The Legal Mini-MBA: Goal Setting and Strategy

Week 4 of our 12 week Legal Mini-MBA is drawing to close for our current cohorts and we spent time discussing the goals, objectives, strategies and tactics with our partners and senior associates

Within The Legal MBA Essentials book we make the distinction between goals being “what” you want to achieve and strategies being “how” you go about achieving them

In the Mini-MBA we build on what vs how, and add in generic vs specific – producing the matrix you see in the image below

In the top left you have your broad, generally qualitative goals and an outline of your key strategic choices in the bottom left

For example:

Goal: Become a partner in my law firm

Strategy: Focus on mid-market industrial and logistics companies and build a suite of services addressing their employment law needs

And on the right hand side, we translate that broad goal into SMART objectives (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timebound) to clearly articulate what you’re trying to achieve in more specific terms

Beneath these objectives we capture the shorter term tactics, or tangible actions, that we’re going to take in pursuit of those objectives and broader strategies

To continue the above example:

Objectives: Build a £500,000 book of business to submit in my promotion business case next year

Tactics: Obtain a list of 200 mid-market industrial and logistics companies to target

The power of this matrix is you can start in any quadrant and either build in the detail to the right, abstract to the left, and move between what you’re aiming for at the top with how you intend on doing it at the bottom

This framework then runs through our accompanying Legal Mini-MBA Action Plan for delegates to build upon and iterate as we work through the remaining topics

I really like this session – delegates start articulating their longer term hopes and aspirations for the future, which helps focus efforts throughout the remainder of the programme on how they can achieve them

Matrix of Goals, Objectives, Strategies and Tactics