The personal approach to business development.

• Author: Darling, Peter

Haley is a fifth-year associate at your firm and a candidate for partner (Haley, by the way, is a real person at a mid-size law firm in California). Early on a Wednesday morning, she is sitting in your office frowning and nervously clicking a ballpoint pen. The repetitive sound is driving you nuts, but given what you're about to tell her, you decide not to mention it. She's going to have enough to absorb.

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You like Haley--she's funny, hardworking, straightforward and down-to-earth. As far as her actual work goes, the partners love her and she bills a lot of hours.

A year ago, she was informed that to become a partner, she needed to bring in business. You worked with her, reviewing her contacts, developing a strategic plan, putting a lot of time into training her and providing her with support. A year later you sat down with her to formally review her progress and her results are ... not much. There's been some activity but not really enough. At her most recent review the partners told her, again, that rainmaking was the key to her future at the firm.

So what happened? On paper, the program is perfect. However, the perfect program on paper is not perfect for Haley. And in that simple fact there is an incredible opportunity. Last week you decided to try a new approach to helping Haley. Your meeting with her today is to introduce her to it.

Haley's business development program did not actually include the real determinant of success or failure: personality, behavior, motivation--the raw material of the actual human being who has to bring in the business. By analyzing these factors and building a program around what your analysis reveals, you can help your attorneys (and yourself) achieve significantly better results.

A Unique Approach

Outstanding performance isn't simply the result of mindless hard work. It comes from working smart as well as working hard--leveraging strengths and compensating for weaknesses. As an example from the world of sports, consider 2008 Australian Open winner Maria Sharapova, who is 6'2" and weighs 130 pounds. She is ideally designed to hit tennis balls.

Yet, Sharapova is not perfect. For example, because of her size she's not especially quick and she doesn't move well. Sharapova, however, knows this and does something about it. She has developed a strategy that reflects her capabilities. That's why she wins.

It's no different in business development. To perform at her best, Haley first has to...