This week: Now How

In this edition, we get into how to fix the misaligned relationships that lie behind legal stuff, so that you can start to bulletproof your long-term plan.

This week's driver: now how (aka the six step healing plan)

If legal stuff is predictable because it's started by a person whose relationship with our business is strained, the key to resolving our legal issues must therefore lie in healing that relationship. But how exactly do we do that?

Here are the six core principles I encourage my clients to apply to help them heal their relationships, fix their legal issues and ultimately land their long-term business plan: 

Recognise your disagreement is actually about psychology, not money or broken promises
It’s all too easy to assume or feel that, at its core, your broken relationship must be about money or broken promises. But it isn't. Every disagreement is actually about how two different businesses feel differently about the same situation. As a result, resolution only comes by changing minds, not by winning legal arguments. Especially as we humans can easily be irrational, emotional beings. 

Understand how the other side feels & why
If you're going to change someone’s mind, you need to work out what they're thinking. So put on their cap and step into their shoes. Set out everything that has happened and try to understand genuinely how those events landed for them. Consider who they are and what they're like. Do your homework on them: their size, their cashflow, their headspace, their ambitions, their recent pressures. Then turn that lens on yourself. Ask yourself what are they thinking? Why? How is that likely to drive their behaviour? Empathy is intelligence, not weakness.

Stare your worst case in the face
Every broken relationship is uncertain. And in any uncertain situation, you have to understand & accept exactly what you could lose. Because losses do happen. So stare your worst case directly in the face: not just the result, but also the costs, the time, the reputational damage, the internal impact, all of it. Compare that to your best case. That will tell you a lot more than whatever the odds of success look like. And if you can't live with the worst case, you shouldn't be rolling the dice at all, even on where you’re a strong favourite. 

Ask if you really want a long-term enemy
Disputes and disagreements are bruising and accusatory. Someone always comes away feeling they've lost, and that grudge tends to last. So ask yourself this honestly: “do I really want someone out there motivated to damage my reputation and fight me in the market for years to come?”  Especially when that will also burn any chance of ever working with that party again.

Resist the temptation to settle the score
To change a mind, you'll have to sit down with that mind and influence & persuade it. And when you first take that seat opposite them, you’ll be hugely tempted to let them know you’re p-ed off and to right a few perceived wrongs. Resist that temptation. Do not fire back arguments as aggressively as possible: faced with incoming fire, people clam up, making it harder, not easier, to change their mind.

Instead, ask about and actively listen to how they feel. Explain how you see the situation honestly, in plain English, in your own voice, without hyperbole. Help them understand the gap between you. That helps them see the person, not the dispute. And gives you and them something to actually engage with to make progress. 

Concede the battle to win the war
A dispute consumes your two most scarce resources as an ambitious, growing business: time and money. Keep coming up for air. Recognise when you're in a hole. Don't pour good money after bad. Dropping or settling a claim is judgment, not failure, especially as that can free up resources to put to something positive. And watch your lawyer: use them, listen to them, but don't defer to them. Only you understand what's right for your business in the long run.

Keep those six principles front and centre as you start to tackle the broken relationships you've identified across your business and you’ll quickly start to zap the existing legal issues in the path towards your plan. If you have a formal dispute, they will get you out of it as quickly as possible, helping you avoid the expensive, stressful, time-consuming and ultimately uncertain ordeal that is litigation (aka gambling in wigs). If your legal issue is still in the early, non-formal stages, they will quickly damp it down and de-escalate it.

This exercise will likely involve you having to let go of something you feel strongly about. So it won't be easy. But if this was easy, everyone would already be doing it. And most meaningful productive things take time and are hard to do. 

This week's sleeper: finding the most effective form of dispute resolution

Given that, deep down, we all just want our disputes resolved, you'd think that we'd pour a lot of thought into the dispute resolution mechanics included in a contract. Yet those mechanics are usually found buried away in the boiler plate: the technical wrapping that everyone assumes we need but never talks explicitly about (as I certainly used to do for the first ten years of my legal career).

Don't just assume any dispute resolution will do. If your goal is to heal the gaps or mismatches in your business relationships, then the mechanic for sorting out issues between you warrants proper considered thought, to make sure things actually get sorted quickly, cheaply and fairly.  And that really only leaves two options, given that several dispute resolution mechanics don't deliver those outcomes, despite their name (yes, litigation and arbitration, I'm looking at you).

The cheapest, fastest, most effective way to sort things out is to do it between yourselves, as soon as it first arises. That needs someone from each business to take ownership of the relationship, to talk regularly about how it's going, and, in particular, to agree to immediately raise anything and everything that isn't working quite right. That's the first stage and it'll take care of 95% of things. 

Anything that those relationship owners can't resolve then needs to be quickly escalated internally between the two businesses, first to their line manager, then ultimately to the CEOs.

In the unlikely event that doesn’t work, then default to mediation.  Not arbitration. Not the courts. Mediation, where an independent qualified individual understands each side’s feeling and requirements and then mediates between the two parties to find common ground. Quick, cheap and effective (certainly when compared to the other options).

So don’t just sleep on your dispute resolution mechanics. Be specific about them, to make sure they’re quick, cheap and effective. And explicitly agree between you that you’ll do these steps to make sure that all possible issues are discussed and sorted out sharpish.

Any questions on either today’s driver or sleeper, just ask. I’m always happy to talk about this stuff (in a Northern Irish accent). Just don’t ask me to say ‘now how’, though.

A

PS: Some of you may have seen that I’ve launched a Clear Course newsletter on LinkedIn. There’s one simple reason for that: I’m finding it very difficult to get this newsletter out there to new readers, especially as it looks like LinkedIn are penalising posts that encourage people to leave their ecosystem. So, for this newsletter to reach more people, I feel I had no choice.

A few promises to you, the OG Clear Course readers, though. First, that LI edition won’t ever have the ‘Sleepers’ in it, it’ll just be the ‘Drivers’. Secondly, you will always get the latest edition first, about a month before it’ll appear on LinkedIn. Finally, at some point, I will look to move all of those LinkedIn Clear Course readers over to this version, by reducing the frequency of the LI version.

Hopefully, as a result, none of you feel short-changed but please do let me know if you do.