What motivates lawyers?

The price of shoveling manure

Traditionally, many law firm managers have assumed that compensation was their main tool for motivating lawyers to work hard for their clients and to produce profits for their firm. Yet we know that salary alone is not enough to make someone love their job. Consider a hypothetical employee who’s paid $1 million per year to shovel manure. They probably wouldn’t say, “I love my job because I get paid a ton of money to shovel manure.” They’d be more likely to say, “I hate my job, but I can’t quit because I get paid so much. I guess I’ll have to keep doing it because no one else will match my pay.”

Law firm managers who misunderstand what motivates their lawyer employees may try to solve motivational problems using tools that are destined for failure.

More than 50 years ago, Frederick Herzberg argued that there are two primary sets of factors that influence employee satisfaction: extrinsic factors and intrinsic factors. (Herzberg called them “hygiene factors” and “motivational factors.”) Extrinsic factors relate mostly to the employee’s external environment. Examples of extrinsic factors include salary, company policy, and the way their boss treats them. Intrinsic factors are internal to the job itself. Examples of intrinsic factors include the meaningfulness of the work, achievement, recognition, responsibility, and advancement.

But Herzberg’s contribution wasn’t simply showing that employees are motivated both intrinsically and extrinsically. His insight was that these factors work on two distinct spectrums. Extrinsic factors meet needs, without which an employee can be extremely dissatisfied. Intrinsic factors breed fulfillment in a job, and can motivate an employee to truly love their job and do their best and most creative work. Put another way, the extrinsic factors will never make an employee love their job. But almost all employees will hate a job if the extrinsic factors are mismanaged. The intrinsic factors, on the other hand, won’t meet the employee’s needs, but if the extrinsic needs are met, intrinsic factors can create a highly fulfilling and motivating environment.

Notice that salary is an extrinsic factor. Salary will never turn a horrible job into a wonderful one. If you aren’t paid enough to pay your rent, you’ll hate your job. But salary doesn’t transform tedious work into meaningful work.

Similarly, vacation time or time off work is an extrinsic factor. If you don’t have enough time to rest, you’ll quickly run out of energy or develop serious health problems. But a job you hate doesn’t suddenly become meaningful when you get Fridays off.

Environmental factors are not interchangeable.

I have a friend who’s an extremely successful lawyer with a sterling reputation. She was earning a healthy income and had plenty of work to do. Yet her mental health began to suffer. Her practice was successful. She was recognized for her skill and professionalism. And yet, she was struggling. With the help of a therapist, she evaluated whether she still wanted to be a lawyer.  She realized that she actually liked being a lawyer, there was just too much of it.  To be healthy, she needed to set some inviolate boundaries around her work schedule. Her boundaries involved tradeoffs. She had to be more careful at managing her caseload which meant saying no to cases that might have once seemed attractive. She had to rethink some of her financial goals. But she realized that she didn’t have much of a choice because she wasn’t going to be able to sustain her career much longer under unhealthy conditions.  The process didn’t happen overnight, but over the course of six months, she was able to make some radical changes in her practice.  Once she made healthy changes, she came to enjoy her practice as she hadn’t in years and was able to do even more extraordinary work for her clients.

Something I learn from her story is that environmental factors are not interchangeable. Just as you can’t treat a plant that’s suffering from a lack of water by giving it extra sunlight, an overworked lawyer can’t compensate for unhealthy stress by earning more money. My friend hit a wall and recognized that she had to start changing things or leave the practice altogether. 

Meditation, going for walks, and taking relaxing baths are all useful tools for dealing with unusual stress. But if our environment is fundamentally unhealthy, we need to have the courage to change things and learn what our personal minimum environmental requirements are to properly function. A person with clinical depression, anxiety, or other mental health disorders needs to be even more careful to create a healthy environment for themselves and to do so with the guidance of a mental health professional.

Intrinsically satisfying work

Have you ever looked at your schedule for a day or for a week and thought, “I can’t wait to do that!” That’s intrinsically satisfying work. It’s work that you’re doing for its own sake. Not because it earns you more money, but because the work itself excites you.

Some of us might think that only artists, professional athletes, and English teachers get the privilege of doing work that’s exciting for its own sake. Every now and then you might find someone who’s found the work that fits their passion. But most of us have to endure a lot of drudgery for 40 years or so and then retire to devote ourselves to our hobbies.

Cal Newport and other proponents of Self-Determination Theory argue that what you do is not as important as how you do it. They observe that most people can find intrinsic satisfaction in many different vocations as long as three psychological needs are met: (1) autonomy, (2)  competence, and (3) relatedness. Autonomy is control over your actions and the knowledge that your choices are important. Competence is confidence that you are good at what you’re doing. Relatedness is connection to the people around you.

Managers at law firms that provide a generally healthy environment have gone a long way toward maximizing the potential of their employees. However, if they ignore the intrinsic factors, they leave a lot of value on the table and may lose great employees to more satisfying opportunities.

How do you make legal work more intrinsically satisfying?

If extrinsic factors like salary, time off, and management practices are mismanaged, no amount of intrinsic motivation will attract and keep high-performing employees. However, once those extrinsic needs are met, law firm managers should look for ways to give employees greater autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Each can make the work more intrinsically satisfying.

Autonomy

A lawyer I greatly respect once said, “In order to be a good lawyer, you have to indulge all your compulsive tendencies and repress all your impulsive tendencies.” There was probably some truth in that advice. Mistakes by lawyers can be costly. But when managers indulge their compulsive tendencies too much, they become micromanagers and their employees never grow.

In one of my early legal jobs every word I wrote was reviewed by my supervisor. I couldn’t write a letter to a client saying, “We received these documents. We’ll let you know when we’ve had a chance to review them,” without the letter getting redlined. From my supervisor’s perspective, he probably thought, “This is important. These clients paid us a lot of money to do this. I can’t permit any errors.”

Employees tend to respond to greater trust by growing and becoming more capable. In a Harvard Business Review case study, the managers of a group of stockholders correspondents tested some approaches to greater autonomy. In one intervention, “Supervisors who had proofread and signed all letters now checked only 10%.” The extra trust paid off. The correspondents’ motivation grew and the quality and accuracy of their letters improved as well.

When we have control over our work it is more intrinsically satisfying.

Competence

Years ago I hired a bright new law school graduate in my criminal defense practice and gave him this challenge: “You’re going to be our immigration expert.” While this may have been an exciting dose of autonomy, I failed to give him the tools to become a competent expert in an extremely complex area of law. He’s gone on to excel in other areas of law which demonstrates to me that his poor performance as an immigration lawyer wasn’t due to a lack of intelligence. It was due to my failure to properly train and support him.

It can be easy to forget how painful and time consuming it was for us to learn to practice law. Law firm managers may underestimate the time and resources necessary to train new lawyers and support staff.

Learning new things can be stressful, but it can be an exciting and satisfying type of stress if we’re making consistent progress. When inexperienced lawyers receive guidance from more experienced lawyers who give them tasks that stretch their ability without completely overwhelming them, the learning gains can be impressive.

Interesting work is intrinsically satisfying if we’re able to do it competently.

Relatedness

As law firms utilize more remote work options it becomes more important than ever to deliberately build connections. Remote work can make it more difficult to feel connected to the law firm team as well as to the law firm’s clients. Adam Smiley Poswolsky advises remote teams to consciously create workplace rituals that promote positivity, vulnerability, and consistency.

Relatedness rituals could include a weekly in-person lunch that includes remote employees, a group text in which everyone shares their biggest accomplishment for that week, or an email in which all team members share a challenge they are dealing with.

A law firm can also promote connection with the firm’s clients by learning about the challenges and victories their clients are experiencing.

Whether remote or in person, our work is more intrinsically satisfying when we are connected to the people we work with.

Beware the compensation trap.

It’s tempting to focus undue attention on compensation because it’s easy to measure and compare. But not everything that’s measurable is meaningful. Focusing exclusively on compensation is a trap that doesn’t serve managers or employees.

Managers and employees share responsibility for avoiding the compensation trap. It can be difficult to quantify the autonomy, competence, and relatedness of a new job opportunity from the employee’s perspective. But failing to take those factors into account can lead us to accepting offers that appear attractive only to fall into similar unhealthy patterns of frustration over and over again. Managers need to appreciate the full experience of their employees’ work experience, not just the easily quantifiable number of hours they work and the amount they’re paid.

Legal work can be healthy and meaningful. When we recognize what really motivates us and what motivates employees, we’ll have a chance to engage in work that meets our needs and intrinsically motivates us.