REPLAY – Deserve the Best

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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 and business and make more money.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:46] Now, that question might be a little triggering to some of you. You might be saying, Well, of course, I deserve the best. Why would you even ask me such a question? But the reason I’m going to ask the question is because I’ve seen a lot of commentary out on social media lately where people are, are presupposing that they deserve the best and they’re talking about what they are able to acquire right now in terms of employees, because of some contraction that we’ve seen in the legal marketplace. And this is what has been dubbed the great recession or the great resignation rather, where people are not coming to work, choosing not to work, etcetera. Right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:01:25] So a lot of people have had that question mark of what is, what is it that I deserve in my law firm? And you know, there’s a lot of resentment that people feel about the fact that they’re getting what they feel to be less than what they deserve. So the one thing that I always tell people when we are in times of economic retraction when there’s any type of distress in the marketplace, there’s almost an inherent lack thinking that goes into that level of business, business development, right? It’s almost like we feel the retraction around us. So we almost feel like our natural, appropriate response is to perceive, lack and respond with a lack mindset. But let me tell you that if the problem around you is lack, the solution is not more lack. The solution is abundance. And so when you start thinking about the fact that there’s not enough, how do you create more than enough? And how do you focus on more than enough so that ultimately you can stem the tide of not enough and get yourself into the advantageous position of having more than enough? Well, the way that you are always going to create the best in your environment is to be the best in your environment. The way that you attract the most superior people is that you be superior.

 

Allison Williams: [00:02:54] Now, for a lot of you, you might say, I know that I’m not superior. Right? I’m working on it, I’m a work in progress but you know that right now you’re not doing everything that you need to do in order to require and expect the best from other people. And where that question comes into play a lot is with managing people. So a lot of lawyers will say, well, I can’t get too mad at my employee who shows up late because I come in late to work. Right? And there is some truth to that. There is some truth to the idea that when you are not in integrity with what you are saying is the standard, it is harder to enforce the standard.

 

Allison Williams: [00:03:37] Now, what I always say to people, especially law firm owners that are kind of struggling with this issue is that really your employees don’t have the same expectations that you do? They don’t have the same job that you do. It is completely inappropriate that you say that your employee does not have an expectation to come to work on time because you quote didn’t come to work on time, right? You own the entity. And you’re coming to work tends to be before them, after them, and on the weekends when that’s not their work experience. So I don’t believe that you have to do everything that your employees do to be able to hold them accountable to everything that you are requiring of them. But what I do think is necessary is that whatever your standard is for yourself, that you live up to that so that you are in resonance with the standard that you’re holding someone else accountable to, that means ultimately, whatever the standard is for your role versus their role, you set the standard for how you show up, which means they must set the standard for how they, how they show up, right? They have to knock it out of the park the same way that you, knock it out of the park and when you don’t, what tends to happen is you start to realize that you are not being in integrity with yourself. So it’s harder for you to hold someone else to being integrity with whatever it is the standard that you’ve set, that they have to meet in order to keep their jobs.

 

Allison Williams: [00:05:08] It becomes a real challenge for you as the business owner to look at someone and with a straight face, say the way that we behave in this law firm is fill in the blank when that’s not how you are showing up in your law firm. So with that, I want to just give you three questions to ponder. That should help you to answer the question of whether or not you are showing up in a way and whether or not you are acting in a way that says that you deserve the best, because when you act in consonance with deserving the best, that tends to be what you get.

 

Allison Williams: [00:05:49] OK, so the first question that I want you to ask yourself is, do you show up? OK? This is do you show up for yourself? This is do you show up for others? That means when you make a commitment, is your word your bond? Right? One of my favorite books is The Four Agreements, and I talk about it often on this podcast. It’s a book by Don Miguel Ruiz. If you have not picked it up, absolutely pick it up. It’s a really, really short read, but it’s so every sentence, every paragraph is so packed full of life lessons that make us better.

 

Allison Williams: [00:06:21] And one of those four agreements is to be true to your word. Right? Be impeccable with your word is how he puts it, right. So I want you to think about that, like when you make a commitment to do something, do you actually do it? Now I’m not talking about you come to work and you have a migraine and you have a meeting at 10 o’clock and you can’t see straight. So you want to move your meeting. I’m not talking about that kind of showing up. I’m talking about when you make a commitment that you are going to achieve a desired outcome. Do you do everything in your power to achieve that desired outcome? First of all, do you believe that you’re going to achieve it? Do you set the intention? Do you marshal your resources? Do you reverse engineer your success, right? If success for you means that by Friday, you’re going to have drafted a 40-page document? Do you wait until Thursday night to start drafting? Or do you put on your calendar every single day, right? 40 pages on one day might be a lot. Eight pages a day, over five days. Not so much. Right? Are you thinking about it? Are you giving yourself every opportunity to hold yourself to a high standard and then meet that high standard? And by the way, this is not just true of quantitative objective criteria like are you making, are you meeting deadlines? But it’s also about how you want to show up as a person and as a leader in your company.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:47] You know, if you have a standard that people have to have a certain dress code, dress codes are not just about how you want people to look, it’s also about how you want people to show up in your workplace because there has been a lot of documented studies that support the idea that when people are in their Sunday best, if you will, when they’re in professional attire, when they’re in suits, when they’re in heels, when they’re in makeup, they show up differently than when they’re in sweats and raggy T-shirts. Right? So even though you may own the business and have every right to wear sweats and a raggy T-shirt in a way that you couldn’t when you worked for someone else, is that really what you want to present to the world, right? If it’s what you want to present to the world? Great, right? That’s what you’re ultimately going to receive. But if it’s not what you want to present to the world, do you allow yourself to slip into the comfort of throwing that on because you don’t feel like ironing your work clothes or because you don’t feel like shopping for work clothes that fit your frame? Right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:50] Especially though a lot of people have had this issue with the COVID-19 right, we were all sitting at home kind of comforting ourselves with calories over most of 2020. So a lot of people are kind of in that. All right now, we’re trying to recover from 2020. We’ve got to get some exercise going. We got to like lay off the carbs and all that stuff. But if you couldn’t fit into clothing that was appropriate for you at that time and maybe you gained weight, are you just saying, all right, great, I’ll put, I’ll pull out the yoga pants and the sweatshirts because it’s comfortable? Or are you saying, how can I? How can I otherwise present myself to the world consistent with the standard that I want to hold? Right? And is that standard one that you are imposing on others, but not meeting yourself. Are you saying to your team, I want you here in business casual and then you’re showing up looking raggedy? You know, think about that, think about how you are showing up for your clients, are your clients getting the best version of you? Are your clients getting the version of you that that’s prim and proper? Are, are your clients getting the version of you, that’s smart and tenacious, that’s zealous, that’s engaged, or are you kind of half assing it or phoning it in? Right? Are you, are you just kind of doing the minimum to get people in the door? And then once you get them here, you kind of stick them in a corner and don’t engage with them that much. Right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:10:17] How would you feel if you were the recipient of your level of lawyering? Always a good question to ask when you are delivering a service to someone else. How would I feel if I was the recipient of the service that I’m offering?

 

Allison Williams: [00:10:34] Ok, next question for you to ponder, to answer the question, do I deserve the best? Do you honor your commitments? OK? Do you honor your commitments? Now, this is a big one, because I know a lot of people have gotten into a place where times are tough and sometimes you can’t honor a commitment because you didn’t plan accordingly. You didn’t adjust your resources. You did not, you did not plan appropriately or something catastrophic happened, right? There’s always a situation where all of a sudden your spouse gets hit by a bus and you have medical bills and you fell short on your mortgage for a month because of all, of the all of the expenses that came with that catastrophe and now you’re kind of choking and trying to catch up, right? There’s that, but you know there’s, there’s also something to be said for when life happens, what is your attitude toward life? Right, is your attitude toward life that you know, life has happened. I’m overextended and now I have to work harder in order to get myself back to the level of being able to manage everything I’m obligated to. Or is your idea to simply say, well, I said I wanted to do this, but I’m just going to opt-out now. Right? I know I agreed to a contract, I’m just not going to honor it. Or do you even ask yourself, how could I make someone else responsible for the choices that I made?

 

Allison Williams: [00:12:15] So we see this a lot with our clients, right? We’ve seen any number of law clients who will take the position that even though they made choices in their life, that got them into a legal conundrum that necessitated your service, they will take the position that your inability to get them out of the problem that they caused in their life is your fault. Right? Because instead of taking responsibility, ascribing fault to someone else feels better, right? It feels better to point the finger at your lawyer and say, my lawyer went into court and wasn’t able to convince this judge that the video footage of me robbing the liquor store is really a hoax and that it was fabricated by the prosecution. My lawyer wasn’t able to sell that argument to a judge, and so therefore it’s my lawyer’s fault that I am now looking at 10 years for burglary, right? As opposed to saying I made the choice to rob this liquor store, I got caught on video, my lawyer has those facts to work with. My lawyer ultimately can do only what my lawyer can do. My lawyer has an obligation to fight for me, to answer questions, to come up with every possible defense, to be creative. My lawyer does not have an obligation to undo the fact that I robbed the liquor store.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:29] So we see that with our clients, but oftentimes when we start to attract a lot of people in our world that are not on their commitment, the question that we have to ask ourselves is, where am I not honoring my commitments, right? What? Why am I? All of a sudden, these people are showing up in my world. These clients that just won’t do what they’re supposed to do won’t come up with the, the gumption to either drink the Kool-Aid of the consequence that’s coming to them or they won’t come up with the strategy that’s necessary. They won’t follow the strategy that I give to them because they feel disempowered. Like, where do I feel disempowered? Because again, you get in life what you put out, so if you are someone that does not find the way or even ask the question, how can I find the way, right? Because a lot of times it’s not about the answer that we give ourselves. It’s about the question we ask. If you ask the question, how can I get to a better outcome rather than simply saying this is too hard, I’m not going to do this anymore. A lot of times what you’ll find is that there’s help available, right? But you have to want the help. You have to ask for the help.

 

Allison Williams: [00:14:43] So when you start to say that you’re going to do something and then you don’t do it, you do several things. First of all, you educate yourself that you’re not reliable, right? You start to make it negotiable in your life, that you live up to the standards that you have set for yourself. You start to move away from the unstoppable, unbeatable, incomparable achiever that you desire to be, and you start to fall into a certain level of mediocrity, right? And by the way, this doesn’t make you a bad person. This is not a moral judgment, but it is. It is a question that you should ask yourself in terms of if I am not showing up for myself and I’m not doing what I need to do based on what my word is. How can I expect others to do the same, right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:15:36] We have one of the retreats that we have here at Law Firm Mentor. We have four retreats a year. And one of the retreats that we have is focused on the topic of sales. And I remember one of the things that really resonated with our community when we were talking about sales is I asked the question, you know, how can you be mad at someone selling you something when you are a business owner? Right? Isn’t that what you do for a living when you’re a business owner, you sell your service, the number of lawyers that are incensed at the idea of someone wanting to sell them something is really amazing to me and it’s almost like there’s this I should have the right. And I think our legal profession teaches us this by the way. I should have the right to sit passively and decide when I want to be sold to, and only then should anyone ever try to sell me something. And if they try to sell me at any time other than when I’m raising my hand and saying I want to be sold to, I’m doing something wrong, right? And I think the no-solicitation rules that we have in the legal profession really helped to reinforce this. This idea of we have to protect people from lawyers. That was really where that whole no solicitation came from. You know, same idea. We have to protect people from those salespeople that are out on the hunt to try to make a dollar. Right? But if you are in business and you are anti sales, then what’s going to happen when someone needs your help and someone has the opportunity to be helped by you and you don’t have that conversation with them? Are you really? Are you really honoring the word that you, that you asserted when you started your business that you said, I am going to, live up to the standard of we are here to help people. We’re in a business that is designed to achieve a positive outcome in the lives of others. And then when a person crosses your path that has a problem, your answer is, Well, let me sit back and not, not do anything unseemly like offer to help them. Right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:17:43] So there’s a whole lot that goes into the idea of honoring commitments. Your commitments are not just your commitments to, to agreements that you make, but it’s also to really the agreement that you make with yourself as to who you’re going to be in this world and what you’re going to achieve in this world, how much you’re going to accomplish, how many people you’re going to help. What is the impact you’re going to create, right? When we think about that, when we think about am I creating the impact that I want to in this world? Then it becomes a lot easier for you to say to another person, you made a commitment that you were going to show up in this office in a certain way. Or to a client, you made a certain commitment that you were going to honor our agreement in this way. Or to team members, you made a commitment that you were going to espouse the values of our mission statements, right, whatever it is. OK?

 

Allison Williams: [00:18:38] Now the third thing, the third question I want you to ask. I’m going to get to right after this word from our sponsors.

 

Allison Williams: [00:18:52] Imagine going to the office for just five hours a week… Ah… Imagine creating systems and hiring people so that your law firm can run without you. Imagine feeling a sense of calm and fulfillment when you realize you’re well on your way to building a business and a life you’ve dreamed of. Now imagine getting there, doing what you’re doing right now. Exactly. You can’t. But we have the tools that can.

 

Neil Tyra: [00:19:16] Hi, I’m Neil Tyra from the Tyra Law Firm in Rockville, Maryland. When you’re looking for a coaching service, you want to walk away with value and you also want to enjoy the environment that you’re in. And here we are with some great people. You know, you’re not learning from an academic. You’re learning from somebody who’s put the practices into effect. I’m absolutely delighted and thrilled with what I’ve seen and how much I enjoyed being here.

 

Allison Williams: [00:19:40] Here at Law Firm Mentor, our B.A.D.A.S.S. Program supports you with the tools, mindset, and personalized coaching necessary to systematize your law firm and crush chaos in its tracks. Text CONNECT to nine zero eight two nine two three five two four. Again, that’s nine zero eight two nine two three five two four. And let’s talk about your goals and how we can get you there faster.

 

Allison Williams: [00:20:10] All right. So now we have talked about the questions that you have to ask yourself to answer the fundamental question do I deserve the best right? So we talked about, do you show up? Do you honor your commitments? And the third question I want you to ask yourself is, do you manipulate others?

 

Allison Williams: [00:20:29] Now, most people, when I ask that question, most people that are not malevolently motivated and try to be good people are going to say, of course I don’t manipulate people, but I want you to think about some of the rationales behind the way that we engage with others in our professional life. And I want you to answer this question through a different lens. OK? So first question that comes up when we talk about manipulation is do you engage in quid pro quo transactional relationships with your employees? OK. So I want you to think about that. OK. Seriously, the idea of a quid pro quo relationship sounds good, right? I give you a paycheck and in exchange, you show up and perform these tasks. But I want you to think about something right? And labor law does not allow in any jurisdiction that I’m aware of the ability to withhold someone’s paycheck because they are not living up to the standard that you have set for the role. So if you told your paralegal I want you to bill 20 hours a week and for whatever reason, he or she did not do so. You don’t get to say, all right. Well, you don’t get paid this week because you didn’t bill 20 hours this week. Right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:21:48] Now, we’re not talking about purely contractual labor, right? So if you have purely contractual labor that you have employed in a fashion consistent with the laws in your jurisdiction that allow for an hour for our compensation model, right? And we do know that paralegals, and I believe just about every jurisdiction in the U.S. are nonexempt employees, right? So you, you do have to pay them by the hour. So we’re not talking about purely hour for hour, but we’re talking about if somebody doesn’t live up to what you say they’re supposed to do during that hour that you can just not pay them for that hour. Right? In other words, it’s not that they didn’t come to work. It’s that they came to work and they half-assed it for a day, right? It would be great in the eyes of some people if we could say, Yeah, I’m not going to pay you when you half ass it or I’m only going to half-pay you when you half ass it.

 

Allison Williams: [00:22:38] But I think most people fundamentally understand that there are times where energy is going to ebb and flow, where interest is going to ebb and flow, where dedication is going to ebb and flow. I mean, think about it. We have a workforce that, at least in, in recent years, has been denoted as 70 percent unengaged at work. If we had all of our unengaged people not compensated, that’s a lot of money left over. But there’d be a whole lot of people that would be oppressed in that process, right? Because not showing up one hundred percent doesn’t mean you didn’t show up at all. So then you get into the question of, well, how much did you show up, right? Do you get 40 percent of your paycheck, 70 percent of your paycheck? We don’t do that, right? We don’t allow for that. And there’s a reason that we don’t allow for that. But I’m not. I’m not even going to get into like the legal reasons why we don’t get into it or kind of structural or ideological reasons. I want you to think about it just from a perspective of you attract what you put out. So if you as an employer were to say, I want a happy workplace, and if you’re not happy at work, I’m not going to pay you. The problem is that you’re not holding the standard that says this is a happy workplace. You’re saying this is a happy workplace, only if my employee is willing to be happy. If they’re not willing to be happy, then I’m going to take away from them to receive back from them what I’m compensating them for. And the challenge with that is that if you don’t hold the standard and say in this workplace, this is how we behave, then when a person falls short of that, there’s no tension for them to be able to rise back up to the occasion.

 

Allison Williams: [00:24:19] In fact, I remember kind of one of the best examples of this came about when this was many, many years ago when I worked at a law firm and it was during the 2008 crisis financial crisis. And I remember that, you know, there started to be a lot more focus on people meeting billable hours. There was always talk about billable hours in this particular law firm, but at some point there was a conversation around really enforcing it and saying to the lawyers, listen, not meeting your hours is problematic, always. But if you’re not meeting it when there’s work to do in the 2008 financial crisis, you’re going to be out of here because there’s plenty of lawyers out of work and we can replace you. And that was a very strong message, but I agreed with it.

 

Allison Williams: [00:25:08] Now I agreed with it to somebody who had always met my hours and exceeded my hours. So I remember I was somewhat in the minority in that regard. There were a lot of lawyers that struggled to meet billable hours, but I was never a lawyer that struggled to meet billable hours. So I was like, Yeah, you know, you agreed to meet the hours in exchange for your pay. Why should you get paid without it? That was my thinking back then. But I remember we started to have these meetings about strategies to meet billable hours. And one of the things that came up, one of the things that was a real issue was that at some point when people weren’t meeting their hours, they were looking for ways to address the otherwise generally compliant person who wasn’t meeting hours. Right? And I’m not talking about not meeting hours because you don’t have sufficient work like, there was work to do, but there was just a concern. And like a lot of people, when they get stressed and anxious, they become less productive. So for those people, it was like, OK, do we just throw those people out, even though those people have been very successful? Or do we coach, train, develop our way around it? How do we address it? And at one point, I got into a conversation with the managing partner. And I remember I said to him, well, you know, can you just reduce their pay to the extent that they’re not meeting their hours? Now, of course, that’s me and my youth and my ignorance. I don’t even think about the idea that, you know, no matter how much you claw back from an employee, the hour is not just compensation for them that’s not being produced. It’s also compensation for the firm, right? Because if someone’s being billed out at three hundred dollars an hour, if they fail to meet an hour, it’s not that they’re losing $300. The firm is losing three hundred dollars. They may be losing 70, 80, a hundred depends, right? But there’s still a greater loss to the firm when someone fails to meet an hour billed than when you just claw it back from them.

 

Allison Williams: [00:26:59] So, but you know, I was trying, I was trying to think about ways to help the situation. And what the managing partner said to me wasn’t about the math of that. It was about the mindset of that. And he said, we set standards in this law firm. Our standards are non-negotiable. Right? We have a standard for the quality and quantity of work that is required for you to be here. And as soon as we start allowing people to opt-out of our standards, we have lost faith, we have lost integrity with the people who are meeting our standards. And I was like, Wow, like, I remember being struck by how poignant that was even back then. And I was like, it’s 100 percent true, right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:27:45] When you, when you say, this is how we function in the world, right? We are the best. And then you allow people not to be the best. And I’m not talking about cutting someone slack or giving grace when someone has something happen, right? If someone had a family member die, yes, cut them some slack. I’m not meeting their hours, right? Obviously, if someone is physically injured or if someone has a crisis in their life, I’m not suggesting that you not be compassionate in dealing with individual circumstances, but I’m talking about just in general, someone who’s not in the mood. Somebody just doesn’t come around to it, right? Sometimes you have to have hard conversations like, listen, you know, I’ve given you enough grace, either you’re going to rise to the occasion or you’re not. And it’s your decision, right? You can’t beat it out of someone. You can’t yell it out of someone. They have to decide for themselves that they’re going to meet the standard or they’re not. And if they don’t meet the standard, then the next thing you have to ask is what we’re going to do about that. But the one thing that you always have to do is you have to maintain your standard. And that then means if you say our standard is that we are the best, you have to show up that way.

 

Allison Williams: [00:28:58] You have to show up that way. You have to stand for that. You have to be about that because when you’re not about that, when you’re not about the business of your business, then it is very challenging for someone to look at you and believe you when you ultimately say to them, this is what is required to be here because frankly, it’s not. right? And that goes into what we just talked about a little earlier about honoring commitments, right? If you don’t honor the commitment that you’re making to yourself to show up in a certain way, to be a certain leader, to require certain things of yourself in terms of when you work, how you work, how you treat people, what is the quality of the service that you’re offering when you don’t stand for that, it is almost impossible for you to find other people who will consistently stand for that, even as you don’t. Now, I don’t say this to convict you or to make you feel bad about yourself. It is purely to give you some food for thought as to how you can elevate your standard so that the people around you, your clients, your employees, your friends, your family, the people that you choose to have in your world will rise to the occasion of where you are, rather than you falling to the place where they may be.

 

Allison Williams: [00:30:08] All right, everyone. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor. And on this week’s episode we have been talking about, do you deserve the best? And the answer is, of course, you do. You’ve just got to show up to get it. All right. If you are thinking about how to elevate the quality and culture of your law firm, I know a lot of people have this question. If you’ve been thinking about how to do this in your business and you’re just not sure of what steps you have to take to evolve yourself as well as others so that you can have the culture that you desire in this law firm, then we’re here to help. So just reach out to us here at Law Firm Mentor, you can speak to one of our growth strategists. The link to the to the strategy session is going to be in the show notes. Feel free to reach out. These calls are absolutely free. No pressure. It really is an exploratory session for us to get to know a little bit more about you and to see if the service that we offer is something that could ultimately help you take your law firm to the next level. All right, everyone, I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor, and I’ll see you on the next episode.

 

Allison Williams: [00:31:25] 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!