How healthy is your career?

Careers in the Scottish legal profession are changing, becoming more specialist, more competitive, more mobile. We know intellectually that the job-for-life is dead, but we haven’t fully grasped its implications… that the responsibility for our careers is now ours. Younger solicitors face career choices that senior partners definitely did not, but has the profession woken up yet to the changes and its implications?

A potted history of why you think the way you do

The paternalistic firm which provided a job-for-life still lives on in many Scottish legal minds. Where did this expectation originate? In the 1950s when the insecurities of the 1930s and 40s gave way to the expansion of the 50s.  More specifically it originated with research done on American middle class males i.e. males who were living in a rapidly growing economy and who were typically the only salary earners in a nuclear family. How did they succeed? By an early commitment to a growing organisation for their working life. A cultural norm was born and all the expectations that go with it.

Is Scottish life in the 2000s different from America in the 1950s (we are known to lag behind)? Eighty per cent of UK businesses are expected to undergo major cost reductions over the next year, with 44% planning mergers with other businesses over that time. Of course there is nothing wrong with holding on to the expectation that if you work very hard for your firm it will remain there to advance your career appropriately. There is nothing wrong in holding on to an expectation that is no longer held by society at large, as long as you recognise your minority standing. The Scottish legal profession is increasingly isolated in its approach to career ‘progression’. Even my former profession, the medical one, is changing so rapidly it can’t keep up with itself and a manpower crisis is approaching too fast.

There is nothing wrong with being in a minority as long as you are aware that the businesses and individual clients you deal with are marching to a different drum. Businesses out there have had to become ‘lean and mean’. They are not expansive and paternal. Employers’ contracts with employees have had to become a transaction rather than a long-term relationship.

The smaller picture

So much for the big picture. How does this affect you? I’ll spell it out in capitals.

HEALTH WARNING: NO ONE IS LOOKING AFTER YOUR CAREER.

Not anymore and you’re the only one left who can do that.  

So just how healthy is your career? If it’s not in great shape you’re in good company. A recent report suggests (do statistics ever do anything else?) that 40% of you are thinking of changing your jobs and 12% (Employment Brand Imperative Study, 2001) of you are actively job hunting. Some of you have spectacular careers but not the careers you actually want. Some of you no longer want to be solicitors, but that’s career change not career management.

What is career management?

It is asking and answering ‘What am I doing here’ . . . at work, that is. (No metaphysics here please. We’re lawyers.) It is identifying and achieving what is important to you at work, set against what your firm is trying to achieve.  Are you very clear about what your firm is trying to achieve and its implications for you, never mind what you personally are trying to achieve?

Do you need to know? Not really. Nor when you start your car do you need to know where you are going and you can go on holiday, destination unknown, especially if you’re aged between 17 and 20. But this is Scottish solicitors I’m writing for. Why should your career be such a poor relation?  Laurence Peter has a point with his ‘If you don’t know where you’re going you will probably end up somewhere else.’

Career management is nothing extraordinary, but it is new, unless you are from England where the legal firms have been using it for years. The best parallel is being cross-examined in court, except it’s faster, more enjoyable, but probably just as exhausting.  

For example, you could expect to be asked:  

• Who has total responsibility for the plaintiff’s career?
• What are the plaintiff’s plans for it in the immediate future, long term and ultimately?
• What are his firm’s plans and aims over the same period?
• Are they compatible with the plaintiff’s goals?
• What is the reality of where the plaintiff’s career is at the moment?
• How does he currently contribute to his firm’s aims?
• What are the plaintiff’s prospects, on current course?
• What are the plaintiff’s options if he wishes to achieve what is important to him at work?
• What contributions does the plaintiff have to make, to get him what he wants from the firm? (Is cynicism allowed in court?)
• What option is the plaintiff going to take?
• By when is the plaintiff going to have taken this action?
• Does the plaintiff wish the court to refer him for career management?

It does involve stepping outside your pressured schedule for one or two hours with a professional or a skilled friend you can be totally honest with. It has got to be done with someone who has no vested interest in what you might say about difficulties or personalities at work, so it must not be part of annual appraisal, tempting as it is to add it on.  

I’ve had one or two exceptional managers but even then I was never 100% honest with them. I kept my shiny side towards them and I find it hard to believe lawyers are that transparent at work. Career management requires you to be more honest and clear sighted about yourself and your prospects than you have probably ever been, in order to make sensible decisions.  Career management is about realistic decisions then action, or it is if I get to you. Talk is necessary, and the men are best at it (if they’re paying), but I see no point in it if it does not lead to action. So this is only for the non-quiche-eating real men. Speaking of which . . .

Women

Where are women in all of this change? As an outsider, it is fascinating to look at Scottish legal firms’ male:female ratio of partners vs. the gender mix of law graduates over the last 30 years. Career management for female solicitors has become more and more difficult. Another ball has been added to the balls you juggle.  ‘Women’s Lib has gained us the right to be permanently exhausted’.  The shift from general practice with long-term, stable clients to specialist practice, and the pressure of having to seek new business, has brought new competition and commercial pressures unknown to Scottish solicitors. Add the stress of having to use skills, like marketing, that you might neither possess naturally nor have been trained in. (Should that go into a career management plan to be brought up at appraisal if not before?)

The new business pressure added to salary-earning motherhood is making many of you ask if partnership is worth it. Fifty two per cent said No in a recent poll of UK and USA legal firms (Monster Legal 2001). I apologise to all the loving fathers among you, but as a cultural norm a British woman mentally takes her children to work with her in a way that you don’t. (Please do write and disagree.)

Of course being the more lateral thinking of the sexes, your female colleagues are finding career solutions. (My contact details are at the end!) For example, part-time work, niche work, moving out of private practice and moving out of law.

Gender issues aside, would any of you run a business the way you run ‘Me Ltd.’? With lots and lots of ability and endless hard work, but no specific targets, no motivating focus and precious little marketing. When you got into your office today did you know your destination and how you might get there?  Isn’t it time you did?