One of the distinctive traits of lawyers is that they are risk-averse. They are trained to detect problems and risks for their clients. And the best they are at doing that, the best lawyers they will become. So risks have to be averted and never embrased.
An inevitable consequence of being risk-averse is that you hate failure. Since lawyers tend to apply their skills learned for the legal profession when they have to deal with non-legal matters (like organization and communication), they become risk-averse individuals when they have to decide and behave within the firm and also with clients, even when they are not working in a legal matter.
Excessive fear to fail has at least two demonstrated negative effects
- Communication. Lawyers tend to have a poorer communication that average individuals. This have been found in studies done decades ago to analyse rainmakers. The average lawyers feels more confortable in smaller groups and dealing with technical information. Social interaction involving affective and emotional components –like when you need to get a client- feels akward for many lawyers, and the basic reason is the fear of failure. Rainmakers are stronger risk-takers and they don´t fear failure as much (if they don´t get it this time, they´ll have it next time). This risk-averse attitude regarding communication also expands within the firm, where lawyers are many times reluctant to share valuable information with partners and colleagues, mostly for fear of loosing something in this exchange.
- Innovation. Risk of failure is probably the main reason why individuals, organizations and societies avoid change and innovation. Innovation to change something that is already going wrong has no special merit. You need to do it anyway since you have already failed. Innovation is much harder when failure is not present –maybe you are even doing well- and change implies taking risks and eventually failing in that pursuit. Lawyers´ risk-averse nature makes them specially reactive against change and innovation. This has worked well for several decades since the pyramid model has proven to be successful. But that might not be necessarily true in the future.
This excessive resistance to failure is not only negative for accepting change when it would be advisable and deal with it more proactively, but also precludes lawyers from using failure as a formidable learning tool. The best opportunities to improve come from failures, even big ones. But since lawyers hate and fear failure too much, they react with a variety of defensive and ineffective behaviors like: (i) minimize failure (“it wasn´t that bad”), (ii) distort facts (“I don´t see it as a failure”), (iii) hide facts (avoid informing a particular situation); or (iv) blame somebody else (“he or she actually caused this problem”).
It is true that in many instances, these behaviors result from a need to defend from a culture that punish failure very heavily. But this is a fruitless chicken-and-egg discussion that is not going to change the basic structural problem: lawyers are not good at learning from failures.
In a more stable and favourable market lawyers could get away with this limitation But in a current unstable and highly competitive environment lawyers will need to become more flexible about taking risks and, if failure comes –as it happens everywhere-, be ready to learn from those failures. As somebody very wisely said “the problem is not so much a failure as the inability to learn from it”.
The main article of the Harvard Business Review (May 2016 issue) is titled “Increase your Return on Failure” (Julian Birkinshaw and Martine Haas) suggests three steps to make sure that failures are not just a bad story, but can actually become sources of future success:
- Step 1. Learn from every failure. This is the painful part of the process since it implies accepting the failure as such and digging into the real causes. It requieres courage and clarity of vision (“we are doing this to improve the firm”). The best way to learn from failure is to challenge the assumptions used in putting together the project in the first place, avoiding the defensive mechanisms that normally come into place when we want to explain problems. The exercise must result in specific learnings: what should we do next time? In which way can we improve our relationship with clients, our service or our operations? These lessons are the assets that should be used in the future.
- Step 2. Share the Lessons. The contents of the lessons should be spread out in the firm to whomever can learn from them. This is one of the main paths in which firms become “learning organizations”. The leaders that were part of “failure experience” should talk to others in the firm sharing their insights. This should happen relatively soon after the events and make a regular exercise within the firm. But they should have a learning purpose and not a punishing sense. Failures should be accepted, learned from and move forward. Even if there would be other negative consequences –like in the compensation system- the firm should still find ways to used these experiences in a positive way.
- Step 3. Review your Pattern of Failure. This a more strategic view. Are we learning from our failures and mistakes? Or we tend to repeat the same things over and over? If so, why? All firms and individuals tend to have strong and weak aspects, and these weaknesses tend to be the cause of the more frequent mistakes and problems. It is important to look at the big picture to make sure that failure is analysed in a structural way, trying to find persistant problems and mistakes, and then focusing with more energy in those problems.
Any lawyer reading these ideas could become easily skeptical . Law firms are not easy places to discuss failures and mistakes in a productive way. All the defensive mechanisms described above are more familiar to lawyers and they will be difficult to change. But this is due to traditional law firm cultures where the individual is more important than the firm, and therefore he/she should be protected even if this affects the success of the firm.
The blaming culture where problems tend to be hidden as much as possible should be changed to allow a more open environment that allows failure as long as you can learn from it. This will benefit the firm, making it a learning organization more fit to face the challenges of an increasingly demanding market.
