Career Talk

July 2007 Issue

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Helping Your Staff Achieve Peak Performance: Seven Strategies that Work

There is a direct relationship between your leadership abilities and your team's level of motivation and achievement. Even if your firm has the most talented and experienced legal support professionals on staff, they still need your ongoing support to realize their full potential and perform at their peak.

While it's important to provide feedback in the form of individual performance reviews and regularly scheduled staff meetings, these measures tend to be reactive and specific, because they typically focus on past performance. In addition to these methods, you need to take a proactive approach that bolsters current and future performance. The following strategies can help your legal support team achieve peak performance.

• Encourage open communication.

Just as you provide direction and guidance to your staff, ask them for timely status reports and feedback about difficulties they experience. This will enable you to promptly address and resolve problems that could impair productivity. But don't feel you must always be the one to come up with a solution. Because employees are more likely to perform their best when they feel their concerns and opinions are heard, give your staff the opportunity to make suggestions for improving procedures or streamlining workflow.

• Be flexible.

Effective leaders acknowledge their own mistakes and make necessary changes to correct them. Be open to trying new methods of resolving challenging situations, and be willing to replace outmoded approaches with more effective ones.

• Align tasks with talents.

Are you utilizing the talents and expertise of your legal support staff to the fullest? To help your team achieve peak productivity, you must consider the character and abilities of each staff member in relation to existing projects. For example, it may not be an effective use of staffing resources to have a paralegal handle the filing of court forms. Today, legal assistants typically perform some of the non-legal work of first-year attorneys, such as the initial drafting of letters and other documents. This is clearly a better use of their time and training. By reassigning court filings, as well as research, calendaring, returning calls and other such duties to legal secretaries and other administrative support staff, you'll ensure that tasks are more precisely aligned with your staff's abilities and skills.

• Praise and reward generously.

Public acknowledgement of your staff's accomplishments-those of individuals and the whole team-is a powerful motivator that can jump-start flagging morale or boost sagging performance. Simple rewards, such as positive verbal reinforcement or gift certificates are particularly effective.

• Don't play favorites.

It's human nature for managers to have favorite employees whom they depend on to handle all important or urgent projects. As a result, other staff members are never given the opportunity to take on more challenging or complex assignments. Familiarize yourself with each legal support team member's skills and professional goals before making assignments. This will help you narrow down the choices for each project and ensure that you are allocating projects fairly.

• Staff strategically.

The use of legal project professionals can help maintain your department's productivity while protecting core staff from undue pressure and potential burnout. Project professionals are an excellent way to quickly access specialized expertise that doesn't currently exist in-house or is required on a one-time basis only. You can also bring in temporary legal staff to cover for full-time employees who are on leave or vacation.

• Respect your staff's time and priorities.

A good manager recognizes that not everyone shares an identical approach to managing time or prioritizing tasks. In a team context, this means that you must provide necessary guidance, then step back and allow members to handle their respective duties according to their own individual approaches.

Ultimately, employing these seven strategies can generate another powerful performance-enhancing factor. When your legal support staff members see how efficient and productive they have become, this in itself will motivate them to continue to strive for new levels of "personal best"- thanks to your support.

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