Putting the “Team”   into the Practice Team Structure

The Teaming Challenge: Leveraging Your Firm's Services

Really successful law firms provide greater value to their clients by bringing together a team of attorneys representing a variety of services from the relevant legal disciplines needed to meet each client’s needs. Under this model, the element of teaming is critical to a firm’s success. However, the overall incentives and culture of the legal industry in general don’t necessarily support this approach to providing legal services. Thus, the opportunity to expand the firm’s client base is often not fully leveraged.

Wolf Management Consultants can help address the need for enhanced teaming capabilities within your firm—both in terms of leading a practice team, and encouraging and being part of a team.

Leading Practice Teams: Ensuring the Success of Your Team

WMC offers a leading-edge learning opportunity designed to sharpen the practice team leadership skills within the firm-- Leading Practice Teams: Ensuring the Success of Your Team. This unique program explores the essence of the team dynamics knowledge and skills needed to lead a team to success. This program is made up of a series of four workshops (ranging from 1 - 1.5 hours each) which can be delivered consecutively, creating a full 1-day program, or separately, during the lunch hour, for example.

• Understanding Team Dynamics
  - Team, Group of Individuals, Group – What Makes the Difference?
  - Leading Your Team Through the Stages of Group Development
  
  
• Leadership Style: What’s Yours?
  - Assessing Your Leadership Style
  - Situational Leadership: The Key to Leading the Various Levels on Your Team
  
  
• Managing Team Conflict – Styles and Strategies
  - Conflict Management Strategies
  - 6-Steps to Resolving Conflict
  
  
• Team Motivation
  - Encouraging Your Team to Use the Team Approach
  - Rewards and Recognition

A Team Building Experience: Enhancing the Team Model to Providing Legal Services

In order to encourage more effective team member behaviors among the lawyers in your firm, WMC offers a variety of team building exercises to enhance teaming skills. Each focuses on a unique set of teaming objectives, allowing you to choose the exercise that best focuses on the needs of the firm.

All of the exercises incorporate an aspect of ‘competition’ - which is an inherent characteristic of most lawyers, and therefore   should have appeal to all levels within the firm. A WMC consultant will work with you to determine the most effective   exercise (or set of exercises).

The duration of each exercise is approximately 1 hour.

Teaming exercises can address:

• acknowledging and managing conflict between team members        
• avoiding “group-think”        
• recognizing healthy and unhealthy competition        
• collaborating to create more wins for everyone        
• listening when disagreeing        
• increasing appreciation for each others' views        
• solving complex problems with limited resources        
• dealing with outside competition        
• reaching a common goal        
• maintaining a positive attitude when things don't go according to plan        
• improving planning, communication, and delegation        
• learning from successes and failures        
• providing clear instructions and feedback

All of the exercises are eye-opening, fast-paced activities that provide new skills, ideas and attitudes relative to teaming.

To learn more about how Wolf Management Consultants can help enhanc e your practice team structure, contact us.