Don’t Abandon Ship! How to Create a Positive Lawfirm Culture

Speaker1: [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.

Speaker1: [00:00:30] Today we’re going to be talking about Don’t Abandon Ship, which is all about the positive law firm culture that you want to create when you are not physically present in your law firm. So this topic came to me over the, over the holiday. We’re at the beginning of 2022 and late in 2021. I happen to connect with three different lawyers who each had a different iteration of the same problem, which is basically that they had rapidly grown their law firms and they had achieved a lot in their companies. But they had now a problem with essentially positive culture, right? The people, some people were there that needed to go. Some people felt an era of entitlement. They felt like they had done the work in the place of the owner. There were just a lot of dysfunctions that came clearly as a result of the owner not physically being there. And I say clearly as a result of the owner not being there because in each of these law firms, the business owner at some point in time had checked out. And by checked out, I don’t mean that they didn’t concern themselves with the law firm at all, they were still overseeing the finances, they were still kind of in the background, but they weren’t physically there anymore. And as a result, they’re starting to be a splintering. Either, key people resigned, saying, I really expected you to be here and you weren’t. Or people started gathering together and saying, well, we’re really the ones doing all the work while the owner is off having fun.

[00:02:18] And over the years, I have heard about many of these types of defections where, you know, an overvalued employee and I say overvalued in the sense that the person gives themself more credit for what they do, then what they actually do. They don’t know all that’s involved in building, creating, sustaining, and growing a law firm. So they assume, Hey, well, I come to work and I service the clients. So I’m the one who really built the law firm or, well, I’m the one who sells the law firm. So I’m the one who does the work or I’m the one who manages the law firm. So therefore I’m the one who does the work and therefore they feel this greater sense of empowerment because they feel that they have done quote all the work while the owner is reaping all the benefits. So they see the owner having a nice life, they see the owner being financially successful. And then there’s this resentment that builds. And next thing you know, there’s a defection. Either key people resign or key people stay, but they start to fester. They start to stew in the juices of their own resentment and share that resentment with other people so they start to harm the culture. Or what really happens is they start to, they start to make demands that are simply unreasonable, like, Oh, I want a 40 percent raise in my salary or, oh, you know, I think I should be able to take 10 weeks off a year in addition to all of the holidays and the existing PTO that you give us.

[00:03:51] And when you think about it, I know a lot of people have this fear when they start talking about things like, I want to be able to travel a certain number of weeks out of the year, I want to be able to work from anywhere. I don’t want to be tethered to a brick-and-mortar office, and I know that other people won’t understand that, so I can’t grow but so large, right? So you have this movement out in the legal space now where a whole lot of people are saying the, you know, the, the smart way to be a business owner is to have as few employees as possible because employees are headaches and you’re going to make the most money if you really just make the most of yourself, get everything automated and don’t hire people. And there is probably some truth to that when you are able to kind of stack the volume of work onto yourself to a certain degree without doing more work, you’re making more money.

Speaker1: [00:04:47] But at some point you’re going to hit a limit, right? There’s only so many hours you can be working, whether you’re choosing to work a few hours a week or 30 hours a week or 50 hours a week, whatever your work schedule is. There’s only so many hours you can be doing something. So the way to scale is always going to be through adding people doing work. The question is, are you going to make the choice to do that? And if you do, can you have the freedom of being able to choose to work from anywhere in the world? Choose to work in certain capacities. Choose to physically go to your office or not. And a lot of people have a negative view about it because of the sorts of things that I started talking to some lawyers about over the week over the holidays. So I wanted to give you some positive culture idioms for how you can structure your business to allow you to be able to work from anywhere in the world without having a resentment factor.

[00:05:51] And by the way, before you start pontificating that, well, you know, I don’t really know how that’s possible, and I don’t really see how it can work. I want you to know that this is more than purely anecdotal evidence, however, part of it is based in my own personal experience. I own a multimillion-dollar law firm, in short Hills, New Jersey, and I am rarely working, quote-unquote in my business. In fact, I don’t work in the business at all, except to the extent that I work with the leaders in the business. My job is cultivating leadership. And you know, I remember when, you know, because I’m always, you know, checking the pace on this and kind of checking the pulse, if you will, on this. And I remember most recently, we had the holidays, right? So we’re having this, this podcast is being recorded in January of 2022, and I remember when we had our most recent holiday event in December. So my law firm, we’ve always been pro holidays. We love the holidays, we celebrate Hanukkah, we celebrate Christmas. We have a holiday exchange at a big breakfast that we do right before Christmas Eve. And we always have a holiday party and the party involves the spouses. But we have a separate holiday event that’s just us and we do fun things together. And so this year we had to cancel our holiday breakfast because of COVID, and several people were personally affected by COVID, whether they had been exposed or actually had COVID, etcetera. And we ultimately made that decision, which was difficult, but everyone understood.

[00:07:29] But I remember contemplating and being really excited about the fact that we got together for the holiday event and the dinner, so we were still able to have that, covid had not raged out of control by that point. And when we all get together, we genuinely love getting together. I mean, it’s like a big family reunion and there is no, you know, I’m a, to some degree, I would say, I’m an energy reader. I’m very much tuned in to how people feel like I can walk into a room and not see the faces of anyone in the room and just feel that there’s negative energy around. And there, there was none, like it was, everyone was coming up and hugging and excited to say hi! And you know, there was all of that in the atmosphere and this was before anybody started drinking. So I know it wasn’t the alcohol, right? But the, the feeling came from having a positive culture, having an environment where people like coming to work. And when people ask me the question of, how do you really create that, right? How do you, how do you create that when you might not have the best people or you know, there might be some issues you got to work out and it has been a journey. I’ll be candid with you, it wasn’t like I just woke up one day and say, Hey, if you do X, Y and Z, you’ll get a positive culture. It takes the right people, and it takes certain right behaviors, but the one thing that has always been infused since I really started focusing on getting the right people is having the right communication with them to set the frame so that when I am away, no one is resentful or frustrated.

Speaker1: [00:09:10] And when I’m away, there is more work for my team, at least in the sense of my birds, right? So anyone that follows this podcast knows that I have two birds, Maximilian and Versace. They live in my office. And when I am physically away, a member of my team feeds the birds and gives them water every day. And sometimes they’ll be nice enough to take pictures and send them to me because I am an animal lover and I miss my babies when I’m gone for a long time. But you know, that’s something else for them to do. And you know, there is a certain appreciation of that. Like, I don’t ever get a, you know, sure, I’ll do it. I mean, like literally people will volunteer because, you know, they like the birds too. But, you know, even aside from that, like, I’m gone often. Sometimes I will go weeks working at home. Sometimes I’ll be away for weeks. I now have a second home in another state that I’ll be spending substantial amounts of time in, and there’s no concern about, well, what’s she doing? Well, how is she off doing whatever? And we are here slugging away. Because when you create the right environment, people are happy that they have their jobs and as long as they don’t feel oppressed in their jobs and they know that whatever you’re working on, you have a lane, the CEO lane, they have a lane, the Paralegal Lane or the Lawyer Lane or the salesperson lane. And you give enough of what they need from you so that they feel that they have your support without feeling dependent on you. Then when you’re gone, they feel emboldened, they feel empowered, they feel supported. It’s like, Wow, my boss trusts me to be away for extended periods and not be checking up on me and not be calling me and not be hovering over me because there’s a level of respect for what I do, and there’s a way to create that, that’s much more involved than we can cover on this podcast. But there are definitely three very specific things that have to be involved that I want to share with you now.

[00:11:14] All right. First up, autonomy has to include respect and a lack of abdication. Ok. Again, autonomy has to include respect and a lack of abdication. So that means that your employees need to think independently and they need to contribute, but they shouldn’t feel that they’re left with a rudderless ship. Like, in other words, you can’t just, you know, they’re there in the building, hustling every day. And when I say hustling, there are some companies that when you’re in a rapid growth mode, if you don’t grow fast enough, you know that the work falls to the people that are there.

Speaker1: [00:11:56] Or if you bring in the wrong clients, the shit of the nasty client falls to the people that have to deal with that person. Or if you hire people and they don’t produce, then the lack of economic resources that they fail to produce are going to hit someone financially, if not you, then others. You know, people have a different experience, right? So as you are creating, it’s really important that when times are tough that they are hearing you, seeing you experiencing you more than when things are stable, and that usually means, by the way, this does not mean that you have to forgo working away from your office. It doesn’t mean you have to be physically in your office nine to five Monday through Friday. It means that they need to hear you, they need to feel you, they need to experience you.

[00:12:44] So by way of example, when COVID happened, I think everyone, myself included, had concerns, right? What’s going to happen to the economy? What’s going to happen to the buying cycle? What’s going to happen to people’s ability to work? What’s going to happen to people’s ability to acquire legal services, to seek legal services? Like what is this going to mean for us long term? And I had an abiding faith that it was not going to be that bad. And for us, thankfully it wasn’t. We actually grew during 2020. But the thoughts came and my immediate reaction was not to quiver and get fearful because I had the thoughts it was to focus my attention on the outcome I desired. And that then required that I wanted my people to be OK. I could not control what level of anxiety they might personally experience, but I could show up for them in a way that says, as a leader, I’m here, we got this. We’re in this together, right? So that then meant I needed to do some, you know, I needed to see them. I needed them to see me. I needed them to hear my voice. I needed them to hear it was OK. I needed them to hear that I was going to bust my ass to make sure I could pay them. I needed them to hear that there was going to be enough work. And they’re also needed to be more meeting time with my sales team. Right, they needed to know what strategies we were going to change and what strategies we’re going to keep the same and how we were going to pivot our talks and whether we were going to maintain certain policies about paid consults versus free consults, and what we were going to do in terms of our intake structure. And all of that additional touchpoints still add it up to about five hours a week, right? It wasn’t like, Oh my God, I’m suddenly having to work around the clock, but I can still do that from anywhere in the world because by that time our team was remote.

Speaker1: [00:14:35] So with our team being remote, I was able to say, OK, they need to hear from me. Let’s record a video and every morning they get a recorded video. And we created a Slack channel where I would post the video and I said, react to this video when you have seen it. And then people would comment on the video. So I could actually see what level of engagement, what things landed for them, right? There was intentionality behind communications. So you have to have that. And the intentionality behind communication is really baked into number one, the autonomy with respect, but without abdication, right? So when we talk about autonomy, autonomy is not I let you do whatever, whenever, however, and I’ll check in with you and see if anything goes wrong. Autonomy is you give them freedom with boundaries. Right? You give them, you give them the ability to think independently to handle things on their own, to contribute to outcomes but ultimately you do hold them accountable to an outcome, and holding them accountable to an outcome requires that to the extent that they need a resource which could include you, it doesn’t have to. Many times it doesn’t include you, but to the extent that they need that resource, that resource is available so that you can hold them accountable.

Speaker1: [00:15:50] And a lot of times, what breeds resentment in people when the boss is away is the idea that there is not that link. There is not that autonomy and holding someone accountable. There’s just the holding someone accountable, right? They feel like they have freedom, but the freedom is not, I want this freedom, I don’t want to be micromanaged. The freedom is you don’t give a shit, so you’re not here. So I’m free to do whatever, but you’re still going to expect me to produce at the end of the day. And when I produce at the end of the day, all that I get is this nice little cookie, right? So a lot of times that that resentment does build up when there’s a disconnect between the ideas of what the boss is doing and the actuality of what the boss is doing. So you have to be intentional about making sure that your team does not feel that you are a rudderless ship, they can feel that they have limited access to you. They can feel that they have to request a meeting rather than stop by your desk because you happen to be working in the is open. But in reality, if you structure your business that way, if you tell people, even when you are all physically working in an office, don’t just walk in my office and expect that I’m going to drop everything and run ping me if there’s an emergency, but much more often than not, email or message me and we’ll schedule an appointment. If we need to talk about something, then you create a boundary and that boundary just continues when you are physically away. Ok.

[00:17:16] All right, number two, when you are looking to create a positive law firm culture, it’s really important that you understand that all employees must meet your attitude, aptitude and fit criteria of your company. Now we have talked about the AAF before the attitude, aptitude and fit of a law firm. It’s really important that you get clear on what this is, right? The attitude is what required, what is the required approach to work that you have for everyone in the business, right? Attitude is about how we show up at work. Fit is about the culture that you are creating, so it is also about how you show up, but it’s much more about how you show up in the unit of others that are there. So that’s really about how we work together as a group. What sorts of things are we going to produce? How are we going to engage? Right? Some people are very collaborative in the way that we engage is. I have my lane, you have your lane and our lanes converge and then we’re riding together for a period of time before they, they separate.

Speaker1: [00:18:21] Other people are very unitary, right? So you have your lane, I have my lane. And at the end we take our finished product, we stick it together and it’s out the door, right? Sometimes cultural fit is about the idea that we are all swimming upstream together, and only if you start falling behind do I take my arm and reach back and grab you. Other people, we take turns. One person is swimming while the other is on their back and then we switch it, right? You ride for a while and that person is swimming, right? Everyone has an approach to work. You have to think about how you want your law firm to work. The cultural fit is that you have a certain energy, a certain personality to your law firm that is fostered by everyone that’s there, right? So it could be the personalities it could be, whether you like to laugh and joke. It could be that you want to have a space that’s culturally sensitive and inclusive. You can have a requirement for a high level of compassion, some high IQ, right? So you got to think about that in terms of what you want people to bring to the business.

[00:19:27] Now, attitude and cultural fit are those universals that apply to everyone. The aptitude is the ability to do the specific job for which you’re hiring a person, which means you could have aptitude criteria that are different from person to person. So aptitude for a paralegal is what do you have to do? What do you have to be able to do as this person to be a successful paralegal in this law firm, you have to be able to draft documents, provide legal research and evaluate financials, propound discovery, whatever the actual items are that you’re going to have that person do. And those could be very different and likely will be then an attorney, right? The attorney has to be able to give legal advice and deconstruct arguments and present trial testimony, right? So different criteria for what the job entails. But the attitude, aptitude, and fit criteria have to be met by everyone. Right?

[00:20:25] Now, we have created a resource for those of you that are struggling with what are the attitude, aptitude and fit criteria that I want in my law firm. The Law Firm Mentor Culture Scorecard is available for you to access, you just click on the link that’s in our show notes and you can get access to that as a free downloadable. It actually walks you through what some criteria are, but you’re going to have to ultimately define it for yourself. We just wanted you to be able to see what those criteria are in each of the categories and then actually evaluate your team members on whether or not they meet those criteria well, or not so much. All right, we’ll be right back.

[00:21:10] Imagine going to the office for just five hours a week. Oh, 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.

Speaker1: [00:21:34] Hi, I’m Neal Tyra, from the Tyra Law firm in Rockville, Maryland. You know you’re not learning from an academic. You’re learning from somebody who’s put the practices into effect.

Speaker2: [00:21:44] 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 two 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.

Speaker1: [00:22:14] Ok, we’re going to continue our discussion of creating a positive law firm culture with item number three. This is the third must-have if you’re going to create a positive culture and be able to work from anywhere despite your team still being either in your office or even working remotely, how do you ensure that there’s not that resentment that builds up when you’re away? And the third idiom is that you have to have an understanding that culture problems really are communication problems. Ok, culture problems are communication problems. The people know what leads to promotion and raise in the company. Do people understand what matters most to the boss, right? Sometimes people are off in La La Land doing things that you think are inconsequential because they somehow got the message that, that matters. Now, it might matter to you on a scale from 1 to 10, about a one. And they think it matters at about a 10, maybe because of something they heard. Maybe they’re making an assumption or are more likely than not. Maybe they’re acting out of their own feeling of what’s important and not what’s important to you. Right? There’s a real cultural disconnect when people are focusing on things that you don’t think matter when they think they really matter, right? And we’re all going to go to what’s comfortable and what’s familiar and what’s valuable to us unless we learn that the person who’s signing our paychecks and ultimately responsible for the evolution of our career want something different. But they’re not going to know you want something different unless you tell them. So it’s really important that people know what the boss thinks matters. What about this, are our issues being addressed proactively? Right, do you have kind of a shitstorm of unhappiness kind of sweltering in different places. And then when someone brings an issue to management, you roll your eyes and say, All right, I got it, we’ll deal with it. And that’s the end of it. Right. If people feel like whatever the problems are, they just are and they are kind of hopeless to do anything about it, then they’re just going to tolerate it until they don’t anymore, which means they’re probably not going to come to you, but so much before they ultimately say, you know, the boss doesn’t care about this. I don’t really have much of a choice, so I’m stuck with, I’m stuck with what this is, right?

[00:24:41] All right. Another question that you want to ask about cultural problems. Is do you have an ombudsman? Right, and ombudsman is somebody that basically is the bitchy, and by bitchy, I don’t mean bitch with a y on the end, I mean a bitch with an E-E on the end. Ok? The bitchee, the person who receives the complaints, the person who filters the information, the person who gathers the data. And in most companies, especially once you get beyond two or three employees, it should not be the owner. Ok? There are some very firmly rooted psychological principles as to why, and I won’t go through all of them. But I’ll just say this, I want you to think about no matter how approachable or kind or relatable or down to earth you are as your law firm owner. There is a very real practical truth to the fact that a person is always choosing. An outcome that they believe is better than what they currently are experiencing by virtue of complaining. Ok, that’s true no matter who they complain to. Ok. So am I’m in a situation and I’m not happy about it. I have two choices, right? I can keep my mouth shut and continue to deal with the situation. Or I can say something and try to get the situation resolved. And the person who said something has made a qualitative decision that saying something is more likely to get me a better outcome than keeping my mouth shut. Right. It’s better for me to say something than to remain silent. When you infuse into that analysis, the fact that the boss is the person to whom you’re going to say something, you are putting your employee at risk. Ok, I don’t care how great an employer you are. There is an inherent risk that what that person requires for their psychological needs, their physiological needs, right. You provide their paycheck. Their basic needs are met through you because you’re the boss. And if you don’t like whatever it is that they said about whomever it is that they said it, in whatever scenario they have ultimately set it, you have the ability to displace them from their income. You have that ability, no matter how great a person you are. And I don’t care if you say, well, my employees know that I’m a pushover and that I, you know, I care about them immensely and that I would never blow off their concerns. You can be the greatest boss in the world, but the myth, the very status that you have places your employees in jeopardy that if you don’t like what they have said about whom they have said it or how they have said it, there will be a consequence. Now there is still some measure of truth to that, even when you add in an ombudsman who can deliver to you the fact that Susie said X. Right. So Susie complaining is still going to ultimately get to you in some fashion. It may or it may not, right? At some point, you get to a place in your business where you don’t know about everything going on in your business because your business is too large. And that’s fine, right? Not every HR concern needs to be brought to you, but assuming that Susie is bringing it to H.R. Presumably, she’s going to know at some point that you would at least have the ability to find out about it. So the reality of it is still there, but it is one step removed. It could be multiple steps removed, right? Depending on how big your company is, you could have multiple layers up H.R.

[00:28:14] I once worked at a law firm that had an HR manager for the staff and a business manager for the attorneys, and the business manager knew how to crack the whip a little bit more and a little bit differently with the attorneys. Then the HR director was with the staff, but the business manager and the HR director very much worked in concert to make sure that the entirety of the workforce adhered to rules, met KPIs and so forth. Right. But if you were complaining about an attorney, if a team member was complaining about an attorney, the first person that got the complaint was the HR manager. And then the HR manager took that complaint to the business manager. And depending on what department that person was in, the business manager would talk to the managing attorney over the department where the issue was so there could be multiple people involved before staff person ever had their complaint brought to the manager of the entirety of the business or the owner of the entirety of the business.

Speaker1: [00:29:16] But assuming that you have a smaller company, right, it’s you, maybe an office manager, maybe two or three employees at that size, there is still a connection between my boss who can take me away from my employment and my problem solver. When you add in that extra layer, they’re almost inherently presumed to be a certain level of protection, right? So a person can complain to the office manager, office manager can then complain to boss. So you get a little bit better outcome there. But the other thing that comes with this is the idea of communication, right? Cultural problems derive from not having sufficient adequate supportive communication. And when I say supportive, I don’t mean that every person feels supported at all times because sometimes people have some pretty wonky things that they think should be happening and you don’t want to support that, right? But in terms of being heard, having a voice, having the opportunity to express grievances, making sure that they can address concerns that they have about their workforce, what they require to do, their jobs, what training they may require. All of those things promote a healthier work environment. And culture is very much about managing the expectations and setting the standard that everyone must adhere to in order to be in the space. So it’s really important that you be intentional about your communication. And if you’re not that and you’re off somewhere, and when I say off somewhere, I don’t mean off somewhere like you’re not working, you could be not be working, or you could be, you know, working from a beach or working from a mosque or working from your backyard or working from wherever, right? Working doesn’t, working or not working is not the issue, it’s more the presence or the feeling of presence of the boss. And if you want to be away from your office, whether it’s not working or working, you have to create an environment where you as the leader, if you’re still going to own the entity and be anything more than a silent shareholder, you as the leader have to be intentional about leadership. So that means while you are off somewhere, you need to have someone on somewhere in your business, and if you’re not going to have someone on somewhere, you have to be strategic about placing yourself in different places in order to make sure that your presence is felt so that people don’t feel like you’re the person who collects the checks and they’re the people that work their asses off to produce what you are ultimately generating.

Speaker1: [00:31:54] Ok, so this has been our show on positive culture. Don’t abandon ship. And for those of you that are struggling with the people in your law firm, whether it is the people in your law firm that are here today or the people that you want to come into your law firm that you don’t know that you can attract based on what you’ve created so far, I’ve created a resource for you. On January 13th, we’re going to have our webinar Seven Strategies to Achieve Rapid Growth in Your Law Firm in 2022. And we’re going to be talking about these very same issues from the culture perspective, but a whole host of other things that you need to achieve in order to create rapid growth in your law firm. So in other words, we want you to be proactive about growing, but we want you to put the things in place that are going to ultimately eliminate these problems before they arise and help you to create a business that will not just run without you, but a business that you can enjoy will still be there and will not be a product of mass defections or hyper resentment when you come back to it. All right, everyone, I’m Allison Williams. Your Law Firm Mentor. We’ll see you next week.

[00:33:08] 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!