RUNNING (FROM) A NONPROFIT LAWFIRM LIKE A GOD (OR THREE) IN THE MILLENNIAL ERA
By: Sateesh Nori
Tags: Lawyers, Human Resources

RUNNING (FROM) A NONPROFIT LAWFIRM LIKE A GOD (OR THREE) IN THE MILLENNIAL ERA

SATEESH NORI, ESQ.

I did not attend business school and I am not particularly religious. But I do run a non-profit lawfirm and so i often seek wisdom where i can find it. I am in mid-career- neither a millennial nor a boomer. As such, I feel as though i am watching this seismic shift in the nature of my work and in the essence of being a manager. For the first time, work is being seen as a thing, not a place. Being heard is a key value. And transparency of information matters.

The complexities of running a lawfirm are evident: legal rules, ethical principles, clients, billing, and numerous acronyms like HR, IT, and CYA. In the world of non-profit law, add to this list labor-management relations, grants and fundraising, compliance with governmental mandates, and the all-important responsibility to do good. Most days I am exhilarated by the chance to hold the reins of my humble organization in Queens. But lately, new challenges have forced me to rethink my assumptions about being a leader.

The fields of non-profit management and organizational development fill an entire shelf at Barnes and Noble. There are maxims such as “build consensus,” “manage up,” and “create a positive and collaborative culture.” Unfortunately, while these ideas sound good, they provide little detail as to how a leader of a lawfirm in 2019 must act to attract and retain talent, meet obligations, and to serve the purpose for which the organization was created.

Also, nonprofit lawfirms are facing new pressures as the nature of our work changes. The political climate in Washington has, ironically, allowed us to expand our services with new funding as our clients-immigrants and the poor, are under more attack. As we grow, the composition of our organization is fundamentally changing. As a manager, I’m faced with a more diverse, younger workforce to deploy for more complex and more fluid legal problems.

Specifically, i noticed that our current employees expect more from our organization in the form of fulfillment, flexibility, and support. Many of our new employees — millennials — expect our organization to meet their expectations as to workplace culture, work-life balance, and for a dialectic about the work. Our new employees are as driven by social justice as any group since those who started in the 1960s and 1970s. They probably subscribe to “woke twitter,” and wholeheartedly support the progressive left of Warren and Sanders.

However, they expect a level of support and guidance from managers which my generation never sought. There is a shared feeling among our new hires that we must work as a team on every case, issue, and task. They want us, as managers, to help problem-solve in real-time. Also, this group expects a work-life balance as an implicit term of employment. They want an office where they can tele-commute, check-in with supervisors as they choose, and where their values are as important as the values of the organization. Finally, our workers seek an ongoing and organic dialogue about their work, their clients, and their lives.

Recently, during a Hindu religious holiday (i was raised Hindu), i thought about the Hindu triumvirate of Gods: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. These three deities provide order to the universe. Brahma is the creative force, building new life and knowledge. Vishnu, the remover of obstacles, perpetuates life. Shiva breaks down old forms so that the process of creation can begin anew. Within this model, i saw a vision of leadership and management in which new ideas are birthed, realized, and discarded, in a constant cycle of progress.

A quick search led me to a research paper by Low and Muniapan: “Organisational development and the Hindu trinity: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva on leadership, culture and change,” ( Int. J. Indian Culture and Business Management, Vol. 4, No. 5, 2011), and from this paper, i formed the ideas here. The starting point is to figure out where we are in the cycle of growth of our organization: creation, maintenance, or destruction?

Before this question comes the question of description or diagnosis.

What is the existing culture of my legal nonprofit? In my view, our culture, not unlike the culture at many non-profit law firms today, was born in the 1960s, in a spirit of self-sacrifice and duty to see justice done for our clients. It was about 50 years ago that the social programs such as the Peace Corp and Americorp were born, and legal services were first funded by the Federal Government.

Many who joined our cause in this mold adopted a single-mindedness and commitment to the work, eschewing other needs like family and personal gain. Those who started during this time are the pioneers and thought-leaders on many legal issues faced by the poor. They also created the model for our current workplace, with a team of attorneys built around a senior supervising attorney, and several of these teams overseen by a managing attorney. We have a centralized decision-making structure, like a federal system, through which all decisions are made.

Today, this culture seems anachronistic and stale to our new staff. Our staff now want balance between their jobs and their lives, and they seek personal satisfaction as much as they seek justice for their clients. They are aware of the vicarious trauma that can come with social justice work.

They want to string together professional experiences into a narrative, like something that can be digested on social media. Work is not a place for them as much as it is an idea or a thing to do. The hierarchies that we have in place mean little to these workers. They want local control and they want their differences to be recognized. In fact, to them, the current power structure represents the same top-down model that our clients face from landlords, bureaucracies, and oppressors as their rights are being denied.

Many of our current leaders, including myself, serve like Vishnu, to preserve and maintain the status quo. We uphold the old hierarchies, methods of evaluation, and channels of communication. We don’t always see what motivates our staff or why they seek to work in our field. Over time, we have managed this culture and perpetuated it by hiring people who espoused the same views. We sought people who already self-selected into our framework for providing legal services to the poor. But now, as our ranks grow beyond the traditional and usual suspects, our model is cracking. Tensions run high as we negotiate for a new contract with our staff. Morale is low and burnout is high.

Maybe it is time to turn to Shiva, or to the power of destruction, to allow for a new model. A movement is growing to change the way we work, the way we are compensated for that work, and the way we negotiate with those in power to make these changes. For the first time, our staff are employing the same strategies that we have used to fight for our clients, but to fight for change for themselves.

Lets start over and allow Brahma to create something new. Do we still need physical offices, filled with support staff and paper files? Do top-down decisions build the consensus needed to move our organization forward? Would we consider building flexible work-schedules so that we could actually be open longer hours with different people filling existing roles? And finally, would we be able to provide that sense of self-worth that our staff members seek from the work- not from being part of the organization?

These are the new questions for leadership, gods and mortals alike.