Expanding the Business Case for Talent Management

By Steve Armstrong –

However firmly talent management programs are imbedded in law firms, those responsible for the function still need – and always will need – to make the “business case” for its value: how does it contribute in a fundamental way to a firm’s success? For those reading this blog, the answers seem obvious. Among the leadership of many firms, however, the view of what talent management is all about is still pretty limited: They see it mostly as responsible for organizing its kind of thing – training, evaluations, recruiting, and the like.

Anyone who has a talent-management role becomes adroit at making the business case. But there’s more than one way to go about that, and some ways are better than others for expanding the firm’s conception of what talent management is all about and why it matters. Of the three approaches described below, the last two will take you beyond the conventional definition of talent management into the areas of organizational development and change management. This expansion is the best way to build the business case going forward. Just as the old definition of “professional development” has long since expanded into the broader concept of “talent management,” talent management is expanding into the broader realm of how firms can structure themselves, manage their cultures, and persuade old-dog lawyers to learn new tricks. That expansion doesn’t change the game, which is still all about enhancing the performance and the professional satisfaction of the firm’s lawyers. It simply expands the field on which we play.

Here are the three approaches:

1. The most familiar one: Start with what you already do and look for ways to demonstrate how good it is, the difference it makes, and how much the firm’s lawyers like it. This approach is particularly effective when the benefits can be measured. (For example, “since we changed our recruiting approach three years ago, the average ratings of junior associates have improved by X.”) But those measurements are difficult to come by – and, of course, every other function in the firm is making the same kind of arguments.
2. A second approach: Look for pain points or pressing needs that open the door to a talent-management approach. These opportunities may appear at the firm-wide level: for example, a shrinking profit margin among long-term senior associates or a disturbing wash-out rate among lateral partners. Often, however, they pop up more frequently at the group or office level. For example, a group may consistently lose associates just at the point they become most useful, or its workload may be distributed too unevenly across its lawyers, or it may be struggling to cope with increasing pressures to manage to fixed fees.
3. The third approach is more difficult. It’s a version of a familiar business-development principle: focus not on the services you have to sell, but on what your clients care most about because it most affects their business. Begin with your firm’s strategic priorities or its primary organizational challenges. Sometimes these can be read out of a firm’s formal strategic plan; more often, even if such a plan exists, you will learn about them mostly through conversations with the right people in the firm. The goal is to find ways to apply your skills to one or two of the priorities that your management committee cares most about.

Here’s an example that has become increasingly common:

Most large firms struggle with how to structure and manage a multi-office, multi-practice firm effectively. As an inevitable part of this struggle, they focus on how well their groups and offices are functioning and, as part of that analysis, the effectiveness of their group and office leaders. At some point, they may turn to their professional development staff to create leadership programs for those “middle management” leaders. At the end of the day, however, their effectiveness will depend largely on issues training can’t address. For example, does the firm have a rational practice-group structure that makes leadership possible – or a befuddling matrix structure of leaders with overlapping responsibilities? Do group leaders have a voice in the firm’s inner councils, or are they only summoned to report to the management committee in a way that emphasizes how much they are not part of the inner circle? Do the firm’s compensation criteria penalize leaders whose practices take a dip because they devote so much time to leading large, complex groups? These aren’t the usual talent-management issues, but they are at the core of managing a firm’s leadership talent – arguably the most important cohort of its talent in these stressful times.

If talent management professionals wait until they are asked to conduct leadership training for this group, the firm’s perception of their role will be quite different than if they open the conversation about the broader issues as soon as they become aware that “middle management” leadership is a critical concern. That doesn’t imply that they will have – or should have – the primary voice in addressing all these issues. But, if they are to be regarded as having a fundamental impact on a firm’s success, they should have an audible voice. The practical difficulty: it takes work to move a firm’s perception of the talent management role towards a broader involvement in issues that aren’t traditionally seen as within its scope. The first steps aren’t to force our way in with opinions or proposals, but to ask the questions that demonstrate that we are thinking beyond the usual talent-management functions. How to do that is a topic for another time.

Blog Author

Steve Armstrong has led professional development and talent-management programs at major law firms for more than 20 years. During that time, he has guided firms to think strategically about managing their talent, has taught programs on managerial and leadership skills, and has designed and implemented a wide range of programs and policies. These have included training curricula, mentoring programs, evaluation and compensation systems, leadership development programs, diversity initiatives, work-life balance programs, associate surveys, and “upward” evaluations. He has published and spoken widely on the topic of talent management, and has served as chair of the Professional Development Consortium, the professional organization for in-house legal educators, and as co-chair of the ABA Committee on Business Law Education.

Since establishing Armstrong Talent Development in 2009, he has provided training programs and consulting services for partners and associates in many of the leading law firms in the U.S. and Canada, focusing in particular on improving the leadership and management abilities of the firms’ lawyers. With Tim Leishman, Steve is a principal of Firm Leader, Inc., which provides leadership, management and business development programs for law firms and law departments.

For more than 20 years, Steve has also taught writing programs for lawyers and judges in the U.S. and Canada. His programs for lawyers have been conducted for law firms, in-house legal departments, and such government agencies as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. He conducts the opinion-writing segments of the U.S. Federal Judicial Center’s orientations for new district, bankruptcy, and magistrate judges, as well as programs for Canadian judges.

With Professor Timothy P. Terrell, he is the co-author of Thinking Like a Writer: A Lawyer’s Guide to Effective Writing and Editing (3rd edition, 2008, Practicing Law Institute).