I have the great privilege of being the CEO of Stockholm’s New Law movement forerunner LegalWorks and my job is basically to build and develop legal teams. This is what I do every day internally at LegalWorks and externally as a recruiter and a legal management consultant for our clients.
I have one secret superpower: put me in a room full of lawyers and I can probably tell you who in that room will be successful and why. Put two legal teams in a room and I can probably tell you which one will outperform the other. How? Years and years of assessments and screening lawyers for future success, great teamwork and knowledge sharing with research collaborators and digging into the fundamentals of performance and wellbeing in different settings, has led me to know this:
Success and high-performance follows a pattern. And that pattern is not based on your law school grades or your personal traits. It’s not luck, it’s not being the hardest working person in the room, it’s not being the person with the highest IQ in the room, albeit those things might be very helpful for reaching short term goals.
I would argue that long term success and high performance is a process pattern and a skills set that can be tapped into at any time and practiced by anyone. It’s about knowing who you are and what you can contribute with. It’s about setting your intentions and staying focused. It’s about having and providing psychological safety. It’s about playing your position and doing it well. It’s about fully embracing diversity and inclusion. It’s about being alignment aware and as a consequence being picky with what team you play for and who else you bring to that team. It’s about managing your reactions and behaviors, it’s about taking very good care of you and the people around you, and yes, it’s about having fun.
If you want to learn more about the pattern of success and how to lead flourishing high performers – check out LegalWorks’ lunch seminar at Nordic Legal Tech Day. We will walk you through some of the latest research that impacts performance and team from neuroscience-leadership to lawyer specific studies and the psychology of high performance sports. Hope to see you there – a very warm welcome to all!
/Anna Lensmar-Friedman (CEO, LegalWorks)
Photo by: VIU Studios
