Building business development cultures that thrive.
Hello S-Curvers,
I started the S-Curve to share my thoughts, and those of others I value, on building business development culture and capability in law firms. The focus is on: what really gets in the way of business development success? Then how you can address those barriers with practical solutions to smooth the way for work-in-the-door.
The S-Curve is not for those who breeze through law firm life unfazed by the ‘noise’ around them and don’t want to think about context. It’s for those leaders and practitioners who are curious about the complexity that succeeding at business development presents; and for those who want to work on their own professional development and those they supervise.
Ultimately, S-Curvers are people who want to consider how this complexity can be understood and then embraced for competitive advantage.
So where do we start?
If you are in the ‘Hurt Locker’ with ‘noisy’ relationships in your firm and that’s impacting your results and your morale, or that of team members, seeing your firm as a ‘system’ and your role in that system can be a gamechanger.
The Hurt Locker is defined by the Urban Dictionary as military slang for a ‘bad and hurtful place’.
Roles wield significant influence in shaping behaviour within law firm systems. When ‘Hurt Locker’ type conflict lingers over projects, workload, resources or direction - understanding the interplay of roles within your firm can provide a pathway to de-personalise that conflict and find a way forward.
Taking a deeper dive into ORA
Organisational Role Analysis (ORA) is a coaching and consulting tool that helps to map the relationship patterns that exist within firms and identify role misalignments often in the form of unclear boundaries. ORA is not concerned with personality; it looks exclusively at role.
Using the ORA method you can create a map to get a sense of the relationship dynamics that impact you and the business development culture of your firm. See the ‘Transforming Experience Framework’ below to get an idea of how this works.
Roles, not personalities
When faced with a person who is upsetting a project try looking at it in an ‘ORA way’ - Ask: What does the firm expect from their role? What is the context of their role? How do other dynamics shape their role? How does the person view their role? What about your role? How does that play out and interact?
You're aiming for a collective shared understanding of role boundaries to move the whole firm forward: person, role, system, context and source.
Remember you are in the firm because of your role.
What I love about ORA is that it can be used as a 1:1 coaching tool, or for team development, and applied at the strategy level across the whole firm to strengthen business development culture.
I’ve used ORA as a 1:1 coaching tool with partners, those on pathway to partnership, and with leaders in the public and not-for-profit sectors. I’ve also used it with groups of business development practitioners. Each time it’s delivered insights around conflict that were not available at first and kept the focus on the role in the system which de-personalised any disagreement.
Thank you
