Your system of management will help ensure you are completing your duties as a manager. In my firm, we have a weekly team meeting to go over new clients, revenue metrics for the month, and a capacity check in.
This weekly meeting is scheduled and structured and lasts less than thirty minutes. This meeting delivers crucial information to people to ensure we are helping new clients, that we are on target to meet revenue goals, and that no one is overwhelmed with too much work. Every other week, we have a lunchtime company meeting.
Net Promoter Score
At the company meetings, we go over our net promoter score, client reviews and/or feedback, some substantive educational materials, and any current client problems and/or judge’s insight. We report to one another any progress made or problems with our quarterly projects. This is a time for scheduled communication and accountability of information.
Finally, each employee has a weekly one-to-one meeting with their manager. I meet with the office manager, each attorney, and each paralegal. The office manager meets with each intake member and each paralegal. There is an additional monthly meeting for all administrative staff.
These meetings ensure that I am giving time and attention to my employees. It ensures I deliver positive feedback and address any problems early and often instead of waiting until I explode. The one-to-one meetings’ primary purpose is to build relationships.
Quarterly Retreats
In addition to the meetings described here, we also have quarterly retreats. These are a half day, off-site meeting with a specific agenda. We identify what is working and what isn’t and come up with a plan to move our company toward our overall mission, vision, and values.
Since implementing this structure, my company growth has skyrocketed. Turnover is lower than it has ever been. Team communication is better than ever. I needed this structure to succeed as a company. My employees needed this structure to be happy with the company. Each person is pushed on an individual growth path, and we hold one another accountable.
Flexibility
I do not believe that the Modern Law structure is the only management structure that will work; in fact, ours has evolved over time. For about a year we were doing daily stand-up meetings and weekly company meetings. When they no longer served their purpose, they became routine and ineffective, we dialed back the company meeting to every other week and killed the stand-up meeting. Some information was falling through the cracks, so we instituted the weekly new-client meeting. You should only have meetings that are useful, where your people are engaged and critical information is being passed between people.
Thankfully, part of our culture is to experiment, so if something isn’t working, everyone is free to opine about it and we usually try something else and discuss the results.
Marrying a well-defined culture with the right people to a good management structure is critical for the success of any company. If you find yourself growing and shrinking, stuck in a cycle where you just can’t quite break through, these three components may be exactly what are holding you back.
