Thankfully the days are now largely gone when partners were elected to leadership positions solely because of their effectiveness as lawyers, with management and leadership often regarded as 'admin' and done in the margins of the working day.

However, the transition from being a working partner to a leader is still a huge step. Leadership of a professional partnership requires the very highest order of influencing skills to persuade fellow partners, who act largely as sole practitioners sharing a brand franchise, to collaborate, to cross-sell, to follow processes, to let others in to client relationships and to adopt the behaviours that will make a difference to the bottom line. Partners are clearly highly intelligent, but they have had almost zero opportunity to develop management and leadership skills in their career progression. Moreover, because these skills are largely behavioural and interpersonal, a theoretical understanding of how to use them will only go so far: they have to be tried out and practised in real life for valuable learning to take place.

Many come to us for coaching. What are the issues they find most challenging? Where do we spend most of our coaching focus? Where do we make the biggest difference? There are five key areas.

Dealing with conflict

The skills and pre-dispositions that determine why someone was attracted to law as a career in the first place are generally intellectual rather than people-focused and it is very common for lawyers to avoid personal conflict. They find it hard to give difficult messages such as those required to deal with unsatisfactory performance in fellow partners. Even those lawyers who can be robust in professional intellectual debate find it difficult to deal with interpersonal issues and tough conversations.

So, for example, dealing with a high-billing senior partner in the practice area who bullies assistants and will not fill in time-sheets is something that gets avoided and postponed. When such conversations do happen, they are often 'in code' because the partner hopes that the recipient will get the message without having to spell it out and mistakenly believes this to be kinder. The recipient, who is either in denial or does not want to change, just keeps on acting as usual -until the situation gets untenable. Therefore performance issues can take much longer to be dealt with than is common in most commercial organisations and can become terminal when, with help and support, real change could have been achieved as soon as the recipient had got a clear message.

Identifying the win-win in the particular situation is vital, and often needs persistent questioning. But most valuable of all has been rehearsing the prospective conversations in the safety of the coaching room; practising how to be clear, honest and straightforward about what needs to be said. Some of my most powerful coaching interventions have been working in this area, as the change in leadership capability can be really dramatic when a leader learns how to do this well.

Praise and encouragement

When I am conducting workshops with senior lawyers, I often ask the participants to turn to their neighbour and each tell their colleague one thing they really value about the other. Reactions can vary from embarrassment to refusal. It is frequently an area of extreme discomfort. Eventually I persuade them by example. When watching this exercise take place, I have seen the whole atmosphere change. Frequently, participants are noticeably emboldened as they hear things about themselves that they have never heard before. We know that praise and encouragement are vital to top-level performance and yet most lawyers generally believe that their partners do not (or even should not) need it.

Lawyers who get to the top are driven, self-motivated people; they need to be. They are hard on themselves and so find it difficult to be appreciative of others. So much more 'discretionary energy' would be given by partners and staff to their work if this changed. Once a firm has made sure that their cost base is well-managed, it is this discretionary energy that will make the difference.

Focusing on leadership at the right level

Because the management structure of professional partnerships is flat compared to other commercial organisations, there is very little inbuilt hierarchy for delegation of management activity. Commonly, a new practice head or managing partner is sucked into doing pure administration and detailed management work at a level that makes no commercial sense given their level of remuneration. It takes courage to put a business case for better administrative support when your predecessor has managed without, and it takes even more courage to create some delegation structure among your fellow partners and persuade them to take on some of the management tasks.

The consequence is that many lawyers elected to leadership positions on a manifesto to achieve change for the firm take a very long time to extricate themselves from detail and from having their diary effectively run by others who book their time up. By bringing in experience from other industries, and even other firms, the coach can create that commercial benchmark and encourage the new leader to spend his or her time on the really important matters.

Decision-making and taking controlled risks

Legal training is largely about deconstructing logic and arguments. Lawyers have good analytical skills, but do not get much chance to practice skills in building the kind of strategies and plans that will inspire and motivate their people. Understandably, given that law is all about precision, there has always been great emphasis on minimising risk. So it is a tough transition to move out of that comfort zone into a role that requires both creating a vision for staff and partners to follow and taking commercial decisions where uncertainty is a fact of life. Being prepared to articulate a vision and to commit yourself to it, rather than sitting on the fence, needs testing out in a safe space. Changes like this need to happen in a controlled way, so that leaders extend their comfort zone gradually. Supporting this kind of personal change is what coaching is all about: taking on challenges in a gradual fashion, reviewing, learning and extending oneself a little further each time.

Getting buy-in to strategies and ideas

Part of the penalty of a highly-intellectual career is often an ingrained belief that your fellow partners will embrace your ideas fully if you just present your case in a suitably cogent way. Alas, it is not so. Most leaders of equivalent sized businesses will have learned on the way up how to manage change and how to get buy-in. There is recognition in today's legal marketplace that individual partners cannot work much harder and yet partners' expectations are that profits will rise every year. So there is more focus than ever on how the firm can work smarter – and this is all about changed behaviours. Whether explicitly recognised or not, what many law firm leaders are seeking to do is effectively to run a change programme within the firm. Yet most firms are not in crisis; they are doing well, by any standards, so there is not a great surge of dissatisfaction to generate a strong will for change.

This would be a tough leadership challenge in any industry, but it is even more so in a professional partnership. The concepts of leading successful change (wonderfully set out in fable by John Kotter, the guru of successful change programmes in his recently published book, Our Iceberg is Melting) involve building a group of advocates to support you -highlighting successes and communicating the vision – need understanding both in theory and in practice. They require 'emotional intelligence' qualities of a high order to be learnt quickly. When a leader embarks on such a programme, there is only one chance to get it right, otherwise cynicism will set in. Leaders find enormous value from sitting down with a coach – someone who has direct experience of the dynamics of senior management – who has no agenda other than both to provide support and constructive advice. They can talk about who is an ally; who is against; who they believe they can persuade and how much communicating they should do.

Is coaching the only answer? Of course not, but what is common to all of these issues is the value of specific input at the right level that recognises the very high intellectual skill of lawyers alongside the very small amount of practical experience in leadership and management. Because many practitioners start from a point of having so little practice management experience, the law can be one of the most rewarding professions in which to coach as the transformation is significant.

Mairi Eastwood is an executive coach and managing partner at Praesta Partners.