Over a year ago when I was visiting my very favorite bookstore (the Upstart Crow, in San Diego’s Seaport Village), I saw a book titled Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way

Part biography, part instruction on leadership in the business context, Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way is an easy and interesting read.  The author gives a chronological review of Mrs. Roosevelt’s life and draws out the lessons in each stage, which makes for a reasonably effective presentation.  My only quibble with this approach is that Gerber occasionally shifts from the historical recounting to a present-day business example without much warning, calling for closer attention than the book requires otherwise.  

The book’s focus, not surprisingly, is on women’s leadership, though many of the lessons transcend gender.  Its opening explains that leadership is particularly important to overcome the gender disparities that continue to exist, giving examples from business and politics.  Similar inequalities exist in law as well, as indicated in the National Association for Women Lawyers’ Report of the Third Annual National Survey on Retention and Promotion of Women in Law Firms, which states that among the AmLaw 200, women comprise:

• Fewer than 16% of equity partners; 
• 15% of average firm’s highest governing committee (and another 15% of firms have no women on governing committees); and 
• 6% of law firm managing partners. 

In additional, the study found that male equity partners out-earn female by average of $87,000.  While these statistics are limited in scope, they indicate that at least in the firms studied, significant disparity remains.  As Gerber wrote,

Although these issues differ somewhat in kind or degree from the problems of Eleanor’s day, the solutions rest on the same foundation: leadership.  Why?  Leadership is about change.  It means intentionally achieving a helpful, ethical purpose, and doing so in a process of reciprocal motivation and support between leaders and those they hope to lead.

Gerber pulls leadership lessons from every stage of Mrs. Roosevelt’s life.  More extensive in number than in depth, the lessons are nonetheless instructive and likely to provoke readers’ reflection.  For example, the following lessons (learned “the hard way”) flow from the painful period in which Mrs. Roosevelt discovered FDR’s affair with Lucy Mercer:

1. Respond.  Every leader experiences difficult circumstances that she cannot control.  The solution, then, is for the leader to learn to control her response.  Self-mastery is a key leadership competency because, as Mrs. Roosevelt wrote, “[t]he influence you exert is through your own life and what you become yourself.”  Leaders must master reactive tendencies and respond to problems instead.
2. Reflect.  Upon suffering a blow, a leader must reflect upon the situation and his response.  A leader must understand himself thoroughly, including what a crisis means to his sense of self and the sources of strength upon which he can draw.
3. Find Courage to Change.  When a crisis occurs, fear is a natural response.  Mrs. Roosevelt’s response is instructive: “Courage is more exhilarating than fear, and in the long run it is easier.  We do not have to become heroes overnight.  Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing that it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.”
4. Accept Change and Take Action.  Having reflected and gathered sufficient courage, a leader must act.  Mrs. Roosevelt wrote, “People can surmount what seems to be total defeat, difficulties too great to be borne, but it requires a capacity to readjust endlessly to the changing conditions of life.”  Leaders must learn to take considered action and move forward, despite setbacks that occur along the way.

What’s in it for lawyers?  As the foregoing example indicates, the leadership lessons Gerber offers are often drawn from Mrs. Roosevelt’s writings or speeches. Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way offers many leadership lessons, generally at a somewhat superficial level that introduces a general principle without fleshing it out in depth.  As a result, those who are seeking deep discussion of leadership or its practical application may be disappointed.  If you enjoy the Roosevelt history, though, and don’t mind a good but topical discussion of its leadership lessons, you’ll likely find benefit from reading Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way.

As the title indicates, Maxwell presents 21 laws of leadership, all of which are free-standing and yet buttressed by one another. You can learn a lot simply by reviewing the 21 laws with Maxwell’s brief explanation of each:

1.  The Law of the Lid: Leadership Ability Determines a Person’s Level of Effectiveness
2.  The Law of Influence: The True Measure of Leadership Is Influence — Nothing More, Nothing Less
3.  The Law of Process: Leadership Develops Daily, Not in a Day
4.  The Law of Navigation: Anyone Can Steer the Ship, but It Takes a Leader to Change the Course
5.  The Law of Addition: Leaders Add Value by Serving Others
6.  The Law of Solid Ground: Trust Is the Foundation of Leadership
7.  The Law of Respect: People Naturally Follow Leaders Stronger Than Themselves
8.  The Law of Intuition: Leaders Evaluate Everything with a Leadership Bias
9.  The Law of Magnetism: Who You Are Is Who You Attract
10. The Law of Connection: Leaders Touch a Heart Before They Ask for a Hand
11. The Law of the Inner Circle: A Leader’s Potential Is Determined by Those Closest to Him
12. The Law of Empowerment: Only Secure Leaders Give Power to Others
13. The Law of the Picture: People Do What People See
14. The Law of Buy-In: People Buy into the Leader, Then the Vision
15. The Law of Victory: Leaders Find a Way for the Team to Win
16. The Law of the Big Mo: Momentum is a Leader’s Best Friend
17. The Law of Priorities: Leaders Understand That Activity Is Not Necessarily Accomplishment
18. The Law of Sacrifice: A Leader Must Give Up to Go Up
19. The Law of Timing: When to Lead Is as Important as What to Do and Where to Go
20. The Law of Explosive Growth: To Add Growth, Lead Followers — To Multiply, Lead Leaders
21. The Law of Legacy: A Leader’s Lasting Value is Measured by Succession

My favorite law, the umbrella under which all of the other laws fall, is the Law of Process. Leadership can’t be developed in a day or a week. Instead, it grows and becomes refined through a lifetime of self-management, skills acquisition, and relationships:

If you continually invest in your leadership development, letting your ‘assets’ compound, the inevitable result is growth over time. What can you see when you look at a person’s daily agenda? Priorities, passion, abilities, relationships, attitude, personal disciplines, vision, and influence. See what a person is doing every day, day after day, and you’ll know who that person is and what he or she is becoming.

Often, when I speak to newer lawyers about leadership development, someone in the group will ask why a new graduate or a lawyer in the first few years of practice should be concerned with leadership development, since they’re at the bottom of the totem pole. My answer is three-fold.

First, it’s critical to lead oneself and develop a strong foundation in self-management. Second, usually even “bottom of the totem pole” lawyers soon have an opportunity to lead something, whether it’s a document review team or a subcommittee. And third, as Maxwell writes, “champions don’t become champions in the ring — they are merely recognized there.” If a lawyer waits until a leadership position is on the horizon to begin developing good leadership skills, the position may never present itself, or if it does, the lawyer will lack the necessary skills to thrive in that position. (Incidentally, point 3 is well illustrated in Maxwell’s first law, the Law of the Lid.)

What’s in it for lawyers? Although each of The 21 Irrefutable Laws is important for leadership development, perhaps none speaks to the profession in quite the same was as the Law of Explosive Growth. That law holds that leaders who develop leaders create an organization that can achieve explosive growth, since “for every leader they develop, they also receive the value of all of that leader’s followers.” Imagine the potential for enormous and sustainable growth in a law firm in which leaders are developed.

Read one chapter a week and apply what you learn. Without question, you will grow as a leader, and you’ll see the difference in your day-to-day life and practice, with clients, and in whatever leadership roles you may hold.

Published in 2003, the book offers best practices in the following areas:

*  Culture
*  Marketing
*  Internal women’s groups
*  Networking
*  Work assignments
*  Management participation
*  Compensation

The Best Practices Summary (5 pages) lists concrete steps that firms (and, often, corporations with legal staff) can implement to provide a setting and structure that supports women in advancing their legal careers.  The recommendations can be boiled down into a few overarching principles:

1.  Create a women’s initiative and/or diversity plan that has buy-in from top management.  Set policies and procedures to encourage promotion of women and work/life integration, and survey to determine how effective these programs are.

2.  Make sure women are exposed to the firm’s clients, to other lawyers in the firm (for cross-selling and referrals), and to networking and marketing events that are successful for business development.

3.  Create mentoring groups and other opportunities for women to interact with other women in the firm.

4.  Design a system to ensure that work is fairly assigned and measure group leaders’ success in part based on the career development of the lawyers they supervise.

5.  Ensure that women have a seat on management and compensation committees.

For women seeking professional advancement, the tips may be summaried as follows:

1.  Be assertive.  Ask for the work you want, the firm leadership positions you desire, the marketing opportunities and client exposure necessary to advance.

2.  Be aware.  Know who’s in power, know who’s handling which clients, and know what the situation is for other women in your firm/practice area/geographic area.

3.  Develop mentors who can guide you on your career path.

4.  Be assertive and ask for what you need and want.  (Repetition for emphasis of key theme.)

This book offers a wealth of resources for those seeking action items and concrete steps that can be implemented.  If you’re looking for more of a discussion of themes, experiences, and findings, you will likely want something beyond this book; even so, I’d recommend that any woman in practice or in law school (and every law firm leader of either gender) read Empowerment and Leadership.  It’s even available as a PDF download, so you could skim it tonight.   For $25 and maybe an hour and a half, it’s a no-lose proposition. �

I began by reading the introductory chapters on strategy.  Several gems leapt out at me, including:  

If you truly want to succeed (and many people do not want it badly enough to make it happen) then you must never settle, never give up, never coast, never just accept what is, even if you are currently performing at a high level.

and

[T]he primary outcome of strategic planning should not be analytical insight or smart choices, but a superior resolve to accomplish something.

and

The best way to approach this re-evaluation [of the organization's purpose, mission, vision and values] is to begin with a very small inner circle of top management leaders, who can look each other in the eyes and ask: “Are  these really the decision rules we as leaders are prepared to stick with?”

Maister invites readers to plunge in with any chapter, and after I got the flavor of his approach to strategy, I dived into Chapter 17: The Trouble with Lawyers.  Maister’s preface to this chapter indicates that he originally wrote it to explain “why lawyers and law firms are different from other professions” but that others in consulting and the financial services industry identify with the culture and behavior that Maister ascribes to the legal profession.  Almost any lawyer who reads this chapter will recognize that Maister is indeed speaking to us.  He highlights four problems that prevent “lawyers from effectively functioning in groups:”

*  problems with trust;
*  difficulties with ideology, values, and principles;
*  professional detachment; and
*  unusual approaches to decision making (referring to lawyers’ propensity to attack any idea presented to locate and highlight its weaknesses, with the result that “within a short time, most ideas, no matter who initiates them, will be destroyed, dismissed, or postponed for future examination.”)

Having identified and explained these pecularities, Maister asks why lawyers do so well financially if the profession is riddled with these problems, and his answer is proven by the lockstep approach that firms tend to apply to innovation:

The greatest advantage lawyers have is that they compete only with other lawyers.  If everyone else does things equally poorly, and clients and recruits find little variation between firms, even the most egregious behavior will not lead to a competitive disadvantage.

 Maister suggests that only client pressure is likely to compel firms to begin to act “as firms — delivering seamless service, practice areas that have depth ( and not just a collection of individualistic stars), and true, cross-boundary teamwork.”  Having come to understand some of the problems that have so far prevented that will help firms to adapt as such client pressure is applied.

Other chapters of Strategy and the Fat Smoker have application to lawyers and firms as well.  The book does an excellent job of delivering its subtitled promise of teaching organizations and individuals to do “what’s obvious but not easy.”  It’s readable, practical, and insightful.  The release date is January 2, 2008, which is perfect timing.  Buy it, read it, and learn how to make your resolutions (and those of your organization) come to pass in 2008.�

Citrin’s first lesson is as follows:

Talent and hard work are a good start. . . To achieve greatness requires something more, something subtle.  It demands the acquisition and application common to the most superior performers in sports, business, or any other endeavor: mental toughness and the ability to stay calm and collected at the big moments.

Citrin holds that an individual’s development in the champion, leader, and legacy stages of the Dynamic Path require skills that peak at certain points on that path: natural talent/intelligence, work ethic/dedication, and mental toughness/problem solving peak at the Champion level, for those at the height of their individual achievements.  People leadership, which has developed along the way, peaks at the Leader stage, along with developing moral/spiritual leadership, so that the individual seeks collective achievement for collective results — group excellence.  Moral/spiritual leadership continues to grow until it reaches its culmination in the Legacy phase, in which collective achievement creates enduring results that will have long-lasting impact. 

Examples of those who have attained Legacy status include Bill Bradley, who has achieved numerous sports victories as well as intellectual success as a Rhodes Scholar, completed by the long-lasting accomplishments of his service as Senator.  Citrin also highlights Arnold Palmer (the golfer who has parlayed his individual success into establishing health care complexes, creating the PGA Tour, and developing the Golf Channel), Arthur Ashe (the tennis player who became the first African American man to win the US Open and to take a Grand Slam among numerous other titles, then cofounded the USA National Junior Tennis League and worked to eliminate racism and poverty before his early death from HIV contracted during a blood transfusion), and Lance Armstrong (the cancer survivor and 7-time winner of the Tour de France who now seeks to eradicate cancer).  Citrin provides stories of many other individuals, well-known and less so, that illustrate the path he describes.

I enjoyed reading this book because it separates out what makes a good leader — one for a season — from what allows a good leader to create a legacy — one for an age.  The book is an easy read, and it’s interesting (for this non-sports fan, anyway) to learn a bit more about what some sports figures have accomplished following their sports careers.  The book is an interesting, sometimes slightly jarring, mixture of personal sketches and attempts to teach how the sports lessons can translate to personal lessons.  Citrin inserts his own perspective into the book throughout, which at times read more as a journal than as a teaching book. 

One conclusion that remains with me is that the rise of team sports for children, and especially for girls, is likely to be a significant benefit to rising generations of would-be leaders.  Citrin has made an excellent case for the lessons that sports can convey, and it’s a good reminder that all of those hours of soccer practice may just pay off in later years, though it would overstate the case to say that The Dynamic Path will provide a roadmap for transforming those lessons into business leadership skills.

1.  Simplicity
2.  Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4.  Credibility
5.  Emotions
6.  Stories

Read more about these principles and see illustrations (ranging from urban legends to important consumer health warnings) in an excerpt from the book here.

Made to Stick should certainly be required reading for litigators, but all of us need to make ideas memorable.  And what’s delightful about the concept of stickiness is that it’s an easy and enjoyable read that will pay quick dividends largely because the concepts (once identified) are rather intuitive.

Footnote 1: You might wonder why I’m recommending a book that I’ve started to read but haven’t yet finished.  That’s because I was reading it while on a business trip.  When I was packing for my flight home, I knew I needed to review some papers and so I packed Made to Stick in my checked luggage.  Big mistake.  My luggage was somehow mistagged when I left Richmond (even though I watched the Delta agent tag the bag) and I got the runaround when I tried to track it down in Atlanta.  Very long story short, it’s now been 15 days and there’s no sign of my luggage.  I’d be delighted to bellyache about this further (there’s plenty of grist for that particular mill!) but suffice it to say that I’ll have to pick up another copy before I can finish reading the book.