Law Firm Multipliers

Allison Williams: [00:00:05] Hi, everybody, it’s Allison Williams here, your host of The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast, Law Firm Mentor is a business coaching service for solo and small law firm attorneys. We help you to grow your revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:29] This week we’re going to be talking about law firm multipliers. So this idea of law firm multipliers is something that actually came to me from a book title. It’s a book that was referred to me recently, and I picked it up, skimmed it quickly at some point it became a bit repetitive, but there were some really, really great points in there of things that we talk about all the time here at Law Firm Mentor that I wanted to congeal into one discussion. So the book at issue is called Multipliers How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman. And in this book, she talks about the difference between a multiplier and a diminisher as a leader. So I want you to think about how you engage with other people on your team and this is true. By the way, this, this, this idiom of being a multiplier versus a diminisher is a common way of being. Whether you have one virtual part-time assistant or you have a law firm of hundreds of people. This is really a description of leadership capacity and the way that we, as leaders of businesses engage with other people, people that are that answer to us, people that serve us, people that work within our companies and whether we take them and make them better or we take them and make them smaller.

 

Allison Williams: [00:02:04] Now, I know that as soon as I say that a lot of people will instinctually, viscerally react with, I know I’m a good leader, I know that I make my people feel good. So we’re not talking about when we talk about multipliers versus diminishers. We’re not talking about whether or not you are a quote-unquote nice boss or whether you are friendly toward your staff or you treat them with basic respect. Ok. These things, to some degree, are a given. When we’re talking about multipliers versus diminishers, we’re talking about how your leadership capacity, how your qualities as a leader either contribute to or detract from your team’s ability, each individual person on your team, their ability to excel and become their best selves. So when and just kind of reading the description of the book and we’re not going to actually talk about the book, I don’t want to make this into a book review. But when we talk about the kind of the general theory of multipliers versus diminishers, we’re talking about someone who in their daily leadership capacity attracts talent, right? This is a multiplier. Someone who attracts talent, liberates employees to do their best to make decisions versus promoting unproductive debate, and a leader who invests in human capital.

 

Allison Williams: [00:03:27] A diminisher, on the other hand, is one who is self-serving, drains, capability and intelligence from their teams, and ultimately through their actions, tears their employees down. So I want to give you some examples of what it is to be a multiplier. And then on the flip side, what it is to be a diminisher because some of these are really counterintuitive. They’re not the kind of attributes that you would think of and say, Oh yes, I’m multiplying the quality and quantity of my team by virtue of doing this, or I am diminishing my team by virtue of doing this.

 

Allison Williams: [00:04:04] All right. So the first thing I want you to think about in the category of multiplier is soliciting process and systematizing assistance from your team. Now, for those of you that have participated in the Crushing Chaos Masterclass, you know that we are big proponents of not just learning how to systematize, but also learning how to ultimately educate and involve your team in the process of creating systems for you. Now, for some people who have never heard this concept before, it might seem completely absurd to you. You might be thinking, Hey, it’s my business, the buck stops with me. Why would I ever delegate out something as critically important as how my business is going to run? And here’s the reason. The reality is, you are perhaps America’s next top rock star attorney. You are not America’s next top rock star paralegal, file clerk, marketing assistant, and so on and so forth.

 

Allison Williams: [00:05:02] So you have to think about what your competency is and when you think about other jobs that are done in your business, you should be hiring people for those jobs that are more equipped and more capable at those jobs than you are. In other words, if the best secretary in your office is you, you have grossly under-hired. So I want you to think about when you are looking at your team, evaluating them from the perspective of asking yourself, is this person better at this job than I can be? Ok? And when we say than I can be, I don’t mean if you were to spend ten thousand hours in that role and ultimately develop the skill, the, the competency, and the know-how. I mean, if you were to pick yourself up from your job lawyering, and put yourself over at the paralegal’s desk and be a paralegal, you know, are you, are you evaluating yourself as superior to the people you hired? And if you are, there’s a serious problem with your deficit or frankly, your ego. Ok. Right? Your deficit would be if you don’t have the talent. Your ego, of course, would be if you have the talent but yet you think better of yourself. So let’s assume that neither of those is true, right? Let’s assume that you’ve hired competent people and they just need to step into their competency and expand it so that the value that they add to your company is not just doing the work, but optimizing how the work is done. Ok, slight distinction, but very important.

 

Allison Williams: [00:06:34] Doing the work means picking up the phone, calling the clients, getting things on the calendar, drafting basic documents, reviewing discovery. Whatever the task is, optimizing the performance of the work is taking it to the next level, which means not just doing the work, but thinking about the work from a process perspective and asking oneself Is this the best, most efficient, most profitable, most expedient way to handle this activity? Is this the way that is going to promote the client’s best interest from a legal perspective and from a customer service perspective? A person who has that type of global view is participating actively in the role of systematizing your law business.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:19] Now, ironically, we have a Systematize Your Law Business Retreat coming up, or actually, as of the date this airs, I believe we will have been past the weekend where we had our Systematize Your Law Business Retreat. But we do teach the concepts of how to Systematize a Law Business and how to integrate your team into that in our Crushing Chaos Master Class. So if you haven’t taken the master class as of yet, I invite you to do that. It’s absolutely free. We host it on Zoom and we stream it to our Facebook group community and all you have to do is register. You can register at Law Firm Mentor Dot Net Forward Slash Master Class.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:55] All right. So the first hour, the first example of multiplying is involving your team in process and systematizing your law firm. The next way that we multiply our team. And by the way, when we talk about multiplying team, we’re talking about multiplying and expanding talent. The next way we do that is to create space for our team to perform. And this means I know it’s going to be hard for you to hear no micromanaging. One of the things that is the most demoralizing for a person who genuinely wants to contribute is having someone dictate every single step of the way from the start of a process or a project to the end that they must do it in a particular way. The idea that we want to have systems in our business does not mean that any everything that ever happens needs to be filtered through your lens. It means that we want our teams to have certain things that are done on autopilot, right? The autopilot comes from having the systems and having people well trained, well versed, well onboarded onto those systems so that they can execute. But then the next step, like once you get them onto your systems, you do want to have spaces and places in their job where they can contribute, that isn’t dictated by the exact way it must be done. Now, if you’re thinking, I can’t conceive of things in my business that don’t require that because I’m a law firm owner and any deviation from the standard process that we have in a law firm puts us at risk of grievance or malpractise. Then you’re looking at this too narrowly.

 

Allison Williams: [00:09:39] There are a lot of things that your team can be doing that will contribute to the overall health and well-being of your law firm that have nothing to do with meeting and obligation that would put you at risk of an ethics violation or malpractise risk. There are, in fact, other areas where they can contribute that do carry those risks, but they are less likely to put you at risk than you are. Case in point, lawyers all the time will have a desk full of documents, right? They get another document in the mail. They just stick it on the pile and the next thing that happens is the lawyer says, OK, this has to be done. I’ll just do it myself, right? Or I’ll get around to giving it over to my team. Now, whatever it is that you’re doing, once you get around to it, you might be highly competent at it. In fact, it might be something that requires a lawyer’s eyes. Oftentimes it’s not. But that’s where you start, right? And then you keep it to yourself and you don’t get around to it until it’s at crisis mode, right? Because you have a business where you put out fires all day, OK? By the way, no matter what your practice area is, if you’re putting out fires all day, you have run your business unappropriately and you are now creating risk by virtue of being in that status. And I say that as a family law attorney. Ok, one of the most hectic, time-laden, emotionally intense practice areas in the practice of law, and I do not accept putting out fires as a way of being in my business, right? Because it’s highly systematized and we’re structure things so that we can avoid them doesn’t mean that emergencies don’t happen, but self-induced emergencies don’t happen, right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:11:23] So you have to think about giving over to your team the ability for them to be their best selves through contributing to the work. And that means they have to do something more than follow your instructions all day, right? And this is true, by the way, even of people that you might consider to be quote lower-level people, right? There’s a difference between someone who’s super intelligent, super dedicated, super ambitious, and what they contribute versus what someone contributes when they really just want a nine to five Monday through Friday, place to go and get a paycheck. There are those people in the world, I would suggest to you, those people are really not appropriate to be in your law firm, but those people are out there, right? You can have a wide range of performance basis, meaning some people their performance is what fuels them, other people, their performance in your law firm is not what fuels them. It is ultimately their children, or their hobbies, or their pet projects, or their side gigs, or whatever, right? You may not be the most important thing in their life, and that’s OK.

 

Allison Williams: [00:12:27] But what we’re really talking about is every person has the ability to contribute and if you don’t infuse into the job a process for them to contribute. What you’ll find is that, that is when people tend to leave jobs, even when you are paying more money than the next lawyer down the street, even when you treat your employees well, give them plenty of PTO, allow them to make mistakes and you don’t go crazy. Right, there are a lot of things that you can do to foster a positive workplace, but typically when people leave workplaces if it’s not for some gross violation of law or policy, or it’s not because they are lacking something that’s critical to the role like proper compensation, it will be because they do not have a purpose that connects them to the work beyond getting the paycheck. Ok, so it’s really important that you create that intentionally, and that is how you ultimately become a multiplier of your team.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:25] Now, when we get back, we’re going to cover one more multiplier and then we’re going to talk about some things that are diminishers the opposite of multipliers. These are the things that will make your team small. We will be right back.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:44] Contrary to what most of us lawyers think to build a successful business without sacrificing our health, wealth, and sanity, we must build our A-Team to get us there. You must master hiring, managing, and leading. And let’s be real. That’s not easy.

 

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Allison Williams: [00:15:01] All right. Welcome back. And now we’re going to continue our discussion about multipliers, I’m going to give you a third strategy of how you can create how you can be a multiplier and create more opportunity for growth and expansion in your team and it is by giving authority, not just activity. Ok, now this goes hand in hand with not micromanaging when you hand over something. I think a lot of us learn the idea of delegating in stages, right? I give you a, I give you a task, I give you a deadline, expect it back by that deadline. I look it over and then it goes out the door. Or if it needs changes, I give it back to you. You make those changes. You presumably learn from those changes and then we keep it moving. And there is an art to delegating, and you can ultimately grow in your skill of delegating where you delegate appropriate to the stage of professional you’re dealing with and appropriate to they’re, they’re coming into your law firm, right? The way that you delegate to a brand new lawyer who’s new to your law firm. Very different than a younger attorney who’s worked in two or three law firms before coming to you, the way that you delegate to a seasoned professional. Very different than a seasoned professional who is brand new to your law firm. Ok, so we can have a whole big discussion about how to delegate. But right now, I just want you to think about the idea that when you are delegating, you should not just delegate the activity that you want done, you should also delegate the authority for that person to get it done.

 

Allison Williams: [00:16:35] Now, this is typically going to be implicated as you start to grow in your law firm, especially after you reach five employees, right? Because people, that study management will generally tell you that once you get more than five direct reports, it becomes nearly impossible for you to be as effective and manager as is required for you to optimize the performance of those team members, right? So ultimately, you want to get to a stage where as you’re growing, you’re giving direct report authority to someone other than you, in the business so that management happens, but management is not contingent upon you being present.

 

Allison Williams: [00:17:11] Ok. So when we talk about giving over authority, this usually involves you having some form of communication to the team so that when you tell the team, Susie on our, on our workforce is going to be taking over this project and I expect and appreciate all of you for rallying behind Susie as she comes to you with, with responsibilities. Everyone knows going in. This is what’s happening. Susie is now the boss over this activity. Ok. If you just tell everybody, Hey guys, we’re going to be doing X, Y, and Z project, and then all of a sudden Susie comes to them and says, Hey, I need you to do such and such. Some people might say, OK, sure, because they’re a team player and other people might bristle and say, Yeah, I’ll do it when I get around to it because they don’t realize that Susie is now entitled to give responsibility and expect compliance from the team. So you have to make sure that when you give over responsibility, you’re also giving the authority and you’re publicly telling those who would be bound by that authority that this is the new person who is going to be responsible for and giving you activities on this project.

 

Allison Williams: [00:18:21] All right. Now that we’ve talked about multipliers, I want to spend a little bit of time on diminishers. Now for a lot of us, we instinctually protect our assets, we protect our business. And oftentimes we protect our ego and we protect ourselves by virtue of creating policies that make us feel more comfortable that the work that we have is going to get done up to our standard in a way that won’t get us sued. Right. So we put all of these little conditions into the workplace. And before you know it, we have the behavior of a diminisher or even though we may highly respect and value our teams, and that a lot of times where there is a misstep in leadership over managing or developing a team member. It’s not that leadership does not recognize the value of the team members. In fact, they may publicly and privately praise, but what they are experiencing is their own inner distress at the possibility of not being effective or, God forbid, creating some risk that gets them sued or a grievance, etcetera, that they clamp down in a way that affects the employee, even though the employee is not the intended target, right? So it’s not that the employer is saying, Oh God, John is absolutely worthless. I have to do this in a certain way because he can’t. Oftentimes, the thought goes to the activity, right? So the, the lawyer says, I have got to get this done in a certain way in order to protect myself from poor reputation, from upset client, from losing money, from risking my license and when I give it over to John, I then engage with John in a way that facilitates my goal of getting the work done in a certain way. Even though John is the collateral damage of how I approach the problem. So let’s now talk about some ways that diminishing happens. And of course, kind of the flip side, how you can avoid it.

 

Allison Williams: [00:20:21] So first, one strategy of diminishers is it’s very you focused when you communicate with your team. Ok, now the flip side of that is the question what’s in it for me, right? When you’re talking to someone and you want them to do something for you because I said so is a valid answer from a boss, but it is not an appropriate answer for a boss or a leader. You ultimately want to get to a place where when you are describing, delegating, discussing activities for your team, you are doing so in a way that involves them as the benefactor of the outcome of the delegated activity. You don’t want to just hand it over to them and say, I need you to do this because I’m going to benefit because the I, you know, I don’t want the client upset with me. I don’t want the court being upset. I don’t want to look a fool. I need you to X, Y, Z, right? Those things may very well be true, but really, what you’re communicating is I want this outcome for my benefit.

 

Allison Williams: [00:21:24] Instead, shift that right. You want a certain outcome for the benefit of the common cause, which is the client or the benefit of the firm, or in many instances, you can actually give the representation of direct benefit to your employee. Right? I want you to do X because this is going to save you time down the road, or I want you doing this because this client becomes really difficult to deal with. You know, if we don’t give them X, Y, Z, right? If you involve the employee in the answer, the antidote to the problem and they can see a benefit for themselves, they’re more likely to respond favorably to not just do the work because you’re the boss and they get a paycheck, but they’ll do it because they see a value to it for themselves. Ok? By focusing on yourself, you’re diminishing the importance of your team.

 

Allison Williams: [00:22:17] Ok, second way that you can be a diminisher as a leader is you can criticize your team publicly. Now, I think most of us understand at a visceral level that, that there’s a lot more to, to be gained, I guess it’s the way I want to put this. There’s a lot more to be gained by praising publicly and criticizing privately. But there are times when we don’t necessarily intentionally criticize publicly, right? I’m not talking about. I think a lot of us will understand and probably be very opposed to things like brutish behavior, where you come out of your office yelling, Where’s my such and such? And an employee says, Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot the such and such, and you say, Oh, I really needed this. I can’t believe you did this again, this is unacceptable. Right? That kind of public berating. Right. Most lawyers that care anything about the quality of their workforce and the reputation of their workforce as a place where people actually want to work, especially in today’s market, where it’s a little bit challenging to find good time. Those people are, those experiences are oftentimes things that we want to avoid. Right. But I really want you to think about ways that you can publicly criticize without necessarily having that type of brutish behavior. Right. The public criticism comes in the form of things like publicly rolling your eyes when someone says something, or if someone asks you a question that you think is a stupid question or you’re tired that you have to answer it over again because you’ve already had this conversation with them and you kind of give the heavy sigh the, all right. This is what the answer is, right? Even though you’re not directly criticizing the person, your actions, your words, your body posture, all of that communicates that you are not pleased with the person who’s communicating with you. And by virtue of doing that, you’re actually making that person smaller.

 

Allison Williams: [00:24:29] Now, that doesn’t mean that if a person is doing something that frustrates you, annoys you, violates a workplace policy, or is something that you think that they should have under their belt by now that you don’t address those things, right? You do address it, but you address it privately, right? You don’t take an opportunity in the moment to make someone into a teaching example.

 

Allison Williams: [00:24:53] Now, there is one little caveat I’m going to give about this, and it comes to the exclusive domain of lawyers mentoring lawyers. One of the most wonderful experiences that I have, which at the time I consider to be a traumatic experience right, was when the managing partner of my law firm decided to have a little moot court experience, if you will. And he called the managing partner of my family law department, as well as two other partners in the family law department to essentially watch me orally argue a case that I had coming up. And that was terrifying. Now, by that time, I had probably orally argued at least two or three dozen applications. I was very comfortable in court after probably the fourth or fifth time I had argued in court. I really loved being in court. But the idea of having my boss and my little boss and my superiors who are not quite bosses but really could be my boss, like having all these people that I answer to kind of sitting around the round table, watching me and critiquing me, that was very, very, very emotionally destabilizing. I did not take that well at all.

 

Allison Williams: [00:26:09] And it was because I had a fear of being criticized, something that I obviously have worked through over the years, but I had to do a lot of work to get there. It was not a small thing for me to have kind of what I felt was a firing squad directed at me. But here’s the thing in that moment I got through that experience, right, I had to do something. I felt very uncomfortable, but I was pushed to. So I did. And the beautiful thing was that I got both positive and negative feedback, and the negative feedback was not just nice. Hey, you could do this better. I mean, they ripped me a new one. But the great thing about that was that even though I felt embarrassed, even though I felt dejected, even though I felt, Oh my god, I can’t believe they said this about me. I took that and that was one of the best lessons I ever had. And it made me into a superior arguer when I ultimately integrated the feedback into my oral arguments in the future, and I had other little moments like that, but that was probably the most profound one.

 

Allison Williams: [00:27:14] Now you might be saying, Well, that’s really kind of a private setting because it’s only the attorneys that are involved. But really, it wasn’t. I mean, it was the managing attorney and it was the head of the family law department and two other attorneys. And the two other attorneys technically couldn’t hire or fire me, even though I felt some level of I need to please these people because, you know, they’re further up the food chain. But there still was this idea of there is an audience to my being told, I’m not good enough. Right? And I think there is some value to that in developing lawyers. Now we may philosophically disagree. I know there are some people that are probably mortified by that, and they’d say there’s no value whatsoever in making a lawyer feel bad. I don’t believe that the mentoring experience I had was about them trying to make me feel bad. I happen to feel bad, but it was about them pushing me to be my best self in a very similar stressful environment where I’m going to have to perform similarly, similarly in the future, because when I’m in court, I’ve got the judge who’s hearing the case. I’ve got my adversary who I want to look good in front of, I got my client who I want to look good in front of. All of them have some level of ability to impact my performance and my outcome. Right? Client, could be upset with not winning their case and could fire me. Judge, could be upset with my argument and could embarrass me. Adversary, could demean my argument and embarrass me. So to some degree, the power dynamic was the same, and feeling put down in the presence of those who were developing me was very much the same as how I would have felt if a judge had put me down or if my adversary had put me down, or if my client had put me down, right? So I learned from that experience.

 

Allison Williams: [00:29:03] And then when I had the experience, if I had grown a little bit as a lawyer and I advanced relatively quickly in that particular law firm, so I was supervising and managing other attorneys pretty young in my career, and I would have the, the opportunity to critique them, evaluate them, give them feedback. And I was very intentional about giving them those moments of discomfort where there is someone else hearing that your behavior, your actions, your argument is just not going to cut it. And here’s the thing because they knew that I would be a, a stern judge critiquer, if you will, of their negative moments. They also knew from interacting with me that I was going to put them on a pedestal and make them a rockstar when they had exceptional moments, even when I personally didn’t think those moments were too exceptional. Right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:29:57] So I want you to. I wanted to put that caveat in there because whenever we talk about public criticism and public praise, we of course don’t want to put humans down. We don’t want to, we don’t want to demoralize our team. But you do want to have a consciousness about your method of developing attorneys so that whatever environments they’re going out to, you are preparing them to have to perform like an elite athlete in those environments.

 

Allison Williams: [00:30:26] Ok. Next up in the, in the realm of diminishing. Ok. You can diminish your, your employees by making your preference into the only outcome acceptable. Ok, so I want you to think about this really in terms of how the office runs, there are a whole lot of lawyers that I’ve talked to that will say, you know, we have these policies that they have to use this printer for this or they have to, they have to put in the code on the copier in this way versus that way. And when I really dive into how consequential doing it, the exact way that is dictated becomes what I, what I learned is that a lot of lawyers have a desire to be respected and it is simply the perceived lack of respect that comes when the employee is not following the instruction. That’s the real problem. It isn’t the policy itself. It isn’t that we put the code in from left to right versus right to left. Or it isn’t that we turn on the lights in the kitchen when we, when we, when we open up the office at the beginning of the day, it really is just that we want compliance, right? And there’s a whole host of reasons that someone will be driven toward ensuring compliance at all costs. But the one thing that I think is particularly important when we talk about this theory of diminishing is when a person is told it must be done my way. But they are really not given a why behind the, the behavior that is being requested. It really feels like the only reason it’s being done your way is because you have power over them, right? Because you are in charge. And I want you to think about for a lot of lawyers, not all, but many lawyers became solo owners of their own law firms because they wanted to escape the helplessness that they felt when someone was telling them what to do and it had to be done their way just because, right, you have to, you have to use exactly these words. You have to use exactly this formatting. You have to use exactly this procedure.

 

Allison Williams: [00:32:37] Sometimes the procedures, the policies, the, the arguments were given to you out of an abundance of caution. Sometimes it was given to you out of the ego of the person giving it to you. And sometimes it had a legitimate purpose that you just were not told. But whatever it was, you wanted to escape that pressure container of feeling that your thoughts, words, deeds, talent was not valued. And I want you to think about the fact that even though as an entrepreneur, there is likely a greater drive toward creating your own destiny than someone who is an employee. There is probably an element of that in just about everyone, especially here in the United States, where we have, as a society really grown into talking about personal development and self-determinism in a way that is much more expansive than ever before in history. So even someone who wants the security of employment and chooses to be very good at a job and seek their fulfillment in their personal self-actualization somewhere else, there is still going to be an element of that baked into their psyche just by virtue of how we speak in the world now and what types of, what types of images and stories show up in the media and how we consume information. So you want to be mindful of that when you are creating a culture that you do not diminish your team by virtue of making your preferences into, quote-unquote, the only way or the best way because someone who thinks there’s another way, even if you ultimately disagree with them, they’re going to also feel that you are saying you are the best and they are not, and that feels pretty crappy.

 

Allison Williams: [00:34:25] All right. This week we have been talking about multipliers, How The Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman. We’ve not been talking about the book itself, but we have been talking about how to be a multiplier versus a diminisher that gave you so some examples of that, and I want you to really think about how this applies to you in your law firm. If you are someone that struggles with how to get more out of your team by being a multiplier of their talent, reach out to us here at Law Firm Mentor. We’ll have a conversation about it. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor everyone. See you on the next show.

 

Allison Williams: [00:35:06] Thank you for tuning in to The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast to learn more about today’s show and take advantage of the resources mentioned. Check out our show notes. And if you enjoy today’s episode, take a moment to follow the podcast wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating and review. This helps us to reach even more law firm owners from around the country who want to crush chaos in business and make more money. I’m Allison Williams your Law Firm Mentor, everyone. Have a great day!