Problems with authority and responsibility - are you guilty?

I have written a fair bit on this blog over time about problems with delegation. A key problem lies in the the grant of responsibility without real authority. This often links to a related problem: constant changes and interventions that further undermine the authority of the person meant to be doing the job.

These problems are often linked to two of the management styles I have discussed: the micro-manager and the over-enthusiastic manager.

You can check whether or not you belong to either class. Simply take a small handful of delegated jobs and monitor your own involvement. Actually write down what you do.

The observer always affects the observed. The fact that you are monitoring your own behaviour will affect that behaviour and for the better. However, you can tell what type you are by your gut reactions.

Does the act of standing back make you uncomfortable? Do you find that you have to discipline yourself not to give staff new assignments before the previous ones are completed? Do you, in fact, have a tendency to delegate and then forget, fail to follow up? Do you give one set of instructions and then actually countermand them?

You cannot change your personality, but can change the way you manage your personality. All these things give you clues that you can use to improve your own perfomance.
     

Decline of the professions in Australia

Over on my personal blog I have been reviewing Professor Don Aitkin's What was it all for? The Reshaping of Australia. (Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2005). The first post is here, the second will come up tomorrow.

The book itself examines social change in Australia over the last fifty years in part through a prism set by the Armidale High School leaving certificate class of 1953. 

I don't think that anyone of us would not accept that the professions have declined in status and not just in Australia over the period covered by Don.  I mention this because he has some interesting material on what he perceives to be the causes of the decline in the professions in Australia.

The first thing he points to is the sheer increase in the scale of the professions. They grew and grew. Further, the growth was associated with the emergence of mini-professions, constant subdivision into smaller areas of knowledge, each with their own societies, journals and specialist knowledge.

As the numbers in the professions increased, as the number of professions also increased, so the general respect in which professionals were held declined.

The growth in the professions was linked not just to the growth of knowledge, but also to a broader process, the "professionalisation" of work. Here I want to quote Don:

Name and fame went with specialised knowledge, and the generalist became seen as someone who knew very little.

The problem is that this professionalisation process and the consequent rejection of the value of broader knowledge has aided the process of locking the professions into narrower silos that have, of themselves, reduced the effectiveness and power of the professions.

Here we get into somewhat slippery territory.

Central to the concept of a "profession" is the idea of professional independence. Without this, a profession becomes simply another occupation. I accept that the concept of independence is a difficult one. In practice, no profession has ever been completely independent, yet the ideal is still central to the professional ethics that lie at the heart of any real profession.

The killer today, as Professor Aitkin notes, is the rise of the concept of "compliance", a concept that has come to replace the old idea of professional independence,

In simple English, to comply means to obey. That is exactly the way the term is now used.

When people speak of compliance, they mean that the profession in question must comply with rules. Of course professions have always had rules, more precisely sets of ethics. However, now we are talking about externally, especially government imposed, rules.

One can mount a case for Government regulation. However, the modern use of compliance is in fact far broader than simple regulation. In a practical sense, it increasingly substitutes rules for ethics and professional standards.

To my mind, this lies at the heart of the decline of professions as professions.       

Software patents and IP risk management

Interesting short post from Sydney lawyer Noric Dilanchian on the rising use of patents in software protection and the consequent need for software developers to do patent checks. Worth reading.

As a broader comment, Noric's overall web site including the blog remains one of the best if not the best specialist law firm web sites.   

Leader vs manager – reflections on Hitler as this blog turns three

I have been reading Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire: Nazi rule in occupied Europe (Penguin Books, London 2009). It is quite a gripping if also depressing book.

Mazower focuses on the way Nazi Germany administered the large European empire it acquired so quickly and then lost. There is no doubt that Hitler was a great leader. He was able first to place his stamp on a nation and then lead that nation into a huge and initially successful war. He failed, something for which we can all be thankful, because he was such a bad manager.

I do not think that Hitler would have claimed to be a manager. In fact, he would have dismissed the concept. He was simply the leader. Management was the responsibility of others.

The problem is that Hitler’s own leadership approach made effective management impossible.

The Germans were very good at managing particular things, Adolf Eichman and the death camps are an example, yet the overall Nazi empire was run in an increasingly ramshackle fashion. Even those things that were effective had unforseen side effects.

Hitler’s difficulty, although he did not see things in these terms, is that he was the leader. Power was increasingly centralised in his hands. The German system dissolved into a series of satrapies each competing for the leader’s attention.

Reading the detail in Mazower left me with the very strong feeling that Nazi Germany could easily have won the Second World War or, at least, worked to a peace that preserved their core gains. The leadership that drew them into the war and gave them initial gains condemned them in the end.

Leadership versus management, that’s the rub.

When I started this blog all that time ago in July 2006, I called it managing, not leading, the professional services firm. I used the word managing deliberately, because it reflected my view that management in professional services was not very good.

In my first post on 2 July 2006 I said:

This blog has been created to encourage debate about and to provide information relevant too the management of all professional services firms.

With time, I hope that it will develop into a valuable resource.

I am not sure that I have achieved the second. However, I remain convinced that improved management in professional services is critical.

Problems with English in drafting

Recently I was preparing a funding agreement. Essentially a scissors and paste of previous documents to provide a base that could then be supplied to the lawyers for review.

In doing so, I found a major problem with language and in particular the difference between English usage in the US and the rest of the English speaking world. I found that I had to go through on a line by line basis to ensure consistency.

I mention this because in a A Licence to Spell the LexPublica blog had an interesting post on the same topic from a Canadian perspective.    

New statistics on Australia's legal services' sector

Short note to say that the Australian Bureau of Statistics released a new publication, Legal Services Australia 2007-2008.  It has been quite some time since we have had statistics on legal services, and unfortunately the new release is not directly comparable with the previous one. Still, there is some interesting data.

Common problems with performance indicators - complexity and control

A little while since I posted. Life has just been too busy!

During the week I had cause to look at some performance indicators. Several pages of them in table form. My heart sank because they really breached two key rules.

The first rule is simplicity. The more things you try to measure, the more complicated the indicators become, the less effective they are likely to be.

The second rule is control. If people are to be assessed using indicators, then there needs to be a link between the indicators and those elements of performance that people can control on an individual basis. With these indicators, no individual or even individual teams could guarantee results.

Sigh. I wonder how we can get the message across in an effective way. Certainly I am not very effective.

Australia's dominant role in Asia's legal services market

At drinks one evening in Shanghai, I was struck by the Australian legal presence in China. The following table illustrates in a fairly dramatic way just how big the Australian legal sector is in Asian terms.

Table: Asia's Top Fifty Law Firms by Country of Origin

Country	Top Ten	Top Fifty
Australia	7	16
China	2	7
UK	-	6
US	1	5
Japan	-	4
Korea	-	4
India	-	3
Singapore	-	3
New Zealand	-	2
Hong Kong	-	1

Source: The ALB 50. Joint country firms allocated to main country.

The Australian dominance in both the top ten and top fifty is quite striking. Equally striking is the dominance of common law countries.

Looking forward, it will be interesting to see how Chinese and Indian firms perform. China is already number two.

The view over drinks in Shanghai was that China was using administrative action to tighten up on the grant of required visas to expatriate professionals.

From an Australian perspective, access to the Chinese market for legal services is a key issue in the current negotiations on a China-Australia free trade agreement.

Managing the professional services firm - what people want to know 4

Continuing my irregular series on what draws people to this blog, the most popular posts among my last 100 visitors have been:

• Australian law firms retrench. This short post came first by a very considerable margin.
• Designing a simple performance appraisal system - sample policy statement came next. This post has been consistently popular.
• Law, Life Style and Legal Salaries in Australia came in third with a gap.

Then came five posts:

• People Management in Professional Services - Effective Delegation
• A Scottish doctor's reservations about evidence based medicine - measurable vs the immeasurable
• Problems with Performance Pay
• Common Management Problems - dealing with poor performers
• Managing the professional services firm: a pause for reflection

In all, a fairly mixed lot!

Managing the professional services firm - end month reflections November 2008

So we come to the end of another month and a rocky month it's been in some ways.

Just to take our mind of current troubles, this poster is from an exhibition by Australia's National Library, Follow the Sun - Australian Travel Posters  1930s to 1950s.

The scene is quite iconic of Australia then (c1930s) and now.

I continue to wonder whether I should merge this blog with Management Perspectives simply because two professional blogs are difficult to maintain.

I have decided not to for the present. To my mind, the two blogs are complimentary.

Management Perspectives provides a vehicle for my writing on economics and broader managements issues extending beyond this blog's focus.

I am better of maintaining both for the present, cross-referencing material as appropriate.