Finding optimism to navigate 2020

Joanna Kingston-Davies, group chief operating officer at MAPD (acquired Jackson Lees Group), says people don’t have to be hard on themselves or their staff to make it through hard times.

Right now, I think we should all be giving ourselves a massive pat on the back for making it through the last six months. If you’re reading this and you had a comprehensive pandemic business continuity plan in place at the end of 2019 and have found the whole thing a breeze, this might not be for you.

If, however, you were already contending with the standard craziness of working out how best to lead and manage people, deal with floods, fires, cyber security, agile working, professional indemnity insurance (PII) renewal, our regulatory framework, cashflow management, partner politics and reward frameworks when the pandemic hit – we hear you!

Seriously, it’s way too easy to get caught up in the endless doom and gloom at the moment but sometimes we all just need to take a step back and congratulate ourselves for doing alright so far. We’ve never, ever, been so deeply grateful for incredible management and ops teams in the law firms we own who have carried on working their magic on a completely dynamic and tireless basis to get it right, and we realise just how lucky we are. But that’s tough if you’re not of a scale to have that level of infrastructure, or if you’re constantly balancing case work and client demands with operational emergencies, let alone the need to renew your PII in a hard market (it’s pretty much been a hard market for the last 20 years – so let’s just call it ‘the market’, (eh?) and accept it for what it is rather than waiting for the day when our underwriters joyfully announce that we are now in a ‘soft’ market!).

Compassion and flexibility

Key wins within our businesses over the last six months have definitely been:

•  The MAPD approach to people and the comms plan – how we talk to people, through what channels, tone of voice, relentlessly, passionately and genuinely – because our people are incredible and they will always come first.
• Empowering people at every level of the business to get involved in solving problems and raising the bar so that the right people get involved in the right things, rather than because their job title or a hierarchy suggests that they should do.
• Quick and simple governance and decision-making processes with minimal red tape or politics so that stuff gets done.
• Great relationships with suppliers and other stakeholders who were seriously helpful throughout lockdown.
• The ability to plan dynamically and see strategy as an ever-evolving piece – focusing on the journey rather than the destination – so that new opportunities and different, more effective ways of doing things don’t pass us by.

There are so many incredible opportunities in the legal services market, whether that be through structure, service delivery or approach to our people. We’ll cover all of these off in a bit more detail in the next few blogs but in the meantime, here’s to you for getting to the final strait of 2020 – let’s be kind to ourselves and keep the optimism going.