About 500,000 years ago men and women would gather in small groups and observe. They would observe each other making tools, hunting and preparing food. They would observe each other looking after their children, and learn how to clothe and protect each other. They would observe the rituals that surrounded life and death.
These were the training sessions, seminars, workshops and conferences of the day, even if they did not have the trappings of delegate badges, stuffy rooms, and PowerPoint presentations. Training was vital to our well-being and our very existence 500,000 years ago. Training might not have the same life or death quality today, but in a world like ours where the winner can take all, corporate and economic well-being (and, in some cases, survival) can depend on the quality of the staff and therefore, in part, on the quality of their training.
We are all familiar with the training rituals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Continuing Professional Development (CPD) hours have resulted in sackloads of leaflets and advertising copy landing on the desks of lawyers in every office in every town. Each has its merits, each promises a ‘must see’ event, but for most of us, we go; and if we go it is because we have to. There is no real structure or strategy as to why we go, other than a passing interest in the subject and the looming sense as the months roll by that we need more CPD hours.
Occasionally an event really does catch the eye and when it does, we notice a total change in our attitude towards it. While this is obviously a good thing, it also points to the majority of occasions when our attitude is anything but positive, as we resent the travelling, the expense and the time away from the more important things in our working lives. For many, training is a chore: something that has to be done, like emptying the rubbish and washing the dishes. We measure the result by noting that we have clocked up five or six hours towards our CPD target and if we are lucky, a few points made during the day were actually quite interesting.
It should be better than this because we all know how important it is to be on top of our subject, to know the trends of our industry and to measure ourselves against the competition.
Each of us needs to reassess what we want from the training providers and start lobbying to get it. Training is not about accumulating CPD hours; it is about gaining economic and competitive advantage. It is about adding value and delivering a better service. If your training is not doing that you need to think again.
Training is one of the most important elements of a successful legal function. It is too important to be left as an add-on to general management responsibilities and it must figure prominently in the way departments are organised and how their strategies are formulated.
Competencies
What skills and experiences do you need, or does your team need, to do a first-class job? Can you identify those competencies and list them? How do you rate each one for the job in hand? Do you need to be ‘familiar with’ or an ‘expert’? Are the skills needed ‘desirable’ or ‘essential’?
Most importantly of all, how do you and your team measure up? Such an exercise might take many hours to undertake and involve skilled assistance from the human resources department. The more time taken to understand the issues raised by the exercise, the better the solutions that will be found. However, even if the task is performed on the back of a Virgin Trains napkin while waiting for a delayed train at Euston station, the result will be so much more valuable in understanding training needs than simply chasing CPD hours at the end of the year.
An even more important exercise to perform is to project the future training needs for you and your team. What are the business challenges in the next 12 or 24 months? What are the likely legal developments to affect your company or firm? Ask the question ‘what if?’- for example, what if we are taken over? What if we outsource our IT? What if the only person who knows about the Consumer Credit Act leaves for a job elsewhere?
How do you now feel about training? If you are like me, you will think you need a structured and systematic approach to training; a strategy that sees competencies and skills developed to meet the challenges of the business and new legal developments that also builds resilience in your team so that the unexpected can be coped with efficiently and effectively.
Skills and expertise
A great deal of the training on offer is about expertise, not skills. Expertise is vital. We have to know our subject, to predict and cope with developments, and to know the impact such developments may have.
Little needs to be said on the question of training in this context. I would say, however, that one of the more rewarding exercises I instigated while head of legal at Cheltenham & Gloucester was to invite the rejuvenated panel of external law firms to undertake on behalf
of the team a significant proportion of our training needs.
Not only was this cost-effective and convenient, it also brought the firms closer to the
in-house team and gave them a better understanding of our needs and pressure points. It was hard to see any downside in the arrangement.
Again, this time as chair of the Commerce & Industry (C&I) Group, a significant focus of the group was to produce relevant training days. I still derive huge pleasure from seeing the range and frequency of training days provided by the C&I Group – now developed more imaginatively and comprehensively under successive chairmen and training directors than I could ever have hoped.
While I would naturally be impressed by
the C&I training initiative, there are many other training providers that have also developed their product in the last two or three years to a significant degree. What is still lacking is skills-based training. This is a gap I would
like to see closed.
Experience is probably the best teacher, but it must be better to be trained in the skills we need rather than relying on acquiring the requisite number of grey hairs.
I can remember reading Sir David Napley’s book The Technique of Persuasion for the first time. In the introduction he explains how he might have called the book The Art of Persuasion but he wanted to avoid anyone thinking that his subject matter was only for those who were born talented. He writes that lawyers can be taught the skills of persuasion and can become experts through practice.
I also believe lawyers can be taught to be excellent negotiators, to become invaluable in business as creative problem solvers and to ditch any myths about lawyers and management to become top-class managers. When the competency analysis has been undertaken, gaps in the skills set needed to really deliver an outstanding service will be revealed. But finding external training providers that can then help to close that gap is not so easy.
Perhaps now is the time to lobby training providers to give us more skills-based training. Last year I had the good fortune to study negotiation and creative problem solving at Harvard. Not everyone can be so lucky, but everyone should have the opportunity to study these techniques closer to home. They are essential skills for the lawyer in business today. The next time you are asked to complete the ‘any other comments’ section on a training evaluation form, give it more than a moment’s thought and make sure you ask for the training you need.
Five hundred thousand years is a long time not to have learnt that skills, and not just expertise, are vital to our future success.
Paul Gilbert is the legal director of Lawbook Consulting. He is a former head of legal at C&G and company secretary to United Assurance. He is also a Law Society Council member for lawyers in business and is a former chairman and chief executive of the C&I Group.
