Fundamentals of Management 6th Edition by Ricky Griffin

Exercise 21

The Law of Diminishing Motivation
At the end of Legally Blonde , a 2001 comedy about a sorority girl who aces Harvard Law School through a combination of hard work and valley-girl smarts, the heroine gets a marriage proposal from her Hollywood-handsome lawyer boyfriend and an invitation to join a prestigious law firm. Her life, it seems, is destined for uncontested happiness, and if she continues to practice law in romantic comedies, everything will probably turn out well. If, however, she succumbs to a blonde ambition to practice law in the real world, she'll probably find the going a little rougher.
Amanda Brown, author of the novel on which the movie was based, is a former law student and the daughter of two lawyers. Interestingly, her mother was a member of the second Harvard Law School class that included women. Harvard was about 30 years ahead of the curve, but the enrollment of women in U.S. law schools skyrocketed after 1970. It was naturally assumed that the flood of young female associates would eventually result in greatly increased numbers of female partners in law firms across the country. As it turns out, however, although female law school enrollments have been climbing for years, there are still relatively few women partners in American law firms. Currently, for example, 34.4 percent of all lawyers are women, yet only 17.8 percent of law firm partners are women, representing a modest increase from 13 percent in 1995. At this rate, women will achieve parity with male colleagues in approximately 2088.
What happens between the time women get job offers and the time firms hand out partnerships? Bettina B. Plevan, an employment law specialist and partner in the Manhattan firm of Proskauer Rose, believes that somewhere along the way, female lawyers lose the kind of motivation necessary to get ahead in a law office. "You have a given population of people," she observes, "who were significantly motivated to go through law school with a certain career goal in mind. What demotivates them to want to continue working in the law?"
The problem, says Karen M. Lockwood, a partner in the Washington DC firm Howrey, is neither discrimination nor lack of opportunity. "Law firms," she says, "are way beyond discrimination. Problems with advancement and retention are grounded in biases, not discrimination." In part, these biases issue from institutional inertia. Lauren Stiller Rikleen, a partner in the Worcester, Massachusetts, firm of Bowditch Dewey, points out that most law firms are "running on an institutional model that's about 200 years old." Most of them, she adds, "do a horrible job of managing their personnel, in terms of training them and communicating with them." Such problems, of course, affect men as well as women, but because of lingering preconceptions about women's attitudes, values, and goals, women bear the brunt of the workplace burden. In practical terms, they face less adequate mentoring, poorer networking opportunities, lower-grade case assignments, and unequal access to positions of committee control.
To all of these barriers to success, Lockwood adds the effect of what she calls the "maternal wall": Male partners, she says, assume that women who return to the firm after having children will be less willing to work hard and less capable of dedicating themselves to their jobs when they return. As a result, men get the choice assignments and senior positions. Jane DiRenzo Pigott, a onetime law-firm partner who now runs a consultancy firm, agrees but thinks that the issues run deeper than maternity leave. "People explain it simply as the fact that women have children," she explains,
but so many other factors play into it. Women self-promote in a different way than men, and because women don't get their success acknowledged in the same way as men who more aggressively self-promote, it creates a high level of professional dissatisfaction for women. Saying these two words "I want" is not something women are used to doing. They're not saying, "I want the top bonus" or "I want that position."... [W]omen need to learn how to be comfortable saying "I want" and how to say it effectively.
The fact remains that, according to a 2009 study of "Women in Law" conducted by Catalyst, a New York research firm, 1 in 8 female lawyers work part time, compared to only 1 in 50 males. Why? According to Plevan, most female attorneys would prefer to work and raise children at the same time but find that they can't do both effectively. "I organized my personal life so I was able to move toward my goals," she says but admits that it helped to have a gainfully employed spouse (also a lawyer), dual incomes sufficient to hire household help, and nearby relatives. In most cases, of course, although dual incomes are an advantage to a household, it's difficult for either spouse to devote time to child rearing when they're both working. The Catalyst study shows that while 44 percent of male lawyers have spouses who are employed full time, nearly twice as many female lawyers-84 percent-have employed spouses who are unavailable for household duties such as attending to children.
"As long as firms are male dominated," says Plevan, "it's much less likely that firms will make changes to accept the challenges of work- life balance." She hastens to add, however, "It's not that men aren't receptive to these issues. It's that they're not aware," and this lack of awareness on the part of the men who run law firms, she suggests, accounts for the persistence of operational practices that hamper the efforts of women attorneys to strike an adequate balance between their professional and personal lives. Take, for example, the concept of billable hours. Law firms typically bill clients according to the amount of a lawyer's time that they consume. This regime not only requires lawyers to keep precise records of the time spent with clients, but also provides the firm with a convenient method of measuring each lawyer's specific contribution to the firm's bottom line. More women than men are penalized by this system, but it's becoming a source of discontent among lawyers of both sexes. "They don't like being part of a billable-hour production unit," says Rikleen. "They want more meaning out of their lives than that."
Like firms in many other industries, law firms have experimented with flexible-work options such as flexible scheduling and parental leave (see "First Things First"). More and more, however, they report that such measures have not been as effective as they'd hoped. Says Edith R. Matthai, founder with her husband of the Los Angeles firm Robie Matthai: "We're very accommodating with leaves and flexible schedules, and even with that we still lose women." The "pressures on women from spouses, family, peers, schools, and others is huge," she adds. The situation has improved over the last 30 years, but "we have a long way to go.... I think the real solution is a reassessment of the role that women play in the family. One thing we need is a sense of shared responsibilities for the household and, most importantly, shared responsibilities for taking care of the kids."
You're the managing partner in a law firm with 55 male associates and 45 female associates, and you agree with the argument that women lawyers need to "self-promote" more effectively. Which approach to motivation would you apply to encourage female associates in your firm to "self-promote" more actively? Explain your choice of approach.