Optimism At Work
by Bob Murray, MBA, PhD and Alicia Fortinberry PhD

Editor’s Note:  Bob Murray and Alicia Fortinberry have lived and worked together for over 25 years. They are the principals of Fortinberry Murray Consulting Inc and work with firms in the US, Asia, Europe and Australia. Their most recent books is Creating Optimism and Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill). Their website is www.fortinberrymurry.com.  Bob can be reached at bob@fortinberrymurray.com.

Once upon a time there were two very large and wealthy law firms. Both were fishing on a calm sea in magnificent boats. They occasionally lost sailors, but it didn’t matter as those who were left were good at their jobs. It was annoying but they could always, at a price, lure fresh sailors from naval academies, and from each other. They had lots and lots of fish and that was, they thought, all that mattered.

Suddenly a fearsome storm, the likes of which they had never seen before, came upon them and the calm sea became very rough and turbulent. The sailors became afraid and called out that the world was ending and that, anyway, their magnificent boats were leaking and they would all be drowned.

The officers of one of the firms, sailing in the good ship SS Pessimism, resolutely decided to take immediate action. They threw 10% of their sailors, a lot of their cargo and even some of their fishing tackle, into the sea. “We will make the ship lighter,” the captain cried. “Then the leaks won’t matter!” He admonished the sailors to work harder at the pumps, to forego their rum and cut their rations. At the same time he warned them that they had to catch more fish or they would join the drowning 10%. Paradoxically they caught very few.

The people in charge of the other firm, whose ship was called the SS Optimism took a different approach. “The storm will not last forever and if we patch the leaks,” their captain said as calmly as he could, “we can all be saved. What’s more since we won’t have to man the pumps constantly we can catch more fish.” The crew was delighted and went to work with a will finding ways to fix the leaks and devising all sorts of new fishing gear which would work in storms and in calm weather.

Eventually the storm abated and the sun came out. Immediately most of the sailors on the SS Pessimism asked to join the crew of the Optimism since their own boat was not very safe, was not a joy to sail on and anyway it wasn’t bringing in many fish. The two firms both survived, but only one prospered.

The three morals of this story are:

That firms become optimistic, or pessimistic according to the outlook of their leaders

That optimistic firms fare better because they are more flexible and better able to adapt to changing circumstances and

People prefer to work for firms led by optimistic people.

What is optimism?

According to Professor Martin Seligman, an optimist is one who sees a setback as temporary, and a challenge to be overcome. He looks for specific reasons for any setback. A pessimist looking at the same situation believes it will last a long time; it may well undermine everything he does and is probably his fault. A pessimist catastrophizes and uses words like “always” and “never.” He says things like “It will never get better, there’s nothing I can do about it” or “People will always abandon me, I’m just not likable.” A pessimist doesn’t believe real change is possible, an optimist does.

An optimistic leader will believe in the possibility of his own and his team’s personal development and improvement and will stress the positive. A pessimistic leader believes that people are fixed in their personality, that personal development is an excuse for laziness and that people will only improve through bullying or bribery.

One of the great problems of our age is that, as a society, we have “learned” pessimism, to use Seligman’s term. We are daily flooded with pessimistic messages from the media. The root causes of pessimism—and depression—such as child abuse, neglect and abandonment are escalating at an ever faster rate. As we show in our book Creating Optimism these stressors are mirrored in the workplace, in bullying, poor management and redundancy. It’s hardly surprising that every generation is twice as depressed  and pessimistic as the one before.

Lawyers, as Professor Susan Diacoff has observed, are “professional pessimists.” In fact studies have shown that pessimists outperform optimists at law school. Lawyers are trained to look for the worst case scenario and to catastrophize. In many ways their clients have come to expect this of them. Unfortunately what makes a successful attorney may make a miserable human being.

Optimism in a changing world

But there is mounting evidence that clients are changing, and in particular they are expecting something from their legal advisors beyond the traditional gloom, despondency, and pessimism. They are looking for a more flexible, more optimistic outlook. Surveys by Fred Luthens of the Gallup Leadership Institute and others have shown that optimistic teams attract more clients than pessimistic ones. Firms that wish to prosper in this new world will have to adopt management strategies that increase the level of optimism among their partners.

Part of this sea-change can be attributed to how clients see the role of the trusted advisor and in the changing nature of how people “buy” law. Our experience of the firms we work with is that their partners are, by and large, resistant to change, even though they know that change in the way they market themselves, and the way they approach their clients is inevitable.

Law is a commodity. What’s more it’s becoming an internationalized commodity. An attorney’s knowledge of the law is no longer his main sales weapon. Clients can buy good legal expertise cheaply from overseas—Pilipino or Indian or even Chinese—operations. Some traditional ‘legal’ work—in property for example, and in trademarks and patents—is being done by non-lawyers. Soon many of the traditional ways that lawyers made money will no longer be available to them. It’s enough to make an attorney even more pessimistic!

Research by the major law firms has shown that what clients are looking for is a deeper client/lawyer relationship. It is the sort of relationship they were used to having with their merchant bankers. This doesn’t mean that they necessarily want to play golf with their lawyer. They want their advisor to know their business intimately and advise on a wide range of issues, not all of them legal. With the bankers’ fall from grace a new opportunity with huge potential is opening up for the legal profession. More and more we are being called in to help firms in a number of countries meet this challenge.

But to meet this challenge lawyers have to face up to a very inconvenient fact—people (and clients are people) are attracted to, and have a strong desire to form, relationships with optimists rather than pessimists.

There will be a greater need for flexibility in adopting new methods of business development and of ways of working with colleagues as wells as clients. Optimists are flexible, pessimists are not.

How to build an optimistic firm

A practice leader setting out to transform his firm must move on five fronts more or less simultaneously. We have an acronym for them: PACTS. This stands for:

Praise and recognition
Autonomy
Collegiality
Trust
Status

Optimism, like pessimism, can be learned and a skillful emotionally and socially intelligent leader is well aware of this. By raising the level of each of these she can “teach” her firm to be optimistic.

Praise. One of the most important factors in an optimistic firm is what we call a ‘culture of praise.’ A culture of praise isn’t just a ‘well done’ when a new client or matter is introduced, or when a case is won. It’s a firm-wide habit of seeing the positive, of acknowledging effort and innovation and encouraging new ideas even when they aren’t yet perfect.. It’s a sense that people value each other not just for what they do, but for who they are. One large legal firm we work with has a deliberate policy of what they call ‘supportive risk-taking.’ There is praise for trying new things, especially in marketing and new business, even when they don’t  pan out as expected.

Praise has the added benefit in that it drives the neurochemical dopamine to those parts of the brain responsible for making it work smarter and more collegially.

Autonomy is the sense of having control over one’s working environment—feeling that one is part of the decision-making process. Without autonomy optimism is very difficult. A good manager increases optimism by effective delegation. He gives significant work to his reports not because he couldn’t do the work, or doesn’t have time to do it, but because doing it will increase their skills or sense of involvement. A good manager realizes that micromanaging increases his team’s pessimism. A good leader goes out of his way to make employees feel actively involved and engaged in decisions that affect their lives and their futures. This sense of engagement increases optimism even in tough times.

Collegiality is much touted in legal practices but internal competition for status and clients is more the rule. According to the renowned Norwegian biologist and psychologist Bjorn Grinde humans are genetically geared to be co-operative especially with other members of their band or tribe. We become, he says, more optimistic and happy the more we co-operate and the more depressed and pessimistic the more we compete with each other.

We recently interviewed a number of partners who had left (voluntarily) a major firm. One of them said that he left because “I woke up one day and realized that my greatest competitor had the office next to mine! His ruthless behavior was making the whole team feel down. It would’ve been OK if he had been the only one, but I looked around and saw that there were many partners like him and that they were encouraged, and lauded, by management.”

A practice which wants to make itself more optimistic will need to examine each of its mores and procedures and eliminate or downplay all of those which promote internal competition and accentuate those which promote co-operation.

Recent surveys on trust in firms has shown an alarming chasm between management and staff, legal and non-legal. A University of Michigan study showed that some 70% of employees don’t trust their managers and a London Business School study showed that over 60% of managers don’t trust the promises made to them by those that they manage. Even more frightening is a statistic from an article in the June Harvard Business Review. Apparently there has been a 76% decrease in trust in senior management over the last year!

There are many ways to build trust. One of the most important, and least obvious, is to clearly and frequently communicate your needs and expectations of others and elicit theirs. Be prepared to compromise on those which aren’t vital and reach agreements. This process is part of what we call ‘needs-based dialogue.’

Status is intimately linked to optimism. The higher your sense of status is, the higher your optimism. Up to now status has been viewed in law firms as primarily linked to a lawyer’s earnings over the last year and their positional situation—particularly the former. Firms believed that they could increase their overall earnings by stressing individual financial performance. Unfortunately this has led to three very unfortunate results: Vicious internal competition and with it a decrease in cross-practice group selling; increasing pessimism, resentment and depression among those who feel that the spoils are being unfairly distributed; lack of experimentation and increasing rigidity firm-wide. Clearly this is self-defeating in the long run (one of the leaks that SS Pessimism has).

Functional status comes from a number of factors. The first of these is praise, as we have mentioned. Being personally praised by a senior partner will increase a lawyer’s sense of status. Secondly status comes from feeling that you belong to a legal firm which is held high in community regard. Perhaps this is for their pro-bono work, perhaps for their championing of particular causes—whatever it is it increases the sense that people who work for that firm feel in increase in their self-esteem. Status comes from being a member of a successful group within the firm. This success can be measured in a whole variety of ways not just monetary.

This in these ways can lead to a number of benefits: increasing retention of key people (especially Gen-Y); increasing internal co-operation; decreased stress in the organization (and with it fewer medical problems, less absenteeism and presenteeism); and much greater productivity.

Conclusion

Optimism can be taught by management and is contagious from the top down. In the future optimism may well be a legal firm’s most precious asset, enabling it to flexibly meet the challenges of a rapidly changing economic, business and social environment. An optimistic firm will be more able to attract and retain clients and form strong ‘trusted advisor’ relationships with them.