{CHAPTER 9}
THE LETT LAW FIRM:
DEVELOPING A
CREATIVE CULTURE AND
OVERCOMING RESISTANCE
It has become increasingly popular in managerial circles to discuss the importance of change management and transformation management. However, in their 2007 book Creative Leadership, Gerard J. Puccio, Marie Mance, and Mary Murdock argue that these terms will soon be replaced by “creative leadership”. But why? The argument is that, in an era demanding transformation and new ideas as to how we can live, ensure economic growth, and produce sustainably, it is vital that managers take the lead.
As a result, we will focus in this chapter on examples of how one can work to promote a creative culture in a company, institution, or organization. How does one get people who do not feel creative to actually be creative regardless?
We have chosen to start with examples from a legal practice. This case illustrates how one can think about creativity and business in tandem. The case also shows that one need not be barred from being creative just because one does not find oneself in a so-called “creative industry”. Near the end of the chapter, we will hear about Lactosan, one of Christian’s companies, where the management has decided to be creative and innovative despite not having a long history of being so.
But let us begin with a brief overview of those elements that Puccio, Mance, and Murdock assert are important for companies and managers in a creative economy:
1. Understand the importance of creativity in today’s complex workplaces
2. Support the ability of employees to envision new opportunities and use their imaginations as well as ensure there are no internal obstacles to this
3. Balance the ability to have new ideas with a well-thought-out understanding of what is actually possible
4. Diagnose complex problems and respond effectively to any issues that may crop up
5. Formulate a visionary strategy that makes it possible to relate to the most pressing challenges
6. Produce original ideas that can be subsequently transformed into ideas that work and into specific products
7. Overcome resistance by dismantling barriers and ensuring appropriate support during the process
8. Understand that people are creative in different ways and have different skills, meaning that it is important to draw on the creativity of others
9. Create a creative climate in which it is pleasant to be and where employees feel they can safely express new ideas and criticism.
As far as the management of change is concerned, creativity is unavoidable. But why, then, do we so often limit creativity by guarding against doing things differently? One of the more thought-provoking articles on this topic is by Teresa Amabile in the Harvard Business Review, “Why Creativity Gets Killed Rather Than Promoted”. Here, Amabile describes how, when asked directly, few business managers and owners actually express a desire to promote creativity at their companies. They associate creativity with messy accounts more than with the creation of value. This, says Amabile, is a big problem, causing a tremendous waste of resources. Employees should be permitted to take new paths and could be motivated by being involved in development processes and the creation of ideas.
Creativity and business can definitely go hand in hand, but as the present chapter shows, there is more to this than simply convincing employees and managers that it is important. Is this because we associate creativity with flowers in one’s hair and doodles on paper rather than with business strategies, visions, new products, and bottom lines? Or is it because creativity and innovation are increasingly discussed in association with unpleasant changes? Let us try to be more precise about what we mean when we speak of creativity at work.
CREATIVITY AT WORK:
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
In a 1996 article, Greg Oldham and Anne Cunning, creativity researchers from the University of Illinois, define “creativity” as what employees do that involves developing patents, suggesting ideas, or being generally regarded by others as creative. At work, in other words, there is a continuum between everyday creativity and the more radical creativity that leads to patents and epoch-making new products. All types of creativity are equally valuable in principle inasmuch as it is difficult to predict whether a random idea on Monday morning will end up resulting in patented products.
The two researchers furthermore highlight that supportive leadership based on empathy and the use of positive feedback encourages creativity whereas controlling, monitoring, and pressuring employees to think in predetermined ways limits creativity.
It neither works when we place pressure on ourselves in the hope of becoming more creative nor when managers unnecessarily pressure employees. As a result, the two researchers suggest, people who get the opportunity to work to develop new ideas and products do best when they are able to take the initiative, work with complex tasks, and develop themselves through their work. All of these activities are regarded as strengthening one’s motivation to get stuck into new and unpredictable tasks. The opportunity to take responsibility is meaningful in itself, and according to these same researchers, those who are creative are often broadly interested in and attracted by complexity, possess the ability to use their intuition, have a degree of aesthetic sensitivity, can tolerate ambiguity, and enjoy a great degree of self-confidence. If we take the results of these researchers seriously, then efforts at affecting change have little to do with creativity when employees lack a sense of co-ownership over the intended change.
Let us, however, dive down into our case regarding the creative lawyers.
LETT IT BE
Most people do not immediately associate lawyers with creativity, yet as this case demonstrates, creativity is not the preserve of those who regard themselves as creative. Rather, being creative can be a prerequisite for specific changes in companies and organizations. Here, then, is the story of how traditional companies can use creativity and how creative processes can succeed in business contexts that are not normally regarded as particularly creative. We will, however, also hear about how the intention to change one’s work processes in new and meaningful ways can risk meeting resistance.
We visit the LETT legal practice on a hot August day. LETT has more than 350 employees, with branches in Copenhagen and two large Danish towns. The firm’s Copenhagen office is on City Hall Square, and we have got an appointment on the spot with business development manager Michael Valentin and trade organization manager Øyvind Fagerstrand.
FIRST MOVERS
As we enter the building housing the law firm, there is no way of sensing that we are on our way up to Denmark’s most innovative lawyers. Though everything looks a bit grey, the view is pretty, and the coffee is exceptionally fine and strong. Michael Valentin has been at the centre of the legal practice’s transformation and has sought to turn the practice into a sort of consultancy, with more focus on sales and on-site work at customers’ businesses. Michael describes it as a question of being first movers, of resisting the traditional professional culture and breaking down the barriers between sales and marketing disciplines on the one hand and “pure” legal work – the company’s traditional business area – on the other.
The interview thus represents a story of how one can lead the way when creative processes concern working on developing the business itself and not just on something that could be pleasant to have in addition to that which already exists (for instance, pool tables, soft pillows, or a pottery club).
BEING WINNERS
In 2010, the LETT law firm was voted Denmark’s most innovative legal services provider by the Association of Danish Law Firms. The company won the award – and the DKK 125,000 prize – for its project on “Corporate Branding for Personal Sales”.
The office has offered all partners individual coaching sessions focused on sales. This has been a voluntary scheme, and initially one partner who wished to participate was sought from each department. The idea was that, if this individual had a good experience, he or she would act as an ambassador to the other partners.
This is thus a story of how growth in the legal sector can be achieved via sales if one systematically trains lawyers to consider the needs of the customer and to think proactively relative to the market.
THE COURAGE TO BE CREATIVE
Michael begins the interview by stating that creativity is not the kind of thing with which lawyers normally concern themselves and that it has a hint of long hair and sandals about it. Nevertheless, he says:
“In ten years, law firms will need to look completely different, with less focus on legal issues and more on solutions. That’s why it’s enticingly necessary for us to actually try to be creative and clamber down from that judicial pedestal. And my advantage is definitely that I don’t see myself as a lawyer. I simply use my own experiences as having been a customer of lawyers. You could call it user-driven innovation.
“At any rate, I could see that things could be done differently,” he continues and he is convinced that, in the future, law firms will need to reach out beyond their safety zone for customers if they wish to prevent them from choosing competitors instead. “I make a lot of use of my experience as a customer, where it’s the solution that counts.
And it’s been hard work even if it looks easy on the surface. And we’d never have achieved anything if it had been based on teamwork from the start. So I had to make the first move and show the lawyers step by step that we could get better at doing things differently. When the process gradually began bearing results, then the lawyers also got that faith that it could be OK to get stuck in for the next phase as well.”
Creativity cannot always be constructed from the inside but sometimes requires that new perspectives on the work be provided from an alternative source. In this case, the perspective is that of the customer. As Michael emphasizes, the primary problem is that customers want solutions whereas lawyers are preoccupied with legal matters. He also stresses that teamwork would not have been effective in the introductory phases: the lawyers would presumably have been too good at this, and ideas would have been shot down and rejected on the basis of good arguments. As a result, it was necessary for the process to show early results. Everyone wants changes to be attractive, and in the world of law firms, attractiveness rests in bringing in business.
TOO MANY LAWYERS SPOIL THE WORK
It is interesting to hear that teamwork is not always the way forward when it comes to creative processes. Teamwork can ensure co-ownership and a diversity of perspectives regarding a problematic situation, but it can also prevent progress and act as a hindrance in those phases when the necessity of change is not particularly obvious.
“We’ve worked both bottom up and top down with our creative process. Many of our partners have had all sorts of things on their mind, but there comes a time when we just need to put a hold on some projects and say, ‘OK, now we’re moving on.’ But it’s all about starting to deliver results. Then they can see what it’s about. Here it’s about numbers – you need to show them first. We also made use of auto-communication in the form of success in media stories and advertisements so we could contribute to internal pride. Then the lawyers could suddenly see themselves out there: ‘Hey, that’s us.’ I wanted them to be more outward looking. The lawyers represent a monoculture. As the saying goes, they’re married to each other and to their work.”
The aim was to convince the lawyers that sales were interesting and to do so by quite simply showing results. “You shouldn’t start with the project plan but by showing results,” says Michael. He also notes that this is particularly important for the less extroverted lawyers, who need to be able to see themselves and win self-confidence through positive responses from media appearances and customer feedback on the good stories. And over time, a fantastic response actually did emerge to what was being done.
“In the start, it was about the process of identifying our values and developing some hypotheses as to what they were. For that work, I sat down with the management, and we had this process where we worked together to define our values by slowly circumscribing them. It was quite informal but still very professional. A lot of people still get this glazed look in their eyes when we talk about values though. They need to see something first, for instance our pamphlets. It has to be concrete for them. So the point is that it’s about starting with some good results, pointing the way, and then quickly showing some more new results.”
Michael wanted to have the lawyers on board for the idea that they were selling a product to a customer. He thus implemented a message training process, grounded in the principle that, when interacting with the customer, the lawyer needs to be able to clearly communicate exciting stories about the work. This is not necessarily easy for lawyers who are trained in delving down into complex problems and who perhaps even work best with a more professionally introverted approach.
Even though we are not discussing extreme creativity here, it is clear that Michael’s ideas were new to the lawyers, who were unwilling to accept them without good reason. They needed concrete results and feedback first.
Michael explains that they also began measuring the company’s familiarity ratings, and as these increased, the lawyers were able to see that the ideas in question perhaps were not so crazy after all. As we highlighted at the start of this book, creativity is not just a matter of throwing out wild ideas but is also about realizing new ideas in a given social practice. And Michael does not feel that one can begin a creative process by presenting a project proposal. Instead, it is results that motivate and inspire – at a law firm at any rate.
OBSTACLES ON THE COURSE
The process has not been without its complexities. Michael admits that he had not foreseen the extent to which some of the lawyers would struggle to master it.
“But for me, it was a question of being proud of the values we actually have. We have some customers who choose us because we do something different. We have more fun. We’re informal, and we approach one another directly. It’s always been like that. The only thing that’s new, really, is that we’ve become conscious of this and use it as a sort of parameter of competitiveness.”
Creative processes can clarify that which already exists and can contribute to making existing skills and values more obvious – including those of mood and informality. The aim has also been to show that the change was not necessarily extreme but instead involved a clarification of existing values. At the same time, it is difficult to become something that one is not, so the idea of turning the lawyers into pure salespeople would have been an unrealistic goal in the first instance.
Yet Michael also stresses that the work has been challenging because the message training process and the unanticipated activity contributed to signalling that “those who go out and fetch the food are more important than those who’ve prepared it.” It has been made clear that the social and creative skills deployed when dealing with customers are those that make the difference. Those lawyers who are professionally skilled at law but lack social skills have had a harder time of it. Instead, it was only those who were interested who attended the sales courses – in the hope that they would later act as culture bearers. The balancing act thus consisted of reaching those who wanted more of a sales orientation while ensuring a place for those lawyers who were more at home behind a desk than meeting with customers – or as Michael puts it, “to create a mutual understanding between ‘hunters’ and ‘farmers’ at the company.”
LEADERSHIP OF CREATIVE PROCESSES
During the interview, Michael shows a keen awareness of both the partners’ and his own roles in the process. “We’re really bad at celebrating our successes,” he says. “I sometimes felt just completely worn down. I’ve been on the verge of conking out.” Michael explains that he was sometimes basically the only one to believe in the process and that he could have used some support. Supportive individuals can be vital for truly spreading a creative culture.
“I wanted the partners to be culture bearers and to get them to understand that they were the leaders, the ones setting the tone, and that their behaviour would make our goals clear. It’s not something to which they’d ever attributed much importance. It was simply a matter of skilled lawyers becoming managers.”
So the process itself created a sort of awareness of the leadership role for both the partners and for Michael himself. He emphasizes that, if he did it all over again, he would seek to secure more involvement and co-ownership but that he remains convinced that the key is to present results and maintain a large degree of top-down management. Michael has, however, learned that he needs to ensure that those who are involved gain a sense of co-ownership over the idea.
“We don’t view ourselves as creative, and as far as I’m concerned, we don’t need to be. We’re business people who are driven by the market to think in new ways.”
Michael Valentin is in no doubt that he is a businessman who makes use of creative resources to achieve his goals. He has understood the importance of creativity in today’s complex workplaces, has diagnosed a complex problem (customer focus is too low among lawyers), and has managed to effectively respond to the demands of the future. He has also formulated a visionary strategy, considered what is possible in practice, and made important choices about how and when to involve employees in decision making. “In 2020, a law firm will be something completely different to what it is today. More customer, less client. More solution, less law.”
We have learned from LETT and Michael Valentin that leaders need to take the lead in creative work. Maybe there is even a degree of “fake it till you make it” at play.
It is about beginning to act like someone who is creative, especially if you wish to create a more creative and innovative company and organization. Next, we will take a look at Lactosan. The company specializes in cheese production and is owned by Christian Stadil through Thornico A/S.
FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT
Christian says, “Lactosan’s core business consists of developing, producing, and selling around 150 different cheese products worldwide. As I tend to say, there’s quite a big chance that your cheese crisp or other snack product, your bread product with cheese, or a prepared meal with cheese has been made with cheese from us. This is the case around the world. With, note, real processed cheese, which shouldn’t be confused with artificial alternatives. In order to constantly keep close to the customers and their needs and developments in terms of taste preferences and varieties within the food industry, we have an R&D centre led by Inger Hansen.” Christian continues:
“We’ve always had a strong tradition of craftsmanship, but it’s only around five years ago that, with our CEO Jørn Frandsen in the lead, we decided to prioritize innovation and creativity on the agenda. I mean, this wasn’t something that happened reactively but proactively. I feel it’s been a decisive factor in our having maintained and increased our growth throughout the crisis, despite increased competition.”
Product development manager Inger Hansen goes into more detail: “Five years ago, we came to the strategic decision to have true innovation at Lactosan. In other words, innovation went from being an uncontrolled and deprioritized task to being a controlled and prioritized task that is distinguished from the application technical tasks in our daily work.
“The reason for this decision was that Lactosan had always been a good local craftsman company that knew its trade. But we wanted to develop the business to be an international specialist company that could offer some values that our customers hold in esteem relative to their own value chains, and we felt, among other things, that this would be possible through targeted innovation.
“As a small company with limited resources, we were well aware that we’d find it difficult to manage the research-oriented aspect since we knew all of the external values of our products – for instance, the primary taste – but not the internal values, which in this context consist of various functional characteristics (including taste) that are necessary to provide good foundations for the future.
“As a result, we chose to outsource the research part. The choice of collaborating partner ended up being the Department of Dairy Research at LIFE (KVL), which is part of the University of Copenhagen, since we feel they’re leaders in the dairy area. Luckily, they were also very interested in collaborating with Lactosan. So we chose at this time to employ someone, a dairy engineer, as product manager and coordinator of the relationship between Lactosan and KVL.
“Once the decision to research and make innovation had been taken, then came the next step: what should the project cover? In this phase, which bore the marks of a kind of brainstorming period, we tried to take our point of departure in how we personally believed the future would look, and the primary thought was to establish a project concerning immediately functional characteristics, such as emulsification ability. In this period, then, we kept our ears to the ground and spoke with all sorts of people to get input on developing trends.
“Our project on flavour enhancers ended up being Lactosan’s first big innovation project on account of a meeting we had with a flavourist from one of our big customers. We’d noticed that our cheese powder had a flavour-enhancing character when we used cheese powder produced from mature cheese. But during a visit to Lactosan, this flavourist said he didn’t understand why we used flavour enhancers like MSG and yeast extract in our cheese powder. He felt our mature cheese was a far more effective flavour booster. It ended up being the catalyst for our going further with this tangent and temporarily forgetting about the emulsification project. Because at the same time, people were talking about natural ingredients, less salt, and no more artificial ingredients.
“LIFE (KVL) had a simultaneous research project going on that touched upon the identification of the savoury flavour in cheddar cheese. We thus found that the right collaborating partners in the Department of Dairy Research had the same interests as us and the relevant skills to start an innovation project. The project thus became: ‘Identification of the Cheese’s Aroma and Flavour-Enhancing Character’. The project was established in 2008 and ended in 2011.
“We’ve all learned so much, particularly because we use our knowledge of cheese’s taste characteristics and flavour-enhancing aspects every day. At the same time, we’ve developed a common language on this basis. The end result turned out rather better and broader than we’d initially imagined.
“We encountered a problem, however, on account of the maternity leave of our project manager. What were we going to do with the resources? It was discussed and decided that some of the researchers from LIFE would be employed part-time at Lactosan for a while. This turned out to be an excellent means of linking up our craftsmanship environment with the research environment since the researchers suddenly became part of day-to-day operations at the company.
“It’s affected both the researchers and Lactosan’s workers that the collaborative relationships have been strengthened across the entire organization and that research and innovation are becoming relevant and comprehensible within our organization. This gives us a skills boost as far as employees are concerned – a model that we’d like to use in the future. Numerous scientific articles were subsequently published concerning our project, and we’ve been featured in various magazines and on relevant websites.
“The customers are very excited about our project, and we often note that we’re meeting with greater respect when we’re out with customers discussing our products. Because now we’re not just saying what we can do. Now we can prove it scientifically, and that makes a big difference – especially because the researchers, who occasionally accompany us on customer visits, support it! This allows us to create solutions in which the customers believe – and that’s very important.”
Both lawyers and cheese producers can, then, take a creative and innovative approach to their business models. The key ingredients can be summed up as follows:
An organization can decide to be creative and innovative, but this requires someone to take the lead.
Even those organizations that do not normally boast of being creative can become creative by having the courage to set a new agenda.
The first experiences with creativity and innovation are decisive for getting a good start. Once the core employees and customers can see the point in the process, it is easier to continue with creative efforts.
Core skills and craftsmanship can represent departure points for creativity.
The breaking down of barriers between various employees, across organizations, and relative to customers seems to be a central ingredient in creativity. We return to this point regularly throughout this book.