Unfortunately, we misunderstood several things about this framework and, in the process, sanctified growth mindset while demonizing fixed mindset.

To be clear, growth mindset is preferable to fixed mindset but our understanding of these states needs adjustment. In her new book, Cultures of Growth, Professor Mary C. Murphy shines light on some of the key necessary adjustments:

• Fixed mindset and growth mindset are not binary choices. A person is not irrevocably one or the other.
• These mindsets are a continuum and most of us can move along that continuum at different times in our life.
• While we have a default mindset, we can be nudged away from that default by prevailing conditions at any given time.
• Those prevailing conditions often come from our organizations.

Organizational Responsibility

One of the biggest misconceptions is that mindset is purely an individual condition. Murphy’s research shows that organizations or even smaller teams have mindsets too. You can find evidence of group mindset in organizational culture, mission statements, policies, procedures, how policies and procedures are enforced, and leadership statements and behavior.

The other related misconception is that hiring new employees who demonstrate growth mindset will automatically convert your organization from a fixed to growth mindset. Unfortunately, it is more likely that these new employees will tire of being countercultural and will conform their behavior over time to the prevailing fixed mindset behaviors. Or they will simply leave.

Cultures of Genius and Cultures of Growth Framework

If you’re curious about whether your organization has a culture of genius or a culture of growth, assess which of the following statements are most likely in your organization:

• Cultures of Genius
  • We hire only the brightest and the best.
  • We believe you’re either smart or you’re not, you’ve got it or you don’t. It’s a binary world, baby!
  • We have a stable of superstar performers. We poach talent and replace our current team as necessary.
  • We aim for perfection. To achieve this, we quickly point out shortcomings and may arbitrarily fire the lowest performers in a team.
  • We encourage competition among our people — how else do you ensure that they perform at a high level?
  • We experience low levels of trust in and commitment to our organization. Our people will leave anytime to get a better deal elsewhere. Consequently, our recruiting and onboarding expenses are a recurring and growing line item in our budget.
  • Our performance management system focuses on results. How you get there is your business. Consequently, we see low levels of integrity, collaboration, and innovation. It’s an uphill battle to stay ahead of the competition. But that’s life in the arena, right?

• Cultures of Growth
  • We focus on developing our people to be their best.
  • We invest in and reward effective teamwork.
  • We encourage our people to take smart risks.
  • We explicitly support learning from mistakes and sharing that learning.
  • We acknowledge and support the struggle that is the inevitable precursor to growth.
  • We honor the struggle as much as we celebrate the achievement.
  • We do not demand perfection or other unrealistic standards of achievement.
  • Our leaders consistently model behaviors of learning and growth.
  • We reap the rewards of high levels of trust in and commitment to the organization. Consequently, our employees stay with us and we reduce our recruitment and onboarding expenses.
  • Our learning-first environment promotes integrity, collaboration, and innovation. Consequently, we see improvements in the organization’s productivity, finances, and impact.

The Legal Industry’s Special Challenge

The legal industry’s special challenge is the presence of lawyers. (That is NOT a joke!) To become a lawyer, a person must prove themselves to be academically capable, smarter than the average bear. But along with all those smarts come other less helpful attributes common across the profession: the focus on individual achievement and the related need for autonomy and lack of sociability. (To learn more about this, see the work of Dr. Larry Richard linked below.) Given these tendencies, the default position of most lawyers is a fixed mindset. Accordingly, a group of lawyers will tend toward a culture of genius.

The default mindset of lawyers is buttressed by the low tolerance for failure found in law firms: the higher the hourly billable rate, the higher the stakes for the client, the less room there is for error. This makes a culture of genius hard to avoid.

Lawyer attributes aside, the prevailing partnership model in law firms is based on the deeply flawed concept of meritocracy that tends to perpetuate stereotypes and biases. (To learn more about the problems with “meritocracy”, see the work of Professor Michael Sandel linked below.) Professor Dweck views meritocracy as “the legacy of hierarchy”: “…those in power, born into privilege and educated at prestigious schools, tend to look for ways to justify why they are better.” Professor Claude Steele (also at Stanford) takes this a step further: “this type of thinking legitimizes and launders privilege. The reality is that I’ve gotten good because I’ve had some pretty good scaffolding, but with the genius idea, I don’t have to think about my position that way — I can think about it in terms of ‘this is a gift that I have.'”

Conclusion

At the end of the day, law firms demonstrate a strong preference for the simplicity and clarity of the fixed mindset. Partners like their Genius Law Firms.

But, if we believe Mary Murphy and all the other acolytes of Carol Dweck, each firm needs to develop a culture of growth in order to increase its capacity for trust, collaboration, and innovation — the bedrock of continuing success. Executing perfectly an operational strategy that does not enable experiment, failure, and learning is a sure path to perfect irrelevance in a competitive market.

Resources

• Above and Beyond KM – What Makes Lawyers So Challenging
• Mary Murphy: Creating Cultures of Growth (video)
• Larry Richard: Herding Cats
• Michael Sandel: The Tyranny of Merit (video)

[Photo Credit: Arthur Sasse]