The Curse of Being the Best

“I can´t believe Jorge is showing resistance in working in my case. He is always so well-disposed”, said Leandro with great disappointment, a partner in a successful firm to his managing partner. “I am sure there has to be a good reason. Let me talk to him” he answered. “Well, young people don´t come any more the way they used to be,” added Leandro in a skeptical tone and leaving the office. The managing partner met later with Jorge, a young senior associate in the corporate team, with great capabilities and always well disposed to take any work that was requested by anybody in the firm. He gave him the list of all the transactions he was working on. The list was larger than 10 and with 6 different partners. The guy was totally overwhelmed, no weekends in the last three months and hardly sleeping at all, facing serious delivery problems and at the brink of a nervous breakdown. “I don´t like saying no when a partner asks for help. I want to give the impression here that I am ready to make a great effort and work for my future and the firm´s. But I am not good at putting limits or explaining partners when my agenda gets fully booked –and they don´t like listening to excuses anyway-. I am really stressed out and loosing the motivation I used to have” said Jorge to the managing partner.

This is a very common situation in many firms, even the best ones. Lawyers a task-and-results-oriented and therefore tend to focus in the work that needs to be completed and delivered to the client. Since work is –or seems to be- always urgent, senior lawyers (partners and associates) are always on the hunt for the best associates available. Once they have spotted an associate they can trust and depend on, they prefer to work with him/her, without deep consideration or the amount of workload the associate is actually handling and the conflicts that may inflict in his/her work with other partners. They just want the work to get done. Some of the best associates that, in addition to being very capable and hard working, have a collaborative attitude and a concern for the partners´ needs, tend to get a disproportionate amount of the work compared to other associates.

The situation described above provokes several management failures, but one of the worsts is the risk of losing some your best associates. The problem with these cases is that these associates are seen by partners as very successful and therefore asume that they must be happy. The point is that they are in fact successful, from the firm´s perspective, but not from the associate´s standpoint. He or she feels tired, overburdened, and unjustly treated –compared to others who receive less work-. The money and recognition is not really paying off, and other options start looking attractive. When the crisis arises, many partners get initially surprised and then annoyed by how ungratefully this associate is reacting to all the opportunities the firm is providing.

The January-February 2016 edition of the Harvard Business Review includes an article titled “Collaborative Overload” (Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant), which explains that employees that have high levels of requests by the organization have a higher chance of turnover, taking valuable knowledge and network resources with them. The solution they propose for the organization is: redistributing work and effective rewarding.

From the perspective of a law firm, the first solution (distribute work more evenly) is normally complicated because: (i) individual partners make their own teams for their cases or deals, with little coordination with other partners or supervision by a higher instance –managing partner, committes, etc.-; (ii) recruiting performance is uneven, so the professional capacity of associates might vary significantly from one case to another in the same firm, which increases work concentration on the best associates; (iii) the billing hour structure does not help in creating efficient project management models in which intelligent decisions can be taken regarding professional resources allocation.

Rewards systems also play a poor role in this matter. Either using direct compensation rewards based on the hours billed or more subjective models, but where substatial effort is the main element for career advancement, the final result is that many associates that have a positive attitude towards work and the firm, and also great capabilities, end up working their lifes off until they become burnout to the point where leaving seems the only sensible solution. They remind me of those horses in cowboy movies that are required to run until they fall dead. This seems to me like a foolish talent development strategy, but still it is being applied by many firms, or individual partners –but with little control from the firm-.

The big paradox of this situation is that firms are successful to a good extent because of this type of professionals, so it seems difficult to explain why so many firms and partners overlook these issues. My explanation lies in the cultural traits that define many firms and professionals. The need for inmediate success, the incapacity to deal with risks and the difficulty to handle conflicting objectives, are some of the typical limitations lawyers face. As with many matters that affect everyday life in the firm, lawyers are constantly punished for not understanding the need to take decisions considering the long-term and broader interests of the firm, and not just their inmediate and individual needs.

Knowledge-intensive organizations like law firms critically depend on their best professionals to succeed. Firms need to nourish and protect these fundamental resources. There is hardly anything important to do in the firm until you have a good strategy and culture to attract and retain your best professionals. If this people find out at some point that being the best is more a curse than a blessing, then your future is probably doomed.