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COACHING: WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT CAN BE USEFUL TO LAWYERS.
By Neil Olson
Coaching is a familiar term in sports but is being used in a new way, to talk about a new profession, addressing life and business issues. A coach is a professional trained in the arts of organization, communication, and interpersonal relationships. The coach is part motivator, part sounding board, and part taskmaster---all with a specific commitment to the individual’s values, goals and circumstances. A Coach may also be called on to work with a lawyer on problems or issues specific to the practice of law: to focus on client relationships or development; to deal with other lawyers, or to address the bench. In any case, coaching can help any lawyer become a more centered and focused person. Sounds nice, right? But coaching for lawyers? How on earth could a coach be of any practical assistance in the tough, competitive, analytical world of law?
The question is the answer. Coaching is an invaluable tool for lawyers in dealing with the tough, competitive analytical world of law. Sometimes that tool is used to organize professional goals and aspirations. In other cases, the practicing lawyer may simply want guidance in sorting through time demands between personal and professional obligations.
THE COACHING PROFESSION
Coaching has been around as a specialized profession since the early 1990’s. It was first introduced first to corporations. Regularly referred to as “Executive Coaching”, coaching is now a mainstream support service to executives in many corporations. Coaches are now certified by an international governing board operating out of Washington, DC: the International Coaching Federation (ICF). Coaches are credentialed as Certified Personal Professional Coaches (CPPC) and may achieve a Master Certified Coach certification (MCC). There are a number of coaching schools in the United States, with quite a few universities now offering classes and credentialing. Some MBA programs include coaching courses.
The ICF defines coaching as an ongoing partnership designed to help clients achieve enhanced performance and fulfillment in their personal and professional lives. I also view coaching, as a specialized relationship designed to focus specifically on the needs, wants and performance of the client. The heart of the relationship is the development of a clear understanding of the client’s values and goals and a deliberate alignment of those values and goals with the client’s actions. Research has established that when one is clear about one’s central values and sets one’s goals accordingly, one’s performance is greatly enhanced and one’s personal sense of fulfillment rises dramatically. It is the coach who keeps the client aware of taking actions that are aligned with the client’s values.
HOW DOES COACHING WORK?
The mechanics are really quite simple: Most coaches begin the coaching relationship with an involved intake session that is sometimes in person and often involves the completion of questionnaires and assessment tools. Following that, clients typically have telephone conferences with their coaches once a week. The calls are typically 30 to 45 minutes. The central values of the client are sorted out during the intake and early calls. As matters proceed, attention typically moves to goal setting, action steps and assessments of the effectiveness of options exercised and actions taken. The coach’s role is to provide a constant source of encouragement, accountability and clarification while the client takes action.
Many coaches and clients e-mail quite a bit between calls, and telephone follow-up and check-ins are fairly common. The central framework is, however, the once-a-week phone call.
HOW CAN THE COACHING RELATIONSHIP HELP A LAWYER?
The coaching relationship provides the client with honest, direct feedback and absolutely committed support. While consultants come to a relationship as experts to share knowledge, coaches operate from the perspective that it is the client who has the best answers to his or her own situation. Coaches believe that, if given the proper perspective and feedback, their clients will find and follow the best course of action. Much of a coach’s role is in asking the right questions and helping a coaching client to clarify what he or she really wants. Then, the coach holds those values with the client and helps the client become and then stay aligned with them.
Lawyers love hypotheticals, so let’s try one: Alice works at a large law firm in its large case litigation department. This is her third law firm since graduating from a top-notch law school eight years ago. She is respected by her peers, valued by the partners and enjoys what she does. However, Alice is burned out. She is on partner track, but she is not sure if she wants the increased responsibility. She is trying to better organize her time to do some community work and wants to learn to skydive.
Alice hired me as her coach in order to maximize her organizational skills. She wanted help with time management, and was interested in tips on how to network for new clients. She was also trying to evaluate partnership, her career path in general, and issues related to life-work balance. Alice and I quickly created a time management system, made a networking plan, and set goals for generating new business. In order to understand how she should prioritize assignments for her time management system, Alice had to examine how to prioritize in some manner other than what was on deadline. While doing that, we found that Alice had confused her personal value of high quality work product with the unattainable goal of perfection--for example, staying at the office late at night unnecessarily re-working otherwise excellent briefs. What we did was set up structures that allowed her to move on to the next project (or leave the office and go home) instead of re-working the first one. As Alice began to understand and honor her value of high quality work and distinguish it from perfectionism, she found more time available to do other things. In fact, from time to time she would choose to over-work a particularly important brief, but did so out of a sense of its importance rather than feeling it was required under all circumstances.
And yes, Alice found the time to learn to skydive.
WHY WOULD A COACH BE NEEDED FOR THINGS LIKE TIME MANAGEMENT?
The real issue we lawyers are facing is an increasingly complex and fast paced world. Competition for legal work is intense. Our law firms have become businesses—sometimes big businesses—in what was once a service-oriented profession. The pressure to immediately respond to client demands, court requirements, opposing counsel and our own co-workers is constant and distracting, often preventing us from fully considering options available to us. Fax and e-mail have shortened our expected response times even more. We are like emergency room doctors, always making decisions under pressure. Because we seem to be constantly reacting instead of acting, our best intentions of how we would like to proceed often become overwhelmed by the moment. The coach provides the support and the clear thinking to keep us focused on our goals, even when we are reacting to immediate demands and pressures. A fellow coach describes a coaching session as an opportunity to sit in the middle of the tornado and see how it is spinning and make decisions about which way to steer it.
Today, lawyers are among the top professionals suffering from depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, divorce and suicide. Nearly 85% of lawyers state they feel isolated and unsupported in the practice of law. That number is even higher for judges. Lawyers describe feelings of being alone, misunderstood, overworked and disconnected from anything meaningful in their chosen profession. As a coach helps the lawyer to clarify the lawyer’s values, they are able to work together to set goals and make decisions, which are consistent with those values. The lawyer will often begin to find the connection and meaning, which originally attracted him or her to the profession in the first place.
Someone once told me that we all know how to lose weight—just exercise more and eat less. The problem is doing it. The coach helps you find the core value, which would motivate you to eat less or exercise more and then supports you in taking action consistent with those core values. In the end, you lose weight. The same goes for managing your law practice—we all know what needs to be done; the coach provides the structure that enables you to see it getting done.
WHAT IS TYPICALLY THE MAIN REASON A LAWYER SEEKS OUT A COACH?
In my practice the number one issue is--without question--attaining a healthy balance between work and life. The culture of the law often seems to call for longer hours, self-sacrifice, and abandoning our personal values. Most clients approach me after they realize that they are working far too much and that their quality of life is not what they envisioned for themselves. One-hundred-hour weeks at the office, client development, travel, professional associations, management responsibilities and more combine to leave very little time for one’s family, hobbies, community involvement, spiritual practices or—unthinkable!--vacations. These are the realities seen by many lawyers, and they are seeking help in managing the situation. As with “Alice”, the focus of the coaching typically begins with time management tools but quickly shifts to prioritizing decisions based on a set of values that the lawyer holds. Commitments and compromises are then made and examined by the coach and lawyer on an ongoing basis. In doing so, the lawyer learns to make commitments and take action based on how he or she wants to live his or her life, rather than simply reacting to circumstances and problems.
HOW IS COACHING DIFFERENT FROM THERAPY OR COUNSELING?
Coaching is decidedly not therapy. A central tenet of coaching is that the client is healthy, resourceful, and creative and that the client has the best answers. Coaching is forward looking: it is not interested so much in what the client’s life has been, but is interested in what the client’s values are and what the client wants to do or be. Certainly issues sometimes arise which call for the expertise of a therapist. If that appears to be the case, all the coaches I know refer their clients to therapists.
HOW LONG DOES THE COACHING RELATIONSHIP LAST AND WHAT DOES IT TYPICALLY COST?
Both vary depending on the experience of the coach and the various issues presented by the client during the coaching relationship. Most coaches I know look for at least a 90-day commitment from the client. Most coaching relationships I am aware of last six to ten months, though many last longer.
Cost varies from $300.00 per month on the low end to as much as $1500.00 or more per month on the high end. Most executive coaches I know charge coaches $400.00-$600.00 per month, with lawyer coaches in the mid- to higher end of that range.
HOW DO I FIND A COACH?
Like finding a doctor, referrals are an excellent way to find a coach. So is the ICF, which has an on-line referral service at www.coachfederation.org. Several of the Coach training schools have referral services. Two of the oldest schools, The Coaches Training Institute and Coach U are good places to start. You can find them at www.thecoaches.com and www.coachu.com.
If you’re a lawyer looking for a Coach, I recommend that you be sure your Coach has some experience coaching legal professionals and the pressures we face. While a non-lawyer coach may offer a different perspective, there are many aspects of law practice that are unique. For example, some of our choices are limited by ethical rules; a coach with no experience in a law office may not understand the pressures of billable hours.
Copyright 2002 by Neil Olson, all rights reserved. Neil Olson is a certified executive coach (CPPC) who lives and works in San Francisco. Neil has practiced law in San Francisco for 17 years as a commercial and personal injury litigator for a large, well established financial district law firm, first as an associate and then as a partner. Neil was a founding partner of his own law firm and still practices law part-time. He is a father and presently finds his greatest career satisfaction in coaching executives at Silicon Valley, international businesses, lawyers and legal professionals.
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