Page 29 - Law Society of Hong Kong MPMC Manual v8 - With checklists (1 March 2018)

Practice Management Course | Unit 3
Talent Management

29. Flexing your style is about temporarily changing one’s own behaviour. The key
aspects of ‘style flexing’ are:

• Style flexing is adjusting your own behaviour.
• Style flexing is adjusting a few behaviours, but not changing your entire
self.
• Style flexing is temporary; flexing only at key times.

30. For example, if you are an ‘Expressive’, who loves to chat and can be loud, then an
Analytical might find it difficult to communicate with you. It is best to tone it down
and stick to data, lists and logic for these people for best communication and
influence.

Effective influencing
31. Although it is difficult to change someone else’s behaviour, it is possible to drive
others to take responsibility for their behaviour and ownership of solutions. If you
manage people or work with people, then you need to know the basics of how to
structure conversations to achieve this. If you want people to handle work
differently, there are some subtle shifts you can make in the way you have those
conversations.

32. Lawyers are generally quite competent at coaching for instruction, but coaching for
behavioural change is something different entirely.

33. When coaching people, we want to transition them from their current working state
to doing something different and keep doing it, even when they are no longer being
coached and monitored.

34. The reality is that people change their behaviour because they have a problem.
They need to do something different to solve that problem and change their
circumstance. If people resist changing their behaviour, they either do not see that
there is a problem, or there is another bigger problem that they are focussing on.

35. There are two key mistakes made when trying to coach: (1) telling and (2) yelling.
If we tell people what to do, this does not necessarily help them understand what it
was that they did right or wrong. Consequently, we will likely have to be around to
tell them again in the future. Also, when someone tells us to do something, we
usually do it to a certain level of effort; but when we want to do it ourselves, we
increase that effort. Similarly, yelling or showing anger does not work. As discussed
above, people change because they have a problem. Yelling becomes their problem
at this point, and they will solve that problem by doing something to stop the
yelling.

General coaching tips
36. Below are some general tips and procedures that can help you influence others
effectively:

• Ask open questions: what, how - not simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ closed questions.
• Get the ‘coachee’ talking. If you are doing all the talking, you are not
coaching.

© The Law Society of Hong Kong (2018) Page 25