How business habits impact the effectiveness of your law firm
The effectiveness of your law firm is intrinsically linked to the daily habits of your team, says Chris Pucci, CEO of Osprey Approach.
Every law firm will have a combination of business habits that either help them to run a successful firm aligned with their goals, or habits that are hindering success and damaging performance.
Regardless of your goals, running a successful firm involves mastering the basics and adopting processes that help you to remain competitive. Improving the effectiveness of your firm requires breaking down your current processes and identifying areas of improvement that enable you to align with your goals, so that you can build effective habits.
Build better habits
Building good business habits helps you to establish a foundation of seamless and effective processes designed for maximum output. These habits, especially when combined across all individuals in your team, have huge benefits for your firm across compliance, client satisfaction, employee motivation, profitability, and much more. They provide a foundation that enables your firm to continue to optimise, stay flexible, and adapt to change.
Similarly though, continuing with inefficient habits will create cumulatively bigger challenges in time. If you find your firm has poor results or outcomes today, it’s likely due to a sum of small choices over a long period of time that eventually led to the problem. To avoid challenges in the future, you need to set yourself up for success today.
Long-term success
Long-term success requires an environment that enables effective habits to flourish while reducing inefficient ones. To help achieve this, you need four things – aligned goals, accountability, effective tools, and the right mindset.
Aligned goals
Aligned goals help you to focus on what is it you want to achieve. If you know your goals and your purpose, you’ll be able to design the most effective processes for the job, monitor performance, and communicate the plan to your team for firm-wide support.
Accountability
If your firm or team aren’t held accountable for their daily responsibilities, they’ll never be motivated to complete the necessary tasks. It can be easy to slip back into old habits, but with specific targets, individuals or teams are held accountable for adopting new processes to meet the wider goals. Performance can be monitored, and areas of improvement can easily be identified for continued development.
Effective tools
Do you have the right technology, infrastructure, digital tools, and people skills to achieve what you’re aiming for? Can you utilise the resources you already have, or does it require investment for long-term success?
The right mindset
As the saying goes, you’re only as strong as your weakest member, so ensuring your team has the right mindset for improvement, change and optimisation, is crucial to building the right environment for success.
How to create the right environment for better business habits
To help improve the effectiveness of your firm, there are five pillars that will help you set up the right environment – enabling you to reduce waste and implement effective processes: –
- Improvement by subtraction – focus on doing less of what doesn’t work, rather than concentrating on what does
- Make it easy – adopt new habits that your team can easily get on board with
- Foster the right mindset – adopt an open mindset of experimentation rather than one focused on outcome
- Tech adoption – give your team easy-to-adopt digital tools that enable them to be more productive, accurate, and effective
- Monitor performance – identify ways you can quantify the results of new habits right across the firm.
Further help and guidance on creating the right environment to foster good business habits can be found in Osprey’s guide to improving the effectiveness of your law firm.
