Building a Smooth and Stable Practice

When I ask lawyer clients what’s their biggest wish or hope for their practice, they often emphatically exclaim that they wish to have a more smooth and stable practice. Who wouldn’t want a smooth and stable practice? It sounds wonderful.

But what does it really mean to have a smooth and stable practice? Specifically, what do you have to do, as the lawyer, to achieve this level of practice success? Just as important, how can your practice success impact your well-being and personal life, and vice versa? Let’s explore this topic and provide some tips to get you started down this path of success in your practice.

The Problem: Focusing on the Wrong Indicators of Practice Success

When lawyers think of having a smooth and stable practice, they often immediately think of hitting a particular revenue goal as the answer. For most of us, the focus is on money as the measure of professional success. After all, if we can generate enough revenue, that must mean we are successful. This measure of success often fails to self-generate and lead to easy growth, because the foundation for your smooth and stable practice that generates revenues has to be laid first.

Most lawyers are so busy that they can’t find the time or energy to see beyond the everyday practice issues. Doing so would broaden their focus and perspective to practice success indicators, beyond substantive practice success, leading to more money. These success indicators focus on your traits as a human.

Society doesn’t do us any favors by referring to certain human traits as “soft” skills. It leaves us believing falsely that “soft” skills are related, perhaps, to a particular gender, or maybe are just a nicety. Stop and think: When did the ability to communicate, solve problems, make sound decisions, and inspire others to action become an optional way of being? In fact, our human traits are the way we bond with one another to create an atmosphere of trust and safety, allowing your professional skills to have a solid foundation from which to shine.

The Solution: Using Emotional Energy to Develop Your Team

Higher revenues are a good indicator, or outcome, of a smooth and stable practice. Before you can get to higher revenues, though, your practice has to have a strong emotional footprint, meaning you and your team need to have high emotional intelligence.

With artificial intelligence having such a focus in our personal and professional lives, a natural counterfocus should be on your own intelligence as a human being. Your intelligence can be defined as your cognitive intelligence, or IQ, and your emotional intelligence, or EI.

EI encompasses the ability to understand and manage our emotions. In essence, it involves how we handle stress, navigate obstacles, meet deadlines, make decisions, solve problems, manage time, read social cues, and address various life issues that can affect our success. These skills are foundational to having a smooth and stable practice that generates high revenues easily. How many times have we seen lawyers not be able to generate revenues and bring in new clients because they can’t manage their deadlines and stressors and can’t communicate effectively? I’ve seen too many instances of this.

High EI leaders generate high revenues and compensation because higher revenues are a natural byproduct of the emotional energy these leaders show up with. This energy is infectious. This energy comes through their emotions, getting others excited to be around them, hire them, support them, respect them, listen to them, etc.

Perhaps Neale Donald Walsch said it best: “Emotion is energy in motion. When you move energy, you create effect. If you move enough energy, you create matter. Matter is energy conglomerated. Moved around. Shoved together. If you manipulate energy long enough in a certain way, you get matter. Every Master understands this law. It is the alchemy of the universe. It is the secret of all life.”

So how can you use emotional energy to create the effect — or matter — of higher revenues? Here are three tips to get you started:

1. Determine your EI baseline. At the beginning of every law firm engagement, I start by providing each lawyer with an assessment that we can then use as a reference point for growth. This assessment serves as a baseline. The hallmark of emotionally intelligent people is that they have high self-awareness. High self-awareness requires you to be able to answer some basic questions about your practice as a baseline. For instance, how are you and your team and employees doing currently in terms of emotional intelligence? If you establish a baseline, you’ll know where to grow from, and you can set reasonable and realistic goals and expectations that can be communicated easily to your team to build upon. Otherwise, how would you know where to start and what areas or who on your team needs more focus and attention?
2. Find the most natural part of your practice. For instance, are you a natural at building your staff and team and leading them? Maybe you are great in the courtroom putting your communication skills to use with the jury, judge, and opposing counsel. Knowing the answer to this question will allow you to know where you naturally put your energy easily. This is likely the part of your practice you enjoy the most and can emotionally express well to your audience.
3. Move slow and steady. Nothing good happens overnight. Tapping into your and your team’s EI is likely a new venture for you, requiring you to look at your career, business, and practice from an entirely different angle. Be patient with yourself and celebrate the small wins.
   

Building a smooth and stable practice is a function of having the foundational element of high EI, not IQ, for you and your team. EI is not a fad or buzzword. It is a function of being human, having and expressing emotions. It’s the energy that attracts the right people to your practice through you.

The first step is having self-awareness by knowing that increased revenues are an indicator of a stable and smooth practice and not the path to it. Next, tapping into where you naturally put your energy (and emotions) in your practice is key. Lastly, moving slowly, methodically, and with patience allows you to deliberately be the power that fuels your ideal smooth and stable practice.

When you employ these three tips, you will notice that your well-being and personal life have taken a turn for the better, also. The simple reason is that anytime you can emote, you connect with others positively, leading to better life outcomes for everyone involved. Emoting is a function of you self-expressing and living your most authentic life. Authenticity doesn’t just draw more money into your practice, it draws harmony and healthy relationships into your life.