Radical Candor at Law Firms - Building High Performing Teams

Years ago, we published a blog post on The Importance of Honesty in the Workplace.  It's still one of our most read pieces of content.  This post explores a concept called “Radical Candor” created by Kim Scott, a former executive at Google and Apple, and provides specific tips for lawyers to practice Radical Candor at law firms.

Culture is Scalable, Relationships are not

Before getting to the essence of Radical Candor, it is important to recognize that the number of quality relationships a boss can maintain is limited. While that number depends on a variety of factors, six direct reports plus or minus two seems to be a commonly accepted number. The selection and quality of these relationships is often the driving factor for professional success. Radical Candor is about relationship quality.

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Several years ago, I was lucky to spend a day listening to Gary Keller of Keller Williams explain the steps he took to create the largest real estate company in the world. He drew on a slide two companies, each with a boss and five direct reports — one company had 120,000 agents, the other had 6 people total. As Keller explained it, the difference was in the selection of the five direct reports. Put simply, Keller was able to scale a business and culture through his careful selection of the leaders on his team, who in turn developed high performing teams below them, and so on.

While simple, this is a critically important concept as a business grows beyond the scope of its founder’s ability to maintain a relationship with every employee.

Elements of Radical Candor

Kim Scott introduced the concept of Radical Candor through presentations and her book Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity.  She argues that greater candor makes better bosses.  The elements of her system are (1) providing guidance (2) to build high performing teams (3) that get results. As to the guidance element, Scott defines two fundamental dimensions of radical candor — “challenging directly” and “caring personally.”  Using those dimensions, boss/employee engagements can be divided into four quadrants based on the level of each dimension involved:

1. Low Challenging Directly/Low Caring Personally — Described as “manipulative insincerity,” this is where the boss doesn’t address the problem either because they don’t have time or they wish to be liked more than being an effective boss.

2. Low Challenging Directly/High Caring Personally — This type of behavior can be described as “ruinous empathy,” where the boss cares too much to provide needed feedback.

3. High Challenging Directly/Low Caring Personally — This is obnoxious aggression where the boss employs no filter in providing feedback.

4. High Challenging Directly/High Caring Personally — This is Radical Candor and it is hard. Using this approach, the boss communicates directly with care to help a team member improve. That means not ignoring poor performance and choosing to be liked over results. This is where real improvement occurs, and is well worth the effort.

See our post Radical Candor -- Honesty at the Office, which explains these dimensions in more detail.

Tips for Lawyers to Implement Radical Candor

Here are some thoughts, based on over 20 years of being a lawyer, on how to best implement Radical Candor in a law firm environment:

• Do not wait until employee reviews to provide guidance. Employees, particularly millennials, want performance feedback. Waiting months to give an employee feedback is not an effective way to develop performance or a high performing team.

• Avoiding tough conversations usually does not pay. Scott describes this behavior as either “ruinous empathy” (high caring) or “manipulative insincerity” (low caring). Ironically, she believes that “obnoxious aggression” is more likely to get results than the two avoiding approaches. Best to handle tough conversations quickly and move on.

• Look for opportunities to praise. People generally spend more time avoiding pain than seeking positives, which means we tend to remember what went wrong more than what went right. Radical Candor includes praising employees for jobs well done. Look for those opportunities to make deposits in your teams emotional bank accounts.

• Does your law firm recognize the value of high performing teams? I’ve worked in companies where individual performance is more valued than team work. Trying to build a high performing team in this environment can be difficult, possibly counterproductive. But even in an individual performance environment no one rarely succeeds alone.

Final Thoughts on Radical Candor at Law Firms

Building high performing teams that get results is hard. The key to achieving this according to Scott is a boss’s willingness to provide guidance that challenges directly while demonstrating personal care. This is tough in any environment. Typical law firm cultures are not always open to direct feedback, and implementing this management style is likely to ruffle feathers initially. But the rewards of increased team performance is worth it.

If you liked this subject, you may be interested in our other law culture related posts, What Makes an Ideal Work Environment and Advantages of a Values Based Business.

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In addition to Thriving Attorney, Darin M. Klemchuk is founder of Klemchuk LLP, a litigation, intellectual property, and transactional law firm located in Dallas, Texas. Click to read more about Darin Klemchuk's practice as an intellectual property lawyer as well as IP mediation services. For more on the latest developments in IP law, see Ideate blog and IP Questions Answered blog.

10 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Practicing Law

One of the challenges in drafting a "X things...." blog post is condensing your experience into a set number of X.  What follows is my best attempt to distill down 10 valuable lessons learned over 20+ years of practicing law.  My criteria was what strategies would have had the most impact on my career had I known and put them to use when I started practicing law in 1997.  

1.  Law Practice Business Model

The first is a painfully simple strategy.  There are only three essential elements to the business of a law practice:

• Leads - This refers to a constant stream of potential clients. Without new clients, a business will eventually die, so it is vital that a law business attract a stream of new clients to replace the ones that are lost.

• Relationships - Repeat business from quality clients is the foundation of a profitable law business. If your model does not attract repeat business clients, then you must focus your efforts on generating more and more new clients. Because attracting new clients is often more expensive and time consuming, many successful law business models focus on keeping existing clients happy and obtaining a stream of new matters from the existing client base.

• Leverage (Leadership) - At some point in the development of a law business, the amount of work exceeds a lawyer's capacity or desire to do it. Leverage is your ability to create systems and processes to manage tasks, acquire tools, delegate tasks to employees, and scale your business by focusing on higher value work. This requires leadership skills development. Put another way, your ability to develop your leadership capacity acts as a ceiling on your law business.

It's easy to over complicate a law practice.  However, if you keep your focus on these three essential elements, you will have a significant step ahead of your competitors.  It's also true that your weakest element is the limiting factor on your business.  See Lesson #3: Law Firm Staffing, Part I and Lesson #7: Law Firm Staffing, Part III for a discussion of how collaboration can solve this problem. 

For more reading on this topic, I suggest Gary Keller's The Millionaire Real Estate Agent.  While not directly on point for attorneys, this book walks the reader step-by-step on how to create and scale a different type of professional service business.  Mr. Keller also built the largest real estate firm in the world, so he has quite a bit of credibility in this area.  

2.  Lead Generation for Lawyers

 For this lesson, I have a couple scribbles. The first is the lead generation funnel:

Here’s how I define the lead generation funnel:

• “Targets” are companies that could be clients, but you have no contact information for a decision maker at the company. To convert a target to a lead, you need a contact. The best way to get a contact is through an introduction from a third party that knows both of you.

• “Leads” are potential clients where you have contact information. Leads are either qualified or unqualified. Once a lead has been determined to be “unqualified,” it falls out of the funnel.

• “Prospects” are leads that are qualified. I recommend making that decision early and using defined criteria of ideal clients and the type of prospects you are willing to entertain to become clients later. I further categorize prospects as either short-term prospect that you can close within 2 weeks or long-term prospects that require significantly more effort.

• “Clients” are prospects that have completed your engagement process — conflicts check, signed an engagement letter, and paid a retainer.

At this point, you are likely wondering why I made this so complicated. The primary reason is you can waste a ton of money on marketing/advertising and generate endless unqualified leads. Measuring your success rate and ROI at each of these steps is essential to success in business development. For example, you may have done an advertising campaign that created 100 leads, 2 prospects, and 1 client. These numbers suggest that the message was aimed at the wrong audience, but your conversion rate was excellent (50%). Without measuring these KPIs you would have no idea where the campaign broke down other than you invested quite a bit of money to generate one client. However, if the amount you invested is less than the amount you would pay to get an ideal client, the campaign was a success. See Lesson #8.

The second scribble summarizes the three types of lead generation:

“Referrals” are leads provided to you by other professionals (Referral Partners) or through contact with your clients (Client Contact). I have heard others refer to this lead generation channel as “seeds” or “word of mouth.” Regardless of what you call it, this is one of the most effective, but time consuming lead generation activities. In fact, a good referral partner can be more valuable than a good client over time.

“Inbound Marketing” is where you take an action that gets the attention of a potential lead and causes them to take an action. For example, if billboard advertising is your lead generation strategy, the billboard gains attention of passersby and calling a 1-800 number to provide contact information is the action. This is referred to as “interruption” marketing since your goal is to interrupt the attention of a lead. The Internet has disrupted this strategy. Now, you can write an educational blog post that focuses on certain keywords. Potential leads that are looking for insight on that topic will conduct Internet searches to find suitable content. With this approach, you are not interrupting a lead’s attention; you are simply answering their question.

“Outbound Marketing” is intentional effort directed at meeting and converting known targets that you have predetermined to meet your ideal client criteria. This requires you to have an “ideal client” profile in mind. See Lesson #8. I find many lawyers haven’t done this exercise. Outbound marketing is the most time consuming of the three activities, but it also provides the greatest opportunity to grow your law business since you are targeting only ideal clients.

3.  Law Firm Staffing, Part I

 For this lesson, I include my third scribble that identifies the four different roles in a law business:

This model divides the four roles into two focuses — business development and service delivery. For service delivery, service professionals provide much of the technical work and act as subject matter experts (SMEs). A project manager leads a team of service professionals to deliver service on time and within budget, and otherwise meet client expectations. A “relationship manager” is responsible for the overall client experience, selecting the appropriate project manager for a matter, receiving feedback from the client, and if the project was successful, selling the client on additional, new projects. A “hunter” or “new client developer” is responsible for attracting new clients to the firm.

While this may seem complicated, it is straightforward. Knowing which hat you are wearing at a particular time is helpful. A dialog between lawyers regarding who is the relationship manager versus the project manager on a particular matter and where those roles overlap can lead to better client service.

Controversial Observation — In 20+ years of practicing law, I have never seen a lawyer simultaneously great at all four roles. The truly great ones focus on one or two roles and collaborate with others, who are naturally great at the other roles.

4.  Understanding People Have Different Communication Styles

As discussed in Lesson #3, lawyers face pressure to be good at all things.  Being an effective communicator can lead to significant increases in leadership capacity. In my experience, people fall into one of three dominant communication styles. Understanding yourself and your audience is essential to success:

• “Rule Followers” like details in writing and time to absorb them. A best practice in working with a rule follower personality is to provide them with all the necessary details in writing (be certain it is accurate) in advance and schedule a time to go over the conversation. If you are one of the two personalities below and ignore this suggestion, you will likely lose the person in the beginning of the conversation.

• “Bottom Line Oriented” communicators want bullet points. They don’t want to wade through a long, meandering memo that has no specific point. One of the best ways to communicate with this personality is to provide an “executive summary” toward the top of the email or memo with details to follow. Think in terms of a 140-character Tweet. If you are a rule follower or verbal processor and don’t observe these recommendations, you run the risk of annoying the bottom line oriented communicator with over detail or not enough organization to the conversation.

• “Verbal Processors” make decisions through “talking it out.” If this doesn’t make sense to you, you are likely a verbal processor. One of the worst things you can do with a verbal processor is to problem solve or interrupt them during the processing phase. Best practice is to have agreement that you are “going to verbally process” before you “problem solve.” If you are naturally bottom line oriented, I recommend resisting your urge to get to the bottom line and focus on making time for the verbal processing.

So which style are you? What are the styles of your team members? As a leader, can you adjust your style to meet people where they are at? What are the styles of your clients? Opposing counsel?

Being able to recognize how others prefer to communicate and make decisions can lead to significant relationship improvements. For more on relationships, see my post Building Relationships Through Emotional Bank Account Deposits.

5.  Law Firm Staffing, Part II

 Warning — Another Controversial Statement.

As a group, lawyers:

• Don’t want to be told what to do; and

• Simultaneously, are bad micromanagers.

If you can break this frame in your law business, you will have a huge competitive advantage.

6.  Trust Your Gut

Just about every time I have not followed a gut feeling, I have regretted it.  This has been the experience with clients I wasn't sure were the right fit, engaging with potential clients, employees and making hiring decisions with new employees, and workplace collaborations.  

The best way I have found to open up more intuition and less thinking is to turn off your analytical brain.  Whether it is "sleeping on it," meditation, or shifting gears to a physical activity, opening up space allows your intuition to send you these important messages.  Listen to them.

7.  Law Firm Staffing, Part III

In the military, sports, and high performance business teams, a leader is only as good as his/her team.  Put another way, there are no low performing teams, just weak leaders.  Jeb Blount provides in People Follow You five “levers” of effective leadership:

• Put People First

• Connect

• Position People to Win

• Build Trust

• Create Positive Emotional Experiences  

If you want to increase the "Leverage" element of your law business, you must increase your leadership capacity.  

Final point — remember as a leader, you are always on stage.  Put another way, you aren’t allowed the luxury of having a bad day because people are watching you and will make assumptions based on your actions and attitude.

Listen to my podcast for more information on law firm leadership: Leadership in Action Podcast Series: How to Rebuild Your Law Firm From Scratch

8.  Law Firm Marketing Fundamentals

Here are some basic points for an effective marketing and sales strategy for a law business.  

First, be clear about what you sell and who is your ideal client.  Entering your time, tacking on expenses, and sending a client an invoice is not good enough in today's competitive market.  Lawyers that deliver high value are always in demand.  To maximize value to a client, you need to focus on ideal clients for your business.  Trying to satisfy all potential clients (e.g., being everything to everyone) is a losing strategy.  

Second, what would you pay to engage with an ideal client?  Answering this question tells you how much to spend on marketing and advertising to attract leads that ultimately could become your definition of an ideal client.  Without knowing this number, you are at risk of wasting money on marketing or spreading it too broadly.  

Third, service businesses typically compete on either quality, service, or price.  Competing on all three pretty much guarantees failure.  I recommend picking one of the three and designing your law business around that quality.  This affects the business structure, pricing strategy, staffing, and marketing messaging.  Random acts of marketing can be very expensive.  

9.  Be You -- Do It for You

One of life's greatest tragedies is to be loved for someone you are pretending to be, not who you really are.  Private practice can be a competitive, full contact sport where success is measured in terms of trial wins, client origination, billable hours, etc. as a replacement for grades, LSAT scores, and university prominence for law school competition.  With all this pressure, it is easy for lawyers to lose who they are as they strive to be great at everything.  

As I wrote in Lesson #3: Law Firm Staffing, Part I, I have never seen anyone great at all aspects of the law business -- at least not without paying a heavy personal price.  In my opinion, the most successful lawyers are clear as to what they are great at it, who they are, and what they are not great at.  In other words, they check their egos, develop self awareness, and focus on their unique ability.  They also collaborate with others that have complimentary unique abilities to achieve a greater collective success than each could do on their own.  

Happiness is found in being you as opposed to pretending you are someone else.  See my post on What I Learned about Living from Nearly Dying for more on this topic.

10.  Most Important Leadership Lesson

We live in a left-brain dominated profession.  Think, analyze, discuss, analyze some more.  We also are driven to collect skills like writing, deposition taking, oral advocacy.  But as I have learned over many years of observing strong leaders, "being" is often more important than "doing" when it comes to leadership.  There are many axioms in this area like "strong leaders stand for something" and "a leader gets the organization that he/she deserves" to name a few.  My view is that if you want to grow your business, you have to start with developing your leadership capacity (being) because your being is a limiting factor on the organization.  I realize this is not as sexy as measuring billable hours, originations, and profits per partner.  But I also believe it to be a natural law similar to the law of the farm (you have to plant in the spring to harvest in the fall).  

From my experience, if you want to develop your leadership skills, I would start with developing your "being" or as some call it your "ethos."  As you intentionally develop your "being," you can develop a parallel path of skills development.  Chapter 1 "Establish Your Set Point" in Mark Divine's The Way of the SEAL provides an excellent discussion and set of exercises on developing your why, principals, passion, and purpose.  Commander Divine describes developing your being as "vertical skills" and doing as "horizontal skills" development.  I highly recommend his companion book Unbeatable Mind for a comprehensive plan for integrated personal development that is a foundation to leadership capacity.  Note Unbeatable Mind is internal development; The Way of the SEAL is about external deployment of the Unbeatable Mind skills.  

Below is my final scribble on vertical skills (being) versus horizontal skills (doing) for lawyer leaders:

 I hope you have found this blog post helpful and welcome comments from readers.  

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In addition to Thriving Attorney, Darin M. Klemchuk is founder of Klemchuk LLP, a litigation, intellectual property, and transactional law firm located in Dallas, Texas. Click to read more about Darin Klemchuk's practice as an intellectual property lawyer as well as IP mediation services. For more on the latest developments in IP law, see Ideate blog and IP Questions Answered blog.

Building Relationships Through Emotional Bank Account Deposits

In Stephen R. Covey’s seminal book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he provides a framework for building productive, interdependent relationships through maintaining a positive balance in other people’s emotional bank accounts. “Interdependent” relationships are formed between two people that are dependent (private victory through Habits 1-3) and realize that together they are better (public victory through Habits 4-6), but neither depends on the other for individual success. This post examines building relationships through emotional bank account deposits in law firms.

Emotional Bank Account Deposits are Cornerstones to Productive Relationships

Dr. Covey suggests the following as effective deposits into emotional bank accounts. I’ve included my thoughts on how these suggestions work best:

• Understanding the Individual — Authentic listening is one of the best ways to truly understand someone and to communicate you care.

• Attending to Little Things — Little disagreements, slights, and overlooks tend to kill relationships over time. It’s usually not the big things.

• Keeping Commitments — By communicating and keeping commitments, you become the kind of person people can rely on. Not keeping commitments - even small ones - trains others not to trust you and to be guarded. Immense relationship power is created when each person can rely completely on the word of the other.

• Clarifying Expectations — Unclear expectations are the root of many interpersonal disputes. This is particularly true when one person in the relationship has an unspoken expectation that is assumed, rather than communicated. Uncovering those assumed expectations and getting clarity leads to significant emotional deposits.

• Showing Personal Integrity — Personal integrity is fundamental to establishing trust in a relationship. As Dr. Covey explained, “Integrity is conforming reality to our words — in other words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations.” See 3 Steps to Build Integrity in the Workplace for a deeper discussion of how this principle applies at work.

• Apologizing Sincerely when You Make a Withdrawal — We all make mistakes. Apologizing to the individual when one happens and making the apology with sincerity can be healing to a relationship as well as demonstrate that you understand the other person.

Challenge — Applying Building Relationships Through Emotional Bank Account Deposits Principle

What: According to Dr. Covey, positive emotional bank account balances between two dependent people lead to fruitful relationships.

Why: As a team leader, your success largely is dependent on your ability to form strong, trusting relationships with your teammates, e.g., a high performing team. As a business leader, your ability to replicate this principle throughout your organization will have transformative results and give your business a significant competitive advantage. See our post on 5 Building Blocks for a Strong Law Firm Culture for a broader discussion of culture versus strategy.

Apply: Choose a key relationship where you believe your emotional bank account balance to be low or even negative, and consciously make deposits into the account for the next 14 days. How has the relationship changed? What caused the low balance in the first place? What steps can you take in the future to ensure a more positive balance and as a consequence, stronger relationship?

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I hope you have found this blog post helpful and welcome comments from readers.  

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In addition to Thriving Attorney, Darin M. Klemchuk is founder of Klemchuk LLP, a litigation, intellectual property, and transactional law firm located in Dallas, Texas. Click to read more about Darin Klemchuk's practice as an intellectual property lawyer as well as IP mediation services. For more on the latest developments in IP law, see Ideate blog and IP Questions Answered blog.

Simple Leadership Lessons for Lawyers from a Navy SEAL

I was lucky to attend the Unbeatable Mind Annual Summit in December 2017, where retired Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf presented his thoughts on leadership. The following is my summary of leadership lesson takeaways for lawyers.

Leadership Types

Good or bad. We all know which one it is when we experience the leader. It’s not more complicated than that.

Leadership Styles

1. Micromanagement — This form of management style results in people asking “what do you want me to do” instead of being proactive. The micromanagement style relies on external forces and discipline.

2. Inspirational — This style is about pulling people along through inspiration. It asks the question, “How hard would you work not to let that person down.” This is about actions, not words.

2 Ways to Lead

By position or by example. In my experience, leading by example is far more effective than leading by position. One is inspirational; the other can be command and control authoritarian.

Additional Thoughts on Leadership

• Set the standard for your team every day through actions and maintaining integrity.

• What you tolerate is your standard.

• Resilience is the important ability to spring back from adversity stronger.

• Seek adversity - take the hard road every time.

• Think like and act like the leader you want to be.

• Being an effective leader is the best way to change the world.

You can find more information about Andy Stumpf through his podcast, Cleared Hot.

You can find more information about this year’s Unbeatable Mind Summit.

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Important Caveat - These are simply my notes and thoughts and shouldn’t be attributed to anyone.

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In addition to Thriving Attorney, Darin M. Klemchuk is founder of Klemchuk LLP, a litigation, intellectual property, and transactional law firm located in Dallas, Texas. Click to read more about Darin Klemchuk's practice as an intellectual property lawyer as well as IP mediation services. For more on the latest developments in IP law, see Ideate blog and IP Questions Answered blog.