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Copy of The Courageous Leaderwork Project 2025
- Dr Deborah Hann
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Launching The Courageous Leaderwork Project 2025
In 2025 I am launching the #Courageous Leaderwork Project 2025 to highlight the strategic and practical value of acknowledging the leadership work that all lawyers do
to make their work, and their colleagues, work better and safer. This includes altruistic leaderwork that people do in their workplaces
In a series of posts I will set out the underpinning conceptual framework of #Professional Leadership, #Organisational Leadership, #Leaderwork and #Legal Working Culture. This is a specific leadership and culture schema formulated for legal organisations which incorporates the working knowledge of leading lawyers and articulates better practice.
These components then provide a specific legal professional perspective that can overlay a critical cultural review of a particular legal organisation.
An analysis of the values, beliefs and behaviours that are prevalent in a specific legal organisation can then identify areas where cultural change is desirable.
For example in many legal organisations there is important leadership work that is undertaken which is not appreciated by the formal leadership team. When this is invisible I call this "leaderwork."
By acknowledging the leaderwork being undertaken the organisation will be able to recruit these leaderworkers to assist in the roll out of the capability uplift required to coach individuals to change unacceptable behaviors that constitute coercive control of bullying or sexual harassment.
Valuable work has been undertaken in Victoria in 2024 -2025 led by the Women's Legal Service supported by a dedicated Project Team and Governance Committee and funded by WorkSafe to define the problem, scope its prevalence, produce a suite of trauma informed resources for the profession and engage stakeholders in deciding how best to prevent these behaviours and thus provide safer workplaces. To prevent harm.
To ensure that this important work achieves its potential for change it is essential that we take the time to reflect on why it is that the legal profession is stuck. And needs unfreezing to use a classic change management term.
Introducing Leaderwork
Leaderwork is like the fascia tissue, a conduit that connects muscles to one another and allows your body to stretch when you move. It resides in the fluid working culture of an organisation not in the backbone of formal organisational structures. Often the formal organisation chooses not to value, i.e. acknowledge, the work people do altruistically to make work better and safer for themselves, their colleagues and their clients.
Look beyond what the organisation choses to measure and reward and you will encounter #leaderwork. In both process and people work domains. For example, in self-motivated work improvement initiatives or emotional engagement to support a work colleague experiencing coercive control.
How I Discovered Leaderwork
I completed the only interdisciplinary PhD level research in Australia investigating how lawyers learn to manage and lead at work post admission. Undertaking 3 years of critical ethnographic research I had the privilege of speaking with and observing many leaders at work in the profession across all branches of the profession. My participants included a Chief Judge, Federal Court Judge, Deputy Chief Magistrate, Senior and Junior Counsel, Dean of a Law School, expert CLE and PLT practitioners, Managing Partners, senior associates, entry level lawyers, the Head of a Public Legal Organisation and mid-career public and private lawyers.
They welcomed the opportunity to input their experiences and challenges in learning to manage and lead. And appreciated the opportunity to focus on this under recognised and nuanced area of their working lives. All of my participants said their management and leadership work was not considered, by the legal organisation in which they worked, to be the main game in their work role. Even the managing partners.
For example A1 recognised a need for the legal profession to change its thinking from what he suggests is:
the prevalent viewpoint and a reluctance of lawyers to embrace notions that might challenge their professional status (p 199). We need a degree of openness and willingness to acknowledge. You don’t just make legal decisions. There is a whole lot more to it that getting out the legal text books and law to say, but I think the view is legal decisions. That might sound like an extraordinary thing. There is nothing demeaning in not making legal decisions. There is the view that these are the sorts of things managers make. We are not managers we are professionals. I think there is a bit of that around. (A1-1-8)
This highlights the complexity of working in legal culture, and particularly managing and leading, when this work challenges what amounts to core beliefs about ‘how we do things around here’. On one hand, lawyers must be self-sufficient, on the other they must value working together in what amounts to a strict hierarchy of seniority (with rules which govern admission to practise law and how to apply to be accepted as Senior Counsel) and which favour personal and intellectual leadership rather than positional authority (p 207) The legal culture is shaped by the experience of working in it on a daily manageable basis. These findings and analysis helped to refine (CUL) to mean ‘Legal Working Culture’ (CULlwc).
Yet all of these professional leaders were motivated to serve their organisation and to improve their contributions by developing their management and leadership skills. Despite this dearth of professional development support and recognition.
Sometimes an organisation will give face value to the importance of the formal leadership and informal leadership roles but fail to provide the necessary resourcing, structural and power alignment support. Even formal leaders will then be obliged to undertake leaderwork.
Implication
Whenever there is better practice Leaderwork is being performed. This means that some crucial aspect of the essential work that a person does is not being validated by those in authority. Which in the case of lawyers may be the overarching professional culture belief that we are professionals not managers.
It follows that many people working in legal organisations face into almost insurmountable hurdles when navigating these bolted on yet poorly articulated beliefs about the nature of legal practice work in legal organisations. Stoicism is not enough. We can lose our best people in these professional skirmishes of what it means to be a lawyer.
The lack of status, or credibility, given to lawyers by their colleagues, when they either assume formal leadership roles or undertake altruistic leader work (leaderwork), can undermine their leadership role and effectiveness. Even authority.
And therefore results in essential workplace culture reform, such as #preventing gendered violence in legal organisations, being stymied.
Organisational Leaderwork Facilitation Method
Our Leaderwork Facilitation method provides a scaffolding upon which to build a more robust understanding of the work you and your colleagues do and its value to you and your workplace.
Courageous Cultural Change
For enlightened organisations Leaderwork and its bespoke organisational development techniques provide a thoughtful and intuitive approach to leading meaningful cultural change. To make work better and safer.
By employing productive reflection methods to evaluate crucial information gleaned from your leaderworkers organisational Leaders can better gauge the health and performance of their working culture.
In time you may choose to incorporate this better work, Leaderwork, into your own systems and processes. Core EQ calls this #Role Sculpting.
Hann, D.,PhD., (2007) Lawyers Practising Learning: Reshaping Continuing Legal Education.
Lawyering Stress and Work Culture: An Australian Study (2014) UNSW Law Journal Volume 37(3) p 1062.
Our Watch, Change the Story: A framework for the primary prevention of violence against women in Australia (2nd ed.), (2021), 134.
Our Watch, Workplace Equality and Respect Standards: Promoting workplace gender equality and the prevention of sexual harassment and genderbased violence, (2022).
Pender, K, Improving Workplace Culture: Lessons from the Legal Profession, downloaded @ www.aspg.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Improving-Workplace-Culture.pdf
Victorian Legal Services Board + Commissioner, Sexual Harassment in the Victorian Legal Sector: 2019 study of legal professionals and legal entities, – Report of Findings (2019), p vii. 7 Ibid, 46.
WorkSafe, ‘Work-related gendered violence including sexual harassment’, Gendered Violence (30 March 2023).
Women’s Legal Service Victoria, Gender and Intersectional Inequality: Power and privilege in Victoria’s Legal and Justice Workforce, (2022).
Women’s Legal Service Victoria, Sexism and Gender Inequality in the Victorian Legal and Justice Sector, (2019).
Workplace Gender Equality Agency, WGEA Data Explorer, (2023).
WorkSafe, ‘Prevent and manage work-related gendered violence: How to create a workplace that is free from gendered-violence’, WorkWell Toolkit, (7 September 2023)
Dr Deborah Hann
3 February 2025
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