Reward Not Shame

“I struggle to fill out my timesheets.”

“I have gotten several calls from my Practice Leader about my being delinquent. The last one with the PL was quite harsh. Most likely, the firm won’t give me a bonus this year unless I fix this. I get why being timely with my timesheets is important, but I’m so busy all the time – I struggle to do the administrative stuff.”

If you work in a law firm, you have heard some version of this. Delinquent time sheets are an ongoing problem (though perhaps less so in 2024 due to greater focus by firms on the issue and improved technology)

Here’s what I see though: Law firms’ approach to resolving this issue is nearly always to “shame and/or punish”. They scold (with increasing intensity), they publish (delinquency lists), and they withhold ($$/benefits). Sometimes this works, but in my experience it works inconsistently. Here’s why:

Shame and punishment are great tools to get someone’s attention but, in and of themselves, they don’t provide a path to lasting change.

To change a behavior, a new habit, or series of habits, needs to be built to replace the old habit. Anyone who has tried to build an exercise regime or change an eating habit and keep to it, knows how hard this is.

Effective habit building starts small, methodically increasing frequency/improving consistency, and focuses on “resiliency” (getting back to the new habit, when inevitably there is a “miss” – rather than returning to the old way).

What helps build resiliency is encouragement and reward. Feeling progress/success tends to encourage greater progress. By contrast, shame tends to undermine resiliency. The bad feelings we associate with a miss tend to discourage us, often leading us to abandon change.

When working with lawyers on improving their timesheet timeliness (or building any new habit), I focus on two things:

-Breaking “improvement” into smaller steps (e.g. keeping a log hourly/daily, scheduling a time for timekeeping etc.)
-Identifying specific measures of success (e.g., taking the identified step X days in a row).

And then encouraging them to reward themselves (or a loved one) when they are successful. The goal, I tell them is replace associating timesheets with failure and shame with good feelings about completing the task successfully.

What works in terms of steps, success and reward differs from person to person – but even the smallest reward (saying you get to have an extra shot of caramel your macchiato) can have an outsized impact. And from small steps, they build bigger and from “easy” wins they move to bigger more challenging wins - and eventually, and often suddenly, a new set of habits is in place.

Reward and encouragement are powerful change agents. Shame and punishment are not.