Creating a grown-up company culture– Catherine Leach

In this conversation Catherine Leach - Founder, Owner and MD of Leach Legal – talks about the importance of creating a grown-up adult company culture. She also highlights the significant role stories play in weaving company values into the culture.

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My key learning nuggets from the conversation:

It is important to understand the nature of the mindset and work of employees when leading a company - e.g. lawyers look for problems and that is their way of helping and care

When introducing change, it is important to take time to provide the background and thinking when sharing the proposed destination, it is foolish to think you can just ‘drop change’ on employs and think that they will just go along with it

Culture is built on connections, solid connections

In early stages, the firm was like a family; as it’s got bigger, care was taken to move away  from the family analogy because people come and go (unlike in a family)

By conducting business in civilised and grown up, adult manner this pervades the culture of the organisation, this particularly important in relation to:

·      Transparency of the financial tracking of the company

·      Ownership of work

·      Assessment of, and asking for help with, workload

·      Genuine team work orientated delivery

·      Now, post COVID, that hybrid working (working both from home and office) is occurring

This will then permeates out to clients by simultaneously treating them as adult humans (which is particularly important in the circumstances surrounding family law and separation)

It is important to holding a bigger wider perspective beyond rigidly following the process in hand to incorporate the human journey/aspects of travelling through a process to a final destination – often younger lawyers struggle with this early on in their career

As much as Catherine wanted to step back and make it about Leach Legal (not her), she found the firm does need a figurehead, a person for clients to relate to – we rarely build a relationship with companies

Onboarding – is generally an under focused area; there is more to it than a week with a manual and ‘off you go’! it takes some time (often 6+ months) for people to build connections, fully embed into the functioning, culture and the values of an organisation – let the job come to you

Actively appreciate people for living the company values builds deeper connections. Allow company values to emerge into stories that then carry greater nuance of the manifestation of the values.