Conflict Management at Ross & Sherwin Ross and Sherwin (R&S) is a 40-year-old, Chicago-based law firm with 65 lawyers and one of the largest specialty intellectual property (IP) firms in the country. Since the firm's founding, a single managing partner has run the partnership meetings and worked with the firm's operations director to make administrative decisions about staff and lawyers. Its clear niche and consistently strong results meant that the managing partner could spend most of his time continuing his law practice. In fact, it was easy to keep your head down and "just practice law" at R&S.

Beginning in 2008, changes in the firm's strategy and pressure from clients and competitors began to challenge the easy-going style of the organization. For example, the recently added IP litigation services required new lawyers with different skill sets. In addition, clients were pressuring the firm to lower hourly rates for basic transactional work, such as trademark and patent applications, and to increase the number of litigation cases under a "contingency" arrangement. That is, R&S's fees would depend on the court's findings and significantly increase the firm's risks compared to the bill-by-the-hour arrangement that had worked for years.

Most of the transactional lawyers had reservations about the contingency work. Although the payoff could be good for the victorious inventor and the law firm who represented him, the possibility of sinking a million dollars of billable time into a case with potentially no return was terrifying to some. As a result, the firm's managing partner began calling for regular meetings to discuss whether to invest in contingency cases and how steeply to discount transactional work. In 2009, the firm lost two partners to competitors and partner income dipped in 2009 and 2010.

By the end of 2010, the partners had agreed on two things: they needed to think more about firm strategy and they needed a new leadership structure. The R&S partners believed that a single managing partner could no longer lead the firm because the two very different businesses, IP litigation (increasingly contingency work) and IP transactions (hourly work with significant rate pressure) required representation at the highest level. Moreover, Andrew, the managing partner since 2000, was eager to retire and fully endorsed the need for new leadership.

In 2011, R&S named its first-ever "comanaging partners," Brad and Ron. Brad is conservative in every way. He is slow to delegate and even slower to endorse the litigation group's growth through contingency work. Ron, on the other hand, is a risk taker in terms of the work he will take on, and in terms of his willingness to pass responsibilities to other lawyers early in their careers.

Brad and Ron also share certain characteristics, however. While they are effective at navigating thorny conversations with clients and adversaries, they have little patience for working through the firm's internal differences. Both of them will say what people want to hear and then go off and do things as they see fit.

The downside of this common trait showed up in their first action as comanaging partners. They agreed to lead the firm through a strategic planning process and hired an external consultant familiar with law firm strategy to assist. Brad believed that Ron was eager to have a discussion about expansion, including contingency litigation but believed that he was so focused on his own group's success that he might jeopardize the core business and push risk-averse lawyers into uncomfortable situations. Ron believed that Brad's primary interest was in stabilizing the firm and "protecting" the hourly work that "paid the bills," and worried that Brad saw litigation as a dispensable part of the firm.

However, instead of engaging in a thorough discussion and exchanging views about the merits of the different options, they chose to gather input from others. They argued publicly that this was the right thing to do. Privately, they weren't so much gathering data as they were avoiding one another and an uncomfortable conflict. They walked into their initial all-partners planning meeting as comanaging partners with different agendas and considerable distrust for one another.

Twenty minutes into the meeting, Dan, the firm's leading transactional practice partner and enemy of any planning process that was unrelated to supporting his work, began his c-examination of the two new leaders. While Dan had some good questions about where Ron and Brad thought the planning process would lead, he quickly attached his remarks to the supremacy of his own practice, his potential new clients, and that any other investment represented a threat to him and his team. The questions carried a hostile tone and were met with defensiveness by Ron and Brad. Ron was feeling alone and needing to defend the idea of expanding contingency work, and Brad felt attacked by an influential partner in one of his first efforts at firm-wide leadership. The meeting limped along but ended with everyone feeling that nothing was accomplished and wondering how or if Ron and Brad were going to be able to effectively lead the firm.

Ron and Brad each blamed the other for not having a clearer plan and structure for the meeting. They each believed that the others' misplaced agenda created the opening for Dan to torpedo the proceedings. Again, however, rather than looking at and dealing with one another, they turned away from each other and pointed at Dan.

The strategy consultant had seen enough. She could see the conflict derailing the strategy formulation process and recommended an OD consultant with conflict resolution experience.

As the OD consultant entered the system, Ron and Brad presented their recommendation: "fix" Dan and everything would be ok. Each of them agreed that Dan was a trouble-maker and would remain a challenging presence as they tried to lead the firm. When they did finally drop the subject of Dan and compare visions for the firm, Ron would waive the banner about the importance of growth and balancing hourly work with the potential for big victories, and Brad would dig into his position that too much risk scared transactional lawyers and threatened the stability of the firm. They would quickly get frustrated, shorten the meeting, and go back to what they each did so wellpracticing law.

The most detrimental aspect of the unresolved tension between them was the conversations that took place behind each other's backs. Ron would worry aloud that Brad did not see an important role for litigation going forward. He described Brad as chummy with his old friends and unwelcoming of anything that threatened his conservative view of the firm. Brad would describe litigation as Ron's pet project and motivated by their inability to develop hourly work. He told his partners that he didn't trust that Ron provided all relevant information about the cases he wanted the firm to invest in. They said they talked more about their conflict to their other partners than they did to one another.

To make the recommendation palatable for Dan, Ron and Brad proposed that the three partners work together in a leadership development process. Initially, Dan pretended to be on board with the plan. Soon thereafter, however, it was clear that Dan wanted nothing to do with coaching, leadership development, or help of any kind. Ron and Brad were left looking at each other. Realizing that the firm was, indeed, at a precarious juncture and needed strong leadership from them, the OD consultant proposed, and Ron and Brad agreed to engage in a process designed to help the two of them manage their conflict so that they could develop and implement a strategy for the firm.

The OD consultant's initial impression was that these two brilliant lawyers rarely, if ever, stopped to think about the impact of their style on others in the firm. Before they could have a constructive dialogue about working together more effectively, Ron and Brad needed some understanding of their own roles in the dysfunctional dynamic. The first step was to gather feedback and help them see how others perceived them.

Ron and Brad each went through a full day of meetings with the consultant to discuss the feedback, to articulate a vision for the firm, and to describe a collaborative relationship with the other. Over the course of the day, they were each quite articulate about what they wanted to help the firm accomplish, where they found themselves frustrated, and how each of them viewed the other.

For the first time since their appointment as managing partners, each of them drafted bullet points describing a vision for the firm. The premise of this exercise was that there might be a good amount of common ground; and, if all of the key items were laid out on the table, it might be possible to work through the various interests, see what was attainable, and what they could agree on. Each of the partners also created a set of steps that the two of them could take to develop a more trusting, coordinated relationship as comanaging partners.

After the one-on-one meetings, the OD consultant asked that they share with each other their visions for the firm and their own action steps to create collaborative leadership. They were genuinely surprised by the similarities on the lists. Brad, to Ron's surprise, did want to expand the firm. He had a different timeline and his view included satellite offices, but he wanted to build. Ron was pleased to see that Brad was not "hunkering down" and riding things out until his retirement. Ron, to Brad's relief, never envisioned the contingency work consuming more that 20 percent of the firm's billable time. This was still a bigger number than Brad would like, but it was a meaningful, reasonable limitation that Ron put forth.

Walking through these and other concrete items on their respective bullet lists, they saw that they were largely wrong in their assumptions about what the other person did or did not want to accomplish as comanaging partner. Similarly, walking together through their respective "better collaboration" lists, they saw that they both knew they needed more time with just the two of them together communicating (the norm had been to include the COO, third member of the Executive Committee, in all of their meetings). They realized that they both tended to posture and take exaggerated positions in front of an audience. They also agreed to be more open and quicker to raise issues and concerns with one another.

The OD consultant had follow-up calls with each of them over the next six months to follow up on commitments that they made to each other based on the two lists. They made significant progress. For example, they developed a contingency work strategy that created a portfolio of cases with different levels of investment. The portfolio would ramp up only as positive verdicts and rewards materialized. This allowed Ron to see that growth was possible depending on the success of his group, and it allowed Brad to see that there were manageable limitations on the risk. They also were successful in carving out some meeting time for just the two of them. However, they were not successful in being open with one another and speaking up when they had a concern about how they were working together or what the other person was up to.

Despite the forward progress and excellent financial results in six months since engaging in the process, both Ron and Brad remained "worn out," "exhausted," "stressed," and believed they were on thin ice as leaders and with one another. For example, Ron and Brad presided over a partnership meeting that Dan hijacked in the first 15 minutes. Dan asked pointed questions about a new contingency case. In Ron's mind, this should have been an easy distraction to dismiss. He and Brad were aligned on the plan related to the intake of contingency work and the partners had signed on. If Brad, the transactional partner of the duo, had simply and clearly told Dan that the new case was accepted pursuant to the agreed-upon system, the discussion would have ended. However, Brad said nothing and left Ron to defend (with the potential appearance of self-interest) the decision to take the case. Ron felt hung out to dry.

Despite some excellent progress together, the partnership meeting and other similar events triggered old patterns and familiar flare-ups. Feeling frustrated, Ron and Brad described the hijacked partnership meeting in their next session with the OD consultant. The consultant reminded them of the important steps that they had taken together over the previous months and that they had jointly steered the firm out of a difficult business cycle for many law firms in the country. He assured them that a "conflict-free" partnership was not possible and not even the goal. They had gotten to the point where they could remain focused on joint business goals and related tasks despite the occasional flareups; however, their relationship needed more resilience. They were too quick to doubt one another and to doubt themselves as an effective unit.

Any "team building" to date had been done through the work of managing the firm. Ron and Brad, both doers, related easily to the task-orientation of making lists and checking items off of the list. The consultant had remained focused on structural interventions as well. However, seeing the frustration in both of them, he believed it was time to take a chance and introduce a more explicit relationship-building component to the meetings. The OD consultant proposed that the partners join him on a stand-up paddle-board outing on the ocean. They had not seen one another looking quite so foolish and despite a couple of mishaps getting out through the surf, they had never before shared much laughter.

The freeing, shared experience created a very different tone for the meeting that followed and the most direct discussion of trust between them. Ron talked about Brad's silence at the partners meeting and Brad talked about his feeling that Ron was less than completely forthcoming about all material facts related to contingency cases he brought into the firm. Brad's concerns were about the timing of the information and the level of detail. The comments from each of them came ac as confronting, but rather than the usual defensiveness or steering the conversation to Dan or something else; they both owned up to what they could and should have done differently. The conflict resolution intervention followed a traditional OD process. It began with diagnosis, working with the energy of the client, and initially focused on structural and behavioral changes that helped the partners get work done. As trust was developed, the consultant was able to suggest other interventions that helped the two partners begin building trust at deeper levels of their relationship.

Which of the following did not contribute to the success of the OD intervention in resolving the conflict between Brad and Ron? a. Equality of power between Brad and Ron b. Reducing task interdependence between Brad and Ron c. Relationship-building activity d. Open and clear forms of communication