To gain the perspective of someone who regularly secures buy-in for training programmes, we interviewed Olivia Moore, Careers and Wellbeing Manager at the Law Society of Scotland.
During the interview, Olivia kindly divulged strategies to engage key stakeholders, make the case for long-term investment in people and overcome objections around resource and time constraints. Olivia shared how to measure the success of training initiatives and provided insights into emerging trends in the legal industry.
By tying essential skills training to retention, performance and wellbeing, Olivia explained how legal firms can ensure their teams remain future-ready in an ever-changing environment. Read on…
General context
Understanding the business need:
What are some of the key challenges you face when identifying the need for essential skills training?
In my role, I work with stakeholders across the legal profession, rather than just internally at my organisation. So, my main challenge is in the disparate makeup of the profession. Our members work might work in international firms, smaller firms across Scotland, or for an in-house organisation. In reality, some training will be universal, and some will need to be tailored. Provision and consistency will be patchy. Appetite can vary substantially from person to person, let alone across the whole profession.
How do you ensure essential skills training is viewed as a priority, alongside technical or legal training?
Making a very strong business case is essential and I tie everything back to retention, performance and wellbeing.
Engaging stakeholders:
Who are the key stakeholders involved in approving essential skills training initiatives, and how do you engage them effectively?
Internally, I would be looking to our Senior Leadership Team, and my successful engagement has been about getting face-time with them and then linking to our strategic internal or external business priorities.
My biggest stakeholders I have to ‘sell’ the value to are our members who participate in the training. Without effective engagement we run the sessions and no-one signs up. So, every time I build an event page on our website, put out a blog or LinkedIn post to promote essential skills training, it’ll always be accompanied by a snippet of the broader business case in some form or another. Engagement is about constantly communicating value.
Making a very strong business case is essential and I tie everything back to retention, performance and wellbeing.
Developing the business case
Key components:
What are the vital elements of a compelling business case for an essential skills training programme?
Tying in…
- Your organisation’s strategic objectives
- Your organisation’s values
- The values/objectives of other stakeholders (e.g. clients, members etc)
- Communicating the ‘issue’, ‘challenge’ or ‘opportunity’ effectively
- Using data and feedback
- Tying it back to people and bringing it back from the ‘macro’ to ‘micro’ level
Financial justification:
How do you calculate and present the value of investing in essential skills training, beyond immediate financial returns?
Investing in people’s skills isn’t really about immediate financial returns, it requires a long-term look at the health and sustainability of the organisation from a people perspective. I would flip this question on its head and talk about the risk of not investing in something as critical as the organisation’s people.
What data or metrics do you rely on to justify the investment in these programmes?
Data is absolutely critical. All organisations can collect data around retention figures (looking at specific teams/groups to establish trends), as well as looking at sickness absence rates (tracking mental health as a separate category ideally) and qualitative data collected at exit interviews.
Then workplaces should also be collecting more data which points to people’s experiences of work – e.g. understanding pinch points, levels of stress, sources of issues, perceptions of management, consistency of approach and critically, asking people what they need, or would like to see the organisation doing.
All of this should be totally anonymised and result in a clear plan of action, to build trust in the process. Collecting data with no outputs will create low engagement and demotivation.
Compelling narratives:
How do you create a persuasive narrative that highlights the importance of essential skills like communication, leadership, or emotional intelligence?
Bring it to life by using an example. Such as…
Drew is a fantastic technical lawyer and has been in his role for several years and has recently been rewarded with a promotion and manages a team.
This a departure from what he was doing previously, and now spends at least 25% supporting other team members.
He really wants to do a good job but Drew is struggling.
One colleague works in a completely different style to him and although they are largely delivering, it’s hard to track their progress and clients don’t feel they are kept up to date.
Another colleague is underperforming and has vaguely referenced challenges in their personal life as a factor.
Another colleague is on leave due to stress and is going to phase back into work next week, but is feeling anxious.
Drew finds his own manager quite hard to work with and doesn’t get much support and opportunities to ask questions.
He’s been trusted to do this job, and as an experienced lawyer, doesn’t he have the skills?
The chances are that Drew is finding this hard, he might not have acquired all the skills he needs and therefore, his team don’t feel supported. Drew is at risk of leaving, but his team all are too.
Can you share an example of how you positioned essential skills training as critical to achieving a business goal?
Recently, I have worked with a colleague to get a line management-centred training programme approved, focusing on people skills through a wellbeing lens. What sold it?
- Reputational risk: we said we would be a leader for this area, and we need to ‘walk the talk’ when we are trying to positively influence the profession.
- Retention: presenting high turnover stats and linking essential skills to why people stay. After all, there’s plenty of data out there that shows line managers are often one (if not the primary) factor in why people stay/go.
- Responding to staff feedback: giving senior leadership a chance to deliver on its promises. We mapped our recent employee survey results to essential skills gaps.
- Roadmap: we provided a roadmap to senior leaders that showed how we can take positive action on feedback was a very effective lever.
The result? Leadership said ‘yes’ and approved that it will be made mandatory for all people-managers, in recognition of the fact essential skills are not optional. Being a good line manager is fundamentally about people and saying that’s optional would have sent out the wrong message.
Addressing challenges and objections
Common pushbacks:
What are the most common objections you hear regarding essential skills training, and how do you address them?
Resource and time commitments. People are too busy doing their jobs. So, I think getting to the root of the value is essential. Sometimes I also think that people get frustrated if they feel like training is put on as a solution to systemic business issues. E.g. ‘time management training isn’t going to solve the fact our team is chronically under-resourced’. I think therefore training must come alongside meaningful investment and commitment from the employer’s side as well, communicating that they are all parts of a solution to the same problem.
Investing in people’s skills isn’t really about immediate financial returns, it requires a long-term look at the health and sustainability of the organisation from a people perspective. I would flip this question on its head and talk about the risk of not investing in something as critical as the organisation’s people.
How do you overcome the perception that essential skills training is “nice to have” rather than business-critical?
I directly challenge this because I believe the opposite and data supports this. People stay in a job because of people, and they leave because of people. That can be anything: the way they are supported with their workload, get recognition or have a positive everyday relationship. People are the most important resource in the legal world. People make or break everything: client relationships, teams, deals, working environments, culture or how much money is made. Productivity, wellbeing and job satisfaction are built on essential skills which some people possess in more natural abundance than others and it’s any workplace’s job to ensure anyone can improve their skillset in these areas.
Budget constraints:
How do you make the case for essential skills training when there is pressure to prioritise mandatory or technical training?
As advances in technology change the delivery of legal services and adoption becomes more universal, people become the unique selling point, more than ever. These people skills are what automated and digital solutions cannot provide.
Have you found cost-effective ways to deliver impactful essential skills training?
We combine skills training with external providers alongside opportunities for people to learn from peers in the profession. They can often bring helpful understanding and context to very specific challenges.
It can be easier to start out with one team piloting a training programme, because then you can show comparative data against other teams that haven’t had training. You would expect improved engagement levels, retention, feedback and performance. This can then sit against costs around re-hiring people, sickness absence and dissatisfied clients.
Measuring success
Defining impact:
How do you measure the success of an essential skills training programme in terms of its impact on performance or culture?
Seeking feedback, ideally at scale. We have an insight tool to pick up regular feedback from members as part of our engagement work, but also do surveying. Internally, I’d ideally like us to do more pulse-surveying so we can respond faster to any challenges and make changes efficiently.
Ultimately, you would also hope to see fewer performance management issues, more acknowledgement of increased achievements and better reviews of employees on sites like Glassdoor. But this requires a mechanism to celebrate the ‘non-billable’ work as well as sustained training initiatives.
What are some specific outcomes or success stories you’ve seen from essential skills training?
Managers that haven’t known how to go about addressing any issues surrounding wellbeing and not understanding what their role is in terms of supporting teams, to being able to have informal and easy conversations about mental health and recognising that they don’t have to be a counsellor to get this type of support right.
Feedback loops:
How do you gather and use feedback from participants to improve the relevance and impact of essential skills training?
Take benchmark data to understand how people perceive their skill level and confidence at the outset. Take brief feedback after each session to see if it hits the mark and adjust as you go, then ask the benchmark questions again at the end to assess change. Ideally, you could ask for more feedback a year on, to see what the impact was in terms of how people have embedded training into their roles.
How do you demonstrate the long-term benefits of essential skills training to stakeholders?
It can be easier to start out with one team piloting a training programme, because then you can show comparative data against other teams that haven’t had training. You would expect improved engagement levels, retention, feedback and performance. This can then sit against costs around re-hiring people, sickness absence and dissatisfied clients.
Advice and insights
Lessons learned:
What have been your biggest lessons from proposing and implementing essential skills training programmes?
Find a training partner that creates genuinely engaging sessions. These are people-based skills, so without participation, there won’t be a chance to maximise learning.
What advice would you give to others trying to build a business case for essential skills training?
You have to collect data and feedback. It’s possibly the hardest bit and seems like a lot of effort, but without it you won’t be able to make a strong business case if you’re being expected to compete with the bottom line. Critically, you won’t know which issues you’re trying to solve. Putting on random skills training without a clear vision of the problems you are trying to address won’t yield any meaningful results, and you won’t be able to communicate the value clearly to colleagues.
If you don’t have any data to work with, there is plenty out there that you can reference for context, while you work on developing your own.
Emerging trends:
How are trends in the legal industry shaping the demand for essential skills training?
Delivering ‘law and more’ is a common theme in the industry. The ‘more’ comes from understanding the deeper business needs of clients, which can only be gathered from creating better relationships, high emotional intelligence, a curious mindset and an ability to listen and ask the right questions.
Are there particular essential skills you see as becoming increasingly important for lawyers and business services professionals?
- The complex human skills
- Adaptability, in a changing technological landscape Resilience to change
- Critical thinking, as ‘asks’ from clients become more complex
- Communication across a range of mediums.
Professional Training are delighted to be delivering an essential skills programme for The Law Society of Scotland in the very near future! Keep an eye out for announcements on this.
If you’d like to discuss an essential skills training programme for your teams, get in touch! info@professional-training.co.uk.