Peer to Peer Magazine

BEST PRACTICES MANAGING EMPOWERMENT When you empower someone for the first time, and they fail, that is okay. I’ve spent a lot of time at my current firm building several teams. When a new process is identified, I delegate that process to an individual or a team, and whoever is responsible owns it. I’ll provide input, but ultimately the authority has been delegated. I will admit that there are times when I overrule, but when I do, it is for a good reason. As time goes on, this happens less frequently. When you delegate, accept failure, and make sure you turn that failure into a learning experience for yourself and the team. Over time, you’ll learn who excels at what. Push the limits! There are times when I set unrealistic deadlines, or what I think are unrealistic deadlines. Almost always, the team steps up to the challenge. Listen to your team often. DELEGATION ENCOURAGES CREATIVITY AND APPRECIATION My supervisor manages me with a hands-off approach. I appreciate this. It is one of the many reasons I’ve worked for my current firm for nine years. Her approach allows me to find creative solutions to the issues at hand. In the end, when your employees work their way through a challenge, make sure you give them credit. Sing their praises inside your firm, and be prepared to have a strong, happy, hard-working team. So remember, when in doubt, delegate! It is a powerful management tool you should not be afraid to use often. ILTA breakthrough. eReview ASPs have already declared their favorite new feature in the latest version of nXT. For anyone that’s ever wished their eReview software was smart enough to sort emails by subject, we have good news. Email SmartSort is one of many features that have come directly from customer wish lists: “One of the new features we found immediately useful is the way nXT 830 handles e-mail sorting,” said Craig Lee, vice president, sales, ACT Litigation Services. “By ignoring the RE: and FW: in the subject line, we get an instant visual of how emails and their attachments are related. The sort result begins with the first character after the RE: or FW. It is a clever tactic for approaching threading without incurring additional cost.” iCONECT’s latest release, nXT 830, is packed with new features and improvements — all designed to streamline the review process by reducing both clicks and errors. Register now to view a demonstration and you’ll be entered for a chance to win a 1TB external hard drive. Call us at (519) 645-1663, or register online: www.iconect.com/demo Beau Mersereau is Director of Applications, Development and Support and Fish & Richardson P.C. where he leads the application and development team in all aspects of intranet, extranet, database and applications development. He also directs the desktop support and training teams at FR. He was the former IT Director at Sutin, Thayer & Browne before leaving to start his own consulting company, Plexix LLC, and he is a former project leader at ProLaw Software. Beau can be reached at bm@fr.com. 22 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer www.iCONECT.com (519) 645-1663 ©2010 iCONECT Development, LLC. All rights reserved.

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