Choosing an Office Manager for Your Firm

By Terri Olson

Last month, we talked about how to determine whether your firm would benefit from (and be willing to use) the skills of an office manager. This month, we're looking at ways to get the best person and make him or her a productive member of your team.

When hiring a manager for the first time, many firms assume they should promote from within. In other words, they take the senior secretary or bookkeeper and add on to his or her duties, transforming the position into one of office manager. Unfortunately, this is rarely effective for several reasons. The primary one has to do with existing relationships within the firm. Your new manager may already be best friends with another employee, or may have been a partner's long-time secretary. How will he or she react when forced to tell that best friend that he's coming in late too often, or that former boss that she needs to get her timesheets in pronto? Even if the new office manager is fair and neutral toward all parties, he or she will likely be the subject of rumors and complaints that "(s)he always treats those people better" or "(s)he never liked me." An outsider is less subject to these criticisms.

Another reason promoting from within may be a problem has to do with qualifications. If Susan has been your bookkeeper for 15 years, then (we hope) she's good with numbers. But what about her skill with personnel, computer systems, facilities management, or any of the other duties you're hoping your office manager will take charge of? To be honest, most office managers have one or two areas in which they shine, and others in which they're merely competent. But you want to avoid someone with no experience in a critical area.

For these reasons, I strongly encourage anyone looking for an office manager to pursue more mainstream routes, such as going through a placement service or placing an advertisement in a legal journal, and hire only after a thorough examination of all the candidates' qualifications and backgrounds.

Once a firm has hired someone, the next question becomes "how do we use this person to the fullest?" To which I have a standard reply: "If you're not giving your office manager more responsibility than you're comfortable with, you're doing something wrong."

What does this mean? Let's look at a real-life scenario. A firm hires an office manager with the best of intentions and some pretty set ways of doing things. The office manager is told that she's to have responsibility for hiring and firing staff, purchasing equipment, and ensuring that timesheets are submitted promptly, among other things. A computer breaks down and what happens? Probably the managing partner will tell the office manager, "Well, eventually you're supposed to take care of this, but I really need to authorize this for the time being." A secretary quits, and again the office manager is told, "This is something that you'll be doing soon, once you know your way around here. But in the meantime I happen to know someone who's really interested in the position, so I'll just bring her in."

As you might guess, "soon" never arrives. Office managers complain that frequently there is no real responsibility and no authority to carry out tasks on the job description. Spend money? Not without a partner's signature. Get a new copier? After the partners meet to approve the purchase. Hire someone? No, a partner already did it and informed the office manager of the starting salary.

Probably the hardest job for the new office manager to step into is that of managing the secretaries. Most secretaries are loyal to their bosses and run to them with any question or problem. Convincing the secretaries—and the lawyers—that the rules are different now is a job that requires the complete cooperation of the highest levels of the firm. The firm's managers must, over and over again if necessary, let the attorneys know that questions about vacations, work loads, and someone else's tardiness are now the province of the office manager.

Because of this, I feel that the "cold bath" approach is often necessary. If the job description says that the office manager should hire and fire, develop a personnel handbook, or choose a network, don't delegate these tasks back to the partners, even for a short amount of time. Remember, you wanted an office manager so you would have more time to practice law! Instead, arrange for the managing partner to meet with the office manager regularly as he or she becomes oriented to the firm, answering questions and providing support. However, let the office manager make the decisions. In some instances these will not be the same decisions you would have made. But that is a price that can be well worth paying.

Terri Olson is the former Director of the Law Practice Management Program.

This article was originally published in the Georgia Bar Journal, August 1999, Vol. 5 No. 1, p. 58