The legal profession has earned itself a difficult reputation when it comes to workplace culture, with it being declared ‘one of the worst’  as reported in a workplace culture article by Legal Futures in 2021. All organisations strive for high performing teams, but ensuring an organisation’s culture is the right fit for supporting teams rather than burning them out, should be considered  key to each organisation’s success – failing to do this results in short term results rather than longer term consistently high performing teams. 

At the heart of every legal organisation, lies human relationships and interactions, meaning culture is central to how each legal organisation works, achieves success and grows; and culture needs to be managed and developed accordingly. As Peter Druker, famously stated ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’, illustrating that without a healthy and supportive culture, organisations will find it much harder to deliver against their strategy and achieve success.

At Beyond Compliance we know that each legal organisation’s culture is unique to them, just as the people who make up the organisation are, and as such their culture needs to be cultivated in an individual way.  We also know that many legal businesses are reluctant to bring in consultants who they feel will tell them what to do and what to change. We understand the reasons for this which is why we FACILITATE; we recognise that we cannot possibly know your people or understand your culture as well as you do, and so we make all of our culture facilitation sessions focus on you and your teams, with you in the driving seat, and us using our experience, objectivity, questioning skills and tried and tested tools to support you on your journey to develop the right culture for your organisation.

Areas of culture that can have a real impact within a legal organisation:

  • How leadership and people practices, along with ethical perspectives, can impact behaviour and culture.
  • How giving individuals a meaningful voice enables everyone within an organisation to feel that they have the power to influence and impact on behaviour and culture within their working environment.
  • How to enable high levels of people engagement and use the right approaches and behaviours in different situations with different individuals and teams.
  • How to develop individual and team resilience and understanding of others within the organisation.

What does it involve?

Examples of Culture workshops we can facilitate:

  • Cultural review session:
  • part 1 – Looking at your existing culture and how it works. A first step here might be for us to conduct an anonymous engagement survey.
  • part 2 – Identifying and agreeing a new cultural approach, the changes and ground rules that need to be implemented.
  • 5 behaviours of a cohesive team full course (Including DiSC®)
  • Building Trust within a team and enhancing working relationships.
  • The importance of communication – encouraging sharing ideas and open discussions, while managing conflict and giving everyone a voice.
  • Commitment and Accountability within a team.

5 behaviours of a cohesive team full course (Including DiSC®)

These Sessions are increasingly popular, possibly due to the fact that they are comprehensively structured yet flexible enough to be adapted for all teams.

As a qualified facilitator of the 5 behaviours of a cohesive team, Helen offers a range of workshops and sessions that centre around the 5 behaviours identified by Patrick Lencioni, in his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

  • Building Trust: when team members are genuinely transparent and honest with
  • one another, they are able to build vulnerability-based trust.
  • Mastering Conflict: when there is trust, team members are able to engage in unfiltered, constructive, debate of ideas.
  • Achieving Commitment: when team members are able to offer opinions and debate ideas, they will be more likely to commit to decisions.
  • Embracing Accountability: when everyone is committed to a clear plan of action, they will be more willing to hold one another accountable.
  • Focusing on Results: the ultimate goal of building greater trust, conflict, commitment, and accountability is one thing: the achievement of results as a team.

Underpinning the five behaviours of a cohesive team concepts, and the way that the sessions are tailored uniquely to individual teams and their relevant needs, is through DiSC®. Everything DiSC® is a tool designed to help people understand themselves and others better. Before starting any work on The Five Behaviours of a Cohesive team each individual will be required to complete a DiSC® based Questionnaire. The questions from this assessment are then incorporated into the Five Behaviours assessment.

Cost

Given that there are a variety of courses available and that they are designed to be bespoke for each individual organisation, it’s not possible to state a definitive cost but once an initial discussion has taken place and the parameters of the sessions are agreed, a fixed fee will be set.

Five behaviours sessions can be between six  hours and three days depending on the depth of the session and areas required to be covered. These sessions work best with a maximum of 12 people, but we can discuss the best way to work with a larger group if that is required.