(c) Let your people grow (cultivate identity and build a growth-mindset)
The elephant must believe it is capable of making the change. As a leader, ask yourself how can I make people make a change based on the way they see themselves rather than their circumstances. SWITCH identifies two elements to let your people grow: cultivate an identity (of leading legal innovator?), and build a growth-mindset (not a fixed-mindset).
Cultivating identity. “I aspire to be a leading legal-tech innovator!” Would your team embrace the statement to be theirs? If so, you don’t have an identity challenge. If not, you may help your team identify what they pride themselves on. Which one adjective would most flatter them? Creative? dealmaker? customer-obsessed? reliable? top-negotiator? et cetera. If such adjective is one that many team members value, you will probably identify the right identity. Then, whenever your lawyers finalise or upgrade a model contract (or whenever they pass by contract automation), appeal to that identity, to further improving of their performance (and eventually integrating the Weagree Wizard in their work process).
Kick-off. At the kick-off meeting of your contract assembly project, refer to the U-shaped curve from IDEO (see Chapter 4 below). As the height of ‘hope’ and ‘confidence’ draw the picture of your destination postcard (see 2(c) above), announce the forthcoming failures with contract automation – it will help your lawyers respond positively to the inevitable setbacks. Anticipate any hurdles and, where you already ‘know’ any, address them specifically.
For example: “at first, we’re probably going to have some business managers pushing back and demanding their case to be solved first. When that happens, we can’t throw our hands up and quit.” Realise that your team will come to a point where determinedness to succeed vanishes (with an exit as the decision) or insight how to further optimise and succeed in implementing your legal-tech future.
Build a growth-mindset. Embrace a culture of failure with a growth mindset. SWITCH refers to the distinction between a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. With a fixed mindset, people believe their abilities are basically static or stay the same; they avoid challenges and fear that others may perceive them as a failure. With a growth mindset, people believe abilities are like muscles: they can grow with practice, they will accept more challenges despite the risk of failure. SWITCH was written in 2010; more recent denominators would be a ‘lean’ mindset – or just plain ‘innovative’. In order to get good at something you want, first acknowledge you are bad. Every failure is a step closer to consistent success (you would better fail fast in order to learn fast).
Prepare for failure. To accumulate small wins really fast – those that will ‘snowball’ into big changes, prepare for failure. When trying something new such as learning how to work with Weagree’s administrator tooling, you should overcome that contract automation is not about using Word and that to some extent contracts require standardisation and modularisation into building blocks. That important new understanding may be a recipe for failure (and the elephant really hates failure). The attractive side of it is that Weagree’s template creation tool is not one where things can fail: inserting a template is highly intuitive, fit for millennials (who like puzzling and who need only two or three hours of admin training) as well as baby boomers (usually requiring five to seven hours of admin training). every improper functioning Q&A element is easily solved by watching one of our 35 video tutorials explaining how it works, and how to troubleshoot your template.
