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CLE Leadership & Management
Ideas, Resources, and Techniques for
CLE Professionals
A periodic e-newsletter
By Chuck Bingaman - chuck@chuckbingaman.com
#20 April
2005
Leadership  From David Allen’s latest
newsletter (worth your getting, particularly
since it’s a free e-newsletter!): “The
most successful executives/professionals/people keep their decks clear, make
decisions on the front end, dispatch the results to trusted people and systems,
track commitments rigorously (their own and others’) and get physically engaged
taking actions on the projects they own. Those are learnable behaviors, able
to be systematized, that build capacity for dealing with the next surprise as
the
next opportunity.” Successful leaders also avoid jumping
in personally to solve problems others can handle, make the right judgments about
what to spend energy on,
maintain control of the key decisions…, and make their people feel appreciated
and, therefore, loyal.
Management
Edward
M. Hallowell, MD, a psychiatrist and founder of the Hallowell Center for
Cognitive and Emotional Health in Sudbury, Mass., and the author of DRIVEN
TO DISTRACTION, is arguing
that many modern “knowledge” workers are afflicted by what he calls ADT—Attention
Deficit Trait. By that he means that
we let ourselves be overwhelmed by multiplying inputs of stimuli, especially
at work but often at home as well, where our cell phones, pagers, emails, blogs,
and “real” telephones, not to mention the actual people, at times overload our
mental and emotional abilities to keep things in perspective. The symptoms of ADT can be distractibility,
stress and impatience. And they can result
in significant under-achievement. We’ve
all experienced those symptoms. Hallowell
argues that we need to recognize ADT and take action to protect ourselves from
it. He stresses the importance of regular,
positive, in-person human contact—not closeting ourselves away from people for
the full day—adequate sleep, good diets and turning off some of the stimuli as
much as possible. Common sense perhaps. Suggestions that we intuitively know
are valid. But it’s also helpful to know that the ADT many of us feel from
time to time really IS significant, should and can be dealt with! Hallowell has
an excellent article on the subject titled “Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart
People
Underperform” in the January 2005 Harvard Business Review Special
Issue on Managing Yourself.
Resources At the 2005
ABA
TechShow last week I had an extraordinary opportunity to catch up on many
areas of legal technology, to meet potential CLE keynoters and instructors, to
get CLE program ideas and to meet potential CLE sponsors. Blawgs were the subject of many conversations,
and all of us need to get up to speed with them. Legal marketing guru Larry Bodine opined
that blogs are the hottest thing in legal marketing at the moment, and I think
they have great potential for CLE use as well. See www.bloglines.com and www.feeddemon.com for
two windows into
the world of blogging. We also need to
follow the new, blog-related development called Podcasting. A feature story in the February Law Technology
News asked whether Podcasting might be “CLE’s new wave”? Basically it involves audio files that can
be uploaded to websites for easy downloading into I-Pods and similar
devices. A very inexpensive medium for
education, news, and developing materials that CLE could experiment with. In fact, some legal groups are moving into
the field right now. See www.mayitpleasethecourt.net and www.itconversations.com/series/lawandit.html. Even
if you have resisted the addictive reading of blogs—or even
blawgs—try www.thecommonscold.com written
by Monica Bay, Editor in Chief of Law Technology News. It’s filled with legal news, management insights,
links to many legal web sites worth knowing about, links to sites on other fascinating
subjects, and much more. Just an amazing
collection of interesting and worthwhile material! Do
you know about the LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell Legal Fellowship that
is an extension of the company's mission to provide support to the legal
community? It is designed to embrace
those individuals and associations that are dedicated to the advancement of the
legal profession, especially those focused on education, the practice of public
interest law, and diversity in the profession. Semi-annually,
a minimum award of $15,000 will be presented to the recipient chosen from the
submissions placed through the www.martindale.com/xp/Martindale/About_Us/Ratings/ratings_fellowship.xml website. The recipients must be
related to a Sec. 501 (c)(3) non-profit entity and must submit a written proposal
by the deadlines of May 1 or November 1. The Fellowship award winners are
announced in June and December of each year. Might be an opportunity to fund
that special CLE or professional education project you’ve
been considering!
I welcome your feedback! Please keep in touch! CCB
P.S. By the way, I am currently preparing a half-day program
on “Getting Results: Practical Ways of Managing 21st Century
Workloads” for the May joint annual convention of the Alaska Bar Association
and the Alaska Judges Association, preparing a series of teleconference
seminars with top staff of a major state bar CLE program on handling current
management challenges, and writing a summary report on the ABA TechShow
for CLE consulting
clients. Let me know if you would be
interested in similar projects.
Following 20 years as Executive Director of a major American CLE organization,
Chuck now consults on strategic planning, marketing and management challenges
with CLE and other legal organizations, law firms,
law schools and others. He
welcomes your
inquiries on projects designed to enhance your organization’s
effectiveness. You
can contact him at chuck@chuckbingaman.com,
at 1-603-756-9268, or at P.O. Box 390, Walpole, NH, USA 03068-0390. Past issues of this newsletter are archived
at www.chuckbingaman.com. |