What do you think of when you hear the words ‘high-performing culture’ in the legal profession?
Long working hours?
Pressure to meet billable-hour targets?
Putting the needs of clients and the firm first, perhaps at the expense of your own family, or work-life balance?
Those are some of the sentiments reported in high-profile media stories about poor workplace culture, and reflected in responses to the UK 2022 Solicitors’ Regulation Authority (SRA) Thematic Review of Workplace Culture. That showed 25% of people felt their firm didn’t have a positive workplace culture.
The SRA’s review set clear expectations that, in creating and maintaining “the right culture and environment for the delivery of competent and ethical legal services to clients”, legal firms should be “taking steps to run businesses in a way that supports wellbeing by minimising the risk of working practices and workplace behaviours leading to poor mental health.”
In a previous article, I cited research evidence showing the harmful physical and mental health consequences for people targeted by workplace incivility, bullying and harassment.
I touched on practical steps that targets and witnesses of unacceptable behaviour can take, along with the responsibilities facing leaders in law firms to ensure they have best-practice complaint management, backed up by support services for everyone involved.
Let’s look at that in more depth.
Tackling workplace bullying needs more than an ‘ambulance at the bottom of the cliff’ approach whilst you wait for things to go wrong.
Changing your culture follows the principle that prevention is better than cure.
You won’t achieve a positive, respectful culture just by writing ‘zero-tolerance’ policies and having the HR department investigate everything.
That’s something of a one-club golfer approach, whereas creating a respectful culture requires more sophistication – starting with the attitudes and actions of leaders.
A respectful culture isn’t a competing objective distracting from high-performance, it’s actually a pre-requisite.
Establishing a safe, respectful and high-performing culture means you’ll need a twin-track strategy that:
* Develops positive, respectful and ethical behaviour as the normal way of working;
* Addresses workplace incivility, bullying and harassment with a focus as much on supportive prevention and restorative practice, as investigation and enforcement.
What does this look like in practice?
Simplify people leadership to its core and you have two choices - motivate by example and encouragement, or by fear and intimidation (sometimes offset by promises of large rewards).
Both may produce some high-performance, but it’s clear that only one is sustainable in anything other than the short term.
In the Second World War, Soviet soldiers were ordered forward with ‘motivation’ provided by a ‘barrier’ squad behind them to prevent any deserters.
Demoralised soldiers caught heading the wrong way were either sent back to the front, imprisoned or shot. Stalin’s “Not one step backwards!” Order 227 was ruthlessly enforced, with extremely questionable overall results. Fear motivated others to keep going forward, but at a substantial human cost.
As fear is cited as a primary reason why people do not come forward when they witness (or experience) workplace bullying and harassment today, this analogy is uncomfortably relevant.
Nobody should feel afraid in their workplace.
The alternative approach is to lead from the front, demonstrating experience, encouragement and support. Show people the way forward, go with them and help clear the path to let them overcome obstacles, working as a team to achieve your objectives. That’s when people will want to follow you as a leader - even through difficult territory.
If your day-to-day working environment feels like a bit of a war zone, that’s a sure sign of a need to improve workplace culture.
Research into high-performing teams shows they are not just focused on results at the cost of all else.
Key qualities include:
Leaders acting as role models, demonstrating ethics and integrity in words and actions
Trust, as a critical factor in team performance
Openness - the ability to speak freely, ask questions and explore ideas
Commitment to a shared vision and outcomes
The ability to collaborate well, with a willingness to share information
Hiring the best talent (although a team of individual high-performers does not necessarily create a high-performing team)
Those seeking a high-performance culture need to recognise the role that respectful, professional behaviour and psychological safety play in ensuring people can achieve their best.
Leaders set the tone, and should reflect on research findings that indicate a “bottom-line mentality” can lead to unethical behaviour, lower participation and a lack of team cohesion.
That’s not conducive to good results for your firm, even before considering the risks of reputational damage from a poor culture.
Given we’ve spent much of this past year hearing evidence in the Post Office Horizon Inquiry of questionable actions by lawyers, and reading press reports of burnout (and tragically suicides) in the legal profession, one would hope the era of ‘bottom line results at the expense of all else’ is giving way to more ethical behaviour and better workplace cultures.
It’s time for leaders in law to act and make this cultural shift happen in their own organisations.
Not every workplace conflict necessarily requires formal, procedural approaches with employment lawyers and investigations. They’re expensive for everyone - both financially and emotionally - causing real stress and harm to people on all sides of this adversarial and defensive approach.
Workplace bullying or harassment is typically a spectrum of behaviour, beginning with some incident of incivility. If this can be dealt with early and resolved amicably, then it’s entirely possible things may not need to escalate to formal action.
There’s an important role for restorative practices in this initial stage of complaint management, sometimes referred to as ‘informal resolution.’
Be careful with this language, as it’s very easy for the person affected to feel like their complaint isn’t being taken seriously, or the behaviour they’ve experienced is being minimised or dismissed.
It’s not about that at all. The initial stage of complaint handling is vital for ensuring people feel safe to come forward, without being disbelieved and without fear of retaliation for saying what’s happening to them.
Restorative practices are a supportive mechanism, particularly useful when the person affected just wants the behaviour to stop, to get back to doing their job and for the other person to understand why it’s a problem.
The complainant needs to understand their options and proceed in their own time, without feeling they are being deprived of choices, if resolution doesn’t work out.
Make no mistake, a restorative practice approach is not a ‘soft option’ for anyone.
It requires courage from both the person affected, and the person who’s (intentionally or unintentionally) perpetrating workplace harm. It has to be a sincere commitment, followed up with genuine behaviour change that people are prepared to be held accountable for.
If that’s not something that all participants are prepared to accept, then more formal investigation processes may need to establish facts, determine findings and recommend action.
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Investigative good practice is a whole separate subject, but it must include a trauma-informed understanding of the harm that workplace bullying and harassment causes.
Bullying affects people physically and psychologically, so procedural investigations driven solely by employment law, without appropriate support, may serve to compound harm.
Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of workplace bullying will know how that feels.
HR practitioners could benefit from adopting the medical profession’s ethos - ‘first do no harm.’
Any indication of procedural unfairness, bias, irregularities or conflicts of interest during a complaint investigation completely undermines its credibility.
More importantly, it undermines wider trust in the process, meaning other people won't feel safe to come forward. People respond to what they see, so that’s a key measure of success for your workplace culture.
Remember, a high-performing culture is founded on trust.
When something goes wrong and people feel vulnerable, that’s when trust will be tested.
A fair, impartial investigation outcome, based on a comprehensive assessment of all the available evidence, is vital for confidence in the investigation’s findings and the decision-making process. After all, it might end someone’s career.
How you support people during, and after, this process is a defining marker of the maturity of your culture and your commitment to the people involved. This needs an investment of time and resources, and it’s more than referring someone to an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP).
Both complainants and respondents may need personalised support such as safety plans, changes in working arrangements, time off and maybe even dedicated psychologist sessions, depending on how they’ve been affected.
Remember, you could be dealing with anything from harsh language to sexual harm, so a one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t cut it.
Restorative approaches also have a place at the end of an investigation, helping people to rebuild a normal working environment and facilitating apology and commitment to agreed changes in behaviour.
It takes time and commitment to restore trust and rebuild teams, but it can be done.
After all, isn’t a high-performing culture about shared commitments and a willingness to support each other, helping everyone to perform at their individual and collective best?
As a leader, if you have any indication of workplace incivility, bullying or harassment in your organisation, then what you do next is going to be your personal ‘moment of truth.’
Make it count.
This article was originally written for, and published by, the Institute of Legal Finance and Management in the Oct/Nov 2024 issue of their in-house publication, Legal Abacus.
You can find more content from me on the subjects of leadership, high-performing teams, respectful workplace cultures, and workplace incivility, bullying and harassment at these links:
Subscribe for more content on the Price Perrott website
Listen to the Life at the Sharp End podcast
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