A variety of recent studies show that employees’ skills are regularly underutilized. By tapping some of these currently-unknown skills, law firms can find new opportunities for business development, cost savings, and added profitability.
For instance, you might—unknowingly—have an associate who could help with online marketing during slow times, or a secretary with a great idea for how to improve your client service.
How can you find out what additional ideas and skills may be lurking in your office?
Consider these five tips to discover hidden talents in your law firm:
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Imagine your improved practice:
Think about what areas of your practice are hurting your profitability or holding you back from growing the way you want. How do you measure success in these areas?
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Learn about your colleagues:
Take some time to learn the skills of your employees and fit those strengths to their work assignments. The book “Now, Discover Your Strengths” is a great resource for this!
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Ask for advice:
Take some time each week or month to ask your co-workers for ideas about how to make your work and their work better. You should also regularly ask your clients how you could improve your service to them.
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Celebrate your successes:
After you successfully tap a hidden talent or idea, acknowledge and celebrate it. Have a pizza party. Give the employee a gift card for a nice dinner. Or just thank them in front of the rest of the staff. Do these things for clients that give you good ideas, too.
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Measure your results:
For each new skill or idea you use, make sure you find a mechanism to track its success.
Your homework: Let us know what profitable hidden talents or ideas you discover in your firm.
(photo: ag2r)
Aaron Street is the Publisher of the law firm marketing and practice site Lawyerist and the legal humor site Bitter Lawyer. 
Lawyerist is the #1 law practice blog. We write about marketing, practice management, career development, and more.
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One thing you can do to help find the hidden talents is to encourage your people to share those talents with the firm. If you have an intranet or wiki, you could have people post things other people probably didn’t know. If you have some kind of social networking solution, you can make talents a part of their profiles. If you have a microblogging solution, you can have people tweet about cool things they’re working on.