A well-thought-out and comprehensive playbook will empower your team to make quicker decisions autonomously. It will also help them be more confident in their decisions and align with your company’s risk tolerance. Rapidly growing legal teams can use a playbook to give their team the necessary resources to ensure individuals are prioritizing effectively and providing consistent support to their business partners.
Here are 3 ways to optimize your playbooks and help your team move quicker, feeling more empowered to make autonomous decisions:
Summarize
Summarizing your risk tolerance in the playbook will help unlock decisions for your team, while also ensuring the high-risk items are escalated and get the right level of visibility. For commercial legal teams, the way you want your team to approach negotiating an agreement likely depends on the type of contract and deal terms. Providing your team with a summary of your risk position will help them prioritize effectively and ensure folks are not approaching the review of your lower-risk engagements in the same way as those high-risk agreements (for example, a one-hour event agreement vs. a high-risk SaaS provider).
Be Flexible
Focusing on approved concepts and suggested language will improve deal velocity and reduce friction. When including "approved language," people tend to get tied to the approved language rather than the concept, and instead of accepting suggested redlines that align with the concepts you're comfortable agreeing to, individuals will propose edits to mirror exactly what the approved language looks like. Where you have flexibility in how language is drafted, empower your team by including approved concepts and suggested redlines in the playbook and encourage them to work within the proposed redlines they’re reviewing.
Make it Interactive
Making your playbook interactive keeps folks engaged and drives them to the centralized resources available. Playbooks can be lengthy, and there may be a lot to read through. If it seems difficult to navigate, it creates risk that folks aren’t turning to your source of truth (particularly for one-off questions at busy times). Creating a central resource that people are engaged with and that is easy to navigate helps drive adoption. One way to approach this is to make the information easier to find and interactive by embedding quick “how to” or “why” videos in a summary section to help individuals locate and review a concept quickly without the need to read through the entire document.
Looking for additional resources on how to create a playbook? Check out this checklist.
