Closed for Lunch

A couple of weeks ago I rang the lawyers who were doing some conveyancing for me and got this recorded message: “We are now closed for lunch. Please ring back at 2pm”

What?! I need a decision now! To get this DONE! But then I broke into a grin and sat back in my chair. Well well well - lawyers who lunch eh?! There’s hope for humanity after all!

In the UK we expect lawyers to be available 24/7. Legal firms operate on a simple system called “billable hours”. Such a pretty word - like burbling babies and babbling brooks - but if you’re a lawyer billable means that every minute of your day can (and should if you want to get ahead) be monetised. Lawyers are for sale. They work in firms - ‘partnerships’ by description - but they operate as lone hunters. As one lawyer put it to me: we eat what we fish.

I’ve worked with lawyers all my professional life - individually and on leadership programmes. I’ve never in over 30 years encountered a legal firm that actually closed the whole shop for an hour every day. For lunch. Didn’t someone once say that lunch was for wimps?

I still remember vividly one man proudly telling a group in a leadership programme we ran for a large legal firm that he’d cancelled his honeymoon because a Big Client said jump. The others nodded in recognition.

Earlier all of them had recounted - joking, dryly ironic - how they’d become lawyers because they wanted to help people, be of service to humanity, make the world a better place. We could all hear the tinge of nostalgia in the room.

It was then I learned that cynicism is failed romanticism: hopes and dreams dashed on the rocks, the desire to do good put on the shelf, aspirations to contribute scaled down.

So could this small gesture of closing the whole firm for an hour every day be a bid to reclaim some of that humanity?

I like to see this firm as boldly ahead of the game by taking a stand for the right of every human being to have some space and time in every day to be just that: human.

Grandiose? Soft? Sentimental? No. Smart. In an age where robots and AI already do much of our work better, quicker, cheaper than us and they can do it 24/7, we humans must learn to reclaim the humanity we allowed to be stolen from us when we fell in love with the lure of untold wealth promised - and delivered to some - by the industrial-colonialist revolution back in the 18th century.

We are not machines and working non-stop is not what we do best. As a coach I’ve spent my life helping clients manage the stress of inhumane working expectations and the demand to collaborate within highly competitive cultures. We all know the fallout from these: anxiety, depression, addictions, workaholism, corrosive rivalries, antisocial behaviours, or just opting out.

I want to see the reinstated lunch hour as a glimmer of an opportunity, the thin end of the wedge, the start of a movement to put the human back at the heart of humanity.

These are also some of the themes we explore through Spirit at Work - our transpersonal leadership coaching programme for coaches and leaders seeking more humane, intelligent, ecosystemic and effective ways of working and living in our overshoot world.