What do you think of when you hear the words “high-performing culture” in the legal profession?

• Long working hours?
• Pressure to meet billable-hour targets?
• Putting the needs of clients and the firm first, perhaps at the expense of your own family, or work-life balance?

Those are some of the sentiments reported in high-profile media stories about poor workplace culture, and reflected in responses to the 2022 Solicitors’ Regulation Authority (SRA) Thematic Review of Workplace Culture. That showed 25% of people felt their firm didn’t have a positive workplace culture.

The SRA’s review set clear expectations that, in creating and maintaining “the right culture and environment for the delivery of competent and ethical legal services to clients”, legal firms should be “taking steps to run businesses in a way that supports wellbeing by minimising the risk of working practices and workplace behaviours leading to poor mental health.”

In a previous article, I cited research evidence showing the harmful physical and mental health consequences for people targeted by workplace incivility, bullying and harassment.

I touched on practical steps that targets and witnesses of unacceptable behaviour can take, along with the responsibilities facing leaders in law firms to ensure they have best-practice complaint management, backed up by support services for everyone involved.

Let’s look at that in more depth...

The full article continues to discuss:

• How a positive, respectful culture is a pre-requisite for high-performance
• The role of positive leadership in underpinning a respectful culture
• Qualities of high-performing teams
• A preventive, supportive and restorative approach to workplace harm
• How trust depends on good practice investigations and complaint management
  

Subscribe now

Sign up as a Price Perrott subscriber to read the rest of this article in the subscribers' only insights area.

As a subscriber, you'll also gain access to other exclusive content, subscriber updates and newsletters.

Originally appeared in...

The original article was written for the Institute of Legal Finance and Management, and first published in the October/November 2024 issue of their in-house publication, Legal Abacus.

It’s a provocative question, I know. If you’re not a bully, are you being bullied? Or have you seen someone else being bullied and wondered if - or when - you should say something, and to whom?

That these questions even need to be discussed in any modern workplace staffed by grown-ups is both an unfortunate reflection of human behaviour and a staggering failure of leadership and professional standards.

It’s perhaps more surprising that bullying is rife in legal services - a sector in which well-educated and highly qualified professionals have ethical obligations, oversight from regulators and (one would have hoped) a greater awareness than most of the implications of breaching employment or health and safety laws.

Yet the legal sector is not immune from the workplace bully, and it’s a topic that needs to be talked about in the open. Like other sensitive topics, from mental health to domestic violence, it’s an uncomfortable subject many people prefer to avoid.

It also something that many people (wrongly) think doesn’t really apply to them. “It’s something for HR to deal with, and I’ve never experienced or seen it myself,” you can imagine them saying.

You might even be thinking, “It could never happen to me, I”m not the sort of person who’ll allow themselves to be bullied.”

But if your workplace has a poor culture, it may just be a matter of time before you experience or witness bullying. Workplace bullying can happen to anyone, and it’s a consequence of a poor workplace culture.

The full article continues to discuss:

• Research showing bullying is a problem for the legal sector
• What is workplace bullying and why must we tackle it?
• What to do if you witness others being bullied
  

Subscribe now

Sign up as a Price Perrott subscriber to read the rest of this article in the subscribers' only insights area.

As a subscriber, you'll also gain access to other exclusive content, subscriber updates and newsletters.

Originally appeared in...

The original article was written for the Institute of Legal Finance and Management, and first published in the June/July 2024 issue of their in-house publication, Legal Abacus.

Managing performance is an essential skill for leaders to develop, if they want to get the best from their teams.

A performance management process should drive success, but inappropriately used, it can become a vehicle for workplace bullying.

Rachel Kline interviewed Dr. Jason Price for his expert insights into this topic. The full interview was originally published in Authority Magazine.

You'll find the key highlights in this post.

Watch the five tips video

Five tips summary

1. Get a 360 degree view of feeback - from above, below, inside and outside
2. Ensure fairness and transparency
3. Evaluate with objectivity and impartiality
4. Improvement focused, tailored to the individual
5. Open to continuous improvement

Let's look at why these matter, and explore each of these five tips.

Why is performance management so tricky to get right?

Because you’re dealing with people, and they’re human beings — not “human resources”.

Everyone has their own life experience, their own values and differing personal goals and objectives. Performance management has to balance the needs of an organisation, its culture and values, with something that supports each individual in their own personal and professional path.

Organisations won’t succeed without people being motivated in their personal goals and supported where they are struggling.

Where do organisations go wrong?

Research studies of bullying incidents clearly show that use of performance management is a tactic which bullies (supported by organisation HR departments) adopt to silence and remove their targets.

More worryingly, the psychological effects of stress caused by bullying are shown to lead to cognitive impairments that cause people to underperform.

That’s not right, so it’s vital that an organisation’s performance management process is transparent, reasonable and focused on positive improvement using clearly defined, realistic objectives. Fairness in representation and taking people’s circumstances into account during the process mitigates against bullies abusing the performance process.

On the other side of the coin, there are, of course, examples where people who are justifiably being taken through a performance improvement process may claim this is bullying.

In many jurisdictions, guidance on bullying clearly states that reasonable and valid performance management is not considered bullying.

But the key words here are “reasonable and valid.”

Managers and organisations must ensure their performance management process is fair, balanced, transparent and impartial.

This helps them prevent vexatious bullying complaints by people who are trying to avoid accountability and valid performance management.

Tip one: 360 degree feedback

• your customers (internal or external)
• your peers
• and (most importantly for leaders), people who report to you.

You can combine this feedback with a self-analysis of your own performance. This gives you a real opportunity to identify your strengths and development areas, and set some challenging and realistic goals for your future development.

It goes a long way to supporting the fairness, transparency and objectivity required of an effective performance management process.

Tip two: Fairness and transparency

For people to have confidence in a performance management system, they have to believe it is fairly applied — to them, and across the whole of your organisation.

People need to know what method is used for measuring performance, how it works, and that it’s been properly calibrated.

Fairness applies to both the organisation and to the individual. The organisation has to be able to manage employee performance, so it can achieve its business objectives. Individuals are looking to their employer for support in their career growth and skills development.

Now let’s consider the performance improvement situation.

This is an area where it’s absolutely vital to have fairness and transparency and it’s really important in cases involving workplace bullying and harassment.

Performance improvement cannot, ethically, be used as a punitive mechanism to “manage people out” without first giving them clear, realistic improvement goals that they have a genuine chance of meeting by improving or developing their skills.

Research has identified patterns of behaviour, where perpetrators of bullying use their management position — supported by HR departments — to target and remove people who’ve made complaints against them, by using the performance improvement process against them.

Tip three: Objectivity and impartiality

You can’t evaluate performance if you’re starting from a position of bias and pre-conception.

The Dunning-Kruger effect (in which an individual may over-estimate their abilities in an area as a result of their limited competence or knowledge) is something both evaluators and recipients of performance management need to take into account.

People may self-assess their performance as better than actual — either in an attempt to ‘present a good picture’, through optimism bias, or just a desire to ensure their evaluation (and associated remuneration) is advantageous.

In cases of workplace bullying and harassment, many people find themselves in the awful position of being performance reviewed by a manager who’s been bullying them.

That kind of bias leads to unfair results, and it has implications for psychological safety, and people’s physical and mental health.

Tip four: Focused on improvement

A performance management process should drive success. An organisation can only achieve its objectives when the people working within it are achieving their personal results.

As individuals, we all have our own aspirations and goals. We bring our own experiences, culture and desires to our jobs.

Some people might want to climb the career ladder, others may just want to do a great job and go home to their family. Let’s be honest, some people are there because they have to be — and work is just a means to an end.

A performance management process should ensure people’s individual development goals are supported — and link their contribution to the organisation’s outcomes.

Tip five: Open to continuous improvement

It requires immediate action.

How do you measure and improve a performance management process?

People won’t be keen to provide open and honest feedback if the corporate owners of a poor performance management process are conducting the survey!

References and links

• Credit: Image by Waewkidja on Freepik