On Episode 16 of The UNCOVER Pod, I was joined by Ed Turner, the Chairman of Mishcon Future and Executive Board Member at Mishcon de Reya, to discuss his leadership philosophies. Read on to find out more about creating a positive, high-retention culture at work.
How do you create a positive experience for the people in and around your team?
I think authenticity is key. The professionals in our risk team are smart, motivated, ambitious people, and they will smell b******t if you give it to them. Being honest and positive about their opportunities is essential. Then look at the organisation that you’ve got, and keep trying to make up new roles to progress people, and give them a bit more money if you can. Having some key principles and a commitment to development will take you far. All of this should be linked to the value that you bring to the organisation.
A secondary philosophy, which is working out well with us at Mishcon, is that there is a constant movement up in the organisation. We believe that the way we can get the best people is to say that wherever an opportunity comes up in the organisation, we will prioritise our own people who we have prepared to move on. If there’s a senior who wants to move on or a manager who moves away, we will straightaway have a pool of people who we’ve prepared for the position, and they’re confident they have the skills and experience to take that role.
As a result, recruitment shifts to a constant model where we see our primary source of talent in the business as a training pool. We take paralegals in at the bottom, give them the best learning opportunities and train them to be analysts. Then there is an understanding that they need to get ready for a senior analyst role. Obviously, that doesn’t work all the time, but as an underlying philosophy that has built a lot of trust within the team.
You have to acknowledge that you won’t always have the next job for them, but that’s not going to stop us from trying to get people ready and support them to move on in their careers. For every person I might lose because they’re high performers and I can’t offer them that next job at the point where they want to take it, I keep two people who have the faith and confidence that they’ve got the opportunity to go on a career journey with us, and we will either look after them in terms of recognising that and giving them the opportunity to advance or giving them an alternative route that better suits their skills.
What tools or mechanisms do you utilise to maximise the performance and potential of your team?
The primary one is authentic storytelling. It’s all about being able to explain to someone how what they do on a daily basis allows the organisation to fulfil its goals. People who come to a firm like Mishcon want to feel safe. Storytelling translates what they do on a day-to-day basis into ‘We did this as a result of your work’ and ties them into the mission of the organisation.
The second thing is making sure they feel safe. It’s my job to empower the people on my team because I believe in them. They need to believe that if something goes wrong when they make mistakes, I accept responsibility for it. That is another crucial part of what I do.
I’m not doing my job because I am the most informed technical expert in the organisation. I have people who are far more technically experienced than I am in relation to the various aspects of risk that we face as an organisation. My job is not to be the biggest brain in the room, my job is to make sure that all of that talent in the team feels empowered, knows what they’re supposed to do and that they have my support. Good and bad, I’ll be looking out for them.
To hear more about leadership from Ed, tune into Episode 16 of The UNCOVER Pod here.
