Small Business: Leadership development - Mark Lowndes

Mark Lowndes, managing partner at Lowndes.

This week, Small Business editor Caitlin Sykes talks to business owners about leadership development.

Mark Lowndes is managing partner at corporate and commercial law firm Lowndes.

What are some of the leadership challenges you're facing in the business?

I do a lot of reading about what's happening in the legal profession and I think it's clear the profession is changing at a fast pace and there are some quite large pressures on us. Clients are absolutely demanding more demonstrable value. There's also a real skill shortage, because the people coming out of law school have a much greater range of career options, such as working in investment banking or consulting. So we've had to be really thoughtful about how we run our business and we've made some big changes this year, which I think have put us in a really strong position.

What are some of those changes, particularly related to how the business is led?

We have a very corporate model, so we have senior managers managing the business and lawyers focused entirely on clients. But we're a medium-sized business so there's a limit to how expensive the management people are who we can have on board full time. So this year we've been bringing in some quite senior experts from outside the business. We've had five folk from Australia and one from New Zealand come in to either mentor and advise the partners, or to actually run functional parts of our business like IT, marketing and client relationship management. Bringing in these experts on a regular basis is really upskilling us, partners and staff alike. And having some of the functional aspects of our business run at a very senior level has lifted our game quite a lot. As part of developing our people we now also have a mentoring programme where the partners in the firm are investing more of their time developing our internal talent.

Another example is our 'parents in law' programme. We've been wracking our brains for years about how to access all the senior talent that's struggling to reconnect to the legal profession, and I think with this programme we've found a really good meeting place now between the needs of our clients and those parents. We've come up with a system that works around them being available to some extent every day, but thanks to some good communication tools we don't care where they're working. Earlier this year we went to a paperless office, and we've invested a lot in our remote working technology, so with those administrative changes the programme is working really well.

What else is on your horizon in terms of developing your leadership capability and capacity?

We're part of three different networks of law firms and I spend a reasonable amount of time at conferences around the world. That's an ongoing learning process, whether that's through formal conference sessions or talking to partners in firms around the world. After every one of those conferences I come back with new thoughts and ideas.

And as I said, another aspect of our business that we're working on is pricing. Clients are really wanting to see and understand value, so we're just starting a programme with a specialist in that area that's getting us thinking better about that. Although we're spending money on bringing on more external expertise to shape our business and relationships with clients, we're also stripping out costs because for clients legal fees are expensive and we can't keep increasing our rates. We've invested in things like the paperless office, and a completely new practice management system, and those improve our efficiencies with things like filing, emails, and creating documents and the savings are demonstrable.

What's the biggest lesson you've learnt about enhancing your leadership capabilities?

This year it's very much been about learning. I've spent a bit of time this year in an organisation called Entrepreneurs' Organisation, which is probably one of the best things I've done for myself in a long time. It's advanced my thinking on the need to not get comfortable. You can't just say 'I've done this for 30 years, I must know it all'. When you're busy it's easy not to invest time in upskilling and challenging your personal practices, but learning is an ongoing journey.