Professional Acumen in Practice

01 / SELF

The Impression You Didn't Mean to Make

We tend to judge our own behavior by what we intended. Other people, of course, can only judge what they see and hear. And sometimes the distance between the two is considerable.

Take, for example, a mid-level associate attending a firm dinner. Seated beside a senior partner and his wife, she spots a friend across the table and jokes that she has spent the entire day listening to the partner talk and now gets to spend the evening doing the same.

Her friend laughs. Unfortunately, the partner's wife hears the remark.

It was meant as a private joke. Heard out of context, it sounds rather different.

Professional reputations are shaped in hallways, at dinners, and during casual conversations just as surely as they are in conference rooms. This doesn't mean we need to become humorless or guarded. That would make for a rather dreary workplace. But understanding how our words and behavior may be experienced by others is an important part of professional self-awareness.

Sometimes the most useful question is a simple one: Would I be comfortable if the person I'm discussing heard exactly what I just said?

02 / WORK

Beyond the Assignment

There's a difference between approaching work as a task to complete and approaching it as a responsibility to fulfill. The distinction often reveals itself before the actual work begins.

Consider an associate given a narrowly defined research assignment involving a client she has worked with before. She knows enough about the client's circumstances to suspect that the question doesn't exist in isolation. Rather than immediately diving into the research, she takes time to understand the broader background.

Strictly speaking, none of this is necessary to answer the question she's been asked. But she doesn't feel she can do the assignment properly without understanding how the pieces fit together.

That preparation proves consequential. She identifies a more fundamental issue—one that changes how the client's problem should be approached. Had she confined herself to the precise assignment, she might have produced a perfectly accurate answer while missing something far more important.

Of course, initiative requires judgment. There's a difference between preparing thoughtfully and embarking on an expensive research expedition without consulting anyone. Time, scope, and the client's interests matter, too.

The associate understood that her responsibility extended beyond producing an answer. It included understanding the problem she was helping to solve.

03 / WORLD

The Organization Behind the Organization Chart

An organization chart can tell us who reports to whom. It rarely tells us who knows what, who makes things happen, or whom people turn to when they need something done.

Imagine, then, a junior lawyer who needs a few minutes with a particularly busy partner. She could send another email, hover outside his office, or hope to catch him between meetings. Or she could speak with his assistant, who knows when interruptions are welcome and how best to get something onto his calendar.

The assistant may not have a law degree, but she possesses something the junior lawyer needs: an understanding of how the organization actually works.

Every workplace has people whose knowledge and influence extend beyond their formal roles. They understand the personalities, the history, and the unwritten practices that keep things moving.

Recognizing and valuing that knowledge requires curiosity, humility, and an appreciation for the contributions of people throughout an organization. The people with the most impressive titles aren't necessarily the ones who can help us do our best work.

The Larger Picture

These situations have little in common on the surface. One involves an awkward dinner, another a research assignment, and the third a relationship that might easily be overlooked.

But each illustrates a dimension of professional effectiveness that can be difficult to capture in a job description—and easy to overlook despite the difference it makes.

Much of this belongs to the invisible curriculum of professional life. Some lawyers learn these lessons from thoughtful mentors. Others discover them through experience, occasionally the uncomfortable kind.

These capabilities are far too important to leave their development to chance. They can be learned, practiced, and passed along to others. And when they are, they strengthen not only individual lawyers but the firms and cultures of which they are a part.