Brenda Fingold is from Hale and Dorr in Boston, Massachusettes. She is a very capable and powerful lawyer who makes leadership programs work; who stimulates action throughout the firm. Here she shares with us how she how she accomplishes that so successfully.

I've been thinking about this topic and whether I have the most mundane topic or whether it was actually the most important topic of the day. Because in my mind its process and the details that make leadership programs work. So hopefully if it sounds mundane you'll at least realize it's necessary.

I am happy to talk about how Hale and Dorr has used PracticeCoach® because I am quite a big fan. I do think we've had a lot of success and I think we've come up with a process by which it works.

We currently have six groups working with PracticeCoach® and we have three more that are going to get started this fall. I thought I would tell you first how we rolled out the program and then tell you where we are now.

We licensed the program in June of 1998 and started by making it a firmwide initiative. We sent a detailed memo announcing the program to everybody, or all of the partners in the firm, even though most of them were not going to see any of the modules or be participants in the program for quite a while. Our managing partner also talked about it in his remarks at our annual partner dinner so we really addressed it as a firmwide initiative that sooner or later would impact everybody.

I was asked to lead our efforts in this area. I'm the partner responsible for training and professional development at the firm. I'm a litigator and I've been there for 16 years. But I now do full-time training and professional development and outside management, for lack of a better word. So I knew this falling on my plate was going to add a significant amount of work to an already busy schedule.

I had been looking for years for a good leadership program for lawyers and had not been able to find anything that I thought was either sophisticated enough or tailored to lawyers. And to me the first seven modules are great leadership training all by themselves. I didn't want to only show them to those people who would agree to do the whole PracticeCoach® thing. So I scheduled a series of four programs. I called it the PracticeCoach® Leadership Series, thinking at a minimum, anyone who thought of themselves as a leader would feel compelled to come. I invited about 35 of our practice leaders and I defined them very broadly. I invited the chairs and vice chairs of each of our nine departments; the chairs of about a dozen or so practice groups -- those that had been well established and those starting out. And I invited all members of our executive committee and management. And those programs went quite well. There was a lot of great discussion. Obviously, David Maister can be quite controversial in those tapes and a lot of things came out that needed to come out. So people were interested.

A number of practice leaders wanted to do the program and two in particular were very interested. So what I did (and I let everybody know I was going to do this) was meet with every practice leader who came to the series and just sit down and talk with him or her about whether they wanted to use PracticeCoach® with their group. So it was their choice whether they wanted to use it.

We talked about what their goals might be. What their needs were. Were there issues around the team-building in their group? Was it around skill development? Was it around marketing? Who would participate? Just partners or partners and associates? Who would facilitate? How often would they meet? We went through all of that. With most of them, by the time we got to the end of the discussions, they had already invested in where we were going next.

We also were very fortunate we had a well-respected partner who just became a great fan of PracticeCoach®. He read True Professionalism by David Maister. He poured through the materials I described. Somebody was talking about hecklers. Well, he was a heckler who actually liked this program. So his interest and enthusiasm actually gave the program a lot of credibility.

The two groups that we began with got off to a wonderful start and word actually got out. I've never really seen it happen in this way but so much was happening in those two groups that I started getting calls from people asking if we could start PracticeCoach® with their groups.

And I certainly will admit to contributing to some of that. I truly became so fired up myself with the process. When you really get into it -- when you're sitting in those rooms and groups are ticking-off action item after action item -- and you know, I had one room where somebody said 'this is really fun,' a partner who I would not have expected to say that. You can't help but get a little enthusiastic and carried away with the momentum.

So I did a lot of my own walking around the halls and the cafeteria lines saying -- you know, bragging -- you wouldn't believe what the Securities Litigation Group has just done. When are you gonna start? And it got people interested.

Of our six groups that are going now they all do things differently. Some just have our senior partners attend. We have a two-tier partnership with senior and junior partners. The larger groups have 12 to 15 senior partners. Senior partners will meet. Smaller groups that have maybe only three or four senior partners will have senior and junior partners together.

We have tried at least one of the modules with associates but for the most part we've aimed our program at the partners.

Who leads each program varies. With one group it's the chair of the department, in another it's the vice chair. In yet another group, it's the chair and the two vice chairs rotate and each one will lead one session. I would like to try with one of the groups that's going to start soon, having it rotate among all members. That was my first choice for how this would work. And now that I've heard that two other firms do it this way and that it works, I think I'd like to do that. Clearly that's a way to get everybody invested in the process.

We have not for most of our groups done the modules in any particular order. I very carefully presented PracticeCoach® as a program that we can tailor to each group. So some groups, many groups in fact, have started with the fourth module, Developing A Practice Group Plan. Starting with that one immediately puts you into an action planning group process. Other groups needed the team-building so we started there. A couple of groups did want to start with the individual planning, but in my mind a lot of them had been trying and struggling with individual planning and the last thing they wanted to do was sit again and start there, so I worked our way back.

I also held an introductory session for each of the practice groups where I showed two of the Leaders' Modules. I showed Module 1, The Power of The Practice Leader and Module 6, Helping Shape Meaningful Objectives. I felt that you need to do that for some context. I know that they are meant to be for leaders. I had to tell the group, You know, David Maister is talking to the leaders and not to you, keep that in mind. But it sets a whole context for asking everybody to do all these action items. And I particularly like that Module 6 because it had Maister's question about how much of your work you would categorize as, God, I love it. I did need for them to see it was about them, too. It was not just about the firm making money, not just the power group in the firm wanting to increase profits but about their unhappiness.

Another key element to our use of PracticeCoach® relates to my role. And as I said, it was my baby -- is my baby -- that's almost an understatement. I have lived and breathed a lot of PracticeCoach® for the last year. I've gone through all the written materials. I've watched all the tapes. I've gone to just about every PracticeCoach® meeting of all six groups who have been doing this now for about eight to ten months. I've written video summaries for partners who needed to know what was in the video. I've proposed agendas for every meeting and I've really done a lot. And in my mind that helps make this work.

Now I did talk to David Maister on the phone one day, and I told him about my role and he said, That's terrible, you're taking away their role. They are suppose to be doing all this and I totally agree with him over time. But my choice is I'm going to do it and make sure it starts or we're not going to do it at all. I would at least rather start like that and let them get enthused over time, feel the momentum with the hope that over time they would learn to do this without my nagging. But in the meantime I felt I needed to do that.

I also think going to the meetings has turned out to be of significant benefit and I really had intended to get them started and step out. But when I started going to one meeting and was able to bring in comments that other partners had made at other meetings, it really made a great contribution. In part, I could stimulate ideas, stimulate the brainstorming. I could interject, you know, if people aren't coming up with great ideas I could comment on the wonderful client resource materials that our Security Litigation's team came up with, and ask if there was anything equivalent in this group. And all of a sudden the ideas would pour out.

I was also able to stir up some competitive juices by commenting that, They're doing this, why aren't you? I could help leaders to figure out where they wanted to go; give them some ideas to think more out of the box by bringing the ideas into the meetings with me. I mean I actually walked in with, Here are the action item lists from the Real Estate Department, the Labor Department and the Securities Group. What are you going to do? And they're hard pressed not to come up with something equally interesting.

Another benefit of going to all of the meetings is that I could evaluate each one, compare it to the others and then try to improve it for the next one. If something didn't work right or there was a better way to facilitate that discussion, I could make it better the next time. And I definitely found with each session they got better by virtue of knowing what else had been going on.

I did take responsibility for writing the action item memos in the end. There's one group that is doing it on their own. I'm very thankful for that. But again I made the choice that one very important piece of this is, when those people walk out of the meeting excited about what they've agreed to do -- that day or by the next day -- something needs to appear on their desk confirming what everybody committed to. And again I could never be sure that the leader was going to make sure that happened, so I always drafted it. Sometimes it went out under my signature; sometimes it went out under theirs. I didn't care.

My role really varies sometimes. I would facilitate or co-facilitate a group and other times I sat in the back and did nothing except know that I put everything together. The plus side of doing it this way is that there's one person with complete control who can make this work. You need to appoint somebody who's a partner or a senior non-legal staff with the know-how to get things done right. And I approach this like any other initiative that I am responsible for. I think that's a big plus.

The negative obviously is it's a lot of time and it may -- as David had said -- it may take away the desire for the practice leader to get really invested because they don't need to. They don't need to be thinking about all of these things, but I haven't found that yet to be a real negative. People are still excited particularly when they feel they have help.

So that's my bottom line here and why I have decided that even though the process is mundane it's important. I think PracticeCoach® is a terrific program. And those who have used it in our firm are really happy. I've had a ball with it. But I think you need to pay your dues and that's in the administrative piece. The nagging, the memos, the phone calls, just all of the reminders. I mean, it sounds stupid but it needs to be done. If you can do all of that, I think the good stuff will flow from it. That's our experience.