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Culture ‘starts and ends with leadership’
In order to overcome “barriers to success”, this managing partner says, firm leaders need to focus on the long-term health of their company culture rather than implementing “meaningless” quick fixes.
Lauren Croft
Travis Schultz is the managing partner of Travis Schultz and Partners. Speaking on a recent episode of The Boutique Lawyer Show, he reflected on why trust is the currency of culture and why firms should be focusing on their long-term health rather than looking at quick fixes to their culture.
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Across the profession, not being able to build and maintain trust with colleagues can be a barrier to success, according to Schultz.
“It doesn’t matter whether you are a boutique legal firm or you’re medium-sized, large scale, or you’re in any other professional services organisation, key barriers to success really are underperformance and toxic work environments. And both of those really come down to shortcomings of leadership more often than not. And if you really drill down, it’s simply a lack of trust,” he said.
“So, I think it’s an important conversation for that reason, that if you want to remove the barriers to success, if you want to give your organisation the best possible chance of succeeding in whatever niche you may be driving in, then building trust in leadership is key. It’s the currency of culture. And at the end of the day, responsibility really starts and ends with leadership in any organisation.”
However, this isn’t something Schultz knew straight away.
“I have made so many mistakes along the way through my career in law that I couldn’t count them. I’d probably be up to about 13,486 by now. But I’m always encouraging people to extend themselves, make mistakes is fine, just learn from them. And so too in leadership,” he said.
“We’ve all made mistakes, and we can read, we can train, we can develop, we can have access to all sorts of resources to scholarly articles, academics, and even going to conferences and conventions, and you can pick things up. But at the end of the day, it’s life experience that really teaches you more than anything else.”
But particularly in the current market, and in light of challenges around key issues like flexible working, cyber security, inflation and legal tech, Schultz said building trust is “absolutely not” front of mind for leaders.
“It’s one of those things that people just don’t really give a second thought to until it’s usually too late. It’s only when people are deserting in droves and the organisation has difficulty with recruitment. They can’t attract an applicant that loans someone to accept an offer of employment.
“It’s only at that point in time do the organisations reflect and go, well, what’s going wrong here? What have we done? Why can’t we attract and retain high-performing talent? And I think at the end of the day, we all tend to look at our bottom lines. We need cash flow in order to support growth. We need cash flow to meet financial obligations. And really that means that the metrics that we prioritise are those which most directly influence our week-to-week survival,” he said.
“From a financial perspective, as being more focused on the hygiene of the organisation rather than the health. It’s very short term, and unless we, as leaders of professional services firms, take a bigger picture approach, unless we take a helicopter view of what’s going on in our ecosystem, then ultimately, we’re going to run into trouble at some point in time when these things really will catch up with us.”
In terms of the hygiene versus the health of a firm, Schultz said the “hygiene issues” are short term – and a “sugar hit” to the culture of sorts.
“We’ve had a bit of a down attitude in the office in the last few weeks. So, I’m going to put some Tim Tams in the kitchen on Friday, or bring in a basket of muffins. That sort of stuff is just really meaningless in the scheme of things. But in the very short term, you might get some sugar hit to culture, some sugar hit to morale. It’s not addressing systemic issues at all. It’s not addressing the root cause of whatever the issue is that is having a negative effect on firm performance,” he said.
“Health, on the other hand, is long-term health is having a strategy. A strategy that’s all encompassing, that covers not just what you’re trying to achieve from a business perspective, but what you’re trying to achieve in terms of your position in the market, in terms of your culture, and in terms of the way in which your values are demonstrated on a day-to-day basis.
“If you are a healthy firm, you are across all of these different considerations. And you have strategies in place to ensure that all of them succeed in the longer term. Rather than just going from problem to problem and bouncing off walls along the way and introducing little sugar hits that might just give you a hygiene check, but aren’t really going to give you the keys to long-term success.”
