We spoke with regular CLL webinar presenter Joanna who helps people develop skills that enhance workplace relationships and opens door to leadership opportunities.
Early career roles in marketing and consultancy brought home to Joanna the vital importance of relationship skills and a strong personal brand. Today, through her business, Inside Out Image, Joanna empowers people in professional services to thrive through training that looks beyond industry expertise and specialist technical knowledge.
What took you from consumer product marketing to professional skills training?
I began my career in brand marketing on Kimberley Clark’s graduate scheme, which included spending time working in France. From there I went into consulting and marketing analytics roles, yet marketing was never going to be my long-term calling. To discover what I really wanted to do I worked with a career coach while doing some contracting work with previous employers.
In this period my view of the workplace crystallised. I realised that we need so much more than core technical knowledge and experience to thrive in a modern workplace. How we show up and engage with others is crucial to our working relationships. So, I retrained in personal impact and started my business, Inside Out Image, in 2011.
Through almost endless networking, I got to know many lawyers who recognised that they needed the help I could provide – help that often isn’t part of formal training offerings. Relationship skills for in-house lawyers are vital. As the people responsible for keeping the organisation out of trouble, lawyers can find themselves in conflict with a whole range of agendas elsewhere in the workplace. The in-house lawyer is often seen as a barrier to people achieving their own goals, so building trust and great relationships go a long way to averting internal conflict before it can take root.
How do you help people develop their personal skills?
Firstly, I focus on self-awareness. How well is someone currently dealing with the multitude of personalities and potentially conflicting priorities that surround them? I aim to get people consciously thinking about their existing relationships and how one person’s perception of another will influence important decisions. The second step revolves around education. What specific people skills does someone need to develop? What, for them, is the best way to achieve that? And the third step is practice – taking learnings into the workplace and making them real.
I encourage people to narrow their development focus areas down to two at a time. Realistically, nobody can grapple with ten areas at a time and make meaningful progress, but honing in on a couple of core elements in a specific timeframe will get results. I advise people to put ‘career time’ in their diaries and they can work on these elements within that time. Just half an hour each week spent thinking about personal growth, received feedback and training needs will focus the mind and get you closer to where you want to be.
What’s your advice for in-house lawyers seeking career advancement?
The difference between being an excellent lawyer and a respected leader is huge. The skill-sets are vastly different.
My first piece of advice is, before you apply for a senior role, get a mentor. They’ll help you fine-tune your mindset around supporting and developing others as distinct from the laser focus on your legal specialism.
Next, ask yourself, “What sort of leader do I want to be?” You’ll no longer have 100% of your working day to dedicate to your own tasks, so you’ll need to decide how you’ll manage your time. This can be hard as the transition to a senior role means relinquishing things you potentially enjoy; it can be hard to imagine what you will do but when you take on managing and leading others, there are many new aspects to focus on.
Think too about how you’ll manage upwards, as well as sideways and downwards. And always, of course, while building your personal brand and strategic relationships across the organisation.
How do you see working patterns for in-house lawyers evolving?
Two things will continue to affect how work evolves for many people in professional services. AI is one of them. I think AI taking care of repetitive tasks such as standardising contracts and NDAs etc – thus freeing up lawyers for more strategic work – can be very positive. On the other hand, if it removes a whole tier of junior lawyers, it raises questions about where the next generation of senior lawyers will come from.
The other big phenomenon of our time is hybrid working. COVID normalised working from home, but there’s now a push by big employers to get people back to the office. There are plusses and minuses on both sides of the debate and I think we’re a long way from the end of this story at the moment.
I’m also fascinated by the generational dynamic across the workforce. Some organisations have five generations across their teams. The younger people are, inevitably, more tech savvy, but in many ways more community minded as well, no doubt as result of growing up the social media age yet they often have very different ideas about work that can be at odds with other generations. It’ll be interesting to see what impact these differences have in the years ahead.
In my own area of work, clients are hitting the limits of e-learning. While many organisations have good e-learning platforms, it’s difficult to get people to adopt them – or measure the outcomes when they do. Accordingly, I’m seeing more businesses making the case for in-person training. It’s consistent with the trend of people looking for more meaningful connection in both their working and private lives.
Away from work, how do you relax?
With difficulty! Unless I’m on holiday on the sunbed, I’m a very active person. My hobbies include high energy exercise classes such as spin, Step aerobics and Bodyattack (aerobics type of class!), which I do five to seven times a week. I’ve been preparing for a three-hour step aerobics marathon recently.
Both my parents are still very active fortunately, so I enjoy doing things with them too, like gardening and going to the occasional football match. Dad’s a big Brentford fan, as was his dad, so it’s a great family thing. I also have a geeky side, my husband and I toured a disused underground station recently.
