4 Steps for Building a Collaborative Culture Between Legal & Business Teams
In case you missed it or want to learn best practice techniques: Legal experts offer strategic insight on how to create an efficient and collaborative environment.
A collaborative culture between business and legal teams improves efficiency, aligns goals, fosters workplace well-being, and has a synergistic effect in which the sum is greater than its parts. There’s no question that you, as a legal leader, already understand the importance of effective communication and speaking the business language to be a better partner for in-house clients and their business goals. But how can you go beyond that communication to better foster a culture of collaboration between your in-house counsel and corporate leaders to improve business outcomes?
To better understand this important topic, Axiom partnered with Law.com to delve into current challenges many legal and business teams face, and how to overcome these through actionable strategies. These key steps include:
- Improve cross-functional communication.
- Align legal and business goals.
- Consider conflict an opportunity.
- Leverage technology and data organization.
Understand the Challenges and Identify Solutions
A starting point for fostering legal and business collaboration is to identify common challenges and then develop strategies for overcoming them. After all, it’s impossible to solve a problem that has not yet been identified.
“If you define the problem correctly, you almost always have the solution.” —Steve Jobs
The most common business-legal collaboration challenges are:
- Communication: Both legal and business leaders have their own vernacular, which creates an environment where miscommunication can easily occur. As Pavel, an Axiom consultant, says, “We basically just have a different language... Different audiences might read what you're saying very differently, depending on their prior experience, their agendas, and interests within the organization.”
- Distinct goals: Legal teams and business teams typically have different day-to-day goals. To generalize, legal teams' primary focus is usually risk management and compliance, while business teams' primary focus is product and revenue.
- Conflict: It’s very common for there to be conflict between legal and business teams. Some conflict is minor, such as a business team wanting a contract turned around immediately and a legal team needing more time to revise and negotiate the agreement to avoid future issues. Other conflicts can be more serious and cause business deadlock.
When identifying hurdles and solutions, leaders should consider the unique aspects of their specific legal and business teams.
Solution 1: Improve Cross-Functional Communication.
Communication is key when it comes to fostering collaboration. Improved clarity of communication and bridging the gap between departmental silos are key steps legal leaders can take to fertilize cross-functional communication.
Legal leaders should tailor the language and method of communication for their intended audience. For example, when conveying information, variations in language, tone, and perspective should be used depending on who they are speaking to. In a conversation with other colleagues on the same team, the language might be vastly different than when they speak with colleagues on other teams.
Clarity in communication is an ongoing effort. As Pavel explains, “It's very important to do the reality check, not just asking questions during that communication, but sort of a dynamic continuous effort to really . . . ensure that we're actually speaking in the same language. And that the message sent is the message received.”
There are multiple strategies that can be used to bridge the gap between departmental communications, including cross-training, team-building exercises, and simulation exercises. Simulations can be particularly effective, as they demonstrate each team’s and individual’s value. This type of demonstration is often more powerful than verbally explaining the importance of cross-team collaboration
Solution 2: Align Legal and Business Goals.
While legal and business teams serve different functions, they have an important shared goal: supporting the business’s longevity and growth. Legal leaders should aim to be interdisciplinarians who understand the operations and functions of other teams. With that knowledge, they can develop shared goals and provide appropriate legal consultancy.
Pavel suggests asking questions to gain a deeper understanding of interdepartmental workings as well as what legal approaches need to be taken. For example, posing questions to the IT team about the organization’s key security software, such as how many breaches there have been and whether it remains the industry's best standard program. Answers may highlight that new security software is needed while also subtly gaining buy-in and support from the IT team.
Comparing the gap between an organization’s stated goals and philosophies is another effective way to identify issues and develop shared goals to resolve them. Pavel provides the example of a company whose stated value is treating teams with dignity but that, in actuality, has many people working evenings and weekends. This provides an opportunity for legal to highlight the discrepancy between business goals and reality and to suggest a shared goal: the development of a new human resources policy.
Solution 3: Consider Conflict an Opportunity.
Conflict is often viewed as a negative, and there can be an organizational tendency to try to avoid it. However, some conflict is healthy for a business. Conflict avoids dangerous “yes man” situations where problems are known but not expressed for fear of rocking the boat. Conflict also shines a light on communication issues and provides an opportunity to further fine-tune inter-team communications.
Legal leaders must learn when to compromise and when to push back, creating some conflict. For example, on compliance issues, it is better to have internal conflict resulting from the legal team holding firm than subsequent regulatory fines or litigation. Pavel explains that this type of conflict can actually increase business leaders' respect for legal “because they understand that they are paying [legal staff] to provide an alternative perspective or be that challenger.” They may not like the opinion, but they would still rather hear it from legal than from auditors or the government.
Solution 4: Leverage Technology & Data Organization.
Legal teams can leverage technology and data organization techniques to improve the efficiency of legal operations while simultaneously improving cross-team collaboration. There is an ever-growing pool of subscription-based technology that can be considered.
For example, most project management programs have features that remind team members of when something is coming due. Such programs also allow other team members to collaborate on what is needed for a specific project, what's coming due from each team member, and the deadline for completion. When used, these tools minimize back-and-forth emails while ensuring that all involved persons can quickly check on the status of a task and view recent discussions on the topic.
As with all processes, it is common to have trial and error in figuring out what technology and data organization approaches are most useful.
💡 Learn how to build a more collaborative culture between your in-house and business teams and how flexible legal talent can help you bridge the divide.
