If law firms are to be effective in building a competitive advantage through knowledge management (KM) they need to invest in both their infrastructure capabilities and the influencing skills of their knowledge leaders and advocates.
Emotional intelligence
However, in the same way that technical ability (as a knowledge manager) should not be taken as an indicator of managerial competency, management skills do not necessarily endow one with great leadership acumen. While leadership and management responsibilities will often be bundled together in the same job specification, the smart person will disaggregate these components as quickly as possible, as they require very different abilities to deliver the success that the firm seeks.
John Kotter of Harvard Business School hits the nail on the head when highlighting the important difference between the two. He argues that, at its most fundamental, management is about dealing with complexity. A good manager can analyse a situation, breaking it down into its component parts, understanding the inter-relationship between each one and reassembling them in a way that improves efficiency and effectiveness.
Leadership, however, is about dealing with change. It is about having a clear vision and the personal skills to persuade others to come with you on the journey.
KM is a fast-developing field. Those who hesitate run the risk of being left behind while other firms capitalise on new ways of serving clients, improving internal efficiencies and developing added-value services, which will build the firm's brand. But a risk is perceived in investing in KM, especially when the investment is in technology that has a limited track record or which will result in significant implementation challenges.
To overcome these hurdles, there are three leadership skills that need to be developed:
- Leading and empowering a team of direct reports. Imbuing in them a sense of purpose and a commitment to working together to deliver the sorts of results that the firm needs;
- Influencing a management board that may be sceptical to the promised benefits and under pressure from other areas to allocate the available budget elsewhere;
- Engaging broadly and selling the vision of the difference that KM can make to the wider community of lawyers and business-support professionals across the firm and within the client base.
While each of these requires a different mix of abilities, they have in common a requirement for high levels of emotional intelligence. Since first being postulated by Daniel Goleman, the concept of emotional intelligence has become accepted as a key factor in the success of managers and leaders. This is particularly true in the sort of people-centric business epitomised by law firms. Goleman has written widely, but his seminal piece on the impact of emotional intelligence on leadership is contained in a Harvard Business Review article published in the November/ December 1998 edition, and entitled ‘What makes a Leader?' His salient conclusion is that: "It would be foolish to assert that good old-fashioned IQ and technical ability are not important ingredients in strong leadership. But the recipe would not be complete without emotional intelligence. It was once thought that the components of emotional intelligence were nice to have in business leaders. But we now know that, for the sake of performance, these are ingredients that leaders need to have."
Most importantly, Goleman makes it clear that emotional intelligence can be developed. This is something that would benefit many in management roles within the KM profession. Given the wide array of audiences that need to be influenced and led if KM is to succeed, it is clear that the abilities of those with well-developed emotional intelligence to "find common ground with people of all kinds – a knack for building rapport" will be particularly well-suited to these organisational challenges.
In summary, there is a compelling argument that effective utilisation and exploitation of knowledge assets will provide a source of sustainable competitive advantage, if firms are able to cross the chasm that divides theory and vision from implementation and realisation. A key component of building the bridge lies in improvements in a broad range of leadership capabilities within the KM function itself.
It is increasingly self-evident that there is a clear edge that can be gained through KM in an increasingly undifferentiated market, where peer-group firms look increasingly similar in almost every respect. Those that can bring the full range of leadership dimensions to bear will find themselves with a difficult-to-replicate competitive advantage.
Published in KMLegal magazine August / September 2008
