You hand a piece of work to a junior, ask if they have any questions, and hear “of course I can do it”. Days later it comes back wrong, and you’re the one redoing it late at night.
So why didn’t they tell you they were stuck? That’s what this episode is all about.
Psychological safety is a term everyone knows and very few of us create the conditions for. Your team won’t tell you they’re struggling until they believe it’s safe to, and making it safe is your job as their leader. This is the first of a two-part episode. Part two, inside our Progress To Partner Academy, shows you how to build it.
Your partners are looking for people who can build a team beneath them. A team that keeps its problems from you is not one you can delegate to with confidence.
I’m Heather Townsend, author of Poised for Partnership and co-author of How to Make Partner & Still Have a Life. I’m the leading global expert in what it takes to move from senior fee earner to partner. Here are 5 ways to work with me.
In This Episode You Will Learn:
- How to find out whether your team has understood a brief, without putting them on the spot
- What helps your team come to you earlier when they’re stuck
- How to set up a new working relationship quickly, even with someone who’s only with you for a few weeks
- How to delegate knowing you’ll hear about problems whilst there’s still time to fix them
If you find this episode useful, don’t forget to like it and then subscribe so you don’t miss another episode.
What Help Is Out There For You?
If you’re thinking, ‘I can see the problem, but I don’t know what to do differently tomorrow morning’, our Progress To Partner Academy can help you.
That’s precisely why part two of this episode sits inside the Progress to Partner Academy. It takes you through Amy Edmondson’s Leader’s Toolkit and what it looks like when you’re leading a team in a professional firm. You’ll also find our on-demand course ‘How to Create a Strong Hybrid Team’ in the Academy.
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Hello, and welcome!
You hand a piece of work to a junior. You brief them. You ask if they’ve got any questions.
“No, that’s all fine. Of course I can do it.”
Three days later it lands back on your desk. It’s not what you asked for. Half of it needs redoing, the deadline’s tomorrow, and there goes your evening. Again.
They didn’t know how to do it. And they were never going to tell you.
So why didn’t they just ask? And what does it say about you as a leader that they didn’t?
Today we’re talking about psychological safety, and why you probably think your team has it when they may not. This is the first of a two-part episode, and the second part, where I take you through how to build it, is inside our Progress To Partner Academy. This episode came out of a conversation with one of our executive coaches who works with lawyers on one of our partner programmes.
This is the How to Make Partner podcast with me, Heather Townsend. The author of Poised for Partnership, and co-author of How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life. In this podcast, I will be highlighting some of the great stuff in our Progress To Partner Academy. New episodes are released weekly, so press subscribe so you never miss a new episode.
Right. Let’s talk about psychological safety.
It’s one of those terms everyone has heard. When my coach and I were talking about the lawyers on our programme, we agreed that everyone thinks they know what it is, because it’s such a commonly used term now. However in my experience, Very few of them create the conditions for it.
In plain terms, psychological safety means your team feels safe to speak their mind without fear of being shot down. They’ll tell you they’re stuck. They’ll tell you the budget’s about to be blown, or that the client hasn’t sent them what they need. They’ll tell you they haven’t understood what you’ve asked them to do. In effect, they will tell you where there are problems – big and small. And they trust you not to shoot the messenger.
Now, a bit of honesty from me. When we talked about what the people on our programme really want from their team, we agreed on this: they want the work done, on time, with no mistakes. Almost as if they want a robot to do their work.
And I understand why. You’re busy, you’ve got billable hours to hit, and you’ve got partners and clients waiting on you. But when a team is scared of getting it wrong, the mistakes still happen. You just find out about them later, when they’re harder and more expensive to fix.
So how do you keep your standards high and still make it safe for your team to tell you when they’re at risk of missing them? That’s the first thing I’ll take you through in part two.
In our Partnership Readiness Assessment, only 41% of people on Partner Track have a trusted group of people they regularly delegate to. Forty one percent. Which means six in ten people are either doing work that someone more junior could be doing, or handing it over and hoping for the best.
And if you can’t trust your team to tell you when something’s wrong, you’ll end up checking everything yourself. That means longer hours, and less time for the things your partners are looking for, like winning work and building your practice. Partnerships want new partners who can win work, be excellent with clients and develop a team beneath them. So what messages are you giving your partners if you can’t truly trust the people on your jobs or projects to do their work?
Most juniors are eager to please. They want to show you how good they are technically. The last thing they want is to look stupid in front of someone senior, particularly someone who has a say in their next promotion. So rather than admit they don’t know how to do something, they decide to muddle along and work it out as they go. You were probably very similar at the same stage in your career. That muddling along is what leads to the delays, the rework and you stepping in to finish the job.
To be fair to them, most of us learnt this at school. You spent a lot of your time trying to fit in and trying not to say the wrong thing, because the wrong thing got you laughed at. Your brain is still wired to protect you from looking like an idiot in front of the group. So people filter what they say, or they don’t say anything at all.
I know what you are thinking. “But I’m approachable. I’ve told them I’m happy for them to call me at any time.”
That feels completely reasonable. But this ‘call me when you need me’ leaves all of the risk with them. They’re the ones who have to pick up the phone or ping you on teams and admit they’re stuck, whilst worrying that you’ll get irritated to be interrupted. And then when they do talk to you run the risk you thinking less of them or make them feel small. Whatever you intend, they’ll judge you on what they’ve seen you do the last time someone brought you bad news.
So what do you do instead? Start with the question you ask when you hand work over. “Do you know what you need to do?” or “Any questions?” will get you a yes almost every time. Instead, ask them, “Take me through the first few things you’ll do to get started on this work.” You’ll usually know within a minute whether they’ve understood, and they haven’t had to admit anything to find out.
That tells you whether they’ve understood the brief. Getting them to tell you when they’re stuck halfway through is harder, and it depends on how you respond when they do. In part two I’ll take you through how to respond to bad news so they come to you sooner, and how to hear from the quieter people in your team.
The second thing that came up on that call was expectations.
Every one of us has expectations of the people who work for us. How often we want updates. What a first draft should look like. When we want to be copied into emails to the client. And most of us never actually tell our team members these expectations. We assume it should just happen. After all, if they are working for your firm they should be good and have high personal standards?
This gets worse when you don’t have a fixed team. Many of you are pulling together transient project teams: a junior from another office for one piece of work, a specialist for a few weeks, or someone you rarely work with because a partner has nicked your usual people. Nobody sits down with the new person to set up how you’re going to work together. Then you wonder why there’s so much rework, and the answer you get is, “I thought we were going to work it out as we go along.”
And of course, there’s no space on the timesheet for “spent two hours getting to know the new junior on one of my jobs”!
What I encourage people to do is give a new team member a one-pager, or have a short conversation at the start, about how they’ll work with you. Something like this: “Your first piece of work back from me may have a huge amount of red pen on it. I expect us to sit down and go through it together. I don’t expect you to have it perfect first time. I don’t even expect you to have it perfect second time. I expect you to learn and be open to coaching.”
Then add the practical expectations may never normally tell them:
- When and how you want to be updated on their progress.
- When you want to hear that something has gone wrong, such as the budget running over, a deadline slipping or the client not sending them what they need.
- What you want them to do if they get stuck.
- How you’ll react if they muck up. Ideally, that you’ll want to understand what happened rather than get cross with them.
- When you want to be copied into emails to the client.
Whilst this won’t stop every junior from muddling along, it does mean they know the rules before they start. And it tells them that coming to you early is what you expect of them.
Setting expectations as a two way process is key to getting the relationship off on the right way. In part two I’ll show you how to set the stage at the beginning of every piece of work, so that even someone who’s only with you for a few weeks knows what the job is for, and knows you want to hear from them early.
Your partners are looking for someone who can build a team beneath them. A team that won’t tell you when it’s stuck is not one you can delegate to with confidence, however talented its people are. And the only person who can change that is you.
Now, if you’re thinking, “I can see the problem, but I don’t know what to do differently tomorrow morning”, that’s exactly what part two is for. You’ll learn how to keep your standards high whilst making it safe for your team to own up. You’ll also learn how to hear from the quieter people in your team, including the ones in another office, and how to respond to bad news so the next problem reaches you whilst there’s still time to fix it. It won’t change your team overnight, but it gives you a practical place to start.
Part two is inside our Progress To Partner Academy, and I’ve popped a link to it directly in the shownotes for this episode. Whilst you’re there, you’ll also find our How to Create a Strong Hybrid Team course. Also in the shownotes, you’ll find links to my books, Poised for Partnership and How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life, so you can easily find them on Amazon. And as a thank you for listening, there’s also a link for a 10% discount on annual membership for our Progress To Partner Academy using the code PODCAST10.
That’s all for this episode of the How to Make Partner podcast. What’s your action for this week? The next time you hand a piece of work to someone, don’t ask them if they have any questions. Ask them to take you through the first few things they’ll do to get started, and listen to what their answer tells you.
And when you’re ready for the how on setting up psychological safety, part two is waiting for you inside our Progress To Partner Academy.
If you have enjoyed this episode please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or give us a comment on Substack. This helps us get the word out to others who may need this advice too. Remember to hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode. Thanks for listening!
I’m Heather Townsend, author of Poised for Partnership and co-author of How to Make Partner & Still Have a Life. I’m the leading global expert in what it takes to move from senior fee earner to partner – and when you get there, stay there. Here are 5 ways to work with me.
Links
Part two of this episode
Poised for Partnership: https://amzn.to/3ETEYk3
How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life: https://amzn.to/4iLxugM
Progress To Partner Academy (use code PODCAST10 for 10% off annual membership): https://www.howtomakepartner.com/get-progress-to-partner/
What help is out there for you
If you’re thinking, ‘This all makes sense, but I don’t have the time or the data to work any of this out properly,’ our Progress To Partner Academy can help you.
Take the Partnership Readiness Assessment
Free to complete, 10 to 15 minutes, and gives you a personalised report across all 12 key indicators. Take the assessment here.
If the Partnership Admissions Process is what is in front of you, this section of Progress to Partner will help you go into it prepared rather than hoping.
Use code PODCAST10 for 10% off annual membership. Click here to join.
Books mentioned
Poised for Partnership by Heather Townsend – https://amzn.to/3ETEYk3
How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life by Heather Townsend and Jo Larbie – https://amzn.to/4iLxugM
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