Walker Morris

Walker Morris is one of Leeds' leading commercial law firms, with a team of around 450 people. The firm has worked with Quarterdeck across a relationship now worth over £52,000.

The challenge

The engagement began as the profession was working out what hybrid working would actually mean in practice — and the honest answer was that nobody knew yet.

The firm's leaders were being asked to pull very different management levers from the ones they had spent their careers learning. Supervision at a distance. Spotting that someone was struggling without the everyday cues of an office. Supporting colleagues through stress and mental health difficulties. Holding a team together when the team was rarely in the same room.

Very little of that had been part of anyone's management training, because until then very little of it had been part of anyone's job.

The approach

Walker Morris came to Quarterdeck already knowing what they were buying. Learning and Development Manager Emma Wilkinson had previously attended one of our taster sessions:

Having previously attended one of Quarterdeck's taster sessions, I really liked their delivery style, and with colleagues facing the challenges of leading and managing hybrid and virtual teams during the last year, it seemed to perfectly meet the training needs we had identified.

The firm's leaders had identified resilience and wellbeing as the areas where their managers were least equipped — areas, as Emma put it, probably not tackled before. That is where the work concentrated: practical leadership and people-management skills, aimed squarely at the problems the firm had actually named rather than at a generic syllabus.

Why it worked

The pattern is a familiar one to us. An organisation with capable, senior, technically excellent people, none of whom had been taught the specific skill of leading other humans through a period where the ground kept moving.

Technical excellence and legal judgement were never in short supply at Walker Morris. What the moment demanded was something different, and something learnable.