Leading Lawyers

Sally Sanderson is a multi-award-winning consultant to law firms. Specialising in leadership, emerging leaders, people and project management, she uses personality profiling to increase self-awareness and speed up development. Her clients include global firms and niche practices, and her ABCDE approach has been tested on thousands of lawyers across the world with outstanding results.

Part 1

Provides an overview of the ABCDE model which helps leaders to get better results from their teams. Then each section of the model is explored in detail, with case study examples, and with opportunities for you to do some planning on how to use it in practice. If you have never considered your own personality preferences, after the overview you might like to use Part 2 before reading the detailed sections in Part 1.

Part 2

This section explores different leadership styles and how they link to the ABCDE model. It should help you to identify your own style preferences. We start by looking at leaders with a very clear style where one personality preference dominates their way of communicating. But most people have more than one preference in their style, so we look at a range of leaders commonly found in law firms who represent a combination of two or three preferences. You may well recognise the style of some of the case study leaders.

Part 3

This section gives you some tips on how to work with and align those with different personalities – whether a team member, a boss or a client. It will help you to adapt your own style when you need to do so to motivate, influence and manage others. It will make you aware of which parts of the ABCDE message different personalities listen out for, which parts motivate them and which parts they might ignore, which could lead to lower levels of performance. This section aims to help you get the best out of your interactions with all those important for your team’s and project’s success.

Part 4

This is the first part of the ABCDE toolkit. It provides a series of ABCDE conversation tools to help you in different situations where you are leading and managing a project team – whether for clients or for internal projects such as for business development or making your firm more competitive. Tools include scoping and planning, briefing the team, delegating part of a project, reviewing progress, reporting to stakeholders and conducting an end of project/matter review.

Part 5

The second part of the ABCDE toolkit focuses on conversation leaders have with individual team members from when they join the team through to delegating, praising, coaching, tackling problems, performance reviews and development planning. Whether a team member is a high flyer, a solid performer or struggling, you can adapt these tools to give them the support they need to deliver their best.

Appendix

This section gives you some links to personal profiling tools which are compatible with the ABCDE model: DISC, Insights and Social Styles.