Get buy-in: leadership lesson from "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen"

There will come a time in your in-house career when you are a visionary. And you fail at it, because you misjudge what you can accomplish and how. That's my leadership take-away from Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a British romantic comedy-drama film viewed this weekend.

If you're in a legal-compliance risk-mitigation role, you often see things others do not. You have this vision where the organization needs to go. You do a decent job at communicating the issues, the risks versus benefits, and the range of reasonable solutions. You may encounter problems, however, if you skip critical next-steps, as illustrated in Salmon Fishing.

10 Principles for In-House Counsel to Live by in Fiercely Complex Times

Surely, these are complex times for in-house counsel.  And if they are “fiercely complex” for you, then well worth the quick read is Ten Principles to Live by in Fiercely Complex Times.

Consultant-author Tony Schwartz lists 10 “enduring principles” he relies on “to make choices that reflect openness, integrity and authenticity.”  Here are three principles I wanted to highlight:

• No. 1. “Always challenge certainty, especially your own.” 
• No. 2. “Excellence is an unrelenting struggle, but it's also the surest route to enduring satisfaction.” 
• No. 10. “When in doubt, take responsibility.”

"Little bets" can work for in-house counsel, too

In May I wrote that in-house counsel might use "small wins" as an effective strategy for navigating through a new client, a new legal assignment, a new employer, or even a promotion.  Today I wanted to share some thoughts about one of my resources, a new book by Peter Sims, Little Bets, which I had the time to read while on a trip out West last month.

Although Little Bets is written with the entrepreneur in mind, I believe it has a far wider application, to include in-house counseling and our personal lives.  The premise of the book is that in your approach to a project, rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket ("big bets"), try out lots of different little things ("little bets"), knowing full well that many or most will fail, but along the way discovering what works and what doesn't.  Then take those things that work and implement them on a wider scale.

Perseverance - in trying times

Perseverance -- a steady persistence in a course of action . . . especially in spite of difficulties, obstacles, or discouragement.  If you feel as if you are struggling in your personal career and financial plans as in-house counsel (not surprising in this economy), then consider these terrific examples of well known people who failed numerous times before they finally achieved success:

• Admiral Robert Peary failed to reach the North Pole seven times before he succeeded.
• Oscar Hammerstein produced five Broadway flops before staging Oklahoma.
• Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before creating a workable lightbulb.

Failing successfully

Failure is “rarely enjoyable when you're in the midst of it or dealing with the aftermath.”  Failure Is Failure.  The thought of failing may seem even more painful for in-house counsel, for whom perfection (or near perfection) is often expected from clients or might be self-imposed.  Yet occasional mistakes and failures are inevitable, even for the most conservative of counsel.  Indeed, clients often want their counsel to take risks that (by definition) may end badly.

With this in mind, take heed of the recent rash of business articles that provide perspective on how to fail the right way:

• Failure is OK, just don’t fail at failure.  The premise is that the benefit of a failure is the “learning” that comes from it.  If valuable lessons are not learned (and you keep repeating what you did previously), then you are “failing at failing.”  See Adam Richardson's Failure Is Failure.
• Failing Forward.  Another view on a successful failure: "when I look back I realize that every failure has moved me forward.  Every failure taught me a lesson and made me stronger, wiser and better.  I failed many times but I failed forward (I first heard this term from John Maxwell)."  See Jon Gordon's Failing Forward.