People respond to incentives. If you want your people to produce thought leadership, maybe you should incentivize them to do so?
What’s a law firm to do when its attorneys don’t produce the thought leadership that its marketing department wants them to produce?
Well, it can draw inspiration from McKinsey & Company and take the good old-fashioned carrot-and-stick approach.
Attorneys rarely produce as much thought leadership as their firms want them to
Ask marketers and business development staff at any law firm, and they’ll say the same thing: Attorneys rarely produce thought leadership as frequently as they should to support their firm’s marketing and business development efforts.
There are many reasons why, which you’ve surely heard before.
Some attorneys can’t consistently come up with topics to cover in their thought leadership. Others refuse to regularly take a break from their billable work to sit down and create thought leadership content. And still others just don’t want to publish thought leadership content because they’re not interested in building a book of business.
Yet law firm leaders and marketers know how important thought leadership is to their firms’ and attorneys’ marketing and business development efforts. For many attorneys and practice groups, thought leadership is the premier way to establish authority and credibility and to attract clients.
So what can a law firm do when its attorneys fail to produce thought leadership at the rate its leaders and marketers expect?
It can steal this motivational technique from McKinsey.
The way McKinsey spurs thought leadership production from its people
I recently listened to a podcast with Raju Narisetti, the Global Publishing Director at McKinsey, who oversees the firm’s thought leadership efforts. He discussed how McKinsey motivates its consultants to regularly produce the amount of thought leadership that its leadership deems appropriate: They incentivize those consultants to do it.
Specifically, as McKinsey’s consultants move up the ranks and are up for promotions, a significant part of how the firm’s leadership measures a consultant’s contribution to McKinsey is the knowledge they contribute.
Does a particular consultant regularly glean insights from their clients’ matters and projects? Do they regularly make an effort to produce thought leadership around those insights?
Because McKinsey incentivizes its people to produce thought leadership, the people who want to take advantage of the incentives—those who want upward career mobility—will change their behavior accordingly.
Not only are those consultants more likely to produce thought leadership, but they’re also more likely to identify future thought leadership topics and angles as they work on their client matters. By doing so, they can continue publishing at the cadence required to help them move up the firm’s ranks, which will help build their reputation and personal brand in the process.
Law firms can take a page out of McKinsey’s thought leadership playbook
Like McKinsey, law firms can incentivize associates and partners to produce thought leadership.
They could consider the frequency of thought leadership production when deciding whether to promote attorneys.
Firms could also pay their attorneys more (through “normal” compensation or bonuses) if they produce a certain amount of thought leadership, and could pay them less if they produce less thought leadership.
Likewise, they could adjust origination bonuses if an attorney brought a new matter in through their thought leadership, if an attorney is a prolific thought leadership producer, or if an attorney fails to produce the expected amount of thought leadership.
Different business models, but that’s OK
Because we’re talking about attorneys at law firms, some people might view McKinsey’s incentive-based approach to producing thought leadership as inapplicable to those firms because consultants bill differently than most attorneys at law firms do.
That’s true, but it’s not a dealbreaker for incentivizing attorneys to produce thought leadership.
While most corporate law firms bill by the hour, most consultants charge a fixed or performance-based fee for their projects. Because, the argument goes, McKinsey and its consultants don’t have the same concerns about devoting billable hours to marketing and business development efforts since they don’t bill their hours, McKinsey’s incentive-based approach would never work at a law firm because those incentives come at the expense of billable hours.
But many attorneys are already producing thought leadership, albeit infrequently. They’re already finding a way to balance doing so with their billable work and client deadlines. Plus, it’s not like law firms expect their attorneys to produce thought leadership daily or weekly.
All they need to do, and all that law firms should incentivize them to do, is produce an amount of thought leadership that a firm’s leadership and marketing team believe is the minimum amount of thought leadership necessary to meaningfully contribute to the firm’s marketing and business development efforts. For most attorneys and practice groups, that’s one to two pieces of thought leadership a month.
In addition, law firms don’t need to require their attorneys to write their own thought leadership. They can rely on associates, marketing colleagues, or external ghostwriters to help them share their thought leadership with the world.
So long as attorneys consistently come to the table with topics for thought leadership that would be relevant, valuable, and compelling to their target audiences, and they actively participate in the thought leadership creation process to help take their ideas from concepts to final drafts (either as a writer or editor), that should be enough in their law firms’ eyes to satisfy their thought leadership production requirements.
With thought leadership, law firms could offer their attorneys the carrot or the stick
Many attorneys have built large books of business without thought leadership. But thought leadership is a core component of law firm marketing and business development. It’s how a significant number of attorneys build and cultivate relationships that lead to more client matters over time.
For those law firms trying to get more thought leadership out of their attorneys so that they can create robust and sustainable thought leadership programs, they could do a lot worse than drawing inspiration from McKinsey on how to incentivize their attorneys to produce that thought leadership.
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