If you are a managing partner, consider this question: What would your firm be like if 20 percent more of your partners were active rainmakers? The answers I hear run the gamut of responses: the firm's lawyers could attract better clients, attract new hires more quickly, think about retirement, play more golf, have more time to manage and change the firm.

Underlying all responses, however, is clearly a sense of disbelief. In most firms, if 20 percent of the attorneys are active business builders, you approach the undocumented, but widely experienced, national average. Doubling that number would significantly change the financial framework of a firm and open many doors.

The adoption of coaching skills will efficiently help a firm capture that doubling -- not because coaching transforms ordinary folk into superheroes, but because rainmaking results can be produced from doing a single skill well. Choose one: speak, write or network.

Two factors have prevailed against just such results: a booming market and a general disinterest in importing proven management skills from the business world. If timing isn't everything, it is something; now is a propitious time to do even better financially and to anticipate the next economic cycle, whatever shape it may take.

Specifically, while business is booming and firms compete to add new associates and laterals, executive committees should give serious thought to improving the rainmaking abilities of the next generation of management leaders. The reasons are many.

First, there's the future of the firm to consider, and then there is the issue of industry restructuring. Small- to mid-sized firms must quickly establish a protectable market niche in the face of industry restructuring, such as mergers or the possibility of multidisciplinary practices. Large firms must contend with this structural shift, too, but the stakes are higher, the competition for talent is costlier and being big is not, per se, a valuable market attribute, particularly as smaller firms cement viable and attractive market positions.

Corporate America has used coaching to speed skill acquisition in all operational areas for the past five to 10 years with great success. It works better than mentoring, captioned by "watch what I do, now do it," and training, which could be characterized as "this is a description of what to do, now do it." They fail to produce sustainable results because they are passive, vicarious models. Not to draw too fine a point, but mentoring and training are a bit like watching neurosurgery on TV, and expecting to get neurosurgeons as a result.

Coaching, on the other hand, works because it is performance-based
(demonstrating the skill is at its center), is a continuous process and is very time efficient. After a short coaching intervention, the learner goes out to try the skill, then reports back at the next intervention. There are some factors to consider, however.

Choose Coaches And Learners Wisely

As a managing partner, you may not have time to be a coach, but your rainmaking peers or an outsider may. Coaching does not take big chunks of time; it is done in small increments over a long period, like a year. Nor does a potential coach have to be trained. Rather, a good coach is someone who is a solid rainmaker, has the skill he or she will be coaching, has the ability to objectify and explain his or her skills and is willing to take on a learner. Doesn't describe anyone you know? Go to an outsider.

In choosing learners, remember that not everyone deserves to be coached -- this is not Little League. Potential learners should have two attributes: (1) they should have a high ego drive, which is predictive of the rainmaking success, and is usually exemplified by a willingness to persuade, even for the sport of it; and (2) they must be willing to receive positive and negative advice. The heart of the coaching process necessarily implies the give and take of critical advice, good and bad. If a learner has exhibited an inability to absorb such advice and bounce back, he or she is not a good candidate.

When we pay for coaching, for tennis or golf lessons say, this honest give and take is expected. For example, when I was studying for my tennis pro certification, my coach would dismiss learners from the court if they showed up unprepared: "You won't get your money's worth if you haven't prepared."

While the process was unnerving the first time, I never showed up unprepared, I got great results in my own game and my first coaching assignment resulted in a perfect season for my team. Similarly, when I studied trial advocacy with the late Abner Sisson in law school, he would make a point (sometimes a very long point) of curing me of small, but important, missteps. The coaching process is not mean-spirited, but is at best honest.

Reasonable Goals, Small Steps

No one learns in large steps, but in small sequential steps aimed at achieving a particular goal. Characterizing the goal of a coaching contract as"learning to be a rainmaker" won't work because it's overly broad. But learning to network, make speeches, cross-sell or publish are appropriately narrow goals that can be achieved through coaching. As long as this objective correlates with marketing success (speaking, writing, or networking in all their variations), attaining at least one will produce significant results for your firm.

Once the coach and the learner have set an appropriate goal, the sequential steps toward achieving the goal must be laid out by the coach (the structure and sequence of learning is an expert task) and put in writing by the learner so that the working relationship has a life of its own.

The substance of the first coaching session is how to do step one. The coach supplies the structure and some substantive advice. The learners are asked to accomplish step one within a time frame with the caveat that if they meet insurmountable difficulty, they can check back with the coach for advice. When the first task is mastered by demonstration, the second task is coached and so on. If the learner fails more than twice, or within the expected time, cause, not blame, needs to be inspected and the coaching process adjusted. Coaching sessions work better if done regularly. They can be in person or by telephone or e-mail as long as the live sessions are interspersed; people solve problems faster and discuss a greater range of emotions in person, such as discomfort at a first attempt or dismay at a failure. When a task or goal is achieved, public approbation is in order.

Learner Becomes Coach

During their training, doctors learn by observing, doing and then teaching the next pupil. This continuity of skill attainment works as well in the law firm as it does in the emergency room. Being realistic, one of the impediments is that the skilled person (the potential coach) will take a proprietary view of his or her own success. Faced with some unwilling coaches, it is important for a managing partner to remind colleagues that coaching is about basic skills, not about the particular magic that one can only acquire on one's own by dint of insight or luck and repetitive experiences. Alternatively, a neutral but skilled third party may be appropriate.

If you are considering a coaching program in your firm, there are lots of places to look before you make a decision. If your firm's clients are businesses, ask your contacts about how (or if) they are using coaching. If your clients are individuals, they probably also work, so don't dismiss their insights, and you may also want to add in the feedback of others you may meet at business associations and networks as well as the mountain of information on the Web. Good luck and good coaching.

© Copyright 2002, The Success Group

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