Managerial and Leadership Programs
Managerial & Leadership Programs
Effective Coaching and Feedback: A Workshop

Coaching and feedback can be a firm’s most powerful tool for clarifying what it expects of associates, improving their performance, and increasing their morale and motivation. This highly interactive workshop shows supervising lawyers how to use feedback to draw the best work from others – without spending more time than they have to spare. It provides a simple framework of “best practices” for both the content and the delivery of feedback, and then asks the participants to apply that framework through scenarios and exercises.

The workshop typically takes place over 3 ½ hours, for a group of 20 to 25 lawyers. It can be adapted for different levels of seniority, and has been taught for audiences ranging from partners to mid-level associates.

Sample Agenda
9:00 a.m.  Introduction
9:05 a.m. Lessons from your own experience (breakout discussions)
  • small-group discussions of feedback that produced your best performance when you were an associate
  • group debriefing
9:20 a.m. Lessons from the research (lecture/discussion)
  • nature vs. nurture: can feedback improve performance?
  • what kind of feedback does the most good?
  • coaching vs. feedback
9:45 a.m. Effective coaching: when and how (breakout discussions)
  • small-group discussion of how to handle a coaching vignette
  • group debriefing
10:15 a.m. Break
10:30 a.m. A framework of “best practices” for delivering feedback effectively (lecture/discussion)
11:00 a.m. Delivering tricky feedback effectively (breakout discussion)
  • small-group discussion, with role-playing
  • group debriefing
11:30 a.m. A framework of “best practices” (continued):  high-value feedback (lecture/discussion)
11:45 a.m. Effective feedback:  addressing a pattern (group and breakout discussion)
  • mock feedback session, for group discussion and critique
  • small-group discussions of how to deliver the feedback more effectively
  • group debriefing
12:15 p.m. Conclusion