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Paradise dismissal not derailing HSF vocational strategy

Recent scandal is not distracting the Australian arm of the global firm from what it sees as being a core cultural mission.

user iconJerome Doraisamy 27 April 2018 Big Law
Paradise dismissal not derailing HSF vocational strategy
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Speaking last week to Lawyers Weekly, Herbert Smith Freehills Australian managing partner Andrew Pike said the recent dismissal of former firm partner Peter Paradise for multiple allegations of sexual harassment was not distracting him from a firmwide strategy of transparency around career trajectory and available vocational options.

When asked whether the incident has motivated any changes in the firm’s approach, Mr Pike said: “It actually hasn’t been a motivator at all. [The strategy] is something that’s been in train, at least from my point of view, for the last three of four years.”

“Our main asset is our people and having them motivated and thriving is our core objective. We’ve got to continually work on that,” he said.

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Such work involves, he said, acknowledging that people will thrive when they are healthiest at work, feel like they have meaning in their jobs, and can answer key questions such as why they are with their current employer, what are they learning, and where is the role taking them.

This necessarily involves open career conversations in real time, rather than in the form of structured sessions, he said, which is actively encouraged across the board as a means of ensuring comfort for staff members to raise any issues or questions they may have about their direction within or outside the firm.

“I am focused on making sure that people are understanding the skills they’re developing and the relationships they’re forming, which in many cases is transportable,” he explained.

“Whether [lawyers and staff] stay at the firm or have roles elsewhere, HSF will have contributed to that [development], and they will have benefited from their time at HSF.”

Psychological safety is particularly pertinent, he noted, in fostering such institutional loyalty and collegiality.

“We have had a real drive of making sure that the environment is psychologically safe so that people feel that they can say what they think,” he said.

“We can have open, honest conversations and everybody is respected in those conversations.”

The strategy requires a tapping-in to people’s intrinsic motivations, Mr Pike said, so that vocational conversations can be as meaningful as possible and also in line with the current climate.

“When I started at this firm during the 1990s, the proposition was that you come here, and there was definitely a chance that you’d become a partner,” he recounted.

“Now, we’re in a sort of low-growth environment, and I think we need to more clearly face up to the issue that not everyone who comes here wants to be a partner. That’s just the reality of the situation.”

The firm therefore has an obligation, he proclaimed, to create and maintain a strong legal community comprising not only current staff and clients, but also former ones, in the form of a “thriving alumni base”.

“All of those things led me to the conclusion that we’re better off being open and transparent about what is going on, rather than sticking to the mantra of, ‘come here and become a partner’.”

Fostering such personal and professional growth of all staff, regardless of whether they stay or not, is the best way to help them thrive and consequently feed the firm’s community, he argued.

And while he ceded that it can be more trying to get legal professionals at the junior level to feel comfortable opening up in such conversations, it is a “work in progress”.

“The more we can do it and the more we can shine a light on it, the better we will become,” he said.

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