Webinar Takeaways: Managing Your Supervisor

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On 22 March 2023, Judd and I had a great webinar about how helping associates manager their supervisors. You can find below three takeaways from the session.

Takeaway 1: Law firms need to address the “time” problem

At the beginning of the webinar, we polled the participants about how they perceive the feedback problem at their firms. Several of the participants blamed a lack of time as the main culprit. For example:

“often senior colleagues do not find enough time to give a constructive feedback”

Not surprisingly, when we work with supervisors on providing better feedback, we hear similar excuses. For example:

“I’m too busy to provide feedback.”

Assuming that law firms think that feedback is important for the development of their associates, they should consider setting up steps to address this time issue. For example:

  • firms can find more time for providing feedback by reducing time wasters (e.g. replacing dull weekly firm or practice meetings with an alternating schedule of bi-weekly meetings and bi-weekly feedback sessions)

  • firms can also address the time concerns of supervisors and junior associates by teaching them how to conduct rapid feedback sessions

Takeaway 2: Learn to interpret silent feedback

Oftentimes, junior colleagues don’t realize that they are getting feedback because the feedback is silent. For example, supervisors are providing feedback by how they rewrite your emails and by how they staff you on particular types of work.

We encouraged the participants to interpret this feedback by focusing on whether it is changing. In particular, change should be viewed as good. For example:

  • if your supervisor is making the exact same corrections in every email, that is bad

  • if your supervisor keeps assigning you different types of work, that is good

  • if you are an 8th year associate and you have never seen a client, that is bad

Takeaway 3: Supervisors can motivate with “Praise Sandwiches”

When we polled the participants about their views on the problem of feedback, several of them expressed issues with the lack of “positive” or “constructive” feedback. For example:

“Mainly negative focus rather than giving feedback overall or even when the feedback is good”

Judd noted that this problem of feedback not having a positive element is not limited to the law. For example, in the medical community, senior doctors also struggle with providing positive feedback to junior doctors. To address this problem, the seniors are taught to package their feedback as a “praise sandwich”. In particular, they are encouraged to deliver their feedback in the following order:

  • start off on the right note by opening the feedback with a positive comment (Note: this will make it more likely that the recipient won’t reject the feedback as being overly critical.)

  • provide all the negative feedback here (this is the meat of the sandwich)

  • end on a positive note by closing things off with a positive comment (Note: this will reduce the likelihood that the recipient doesn’t leave with a bad taste in his/her mouth, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will buy into the feedback.)