Lawyers as Leaders by Rhode Deborah L

Author:Rhode, Deborah L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Strategies for Organizations and Their Leaders

Supporting aspiring leaders is itself a leadership skill, and one that has received inadequate attention in many legal workplaces. The most important factor in ensuring equal access to leadership opportunities is a commitment to that objective, which is reflected in organizational policies, priorities, and reward structures.187 That commitment needs to come from the top. An organization’s leadership needs to not simply acknowledge the importance of diversity, but also to establish structures for promoting it, and to hold individuals accountable for the results. The most successful approaches tend to involve task forces or committees with diverse and influential members who have credibility with their colleagues and a stake in the results.188 The mission of that group should be to identify problems, develop responses, and monitor their effectiveness.

As an ABA Presidential Commission on Diversity recognized, self-assessment should be a critical part of all diversity initiatives.189 Leaders need to know how policies that affect inclusiveness play out in practice. That requires collecting both quantitative and qualitative data on matters such as advancement, retention, assignments, satisfaction, mentoring, and work/family conflicts. Periodic surveys, focus groups, interviews with former and departing employees, and bottom-up evaluations of supervisors can all cast light on problems disproportionately experienced by women and minorities. Monitoring can be important not only in identifying problems and responses, but also in making people aware that their actions are being assessed. Requiring individuals to justify their decisions can help reduce unconscious bias.190

Whatever oversight structure an employer chooses, one central priority should be the design of effective systems of evaluation, rewards, and allocation of assignments and professional development opportunities. Supervising lawyers and department heads need to be held responsible for their performance on diversity-related issues, and that performance should be part of 360-degree evaluation structures.191 Such accountability is, of course, far easier to advocate than to achieve, particularly given the absence of systematic research on what oversight strategies actually work. Our knowledge is mainly about what doesn’t. Performance appraisals that include diversity but lack significant rewards or sanctions are unlikely to affect behavior.192 However, we know little about what has helped firms deal with powerful partners who rate poorly on diversity, or whether incentives like mentoring awards and bonuses are effective in changing organizational culture. More experimentation and sharing of information could enable organizations to translate rhetorical commitments into institutional priorities. What research is available casts doubt on some interventions that are frequently part of diversity initiatives. One of the least effective is training. Surveyed lawyers tend to be at best “lukewarm” about the usefulness of diversity education, and experts who have studied its effectiveness are even less enthusiastic.193 In a large-scale review of diversity initiatives across multiple industries, training programs did not significantly increase the representation or advancement of targeted groups.194 Part of the problem is that such programs typically focus on individual behaviors not institutional problems, provide no incentives to implement recommended practices, and sometimes provoke backlash among involuntary participants.195

Another common strategy is networks and affinity groups for women and minorities.

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