Imagine you’re that ambitious person who wants to impress clients and outpace your colleagues to get promoted.
To make partner, even.
You know that there’s knowledge and skills that you really need that could propel your career forward, but you’re too busy, you don’t have the time to dedicate to training programmes or reading lots of leadership books.
This isn’t a hypothetical situation.
It’s the reality for many ambitious lawyers, many who work in a relentlessly competitive and insular environment.
But what if I were to tell you that your secret weapon for success lies right under your nose!
The Key to Career Success Lies All Around You
When you’re drowning in casework, it’s easy to develop tunnel vision.
Ally McBeal had the right idea:
“Keep your eyes open and learn from watching others work. See how they deal with clients, associates, and superiors. Discern the values and traits that make them successful.”
Ally McBeal
All around us is a goldmine of real world expertise, and it’s absolutely free, on a plate, right there in front of you!
Rather than keeping our heads down and our eyes front, real insight lies in watching our colleagues.
Staying alert to, and observing how other legal professionals operate, handle challenges and secure success offers such invaluable learning. It expands our thinking, transforms our skills and accelerates our career progression.
However, actively analysing the behaviours and strategies of lawyers around us is often completely overlooked. You might even see it as distracting, uncomfortable or just plain odd.
Yet reframing ‘workplace observation’ as a developmental tool unlocks huge potential for you to progress and here’s 6 solid reasons why:
Career Benefits of Watching Your Peers
It simply is a no-brainer.
By tuning into your colleagues, you really can fast-track skill development across multiple areas, particularly as you transition to senior leadership/partnership roles where there are higher expectations of you not just in case management:
- Building Legal Capabilities
All around you, colleagues model best practice daily. Pay attention to what they do and their tangible examples will become toolkits for your self-improvement. Even better, accessing their strategies will embed learning at a deeper level to lift your legal performance. - Enhancing Business Development
Building a standout legal profile requires not just deep work but networking, personal profile raising and relationship building too. Pay close attention to colleagues who really excel here and apply their successful techniques to magnify your own reputation. - Understanding Office Culture and Politics
To navigate the firm confidently you have to know how to rapidly decode office social rules and hierarchies. By continuing to observe these over time, you’ll understand subtle cultural patterns and enable tactical career moves to elevate your status and influence. - Fuelling Inspiration and Motivation
Even the most successful senior lawyers have lapses of confidence, motivation and imposter syndrome. If your self-doubt creeps in, simply look around at your colleagues. Their achievements and resilience in the face of challenges and will remind you of your own possibilities to reignite your own determination and self-belief. - Sharpening Negotiation Skills
Observe your colleagues’ best practice negotiation techniques, how they frame arguments, handle objections, and build consensus. Learn from both their successes and occasional stumbles to refine your own negotiation tactics and secure favourable outcomes for yourself and your clients. - Developing Management and Leadership AcumenYour colleagues are a treasure trove of leadership styles. Watch how they delegate tasks, provide feedback, and motivate their teams. Observe which approaches resonate with their teams and inspire high performance. Analyse these leadership dynamics to build your own management toolbox. Learn from their successes and areas for improvement to become an effective manager.
And a bonus: - Reignite Your Career Spark
If you’re feeling stuck, shadowing colleagues can offer fresh perspectives and identify new skills for you to cultivate. Seeing colleagues confidently navigate challenges and achieve success can be incredibly motivating to empower you to break free from stagnation and propel your career forward.
A LexisNexis survey found that over 75% of lawyers believe that continually learning from peers and experts help them to become better legal practitioners.
However, under half of those do this regularly citing time constraints or lack of structured opportunities.
Imagine the potential for career acceleration if we overcame those barriers!
How to Observe your Colleagues (without looking like a Stalker…)
Here’s some actionable tips to turn observation into advantage:
- Ask for feedback.
- Seek out mentorship.
- Engage in internal training.
- Foster collaboration on cases.
- Embrace peer to peer learning.
- Attend colleagues’ court proceedings.
- Ask a colleague if you can shadow them.
- Participate in knowledge-sharing initiatives.
- Ask for opportunities to assist senior colleagues.
- Participate in client meetings/case strategy sessions.
- Join professional development seminars and conferences.
- Generally observe how colleagues manage their time, prioritise their tasks and maintain work-life harmony as models for effective practice.
The key is to take an active, observational approach and be open to learning from the diverse experiences and approaches of your colleagues.
“Observe the best around you. Learn from them. It’s that simple. It’s the fastest way to improve.”
Vince Lombardi
4 Pitfalls to Avoid When Observing Peers
Of course, watching colleagues has some potential downsides too so here’s how to approach this valuable skill with a balanced mindset to maximise your growth:
- The comparison trap
Avoid falling into negative self-comparison. If your colleagues seem effortlessly advanced, use it as motivation to stretch your abilities not fuel self-doubt. - Don’t Lose Independent Thought
Absorb others’ methods but continue to critically evaluate ideas yourself. Blending external wisdom with your own analysis creates the most robust professional toolkit. - Go Beyond Imitation
Outright copying colleagues’ behaviour often backfires. Their style and approach is shaped by individual personality, behaviours and experience. Instead, adapt observed tactics to align with your own strengths. - Be subtle!
Constantly staring at colleagues is obviously uncomfortable. Discreetly glance around instead to pick up useful insights and cultivate a keen eye for picking up useful insights through discreet observation.
The Bottom Line
You owe it yourself as an ambitious lawyer not to operate in a professional vacuum. Take inspiration from partners and more senior lawyers, acquire skills from experts around you and model those already where you want to be.
Workplace observation speeds up capability development for huge career progress potential in a way that formal training simply cannot match.
So, get watching and propel your legal career forwards!
“Leaders cannot help but walk in front of people, showing the way. What matters is where they lead people to—the values, the standards, the vision, the behaviour, the example.”
~ Simon Sinek
Recommended Reading:
Smarter, Better, Faster (Charles Duhigg) – This explores the science of learning new skills rapidly by focusing intensely on experts around us. Consider applying his 8 step STAR model to power up your own legal capability growth through workplace observation going forwards.
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Are you stuck in your career growth and seeking success, promotion perhaps?
Your colleagues hold a goldmine of knowledge. I help lawyers like you unlock it.
Why not book a FREE Call and together we can discover how coaching can help you transform observing colleagues from a passive activity into a powerful tool for career-propelling skills & confidence.
Amanda 💛
