News flash: treating employees badly hurts morale

A current National Law Journal article by Leigh Jones reports on rumblings that the newest "Generation Y" associate attorneys are lazy, or at least have priorities of which some law firm partners are less than fond.

I could comment on a number of aspects of the article. But what I found most astonishing was the following quote from an unnamed "managing partner at a national firm."

[Newer associates] have a very strong connection with each other as opposed to the institution. If someone is treated badly, they all react to it.

My first thought on reading this was along the lines of, "Holy crap! How can you not expect treating an employee badly to impair morale among other employees!?"

Does the speaker mean to say that these young associates aren't willing to stab each other in the back and watch each other rot in hopes of rising above the rest? Because that's a good thing!

Morale is real

The management implications of this quote stunned me. At least the way the author presented the quote, it sounds like the unnamed managing partner is surprised that treating someone badly has a collateral impact on that person's peers. It almost reads as if the manager is aching to be able to go out and treat someone badly but is dejected because he now feels constrained.

Any manager should expect that if one subordinate employee is treated poorly, morale will decline among the employee's peers. No, treating people uniformly badly will not remedy the problem. Anyone who thinks it's a fine idea to go around treating subordinates "badly" should be shuffled as far as possible from supervisory roles. Management must take morale seriously. (The black hole of turnover costs can be a topic for some other post.)

I'm not saying management ought to roll over on important issues. It is also a morale-killer to fail to deal with an associate who does bad work or displays questionable ethical standards. I'm saying only that 'management by temper-tantrum' and 'motivation through degradation' come from a rotten breed of supervision techniques, they still exist, and firms should make it a management mission to expunge those 'techniques' and their ilk.

Loyalty among co-workers is an opportunity

Loyalty among co-workers is a good seed trait. It seems to me that firms should aim to grow something better and further-reaching out of it. The hard part is to find ways to build and reinforce that loyalty so that it grows upward and outward to encompass the company as a whole.

Find out what makes associates cynical about management, and then get creative in finding ways to disarm that cynicism. This might mean adjusting some practices you had taken for granted. Don't forget to humanize employees. If your associates feel like you only see them as little revenue generators to be rewarded periodically with trinkets, you've lost already. As Bruce MacEwen noted in his review of the recent Hildebrandt report:

It cannot be said too often: Your associates are your future, and your partners are your current, revenue stream. It is literally an act of insanity (in the sense of being divorced from reality) to be inattentive to these indispensable, core assets.

More importantly, leadership skills are not taught in law school, but today's complicated, globalized firms demand both strong and nuanced leadership ability. Leadership is difficult to develop, but that's all the more reason to devote focused attention to it. ("Reed Smith University" being a prime, laudable, example.)

His use of economic terms comes across as a little dehumanizing, but his point doesn't. Leadership counts. Other human traits count. Traits above and beyond one's hours billed.

Loyalty counts too. There have got to be ways to benefit from loyalty among workers and expand that loyalty to the benefit of the firm. Focus on team-building, knowing that team-building and treating people badly are generally incompatible. Loyalty provides an incentive for cooperation and consequent increased productivity among people working together. De-incentivize each and every manner in which associates might undermine each other.

This is a brainstorm and is likely to include at least some nonsense

Now, understand I'm just brainstorming here, trying to come up with even a germ of an idea that could help firms bridge gaps between management and the subordinate employees and create productive offices that are good places to work. I'm not a management consultant. And I'm not afraid of hard work myself — in fact, I've had employers tell me I needed to slow down. I'm just excited about this topic because I think there's a lot of opportunity in employees who have a strong loyalty trait, if managers can cut through whatever makes the employees cynical about management.

Tales of cutthroat intra-firm competition promote cynicism

Trying to drive wedges between employees would be the worst approach to take. Stories abound, in fiction and real life, of law firms where the associates spent what little spare mental time they have scoping out opportunities to step over (and on) each other and prove each other to be dead wood, in hopes of beating out the others for the coveted partnership. Increasingly often, these stories seem to be historical rather than current. I envision the quoted managing partner as wishing his firm [still?] drew in those kinds of associates.

I suspect that the continued circulation of those stories substantially contributes to associate cynicism. Young, inexperienced associates might assume that they've gone to work for people like that. Some of them probably assume they have. I don't make assumptions like that, but you can tell those stories have affected this blog post.

I wouldn't want to work with other associates like the ones in those stories. I wouldn't want to have employees like that, either. I want to trust the people I work with, I want to trust the people I work for, and I want to trust the people who work for me. If I don't trust and respect my co-workers now, how can I trust and respect them when we are eventually partners? And if we don't have some baseline amount of trust and mutual respect as partners, how can we run a firm well?

But what do I know? I'm just an associate.

I'm not particularly cynical, myself. (Maybe that's because I missed "Generation Y" by a year, according to the article.) But I do hope that management where I work next is at least aware that treating one employee badly is likely to be bad for morale throughout the office.