Your business needs a pulse, a rhythmic sequence, a heartbeat that steadily continues whether you’re present or away.

A management cadence shifts the burden of making things happen from you to your team. The cadence becomes an energy source that will drive the law firm forward. It’s the mythical perpetual motion machine. The law firm gets stronger and stronger; it fuels itself, turns team effort into solutions for clients, satisfaction for employees, and profits for owners. Let’s walk through a management cadence that will get you where you want to go.

Of course, first of all, you need to know where you’re going. Where are you going? You need to know–some call that a vision.

Then you need to move steadily toward the vision. That’s called management.

Management is all about communicating the vision to your team, so that everyone moves together; all expenditure of effort should propel the firm toward achieving your vision. Alignment is essential, whether it’s you and a virtual assistant or you and a team of hundreds. The cadence of management is the heartbeat of the business.

Rowing is the perfect analogy. Each member of the rowing crew sits facing the stern of the boat. Their energy is devoted to propelling the boat forward, toward the vision, which only the coxswain can see. That can only happen when there is excellent communication between team members. Some boats swerve back and forth. Others move straight toward the objective. It’s the communication that keeps the boat moving in a straight line.

I’m guessing that you’re hearing a voice in your head right now–it’s saying “stroke, stroke, stroke.” You’re on your way–you’re getting it. That’s the management cadence forming in your mind.

You need your team aligned, rowing in the same direction. That’s what management is all about–keeping the team in alignment. Stroke, stroke, stroke.

But what is management? It’s one thing on a boat, but it’s something different on land. What does it look like in a law firm? Mostly it looks like: meetings. Yep, meetings. There’s more to management than just meetings. There’s delegation, feedback, and coaching. But even those extras usually happen at a meeting.

So management is communication between team members, which is aimed at implementing the plan, which is designed to bring the vision to fruition. Management is what happens in meetings. Meetings are the subject of too many jokes and a great deal of derision. They aren’t always much fun. But actually, meetings are where the business of a business gets done. They are where vision becomes reality.

You need a culture of automatic communication

Vision turns into reality when you (1) assemble a great team, (2) provide them with the resources they need, and (3) communicate so they can align around the vision.

In the beginning, the rhythm of the meetings is established by the leadership of the law firm. Some firms have a quick, accurate, comprehensive communication culture—those firms row in the same direction.

Other firms have haphazard communication. Their meetings consist of random phone calls from the car on the way to court. Or the quick stop by a desk on the way out of the office. Meetings are infrequent, disorganized, interrupted by calls and clients, and rarely finished. Those firms row in circles; they make mistakes, miss deadlines, overlook important issues, and keep playing catch-up, never able to stretch or grow.

Meetings are essential to keeping the communication flowing. But you don’t want to be the sole driver of the communication system. You want a team culture of communication. You need to shift the burden of maintaining the meeting rhythm from the leadership team to the law firm’s culture.

The meetings need to simply become the way things are done in your law firm. They need to be the way people think about working in your business. They need to be the rhythm, beat, and cadence of how things are done within your law firm. The meetings happen because they are simply the way the law firm works.

You need a beat, a rhythm, a cadence for your law firm

Once you’ve got a cadence in place, it drives the year forward. It’s simply the way things are done. The cadence becomes the foundation of your annual plan forever. Every team member comes to know what to expect because it all runs like clockwork. There’s a system.

It’s helpful to turn the management cadence into a visual on the wall or the computer desktop. I used to love my giant Year-at-a-Glance calendar on the wall. With that chart to help me, I could hold the entire year in my brain.

Visualizing the entire year helps me see where I am, where I’m going, and how I’m going to get there. The big calendar always gave me a feeling of control.

Now, living on the road full-time, I lack a wall chart. Feeling in control is harder. I frequently find myself sketching things out on paper or being frustrated by the 12-inch screen on my laptop. My brain is a bit too small to see the big picture. I need visual aids.

But before visual aids can help, we need to understand the concept. We need to accept that developing and adhering to a cadence matters. We need to see the benefit of following a systematic approach–of creating an approach to communication, problem-solving, and education. A comprehensive system–an annual cadence–ensures that everything that needs to happen is happening.

Seeing the big picture is rocket fuel for your success

I’ve learned the value of seeing the big picture. But I’ve also learned that much of what’s in the big picture repeats itself year after year. Repetition is the path to mastery. The cadence is repetition embedded into the law firm culture.

At some point, the cadence and the culture merge into one. The cadence works its way into the fabric of your business. You’ll find yourself thinking of the business as the cadence.

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Even without the wall chart, I’ve started to see the annual calendar in my mind because there’s so much repetition, year after year. The older I get, the more I can see the entire year in a glance. Summer happens after spring; who knew?

Our years repeat themselves. If we’re making progress, we do many of the same things over and over again. When we treat each year as a unique one-off, we tend to stagnate.

Repetition is boring, but it’s what progress looks like. Recognizing the pattern might feel a little dull. Seeing patterns takes a bit of the spontaneity out of our days.

But seeing the patterns enables us to plan, master techniques, perfect our approach, and begin to see the business as a system rather than a series of unrelated, intermittent events.

The bare minimum cadence

Today, I’m providing you with a minimum cadence for your year. You’ll need to adapt what I provide to fit your requirements, your stage of development, and your culture.

If you’ve already got an annual cadence, then keep it. If you see opportunities for improvement, borrow from what I provide. But if you’re still playing out each year like it’s a surprise, then it’s time to adopt my system in its entirety.

The cadence looks mostly like meetings. Meetings aren’t exciting like buying new software, adding new practice areas, or redesigning the website. They’re not shiny. They’re kind of dull. But they’re how things happen in a business, which is, at its core, a gathering of people brought together to solve a problem for others, in exchange for payment. The “gathering of people” part is what we call a meeting (yeah, they didn’t teach us that in law school. The MBAs learned that over in their building and didn’t share it with us).

The cadence I suggest is going to be full of meetings (lots of meetings) and you’re going to be bored sometimes, and you’re often going to want to be somewhere else–like snowboarding, or mountain biking, or smoking pot where it’s legal (which I guess you can still do during a meeting, right?)

Time is of the essence and you don’t have any

“I don’t have time for this crap,” is the first response of most lawyers when presented with my management cadence. They’re maxed out and still trying to get around to what I suggested in my annual marketing plan.

But you do have time, in the same way that replacing the tires before a cross-country road trip saves you all the time of the blow-out, the smash into the guardrail, the wait for the tow truck and ambulance, the emergency room visit, the physical therapy appointments, and the argument you’ll have with your spouse about why you didn’t replace the tires.

Meetings with your team minimize interruptions and maximize productivity. Educating your team makes the team more efficient. Quarterly plans and themes will energize and motivate and align your team. The management cadence I propose is a time saver. Once it’s up and running, it’ll even give you enough spare time to swing by and get the tires replaced.

Making the shift from where you are now (overwhelmed and lacking in team communication) to wher...