CLE Leadership & Management
Ideas, Resources, and Techniques for
CLE Professionals
A periodic e-newsletter
By Chuck Bingaman - chuck@chuckbingaman.com
#28 May 2006
Leadership  Since Proctor & Gamble’s CEO A.G. Lafley took
over in 2000, annual sales have shot from $40 to $57 BILLION! A key approach
he instituted was an annual all-day review for each product designed to set
(or reset) its tone and direction. Lafley reviews all managers’ presentations
in advance to weed out historical justifications and insists that the key
questions for discussion are “where to play?” (defining markets)
and “how to win?” (defining product and marketing strategies).
If CLE organizations devoted similar, in-depth analyses to each product and
product line, enhanced and productive focus would be inevitable. Jeffrey Pfeffer, writing in the April Business
2.0, quotes
a study of corporate annual reports that found that stock prices were higher
one year later when companies blamed poor performance on controllable internal
factors rather than on external issues. “Attributing bad results to
outside forces fuels…resignation,” says Pfeffer. “Coppng
to shortcomings, on the other hand, is the first step to recovery. No one
in a company is going to fix a problem until executives name and describe
it. No one will follow a leader whose message is that success and failure
depend on random factors. No one will take responsibility for his own errors
unless he sees the company’s leaders building the foundation for a
culture of truth-telling.”
Management
At
least once each year review with all your employees the history of
your CLE organization and CLE in general, tell them how it is governed,
and walk them through a detailed financial update. Invite written questions
in advance and
take impromptu questions at the meeting. Such an update can give employees
a sense of pride in their organization and an accurate picture of how it really
works. Without periodic—and accurate—refreshers, CLE employees
can miss the importance of what they do and develop highly inaccurate, even
destructive, understandings of how the organization really works. If you create
an outline of your organization’s history, you need simply update it
yearly. If
you are now planning your budget for a July 1 fiscal year, be sure to plan
funding for all needed employee training for the year. Ideally
each employee will have a tailored and budgeted training plan. And any new
software/hardware
plans for the year need to be supported with training plans and funds. Periodically
use a “secret shopper” to register for your CLE
courses (by all the means you offer) and to order a publication, webcast, or
other offering
from your organization. Your “secret shopper” should be given a
checklist of things to watch for and report to you on including whether his
contact in your organization was friendly, polite, helpful, informed and efficient.
Also, check the promptness of delivery of any items, the packaging and the
condition they were in when delivered. Tell your staff in advance that you
are using an outsider to sample your customer treatment and delivery times
from a customer’s point of view. Intergenerational
conflicts are increasingly
common in the CLE workplace with three and sometimes, for the first time in
history, four generations working together. With their widely differing values
and priorities, it is vital that you understand their approaches to life and
work. For a quick cheat-sheet summarizing generational differences, see http://www.library.dal.ca/law/St-Johns/Pres/Tues17/Hartnett-Generational_Differences.pdf.
Resources See
www.workforce.com for a range of resources on handling personnel problems,
job descriptions, performance evaluations, etc. Check
out www.inter-alia.net, Tom
Mighell’s outstanding blawg on legal
research, both for his useful content and as a great example of what
a stellar blawg can be. Another VERY good blawg is http://jimcalloway.typepad.com written by Oklahoma State Bar Technology Advisor Jim Calloway. The
New PR Toolkit: Strategies for Successful Media Relations by Deirdre
Breakenridge and Thomas J. DeLoughry (Prentice Hall, 2003) offers a
valuable 21st century guide to effective media success, an area where
CLE organizations are traditionally weak. For
an engrossing read as well as a comprehensive course in leadership,
human relations, emotional intelligence and a few other vital human
skills, I heartily recommend Doris Kearns Goodwin’s A
Team of Rivals (Simon & Schuster, 2005). It’s the story of how Abraham
Lincoln recruited a group of political leaders, several of whom had
been his bitterest rivals and detractors, into his cabinet, drew their
best work from them in a time of national crisis, and gained their
personal support and admiration in the process. Terrific stuff!
Please
keep in touch! CCB
Following 20 years as Executive Director of a major American CLE organization,
Chuck now consults and teaches on strategic planning, marketing, CLE executive
hiring, and management challenges with CLE and other legal organizations, law
firms, law schools and others. He also offers economical in-house training
through conference call courses for CLE and bar association staffs. 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.
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