Abracadabra! What once was is no more. Why are mid-size firms disappearing?

Why are mid-size firms disappearing?

Major shifts in the legal market place, an individualistic (where siloes exist) firm culture where lawyers hoard clients and information, and fewer lawyers retiring are just some of the reasons.

A shift in the market cannot be ignored. Some consumer market segments are disappearing or are already gone. For example, simple legal documents are frequently provided by Internet legal rather than an actual attorney. A great deal of defense work is now done by young lawyers out of law school rather that senior partners. Clients are not willing to pay higher fees for work a new lawyer can and will do for less; business clients are savvier in the digital age. Some smaller companies have gone out of business, merged with a larger company or simply don’t have the cash to expend on legal fees. Firms that fail to offer alternative fees or even budgets will not be in practice for long as client demands grow and change.

Shared basic assumptions are deeply embedded, taken-for-granted behaviors, which are usually unconscious, but constitute the essence of culture. These assumptions are typically so well-integrated in the office dynamic that they are hard to recognize from within. Simply put, culture is the way a law firm does things. A clearly-defined culture lets employees know what is expected of them. It also lets employees know what to expect from the organization. A clearly-defined culture provides valuable clues about how to navigate the culture — and how to achieve success. Most law firms today are hierarchical in their partnership set up: senior partners, junior partners, associates, paralegals, clerks, and other staff. The partnership culture that permeates the legal arena must change.

Strong management will make the tough but smart decisions. While some firms have executive committees comprised of partners with strong business backgrounds, most mid-size firms do not. The traditional “country club” law firm structure does not align with the current market-driven management (post-2008 financial crisis). A practice of law that fails to hire business people and if they do, fails to let them manage the firm but a business of law embraces business processes and client-centric behaviors and attitudes. These failures are reasons mid-size firms are disappearing. 

People who come from the corporate world are often jaw-dropped when they go to work at a law firm. They often find a lack of clear hierarchy, reporting lines and accountability, even among the partner/owners of the firm. This culture is highly disciplined and the structure is vertically integrated — and as such, very difficult to change. This lawyer-centric model tends to organize by functional departments, such as by practice areas like tax, litigation, transactions, labor and employment, rather than using a horizontal structure based on industry, with teams prepared to meet all the various needs of clients within the industry — evidence of a client-centric culture. Here is where one might find a practice leader who favors the interest of his practice area over that of the firm as a whole, and thereby limits their responsiveness to firm business development. Further, since the marketing, business development, and delivery of firm services must overlap, this practice culture cannot realistically compartmentalize these roles and functions into rigidly defined and sequential tasks.

This type of practice culture does not foster innovation, and if new problems arise for which it is ill-prepared, the whole firm suffers. Each firm has a personality of characteristics that can’t be ignored, but can be very difficult to articulate. Generally, however, there is a partnership set-up made of traits common to many law firms. In this arena, decision-making is extremely slow. Some partners are more equal than others, and in many firms almost anyone or any group can stand in the way of action, even if they do not have the power to force approval or move ahead. Lawyers are competitive but risk-averse, task-oriented and results-oriented in their work — but their governance may display serious paralysis when it comes to taking action for change or reining in difficult partners.

Part of the culture problem in most firms is generational — between the older partners, who have gotten along doing things fine the old way, and the younger partners and associates who, feeling they have so much at stake in the competitive marketplace, are not tied to old habits and attitudes. To survive and thrive, many lawyers who are not inherent marketers or salesmen feel they must conform to new standards of thought, behavior, and performance, just to maintain their status, never mind get ahead.

Lastly, partners not retiring as often, is perhaps another reason, as in the post-2008 economic climate, attorneys may not be in a position to retire. Instead they choose to continue working and they maintain their old-style behaviors and attitudes that were once prevalent in a practice of law but are irrelevant in a business of law. Often, they create limited value and profit, yet expect to maintain the same level of compensation.

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Understand the Language of Your Audience

According to Linguist, Deborah Tannen, people have different conversational styles, influenced by the part of the country they grew up in, their ethnic backgrounds and those of their parents, their age, class, and gender. But conversational style is invisible. Unaware that these and other aspects of our backgrounds influence our ways of talking, we think we are simply saying what we mean. Because we don’t realize that others’ styles are different, we are often frustrated in conversations. Rather than seeing the culprit as differing styles, we attribute troubles to others’ intentions (she doesn’t like me), abilities (he’s stupid), or character (she’s rude, he’s inconsiderate), our own failure (what’s wrong with me?), or the failure of a relationship (we just can’t communicate).

Conversational rituals common among men often involve using opposition such as banter, joking, teasing, and playful put-downs, and expending effort to avoid the one-down position in the interaction.

Conversational rituals common among women are often ways of maintaining an appearance of equality, taking into account the effect of the exchange on the other person, and expending effort to downplay the speakers’ authority so they can get the job done without flexing their muscles in an obvious way.

When everyone present is familiar with these conventions, they work well. But when ways of speaking are not recognized as conventions, they are taken literally, with negative results on both sides. Men whose oppositional strategies are interpreted literally may be seen as hostile when they are not, and their efforts to ensure that they avoid appearing one-down may be taken as arrogance. When women use conversational strategies designed to avoid appearing boastful and to take the other person’s feelings into ac-count, they may be seen as less confident and competent than they really are. As a result, both women and men often feel they are not getting sufficient credit for what they have done, are not being listened to, are not getting ahead as fast as they should.

We apply this thinking when training on client service best practices noting client service is the most powerful of all business development strategies. When you understand the language of your audience, you have a better chance of building a meaningful relationship with them. 

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Presentation Tips and Tricks

PRESENTATION SOFTWARE TIPS

There are four main presentation tools: PowerPoint, Keynote (for Mac), Google Slides, and Prezi. PowerPoint is ubiquitous and on PCs and Macs, though I find Keynote (Mac only) easier to use, and with better typography and graphics. Google Slides is web-based and great for working collaboratively. Prezi (in which TED was an early investor) offers an alternative mode in which, instead of a linear succession of slides, you move around a two-dimensional landscape, zooming in and out to focus on what matters to you. Most projectors and screens these days are the dimensions of a modern widescreen television: 16:9, as opposed to the 4:3 ratio of old TVs. Yet most presentation software opens up in 4:3 mode. You want to immediately change the settings to 16:9 (unless you’re speaking at a venue where they might still have only 4:3 projectors). Don’t use the software’s built-in templates of bullets, letters, and dashes. Your presentation will look the same as everyone else’s, and the templates end up being limiting. I recommend you start with a totally blank slide.

If you’re showing a lot of photos, use black as the background—it will disappear and your photos will pop. Most photographs should be shown “full bleed.” That’s not a horror-movie term but an old printing term meaning that the image covers the entire screen. Better to have three full-bleed photos in a row than three images on one slide.

Photos are often still shot at 4:3, so if you wish to show a picture without cropping its top and bottom, put it on a black slide, which will leave unobtrusive black borders on the left and right. Photo resolution: Use pictures with the highest resolution possible to avoid annoying pixilation of the images when projected on large screens. There is no such thing as too high a resolution unless it slows the software down.

FONTS/TYPEFACES

It’s usually best to use one typeface per presentation. Some typefaces are better suited than others. We usually recommend medium-weight sans-serif fonts like Helvetica or Arial. (Medium weight is medium thickness; sans-serif means the type doesn’t have flourishes on the ends, e.g., Times.) Don’t use excessively thin fonts as they are hard to read, especially on a dark background. If in doubt, keep it simple.

Font size

Tiny type causes the audience to struggle to read it. Use 24 points or larger in most cases. Use at most three sizes of your chosen typeface per presentation, and there should be a reason for each size. Large size is for titles/headlines; medium size is for your main ideas; small size is for supporting ideas.

Font background

The background on which your text is displayed can mean the difference between legible and impossible.

If you’re going to place type over a photo, make sure you place it where your audience can read it. If a photo is too busy to put type on directly, add a small black bar at the bottom and put the type on it.

Font color

Here the operative words are simple and contrast. Black on white, a dark color on white, and white or yellow on black all look good because they have great contrast and are easy to read. Use only one color of font per presentation unless you want to show emphasis or surprise. Never use light-color type on a light-color background or dark-color type on a dark-color background—for example, light blue on yellow or red on black just won’t be easy to read.

LEGIBILITY

After you make your font and color choices, look at your presentation on your computer or—way better—on your TV or a projector, and stand back 6 to 12 feet. Can you read everything? Do the photos look clear without pixilation/graininess? If not, readjust.

What Not to Do:

• Bullets belong in The Godfather. Avoid them at all costs.

• Dashes belong at the Olympics, not at the beginning of text.

• Resist underlining and italics—they’re too hard to read.

• Bold typefaces are OK.

• Drop shadows can occasionally be useful to improve legibility, especially for type on top of photos, but use the effect sparingly.

• Don’t use multiple type effects in the same line. It just looks terrible.

EXPLANATIONS AND DIAGRAMS

Use builds—add words and images to a slide through a series of clicks—to focus people’s attention on one idea at a time. Give your audience enough time to absorb each step. Don’t feed too much of the slide at a time or people will get overwhelmed.

PHOTO CREDITS

In the scientific community, it’s especially important to credit each photo on every slide. But it’s better to avoid large type, because those citations will draw the audience’s eye away from your slide. If all the images are from one source, you can say thanks to National Geographic out loud, or you can add one photo credit that says: “Photos courtesy of National Geographic,” and then you don’t have to repeat it on every slide. If you do need to include credits, they should be positioned and styled consistently, in the same place, same font, same size (no more than 10-point ) on every slide. And cut them down from “Photo Credit: Augustin Alvarez, Ames Research Center, NASA, Mountain View, CA” to “Augustin Alvarez, NASA.” Note that some rights holders, such as museums, may resist abbreviating their credits. But it’s worth asking. I usually set credits in white, reversed out of the image and rotated 90 degrees so they sit vertically, up the right side of the slide. Ask your friends: are the credits pulling focus away from the images? If so, they are too prominent.

PICTURES OF YOU AND YOUR TEAM

It’s great to include a photo of you in your working environment: lab, bush, Large Hadron Collider. But resist including more than one unless there is a reason. Ben Saunders told us how he journeyed to the North and South Poles. His image is necessary in most photos to tell that story. There was also a whole team of people who worked tirelessly to make Ben’s expedition possible, but to show photos of them would have taken the audience’s focus away from the main story. While we understand that you want to share the credit, pictures of your team, especially in a yearbook-style compilation of individuals, matter to you but not to your audience. Resist, and if you must have one photo, make it an organic grouping. It’s much better to depict your team in context during a presentation.

VIDEOS

Videos can be amazing tools to demonstrate your work and ideas. However, you should rarely show clips longer than 30 seconds. And in an 18-minute talk, show no more than two to four clips unless your work absolutely depends on it. It’s best if video clips are of your work and you have rights to them (versus a clip from Star Wars); explain something that can’t be explained by still images; and have great production value (shot in high-definition, with good lighting and especially good sound). A badly produced video will have your audience thinking more about its poor quality than about its content. Make sure it’s organic and authentic, not produced by your PR department or with bombastic canned music.

Hint: When you are working, capture video of everything, because you may decide to use it later, even if you don’t know when. TED invests in high-quality video and photographs, and they just get more valuable as the years pass. You can embed a video in your presentation, but remember to check with the A/V team to be sure it’s definitely working before you go on stage.

TRANSITIONS

Many presenters sink in the dreaded quicksand of excessive transitions. Rule of thumb: Avoid nearly all of them. Shimmer, sparkle, confetti, twirl, clothesline, swirl, cube, scale, swap, swoosh, fire explosions, and dropping and bouncing sound like 1970s dance moves, but are all real Keynote transitions. And I never use any of them, except for humor and irony. They are gimmicky and serve to drop you out of your ideas and into the mechanics of your software.

There are two transitions I do like: none (an instant cut, like in film editing) and dissolve. None (or cut) is great when you want an instant response to your clicker, and dissolve looks natural if it’s set to a time interval of less than half a second.

Cut and dissolve even have two subconscious meanings: With cut you’re shifting to a new idea, and with dissolve the two slides are related in some way. That’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s valid. You can use cuts and dissolves in the same presentation. If there is no reason for a transition, don’t use one. In summary, your transition should never call attention to itself.

TRANSPORTING FILES

Send your presentation to your hosts, and bring a USB stick with your complete presentation and your videos separate from your presentation. Also include the fonts used in the presentation. Even if I have sent a presentation in advance to the venue where I’ll be speaking, I always bring it with me too. Important: Before sending over the Internet or copying to USB, put all these files into a folder and compress the folder into a .zip file. That will make sure that Keynote or PowerPoint will gather all the pieces of your presentation in one place. Do label each video clearly, including your name and its order in the presentation. For example, SIOBHAN STEPHENS SLIDE 12: VIDEO: MOTH EMERGES FROM COCOON.

RIGHTS

Make sure you have a legal license to use the photos, videos, music, and any special fonts, or that they are in the Creative Commons or outright free to use. It’s always easiest and best to use your own work. If you use a Whitney Houston song, for example, it could cost thousands of dollars to clear it for use in your live talk and especially online.

TESTING

There are two kinds of testing: human and technical. First, for human testing, I recommend that you test your presentation—especially your slides—on family or friends who are not in your field. Ask them afterward what they understood, what they didn’t, and what further questions they have. Testing is extremely important, especially on very technical or abstruse subjects. Edit according to their feedback and test again. The harder the talk the more you should test.

Equally important is technical testing. I bought a Kensington remote for $35 that plugs into my computer’s USB port so I can click through the talk as I would on stage. Are the slides crisp and bright? Are the transitions quick enough? Are the fonts correct? Are the photos high resolution? Do the videos play OK? Are there any technical glitches of any kind? Running through your talk a lot will help you know if it is reliable.

Always ask what kind of computer will be used to show your presentation, if it can be shown in the same program and with the same fonts you used to create it, and, if your host is using the same software, ask what version they are using. Using your computer is the lowest risk of all. Make sure you use the very latest version of your presentation software because that’s generally what organizers will have, and onsite conversions from one version to another are stressful and sometimes require lots of finessing. Once, I created a presentation in Keynote on a Mac and it was imported into PowerPoint on a PC. It looked like a disaster in rehearsal. I convinced them to get a Mac and Keynote and it worked great.

Never give a presentation unless you have walked through your slides—and especially videos—on the equipment that will actually be used to show them. It’s particularly important to get the sound person to (a) note there is sound in your presentation and (b) check the sound levels of any audio in your presentation, especially if you plan to speak over it. Inaudibility or a startling burst of sound will throw you and the audience off.

The main mistake sound people make is to not turn up the sound of your videos, especially the first one. The video plays silently, and then all of a sudden the sound comes up, too late. If you are thorough in rehearsing sound cues (going over to speak to the sound team personally is a smart idea) then the house is alive with the sound of video.

WORKING WITH DESIGNERS

Most people can learn to make good slides, but if the stakes are high and budget permits, by all means enlist the help of a presentation graphics designer. Notice how I didn’t say just any designer. Someone who focuses on websites or printed materials may not be as fluid with the art and grammar of conveying ideas through slides. Ask for previous work. You can find good designers on Behance.com and other websites.

Four more important points:

1. Even if you have a corporate graphics department to do the work, you should be involved from the beginning. Be proactive. Don’t just review the finished video; make sure you are present and participating.

2. Most designers are great at what they do, but they’re helping you express yourself, so it just makes sense to be involved. If you are uncomfortable with someone else’s slide recommendations, trust your instincts. It’s you up there on stage, after all.

3. We work with a lot of designers remotely, using Skype, email, and Dropbox, and it works well. There is no reason your designers have to be nearby. Help doesn’t need to be expensive.

4. For presentation graphics, I like to work with small design shops of just one to about fifteen people because I get to work more with the principals. There is also a steady supply of recent art and design school graduates from places like RISD, Art Center College of Design, Pratt, the Art Institute, Cooper Union, and many more colleges around the world.

FINALLY, VERSION CONTROL

Use version control religiously, and a tool like Dropbox to store all your drafts as well as your fonts, photos, videos, and sound.

It’s always a good idea to name files with the version number, your name, the venue, and later the TED session if you know it. For example, like this: v4trjwTomRiellyPrezTED2016Session11. The initials (“trjw”) tell who worked on it last, e.g., Tom Ryan and Janet Walters.

Hint: Put the version number and last person’s initials at the beginning of the file name, otherwise you might not be able to tell easily which is which. Every time you pass it to or fro, save a new version with a new number, and before you share the Dropbox link with the production team at an event, make a folder inside Dropbox for the old versions and keep the latest version separate. Mark the final version “FINAL” at the beginning or end of the filename. Your designer will love you if you or a team member assemble as many of the assets (photos, videos, sounds) as possible in a folder before he starts designing. Also, to help the designer, sometimes I’ll open a new Keynote file and make dummy slides with instructions, for example: This slide will show one of the species we’re trying to conserve. This slide will show the dry lakebed; etc. Do that for as many slides as you can, arrange them, and send the file to the designer. This is the equivalent of a filmmaker’s Post-it Notes on the wall—they help her organize her ideas. Finally, as in all things with graphics, less is more.

Anderson, Chris. TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

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You Can't Spell TRUTH Without RUTH

We have Ruth Bader Ginsberg to thank for so much, especially if we support women's rights and equal pay.

A LOOK BACK:

President Barack Obama commemorated the 7th anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — with the announcement of even more steps to reduce the pay gap between men and women.

It was a fitting tribute to the first measure Obama signed into law as president, which gave employees more time to sue their employers and claim discrimination — an achievement that may not have been possible without Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Ledbetter, an area manager at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company in Alabama, claimed discrimination when she sued after discovering she was being paid less than men in the same position. But the Supreme Court ruled against Ledbetter in 2007, saying that she had to bring the suit within 180 days of when she first started getting paid less, as Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act requires.

President Barack Obama signs the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, a measure that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had pushed for. That’s where Ginsburg came in. In a sharply worded dissent, she argued the majority had overlooked the way pay discrimination works.

“The Court’s insistence on immediate contest overlooks common characteristics of pay discrimination,” she wrote. “Pay disparities often occur, as they did in Ledbetter’s case, in small increments; cause to suspect that discrimination is at work develops only over time. Comparative pay information, moreover, is often hidden from the employee’s view.” Ginsburg added that employees might be hesitant to claim pay discrimination, especially if they hold a role more commonly occupied by another gender, because they don’t want to cause a stir.

She called directly on Congress to amend Title VII and took the unusual step of reading her dissent out loud from the bench in an effort to draw attention to the issue. As The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin noted in a 2013 profile of Ginsburg, she also rewrote the dissent she read from the bench in language more accessible to the general public. The dramatics, Toobin wrote, gave the relatively unnoticed case national attention.

In 2009, Congress did amend the law, which now resets the clock for employees to sue after each individual paycheck.

"RBG" - see it on CNN on September 3, 2018.

TANNEN TALK:

"There are those who claim that what’s really important is economic issues like the salary gap—equal pay for equal work. Why do women still make less than men, on the average, and why, if efforts are made to equalize salaries in a given setting, is it only a few years before the women’s pay once again falls behind?

This too can be a matter of ways of speaking, since anything you get depends on talking. Marjorie and Lawrence Nadler suspected that getting raises, promotions, and other advantages depends on people’s ability to negotiate, and that women might be at a disadvantage in this regard.

They tested this by asking 174 students to role-play negotiations for salary, and sure enough, they found that the women in their study ended up with lower raises than men.

The researchers turned up a slew of other fascinating results too: On the average, male students role-playing supervisors gave lower raises than females in the same role, even though the males started out by offering more than the females. In other words, the women playing supervisors raised their offers much more as a result of negotiation.

Even more interesting, and more worrisome, male students playing supervisors ended up giving higher raises to male student-subordinates, though this may be related to the fact that male student-subordinates made higher initial demands than females did. In the end, the lowest raises were negotiated by female students playing subordinates in negotiation with males as bosses.

This does not mean that differences in ways of speaking are the only reason for the salary gap. Nadler and Nadler found not only that men in their role-plays ended up with higher raises than women as the outcome of negotiation, but that men were offered higher raises to start with, before negotiation. Most distressing, the lowest initial offers were made by female students playing supervisors negotiating with females as subordinates. It could be that the women started with low offers to women because they knew they would raise the offers as a result of negotiation. In the end, the researchers found that higher final offers were made when the negotiators were of the same sex."

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"Susie" No More

When I worked at State Street Bank in Boston, I was still a young "southern girl" one might say. Though someone else might take offense to this, I did not. Not too long into my time there, a friend in the business volunteered to "reinvent" me. I was surprised at the suggestion and curious about the notion. I said, "Sure, I'm game." With that, she calmly proceeded to list five things that needed change. As I sat listening intently, wide-eyed and jaw-dropped, I realized, "She is trying to help me fit in. I need to be more like the power structure to succeed here." 

As you might imagine, the power structure was created and sustained by rich, white men. I knew that there was money to be made in financial services so I did as I was told and "reinvented myself." Here are the top five lessons she imparted:

Lesson #1: I was "Susie" no more. I was born "Susan" but everyone called me "Susie" from the earliest days of my memory. Looks like I had to go by "Susan" to be taken seriously in Financial Services.

Lesson #2: No more "big hair." As a proud "Southern Belle," I had the "big hair" and wore it well, like the Leo woman I am. Roar!

Big hair -- and long red nails.

Lesson #3: No more bright colors. Yep, she told me to march myself over to Talbots and invest in pantsuits of brown, navy, black and gray. No questions, just do it. The time for red skirts was over.

Lesson #4: No more, "Please and thank you, sir. If you don't mind could you, would you, ma'am?" Nope. It was time to change from sheepish passive voice to strong but non-emotive active voice. Some of my friends from the South might say I was simply being polite but in business, there are other forms of politeness. If you don't want to be seen as Julie, the cruise director from the Love Boat,  drop the girly charms. I had to change the content of my message.

Lesson #5: No more excited high pitch in my delivery. Even if changing the content of my message, I still delivered it in such a way as to be confused with Minnie Mouse, I needed to lower my voice an octave, at least. I had to change not only the content but also the delivery of my message.

As you see, I was trying my level best and then some, to fit into the white man's corporate world. Financial Services is as corporate as it gets too -- still, to this day. There have been changes made and great strides in recent history. If memory serves me correctly, banking has more female General Counsels and CXOs than any other industry. Bravo for progress...but at what price?

Glass Ceiling

Two surveys taken in the 1990s found women in only 5% to 6.5% of executive-level positions in the largest US corporations. Women fail to promote their achievements, and their supervisors often don’t note their performance.

Women tend to favor using unobtrusive, proactive methods for preventing obstacles, but men sometimes favor the “white knight” method that allows problems to erupt and gives them an opportunity to save the day spectacularly. Studies from the 1990s show that, at that time, most women adapted their behavior to mimic the way men act.

Linguist professor and best-selling author, Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., uses case histories to demonstrate various social tendencies and trends. For instance, she says female professionals often speak tentatively to soften any emotional blow in the message they’re delivering. Men often see this way of speaking as a sign of insecurity or incompetence.

Dr. Tannen also found that the narrow limits of a professional man’s wardrobe – dark suits, pale shirts – allow him a degree of freedom because uniformity resists cultural labeling or “marking.” The multiple choices a professional woman faces in her clothing, hairstyle, and makeup leave her more vulnerable to being categorized. In this way, cultural expectations label a woman’s fashion style. 

It seems for all the success women have enjoyed in climbing that corporate ladder and shattering the glass ceiling, they have done so by becoming the men they fought so hard against in order to succeed.

The percentage of women running companies in the Fortune 500 is still solidly in the single digits, but the proportion is slowly growing, and just reached an all-time high.

Fortune Magazine released its 2017 Fortune 500 list, which ranks major U.S. companies by their fiscal 2016 revenues, and still, only 32 of the companies, or 6.4 percent, were run by female CEOs. The magazine said that number was the highest proportion yet seen in the 63-year history of the list. Last year, it had just 21 women CEOs on the list and for the 2014 fiscal year, there were 24.

Females in authority often conform to a toned-down style that erodes the respect they receive, because asserting themselves invites disapproval. Female conversational rituals emphasize equality and emotional support, risking that a male who can’t read his female colleague’s signals may assume her to be incompetent, unfit for promotion or domineering. And without a doubt, a  businesswoman who takes a role formerly held by a man faces challenges from male subordinates.

Tannen explains that ambiguous behaviors by both genders can hold double meanings that comment on both status and connection:

• A friend who grabs the check may be flaunting his or her wealth and simultaneously showing generosity.

• Using first names may exude amiability but suggests a lack of respect.

• Giving compliments implies holding a superior status that enables one to make judgments.

• Making others wait is a power play, often male.

Tannen exposes the communication minefield of meetings. Cultural boundaries that hamper a woman’s job performance also restrict her in business gatherings. Many women pepper their suggestions with humble disclaimers. Speaking at a low volume, they speed through their ideas to save others’ valuable time. If interrupted, they wait to continue. If met with groundless opposition, they compromise or retreat altogether.

Gender-based styles continue to hold women back today. Daily headlines demonstrate the truth of Tannen’s observations about how and why an ambitious commanding woman risks ostracism from peers of both genders. The paradigm of a powerful man is one who subdues a woman.

Soaring higher

Cultural expectations about gender can fuel ambiguous behaviors including sexual harassment. The paradigm of a powerful man is one who subdues a woman. In the 1990s, Tannen found that this may take the form of sexual taunts and mock threats of sexual violence that denigrate women’s status. Whether that remains as true today in a world of sexual harassment laws and lawsuits, of more empowered women, one does not know but one can hope not. Yet, sexual harassment today, compared with the 1980s and ’90s, appears more outrageous in light of modern awareness efforts. Only a few of the most blatant offenders seem to face consequences.

There are undercurrents swirling through offices and professional interactions and a wide range of issues involving cultural and gender diversity. Willingness to cooperate with people who have diverse conversational styles can allow “more truly powerful ideas to emerge.”

Every professional, male or female, needs to appreciate navigating the spoken and unspoken social cues that can lead to success or sabotage it. Some may think it is unfortunate that we must abide by such cultural norms and I might agree. Many millennials are throwing the rule book out and embracing authentic selves in the workforce. I have to admit, I find that a quite refreshing paradigm shift. I do believe Financial Services and Legal are two industries that may be slow to adopt any "just be me" in the workplace. We shall see.

I might add that State Street of today leads the world in supporting women and naming women into positions of real power and influence where change can be made. Their "Women In Finance" movement celebrates strong women in all corners of the financial services industry who are using their talent and power to drive the industry forward and set an example for future women. Read more here: https://listen.statestreet.com/detail/2018/women-leaders.html

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Investigate to Learn More of What GCs Really Want

For You to Understand Their Issues: “Come prepared. Find out as much as you can about my issues before you even walk in my door. However, don't pretend like you know exactly what my issues are. How can you? You don't even know me. If you ask some intelligent questions and add value, I'll open up, and we'll have a meaningful conversation -- and I won't see you as a waste of my time.”

Do your research and arrive at the prospect's office knowing the broad outlines of their strategy, the major initiatives they have going on, and the key trends and challenges they are facing in their industry. Then, use that information to ask intelligent questions that slowly draw the other person out. Ask questions that reveal what they are most concerned about— what their agenda of three to five critical priorities, goals, or needs is. It's often better to ask indirect questions that get the client talking about their issues than blunt, generic ones like “What are your priorities?” In a meeting with a prospective client, you are trying to build trust and identify an important issue you can help them address. The challenge is to get them to open up about their true priorities and frustrations. You do this by adding value in the conversation and through thoughtful, informed questioning.

Questions to Help You Understand a Client's Issues (the more tailored these are to your specific client and their industry or job function, the more effective)

1. What are your most significant opportunities for growth over the next several years?

2. I'm familiar with the broad outlines of your strategy… my question is, how are some of these initiatives, like becoming more market-focused and reducing your cost infrastructure, affecting your own particular area?

3. How will you and your area be evaluated at the end of the year? What are the major goals you're being asked to accomplish by your leadership?

4. What exactly do you mean when you say…(“ risk-averse,” "problematic," “dysfunctional,” “challenging,” etc.)? 

5. What would your best customers say are the main reasons they do business with you?

6. Why do your customers leave?

7. How have your customers' expectations changed over the last five years?

8. What's the driving force behind this particular initiative (e.g., what is behind the drive to reduce costs, design a new organization, etc.? or, Why did you decide to do that?)?

9. What would “better” (risk management, cost controls, organizational effectiveness, etc.) look like?

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