CLE Leadership & Management
Ideas, Resources, and Techniques
for CLE Professionals
A periodic e-newsletter
By Chuck Bingaman - www.chuckbingaman.com
#3 January, 2003
As 2002 ends and 2003 begins, we should remind ourselves how fortunate we are to work in continuing legal education. We have the opportunity to do such valuable work with such terrific people! Sure, we all have program, personnel and financial problems to deal with—some very challenging—but we also have great opportunities to exercise our minds and our creativity. And we have unlimited opportunities to help others develop their skills and their insights both in law practice. As leaders, we must maintain our own broad, positive perspective, share it with others, and avoid being bogged down or blinded by the minutia of everyday work. That’s a difficult assignment to handle consistently every day, but it’s essential for ongoing success.
I hope you have a happy, rewarding and successful New Year! I look forward to hearing of your challenges, successes and new ideas as 2003 speeds along.
Leadership
Every CLE organization that I
know of is looking for attractive, new ideas for courses and publications—ideas
that can carry it through a struggling economy and generate enthusiastic
new attendees and new readers.
Leaders can help the process by getting out of their offices
and encouraging others to do so as well.
Have off-site staff retreats, some with an outsider or two to
stir the pot. Talk to practitioners about their work
and their clients. Visit
other CLE organizations. (That
can be valuable for both the visitor and the visitees!) Get ideas from every member of your staff—not just the
course group or the books group.
Visit—and build a relationship with—your nearest
continuing medical education director, CPA education director, and dental
education director. See what THEY do and how THEY do it.
Arrange to sit in on a practice session of a local college athletic
team or, even better, a professional team.
See how they organize and teach.
And, don’t let these be one-time affairs.
Build relationships and invite return visits.
Keep the conversation going on the best ways of helping people
to learn and perform. You
WILL find new, valuable, and marketable ideas. Have you scheduled your first bus-trip
CLE courses for spring or summer?
Illinois CLE did a two-day bus-trip program for its staff on
law office economics a few years ago.
We visited six law firms over two days and discussed work management
and billing with firm leaders in their offices.
I’ve been wanting for some time to do a bus-trip course
for practitioners on environmental cleanup problems that would include
visits to brownfield sites with guided, explanatory walkarounds, demonstrations
of testing procedures, visits to environmental laboratories, and visits
to regulatory agencies. Another
apt subject for a bus-trip would be a course on land use and zoning. Why just talk about plat maps, easements,
traffic and drainage issues when your faculty can walk and drive your
attendees through the actual development areas while discussing the
legal issues and problems? Among
the beauties of the bus trip approach is that you see first hand what
the faculty is talking about, you have semi-closed environment periods
for lectures or discussions while moving from site to site, and you
see your faculty experts in their natural habitats that, in many cases,
cannot be understood as well in a hotel meeting room.
A day-long bus trip can conjure up great old memories of school
field trips, and a modern coach or two for a day may cost less that
a hotel meeting room. Some MCLE authorities might question the
absence of traditional classroom trappings, but I bet you could sell
the educational value with the right subject and format. And it would give your registrants a great change of pace!
Management
Starting the new year may be
a good time to do some fundamental updating and upgrading in your organization.
Is your mission statement up to date?
Are the job descriptions for your governing board members, your
employees, and yourself up to date?
Do you have specific, quantified goals for the next six months?
Is it time to devote a Board meeting or, better yet, a Board
retreat to assessing where your organization stands strategically in
its market and to deciding where it should be going in the next two
years? Now is the time to get these important
items on your calendar for 2003.
Now is also a great time to get yourself
and your WHOLE staff organized to make 2003 a learning, developing year.
Each member of your staff can be asked to set a quarterly or
six-month business related learning goal and related plan—using
the attached form. Share
your plans, help each other, and your organization can grow as a result
both in personal capital and in appreciation of lifelong learning.
Resources
& Strategies Two magazines that I read cover
to cover each month are Business 2.0 (www.Business2.com) and Fast Company
(www.FastCompany.com). They are filled with specific, stimulating
articles on how innovative women and men are creating and leading modern
enterprises, many with direct relevance to the CLE organizations we
are leading. The November
issue of Business 2.0 has an interesting “Cheat Sheet”—a
one-page pull-out section on health and survival in the workplace that
lays out the latest responsible suggestions for fighting anxiety, depression,
ADHD, insomnia and fitness problems. The December Fast Company has an
interesting section detailing how six innovative CEOs made shrewd moves
to deal with tough times in 2002. In the last
month I’ve been reading, for a consulting study group, The Heart
of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change their Organizations
by John Kotter and Dan S. Cohen. (Harvard Business School Press, 2002) Kotter published the acclaimed Leading Change several years
ago, but he subsequently refined his thinking on how change in people
and organizations can be implemented most effectively. Kotter’s new book emphasizes—with 34 real-life
case examples—how leaders bring about change most effectively
when they help themselves and others SEE a situation in ways that affect
them EMOTIONALLY. As Kotter
says in his introduction, “Behavior change happens in highly successful
situations mostly by speaking to people’s feelings…even
in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative
measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an
M.B.A. sense.” The
case studies, most less than a page long, are worth the price of the
book because they give real examples of stimulating change through making
people SEE situations in ways the engage their emotions. (Some of the examples also suggest ways
of making our CLE advertising pieces and our courses and publications
more likely to influence positive response.)
Following an award-winning 20 years as Executive Director
of Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education, Chuck now consults
full-time on management problems and opportunities with CLE organizations
and law firms and with IICLE. Chuck welcomes inquiries about possible
consulting engagements from CLE organizations, law firms, publishers
and others. In addition to his personal consulting work, Chuck is an
adjunct consultant with Altman Weil Inc., the leader in legal consulting.
Contact Chuck at chuck@chuckbingaman.com, at 603-313-1920,
or at P.O. Box 390, Walpole, NH 03068.
Personal Learning Objective Worksheet Date: __________
Name: _________________________________________________
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(Comment: Be specific and realistic—not vague and beyond reach. E.g. Learn how to do mail merge in MS Word—not how to speak Japanese!)
How I’ll know if I have achieved my objective: ______________________________________________________
When I’ll have achieved my objective: _____________________________________________________________
What resources I’ll use in prompting my learning: _____________________________________________________
Who I’ll consult or work with in pursuing my learning: _________________________________________________
Who I will share my learning with: ________________________________________________________________
Why this learning will benefit me in my work and otherwise: _____________________________________________
Signature: ______________________________________________________________