Posts Tagged ‘plan’

Making the most of changes

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

For those involved in the legal services marketplace, a wide variety of delivery options have become available. Expanding the range or reach of your services will provide you with additional skills and resources as well as a potentially wider client pool. However, expansion requires enhanced leadership and management skills to make the new, larger entity more successful than the sum of its individual parts.

Before you move into new ways of operating, you need to be sure of a number of issues. Implementing changes will put considerable demand on your resources, time and energy. It is important therefore to check that you are using this strategy for positive reasons and that you have a sound base to expand from. Too many people think that expansion will provide the panacea to all of their current problems. As a result, they spend a lot of time and money chasing rainbows rather than making sure their existing business is solid and secure. Expansion can be risky, as it will require a stronger and deeper resource base as well as a different set of skills. You need to minimise the risk by being clear about what you want to achieve and how you plan to go about it.

These changes may involve new services and new ways of operating. It will certainly involve relationships with people who you will be trusting with your image and reputation. Any new enterprise will require you to develop and sustain trust quickly, so it is important to choose partners who share your core values.

To make the most of new opportunities, you need to: -
1. be positive about yourself, know what you excel at and what you enjoy doing,
2. be able to articulate your core values and what is important to you,
3. be clear about what you want to achieve,
4. have a secure resource base,
5. listen to your clients to find out what they will want from you in the future,
6. be passionate about what you do and want to do so that people will feel inspired to work with you,
7. be constantly on the look out for opportunities,
8. look for obvious synergies between services and/or clients,
9. talk to as many people as possible to find out what they have tried, what worked well and why, what did not work well and why, and
10. always be willing to listen and learn.

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Posted in clarity, leadership, values | No Comments »

Personal Action Plan

Monday, January 10th, 2011

Happy New Year!

People tend to start the New Year with the best intentions to do something about their weight, fitness, work-life balance and then the pressures of returning to work distract them.  There continues to be a good deal of negativity around the UK economy with some professional firms dependent on public sector work anticipating that this will soon dry up.  There continues to be a limited supply of quality work with too many good professionals chasing it.

When we focus on what we are good at and enjoy, we develop our skills and confidence.  If we spend our days working with people who undermine and criticise us, we will struggle to remember why we chose this profession.

So it is important to think about what is important to us and what we want to achieve in the long term.  January is the time to develop a Personal Action Plan.  This will allow you to:-

  • play to your strengths in your current role,
  • cope better with the areas of your job that do not focus on what you enjoy doing,
  • develop the areas that you feel you need more help with,
  • tackle clients or colleagues you seem to clash with, and/or
  • identify where you want to go with your long-term career.

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Posted in Self-help, resilience | No Comments »