Leveraging Lawyers' Strengths and Training Them to Support Team Problem-Solving Under Crisis Conditions

SCOTT WESTFAHL

In... a [crisis] situation, professionals often perceive the lawyer who gets in the way of timely action as an obstacle to dealing with the event. Attorneys may find themselves literally locked out of emergency operations centers unless they have taken the pains to become a part of the team during the early stages of emergency management.

—anonymous senior crisis leadership practitioner

I don't want my lawyer to keep me out of court; I want my lawyer to keep me out of jail.

—anonymous Federal Coordinating Officer at FEMA

Crisis situations typically present significant legal and ethical challenges. Law­yers often play a critical role in sorting, analyzing, and proactively addressing these challenges. Their legal training and expertise provide them with power­ful capabilities to help lead in a crisis and to provide critical input. However, some of their learned behaviors and tendencies may create significant imped­iments to successful crisis resolution. In the context of the groundbreaking meta-leadership model developed jointly by scholars at the Harvard School of Public Health and Kennedy School of Government,¹ I will discuss how lawyers can successfully cultivate and leverage their skills, experience, and problem-solving abilities to help lead in a crisis. I also offer suggestions as to how to train lawyers to improve their awareness of, and help to mitigate against, counterproductive activities and reactions that they may exhibit when under stress in a crisis.

The Meta-leadership Model

Developed in the wake of September 11, the groundbreaking meta-leadership model for crisis leadership is based on an extensive survey of international leadership experience of both failures and successes. It integrates and trans­lates leadership analysis, practice, and scholarship into five dimensions of leadership practice.

The Upside: Common Learned and Natural Strengths of Lawyers in a Crisis

While some traits and learned behaviors of lawyers can inhibit them from contributing most productively in a crisis, the good news is that they com­monly bring many positive strengths to the crisis leadership table. Some of those strengths seem to be inherent in the “lawyer personality,” and others are shaped over time by legal education and practice settings that select for and reward certain characteristics and behaviors over others. The danger of this analysis, of course, is stereotyping and applying broad generalizations to a very large, diverse group of people. Nonetheless, significant analyses by schol­ars of the legal profession, and observations by experts in the crisis leadership field, support the necessity of this discussion and framework.

Strengths Inherent in the Lawyer Personality

In training senior law firm leaders and in-house counsel about leadership at Harvard Law School Executive Education, we directly address the implica­tions of common personality traits among lawyers. Using a framework drawn from motivational psychology and a related “personal values questionnaire,”³ we have, by engaging with thousands of lawyers, confirmed that the great majority of top lawyers are motivated primarily by a high need for achieve­ment. That need drives lawyers to seek autonomy, competition, and, above all, challenging tasks into which they put a tremendous amount of focused energy. They want to understand the rules and parameters of a situation or challenge and then want to go off to work on it alone to produce what they believe to be a perfect work product. In working on a challenge, they can become captive to their high need for achievement, meaning that it is hard to pull them out of their task and to expect them to do anything other than the articulated task at hand. Thus, it becomes critical to frame their tasks broadly to encompass the full range of contributions expected of them.

The high need for achievement drive is a critical lens through which to view lawyers' crisis-related personality strengths because it explains much of their natural working style in a crisis. They have an incredible ability to focus and work through all aspects of a difficult problem. Additionally, in part due to their competitive nature, they have a natural orientation toward learning and gathering additional information—an inherent curiosity—that can con­tribute importantly to analyzing a complex situation.

Legal Education and Practice Effects

My colleague David Wilkins and I have written extensively about lawyer development and how traditional legal education is increasingly out of step with the market for legal services and what effective lawyering now and, more importantly, in the future will require.⁴ We have been very careful to acknowledge, however, that traditional models of legal education and law­yer development within the early years of corporate legal practice produce significant, highly relevant benefits.

At its core, legal analytical rigor is the ability to view a problem from all conceivable angles and then articulate and persuade effectively on behalf of any stakeholder affected by the problem. This approach requires lawyers to sort through a mass of data and potentially misleading information to discern the facts and evidence that most effectively supports a particular stakeholder's viewpoint. No stone is left unturned, and “negative facts”—the absence of confirming evidence—are treated with due respect and attention as much as directly confirming “actual facts” and evidence. Among all positive law­yer traits, this ability can often in a crisis start to look like a superhero's superpower-with great force, lawyers work the problem to cut through the noise and misdirection inherent in a crisis to identify the “real” problem and potential ways through it.

Additionally, traditional legal education and corporate lawyer develop­ment greatly enhance lawyers' communication and persuasion/advocacy skills. Because so much of crisis leadership can depend on effective commu­nication to multiple stakeholders with often competing agendas, these skills can be highly useful.⁵ As much as it can sometimes inhibit learning through intimidation, the US law school classroom's Socratic approach requires law students to critically analyze and communicate complex problems and ideas on the spot in the context of a broader, conceptual discussion of legal, ethi­cal, and societal norms. Sound familiar? Arguably, no other general model of professional education prepares students more effectively to lead in a crisis, given that a critical pillar of crisis leadership is the ability to communicate effectively under great pressure and stress. Law school training in that sense might be compared to the legendary stories of how Tiger Woods's father, Earl, trained his young son to putt and make golf shots under pressure by standing behind him making noises and creating distractions.

The rigors of legal practice also contribute to lawyers' ability to function in a crisis. Whether in private practice or public sector/government legal po­sitions, high-need-for-achievement lawyers typically work very, very hard under a great deal of stress, managing multiple projects at once and hold­ing themselves accountable to a very high standard of analytical and work product accountability. Their self-motivated, competitive drive for perfection ensures that they do not give up when facing a challenge and don't lose their focus when others might. Lawyers are often the reliable team members who responsibly perform assigned tasks and help keep the crisis team focused on timelines, deliverables, and end goals.

Finally, traditional legal education's emphasis on the dispassionate consid­eration of facts and positions provides lawyers with a mind-set that can be particularly helpful in a crisis. As the temperature rises and a crisis triggers significant and varied emotional responses from stakeholders, legal training helps lawyers to step back and more calmly assess what is happening. They are trained first to listen and then to sort facts from emotion, to analyze the situation and suggest options. By slowing down the process, lawyers can help mitigate against the knee-jerk, emotional responses and actions or inactions that can add fuel to the fire in a crisis.

A recent conversation with the general counsel (GC) of a global profes­sional firm illustrates an extreme example of how this works. The CEO of the firm called the GC into her office to demand the immediate, “perp-walk” firing of a senior executive with whom the CEO was very upset. The CEO wanted to ignore the required due process and investigation and all of the negative ramifications of such an action. Brilliantly, instead of trying to push back against the CEO's strong emotional affect, the GC immediately “pulled a Frank Underwood”⁶ and told the CEO he would immediately call police as well as building security and march the senior executive out of the office, shut off all computer access, and have staff pack up and send the personal con­tents of the executive's office for delivery to his home that afternoon.

Meta-leadership Model Benefits

The above-described personality traits of lawyers and attributes of the tradi­tional lawyer development model prepare lawyers to contribute significantly to effective meta-leadership in a crisis. There are some other benefits that we should mention.

Self-awareness. First, with respect to the dimension of self-awareness and self-regulation, effective meta-leadership most importantly requires a leader to mitigate against the “amygdala hijack” that often freezes leaders in a primal fight, flight, or freeze mode.⁷ The model posits that leaders need to be able to move from the “emotional basement” of that initial, stress-induced ac­tivation of the amygdalae to the “middle” of the brain where prefrontal cortex, higher-level, complex, rational reasoning can occur. Legal training instills in lawyers an autoresponse toward dispassionate, critical thinking, and the rigors of legal practice build significant muscle memory that they can leverage to be the actors in a crisis who keep calm, keep thinking, and move a team toward rational consideration of the situation and more effective decision-making. For example, former president Barack Obama's legal training likely helped him to achieve his ability to be seen as the “cool” head in a crisis, rarely to be rattled, even though he has also faced significant criticism for just that virtue.⁸

Accurate diagnosis of the crisis. The second dimension of meta-leadership requires an “evidence-based, clear and actionable descrip­tion of what is occurring” and “the ability to convey it to others.”⁹ Legal ana­lytical rigor is ideally suited to provide the former, whereas legal advocacy and communication training is extremely useful for the latter. In simulation­based training of lawyers and law students, we have noted their extraordinary ability to adopt the viewpoint of a stakeholder, thoroughly explore it, and then passionately and effectively advocate for that viewpoint. To fully leverage their training, lawyers in a crisis should be tasked with broadly identifying stakeholders, rigorously analyzing their perspectives, and synthesizing that data and information into an actionable understanding of the situation.

Managing up. Meta-leadership fails without effective managing “up,” which involves effectively working with and influencing those to whom lead­ers are accountable.¹⁰ This is a particular strength of lawyers because, through their legal training and practice, lawyers internalize a deep desire to serve their clients by listening to them, advocating for them, advising them, and protecting them against obvious and potential risks. They are trained to main­tain a dispassionate, level-headed demeanor and approach and also to present hard truths to their clients when needed—all of which closely align with this dimension of the meta-leadership model. Good lawyers are also adept at serv­ing clients with widely varying temperaments and working styles, a critical skill of the meta-leader.

Managing across. To be effective, a meta-leader must “influence, engage, and unify” many different stakeholders to “create unity of effort.”11 Meta-leadership benefits greatly if “cross-system linkages” can be built in advance, in part through formal agreements. It is clear that lawyers, given their impressive commercial success in the corporate deal space, are particu­larly well trained and well suited to the tasks of working with stakeholders to identify collaboration opportunities and then drafting formal agreements to codify those opportunities and provide a clear, helpful roadmap for action when certain events occur. Engaging legal counsel in such efforts in advance of crises would be highly beneficial to the goal of “managing across” and en­suring the likelihood of stakeholder cooperation.

The Downside: Potential Blind Spots That Impede Lawyers' Ability to Add Value in a Crisis

The learned and naturally occurring strengths that lawyers bring to a cri­sis are unfortunately also often paired with several important potential blind spots. It is important for lawyers to become self-aware about these blind spots and for those working with lawyers in a crisis also to be able to identify and mitigate them.

Teamwork

As helpful as it is that high-need-for-achievement lawyers love challeng­ing tasks and attack them with incredible analytical rigor, their desire for autonomy can hinder the highly collaborative, multi-input, multi-stakeholder, inclusive process that effective crisis leadership can require. We observe this phenomenon as early as first year of law school. One Harvard faculty mem­ber who teaches at both Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School notes that, when he gives students a team-based assignment, business-school students get together in their teams and work out the problem in the same room to produce their best team answer. By contrast, his law students meet quickly after class, divide up the project, go back to their individual dorm rooms or apartments to work on their parts, and then assign one team mem­ber the task of integrating all of the various pieces of the assignment. Without any intervention, law students' method of working in teams leaves a lot to be desired! When I share this anecdote with practicing lawyers in our Harvard Law School Executive Education leadership programs, they sheepishly laugh and admit that is how they used to work, too.

Because traditional legal education requires little or no teamwork and rarely if ever provides any deeper guidance about how to work in teams,¹² lawyers enter the profession underprepared for collaborative work, even though their clients are increasingly demanding it?³ Extensive experience and interviews with practicing lawyers in both private practice and the public sector confirm that the great majority of lawyer “teams” working on projects are not actually what other professions would consider to be teams. Rather, they are hierar­chical, loose working groups where a senior person controls client contact, a midlevel “quarterback” person communicates up and down the chain, and individual contributors perform various tasks with little or no contact with each other or the broader purpose of the team's effort. There is no team launch or kickoff, there are few if any team meetings, information is shared loosely on a need-to-know, hierarchical basis, and the teams rarely if ever meet during or after the project to share lessons learned or any ideas about how to work more effectively together. By contrast, consulting, accounting, engineering, and mili­tary teams all employ team protocols and processes—some quite formal—to ensure team alignment, efficiency, and engagement.

So where does this leave us? Crisis team members may falsely assume that lawyers participating on the crisis team know how to work in a team effectively. This can lead to great disappointment or frustration when the autonomy-seeking lawyer fails to communicate or share information effec­tively with other team members and/or does not understand that a team ef­fort, especially with a diverse team, provides a better solution by leveraging team members' individual and collective strengths. Other potential lawyer blind spots compound these issues, as illustrated below.

Low Resilience and Sociability

Personality assessments of lawyers suggest strongly that lawyers are lower on the scale of resilience and sociability traits compared to other profession- als.¹⁴ We see evidence of those findings through many reports of lawyers being particularly thin-skinned and defensive when receiving criticism and constructive feedback. More quickly and more aggressively, they become defensive. Rather than listen and learn, their natural instinct is to justify their action(s) or inaction(s) and even attack (actively or passively) the person offering the criticism. Exacerbating this effect is the fact that legal training has finely honed their ability to defend, justify, persuade, and even attack. Clearly, this can be dysfunctional in a crisis environment where the team requires each team member to be fully engaged, share openly, and stay focused on the challenge at hand rather than the egos in the room.

Skepticism and the Pessimistic Explanatory Style of Lawyers

Psychologists studying lawyers are concerned that lawyers have a higher degree of skepticism compared to other professionals?⁵ The founder of posi­tive psychology, Dr. Martin Seligmann, has artfully described how lawyers are highly selected and paid/rewarded for their uniquely powerful, pessimistic perspective.1⁶ As a simple example, a transactional/deal lawyer must antici­pate in advance all the things that could go wrong with the deal and then structure the deal's legal documents to account for all potential negative events that might occur down the road. Lawyers are often deliberately positioned to play the devil's advocate role and/or to be the guardian against undue busi­ness, ethical, and existential risk. In-house counsel, for example, are given the unenviable role of enabling the business but also guarding against and saying “no” to their business partners, who may propose that the business engage in unwise/unethical/potentially illegal conduct. High-need-for-achievement lawyers will take risks but only realistic risks, which can sometimes frustrate company executives whose risk tolerance is much greater and indeed highly incentivized by their reward/compensation structures.

The ramifications of this for crisis teams are at times profound, including:

• Lawyers may impede effective crisis brainstorming by too quickly and too negatively shooting down presented ideas. The best brainstorming requires a broadening of options before that narrowing and critical thinking is applied?⁷

• When lawyers encounter push-back or even mild criticism from crisis team members, their egos may be more bruised than other team members realize and lawyers' defensive/unhelpful emotional responses to criticism may confuse the team at best and completely undermine it at worst.

• Lawyers may shut down their own creative contributions to crisis resolu­tion by preconceiving their role too narrowly. They are incredibly smart and have great potential to offer out-of-the-box ideas. Yet if they perceive that their only role is to mitigate risk, those contributions will be lost.

Risk Aversion

As noted above, high-need-for-achievement lawyers have a high degree of risk aversion and compound that when they are either (1) positioned only to play the role of devil's advocate/skeptic or (2) adopt that posture on the crisis team themselves. In addition to undermining brainstorming and the lawyer's ability to contribute creatively to team problem-solving, risk aversion results in an agent-versus-principal issue. Lawyers on a crisis team are often required to make the call on a key issue and to act. Legal training and their natural risk aversion may leave them paralyzed, however, for several reasons. First, legal training emphasizes the gathering of all facts and information and deep analysis of every possible avenue or potentiality. Yet all important decisions in a crisis are by definition made with incomplete information. The question is when to stop the analysis and decide, and lawyers may be prone to over­analysis and then paralysis at critical times. Second, legal training emphasizes the consideration of a problem from all possible angles. A lawyer's answer to a legal question often begins with the phrase, “Well, on the one hand...” and a common joke among lawyers' business partners is that they are dealing with the “one-handed” lawyer who presents options but is incapable of making a recommendation. Lawyers' natural risk aversion compounds this problem, of course, as making a recommendation requires the lawyer to assume some element of risk for the course he or she recommends. As a result, lawyers may opt for “safer” solutions than optimal when leading in a crisis.¹⁸

The Advocacy Trap

Lawyers are trained to be black belts in advocacy, but that is sometimes dys­functional on a crisis team. Optimal team decision-making requires that potential solutions be thoroughly vetted, which lawyers can do very well if they have no ego invested in the analysis. The problem arises when a well- trained, persuasive lawyer out-advocates others on the crisis team and puts “winning” the discussion ahead of finding the optimal solution. Worse, if the low resilience, thin-skinned lawyer “loses” the discussion, he or she may unproductively disengage from the crisis team for a while to heal a bruised ego. It becomes imperative for the lawyer to be self-aware and to help create a team environment that leverages the proven benefits of psychological safety and inclusion.

Meta-leadership Model Concerns

While we have noted that lawyer personality traits and legal training and experience can enhance the exercise of meta-leadership in a crisis, so too can they have significant negative effects.

Self-awareness. This is a foundational element of meta-leadership, but unfortunately, in our observation and experience, lawyers are among the least self-reflective professionals. First, legal training establishes a culture of always putting the client first rather than investing time in one's own reflec­tive processes or growth. It is only recently that leadership development for lawyers has become an accepted practice, and even then, in most legal orga­nizations, leadership development is much more limited than in comparable professional organizations. Second, because very few law schools or legal em­ployers train lawyers to work in teams and lawyers are rarely assessed on their EQ skills, they may have a less-developed “understanding of the impact that personality, experience, culture, emotional expression and character have on others,” which is fundamental to the meta-leadership model.¹⁹

Accurate diagnosis of the crisis. The concern here is that legal training in analytical rigor may lead lawyers to insist on overanalysis of all facts in a crisis. In the meta-leadership model, “a quick assessment that is close to the mark and moves the process forward is better than a slow though more accurate one that comes too late to make a difference.”²⁰ Among those who criticized lawyer and President Barack Obama's crisis leadership style, many cited frustrations with his very deliberate, slow-paced (in their view) fact-finding.

Leading the base. The meta-leadership model suggests that effective leaders need to develop “strong, smart, capable followers not seen as [a] threat but rather as a valuable asset.”21 Leaders must be committed to leadership devel­opment and the empowerment of their followers. In our experience with lead­ership training for lawyers, we encounter several barriers here. First, lawyers trained to err on the side of perfectionism tend to delegate poorly. Rather than employ a “highest and best use of my time” test, they decide whether they can do something better than their subordinate and, if so, decide not to delegate.

Implications for Improving Lawyers' Ability to Add Value in a Crisis There are many ways that the legal profession and the crisis leadership world can collaborate to improve lawyers' ability to add value in a crisis.

Building lawyer self-awareness. Most critical is for legal aca­demia and organizations to help lawyers become more self-aware of their potential blind spots related to crisis leadership. Helping lawyers to name and understand these learned and natural proclivities can build their mus­cle memory to recognize and mitigate against them in a crisis. Law schools and legal organizations should provide training related to lawyer person­ality and leadership and consider those equally important to the provi­sion of training related to substantive legal topics.²² Intensive executive education leadership programs modeled after traditional business school leadership programs can provide a forum for such training for practicing lawyers?³ One of the most effective methods we have applied is using busi­ness school-style cases and simulations with groups of lawyers to illustrate how lawyer personality traits can impede effective decision-making in a crisis, for example.

Working in teams. More particularly, law students and practicing lawyers should be introduced to research, tools, and experiences that signifi­cantly enhance their ability to work more effectively in teams, particularly in a crisis where effective team communication and leveraging diverse team member's strengths becomes critically important. Using an adaptive leader­ship model based on the work of Harvard Kennedy School professor Ron Heifetz, we ask small groups of lawyers to form and name their own law firms and then work as an executive committee to make difficult decisions in three separate, challenging scenarios. We observe participants' deliberations and interactions and help them to understand how their natural and/or learned personality traits impact their ability to work together effectively. In partic­ular, we focus on how lawyers tend to become thin-skinned and defensive when challenged and/or move too quickly to advocacy mode, which can in­troduce destructive power dynamics into the team's deliberations.

Within law schools, requiring significantly more team-based projects would be a very helpful start, provided that students would be introduced to and taught to apply basic team tools and processes. Team launches, team feedback, and team reflection tools are common across many professions but almost never applied in the legal profession. In the team-based courses I teach, students overwhelmingly report better results and higher satisfaction with their team experiences when we require them to learn and apply team- related tools and processes.

Mind-set shifting. The growth of mindfulness and resilience training for professionals—including lawyers—is a step forward toward helping law­yers adopt a more positive, growth-oriented mind-set.²⁴ This does not mean that lawyers should no longer play the role of skeptic or devil's advocate (for which they are often highly valued). Rather, lawyers need to become aware of the particular mind-set and approach they should bring to different roles they are playing. Crisis teams should clarify—and potentially broaden—their understanding of their expectations of lawyers on their teams. The “SALT” model adopted by FEMA's lawyers under the leadership of former FEMA gen­eral counsel Brad Kieserman is a great example of setting such expectations to leverage lawyers' strengths fully on a crisis team.

Design thinking as a problem-solving tool. As design thinking-based problem solving has moved from the world of products to the world of services, there is increasing interest among lawyers in how to apply design thinking to solve particularly tricky problems they encounter. For several years, I have taught design thinking approaches to law students and practicing lawyers and believe that it has a lot of potential to help lawyers function more effectively during a crisis. Design thinking-based problem­solving requires progression through five stages: empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing. Learning how to progress through these stages can enhance lawyers' crisis leadership capabilities, as follows:

• Empathy. Designers develop empathy by observation and open-ended questioning of a broad group of stakeholders, particularly focused on “extreme” users or people who love or hate a particular product or service. Lawyers become better listeners when practicing these skills, and they also learn how to interview in a much less biased way—a critical skill to have when gathering facts in a crisis.

• Problem definition. Too often, lawyers feel a need to show immediately that they are the smartest people in the room. As a result, we find that they sometimes jump too quickly to believing they understand a problem with­out fully exploring it. Designers spend most of their time at the problem­definition stage to ensure that they are not designing a hammer looking for a nail that doesn't exist. Having conducted numerous design sprints, hack- athons, and workshops with lawyers, I have observed that helping them to seek broader context and center their problem definition in empathy for an end user or client helps them to define the problem(s) at hand much more effectively. I believe this stage of design thinking training can help lawyers in a crisis to think more holistically about the problem(s) at hand rather than viewing a crisis solely through a narrow, technical legal lens.

• Ideation. The ideation phase of design thinking requires creativity and an ability to brainstorm and build on teammates’ ideas. Lawyers' natural and trained proclivity is to hear an idea and immediately start to attack it from all angles to test its merits. Designers first broaden their lens of potential solutions by deliberately including “wild” ideas in the mix before they start to narrow toward a solution set. In my experience in helping lawyers to fol­low brainstorming guidelines, I have been encouraged that, with prompts and structure, lawyers can generate ideas that are truly creative and inter­esting (and on par with those that designers themselves might develop).

• Prototyping. Legal education drills into lawyers’ mind-sets the need to be perfect the first time. There can be no typos missed and no citation in error when you submit a brief to a court; neither can there be a misplaced comma in a term sheet that might dramatically alter the economics of a deal. Yet what designers do is decidedly different. Once a hypothesis is developed from research and brainstorming surfaces possible approaches, designers start prototyping quickly and roughly to be able to start testing whether they are on the right track. This notion of “failing quickly” and then learning is antithetical to the way lawyers are trained and the way we practice law or run legal organizations. Far too often, after a “pilot” ap­proach at a law firm fails to meet all objectives, partners are much more re­sistant to piloting similar approaches in the future. It is not uncommon to hear law firm administrative professionals complain about partners urging them to “do something really innovative” and then continue on by asking “what are all the other firms doing?” Training lawyers to prototype quickly is quite a stretch for them at first, but success is possible if metrics are es­tablished in advance to measure learning rather than whether a prototype perfectly addresses the client’s pain points. Putting lawyers in design teams and closely coaching them through their uneasiness with prototyping can produce surprisingly creative results.

• Testing. As prototypes are developed and testing is required, it is important to guide lawyers about how to measure success and how to capture related learning. Helping lawyers to develop those metrics themselves in a design simulation embeds the learning much more successfully than imposing it on them, as learning from failure needs to become a cultural norm rather than a mandatory duty. By analogy, General John Kelly relates how the US Marines have become more successful by changing the way they evalu­ate Marines as leaders. Traditionally, Marines have been trained to have a bias toward action and were evaluated on whether they took initiative and what results they achieved. It was career-limiting for a Marine to receive an after-action evaluation of “good initiative, bad judgment.” Today, the Ma­rines retain their bias toward action but focus on learning from mistakes. Thus, the after-action review instead would say “good initiative, what did we learn from it?”

Leadership development. As my colleague David Wilkins and I have strenuously argued, lawyer development at law schools and in legal organiza­tions needs to include the education of lawyers across a much broader spec­trum of leadership and professional skills. To prepare lawyers to add more value in a crisis, lawyer development must include training, tools, and experiences that help them to listen, give and receive feedback, communicate, facilitate, ne­gotiate, analyze, think creatively and innovatively, and exercise judgment and to apply both legal and ethical frameworks in the broader context of a crisis. It is a hopeful sign that more law schools are initiating leadership training for law students, using simulations and cases drawn from real-life experiences. Ex­ecutive education leadership programs across the arc of a lawyer's career can also positively affect their ability to add value during a crisis. Several of the case studies developed by Harvard Law School Executive Education directly address leadership in a crisis, including cases that consider the role of in-house lawyers involved in the General Motors ignition switch recall; having difficult conversations with a company's board during a crisis; managing a law firm suc­cessfully through a global financial crisis; and applying principles of adaptive leadership to meet new challenges. Some cases have also been developed for training law students and younger law firm associates, such as a case that asks students to play the role of an in-house lawyer who needs to deal with a product recall resulting from lead paint being found on toys; or a case about a mid-level associate at a law firm whose career and personal life may be unraveling due to passivity and false assumptions. Such cases help lawyers to build important perspective-taking and leadership skills, all of which are helpful in a crisis.

Finally, it is important that lawyers' learned and natural strengths and po­tential blind spots be on the radar and visible to leaders and crisis team mem­bers who are not lawyers.²⁵ This effort to unpack the world of crisis lawyering is a very important first step toward raising awareness and starting a produc­tive dialogue that will have benefits across the broad field of crisis leadership.

Conclusion

While legal education and training provide lawyers with important critical skills for leadership in a crisis, lawyers also have blind spots and areas of relative deficiency that can derail effective crisis leadership. In the context of the meta­leadership model, we can greatly appreciate that lawyers have certain core skills that can be leveraged effectively to build situational awareness and an accurate diagnosis of a crisis, as well as to “manage up” and “manage across” particularly well. It is important, though, to understand that lawyers may fail to contribute to meta-leadership in a crisis due to their reluctance to self-reflect, their desire for perfection through endless deliberation, and their relative inability to work well in teams. Legal academic education and executive education for practic­ing lawyers provide avenues through which lawyers can build critical skills for working well in a crisis, and training lawyers in a design thinking-based prob­lem solving is particularly promising in that regard.

NOTES

Epigraphs from Eric Stern et al., Advice in Crisis: Leaders, Lawyers and the Art of Disaster Management, in Homeland Security Handbook: Strategic Guidance for a Coordinated Approach to Effective Security and Emergency Management 715 (David J. Kamien ed., 2nd ed. 2012).

1 Dr. Leonard J. Marcus et al., Crisis Preparedness & Crisis Response, in Homeland Security Handbook: Strategic Guidance for a Coordinated Approach to Effective Security and Emergency Management 679-709 (David G. Kamien ed., 2nd ed. 2012). See also, Leonard J. Marcus et al., You’re It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When It Matters Most (2019).

2 See Arjen Boin et al., The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure (2005).

3 This assessment is drawn from the work of David C. McClelland in The Achieving Society. See David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (1961).

4 See Scott A. Westfahl & David B. Wilkins, The Leadership Imperative: A Collaborative Approach to Professional Development in the Global Age of More for Less, 69 Stan. L. Rev. 1667 (2017).

5 Andrew J. DuBrin, Handbook of Research on Crisis Leadership in Organizations 8-10 (2013); Leslie DeChurch et al., A Historic Analysis of Leadership in Mission CriticalMultiteam Environments, 22 Leadership Q. 162 (2011).

6 From the Netflix series House of Cards.

7 Marcus et al., Crisis Preparedness, 687.

8 See, e.g., Boin et al., The Politics of Crisis Management (discussing the critical importance of empathy in crisis leadership and crisis lawyering); Stern et al., chapter 13 in this volume.

9 Boin et al., The Politics of Crisis Management, 689.

10 Id. at 694.

11 Id. at 697.

12 See Westfahl & Wilkins, The Leadership Imperative. The author of this chapter is currently developing a new, team-based leadership course for first-year students at Harvard Law School and is incorporating specific teaching, tools, and frameworks to help law students work more effectively in teams.

Heidi K. Gardner, Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos (2016).

Larry Richard, Leadership Competencies in Law, in Law and Leadership: Integrating Leadership Studies Into the Law School Curriculum 35 (Paula Monopoli & Susan McCarty eds., 2013); Larry Richard, Herding Cats: The Lawyer Personality Revealed, 29 Rep. to Legal Mgmt. 1 (2002); Larry Richard & Lisa Rohrer, A Breed Apart?, The American Lawyer 43-44 (July 1, 2011).

Richard, Leadership Competencies; Richard, Herding Cats.

Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (2002).

Brainstorming, IDEO, www.ideou.com; Brainstorm Rules, Design Kit, www. designkit.com.

See Stern et al., Advice in Crisis, 729-31, for a helpful discussion about how lawyers in a crisis view risk and how, ideally, lawyers should be trained to understand that “legal risks must be weighed against other forms of risk” and that “[l]awyers who seek to avoid legal risk completely will be perceived as obstacles to effective disaster management and are likely to be marginalized within their teams.” Marcus et al., Crisis Preparedness, 686.

Id. at 690.

Id. at 693.

As noted above, the author of this chapter has developed a new leadership course for first-year Harvard Law School students that includes such training.

For a thorough discussion of the lawyer executive education model, see Scott Westfahl, Learning to Lead: Perspective on Bridging the Lawyer Leadership Gap, in Leadership for Lawyers 163-74 (Heidi K. Gardner & Rebecca Normand- Hochman eds., 2nd ed. 2019).

See the materials on lawyers and resilience and lawyers and well-being at www. pauladavislaack.com.

In our leadership programs for senior law-firm leaders and general counsel at Harvard Law School, we routinely and emphatically remind participants not to use the term “nonlawyers” to refer to the professionals without a law degree with whom they are working. The term is pejorative and often leads to resentment among professionals with whom lawyers need to collaborate!

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