How Leaders Create Focus in Busy Law Firms (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Stephanie and I'm Zach and welcome to the lawyers podcast One of the many ways that we help lawyers build healthier firms better businesses and more sustainable lives Today I talked with Sean van der Hoeven about how top performers move work across the finish line

[00:00:18] Speaker 2: Today's episode is brought to you by Smith AI So stay tuned Zach's gonna have a conversation with them and just a few so Stephanie speaking of top performers

[00:00:27] Speaker 1: I think of LabCon as a place where I see a lot of top performers. I see a lot of top performers from lawyers, top performers from our labsters. We got that coming up.

[00:00:39] Speaker 2: It is. There's still time to register. So we wanted to give it one last little shout out here because we always, it's for our lab community. So if you're not familiar, I guess we'll just back up and say, yeah, we have a conference every year. And to me, it's one of it is really one of my favorite things that we do. We it's it's not a typical conference with a CLEs and talk tracks and you're not sitting in a room with people speaking at you for a couple of days. Instead, we were like how do we create a space where you can come together with the community, learn about what people are doing and generate a lot of cool ideas, but then also work on your business. Spend a couple of days away from the noise of your business so so that you can actually get some stuff done and collaborate with our team on what that looks like. And it always sounds weird to people when they hear it, because they think, okay, but where's my agenda? You know, lawyers, darn lawyers with your agendas. And I'm like, I just need you to trust me to show up and be in the room. And I promise you, whatever you need help with, we'll get you help and we will figure this out. And yes, there is an agenda. we kind of know where people want to go. But it's just, it's just very different, right? It's, it's more workshops. It's more hands-on. It's the example I give to someone is I remember a couple of years ago, or maybe it was last year, we had a group that wanted to talk about how to use video in their social media marketing. And I think at a typical conference, you would have sat in a room for an hour, watch someone's PowerPoint presentation with pictures of video cameras and a a long list of what to do and how to do videos. And what we did instead was we spent like three minutes giving the fundamentals, maybe it was five, I don't know, but we went over some fundamentals. And then we're like, you know what? We have equipment right here. Let's go outside. Let's start shooting some videos for your social and like just dive in and practice and get it up. And everybody in that session like walked away knowing how to do it, but also got to start on doing it, which is sometimes the hardest part is just getting in front of a camera and recording.

[00:02:46] Speaker 1: I remember that session, I can see that. I remember walking by and seeing a bunch of people literally doing the filming, and I know that a bunch of people got actual social media stuff out of that. So that's kind of what it is, but who's at this? Obviously our team, our team of experts, but who are the people that show up to this? What is that?

[00:03:08] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's mostly law firm leaders. So a lot of times, we have small law firms in our community, So a lot of times it might be the current managing partner, founding partner, you know, but if you have a small team of partners, you certainly can all come. We have a lot more people bringing their second in command. You know, that person may have lots of different titles in a law firm. So, you know, whether that be your firm administrator or whoever you kind of have, that can be a very powerful duo as well, because if you, you know, they're getting the benefit of what you're learning and you're not just coming back, downloading to them. I'll also shout out that this year, we're doing something a little different. The timing of when we start has changed. So we're launching on a Monday afternoon, but we opened up an optional AI pre-session. I mean, we'll probably talk about AI a lot, but we wanted to have a dedicated space for just people who wanna get their hands, you know, dirty using AI tools. And so that Monday morning is a separate optional AI workshop that you can just register just for that. So both of these events take place in Atlanta. We love our friends over at Emory. It's a really nice little space for us. We get to be outside a lot. We get to, I don't know, we're not in hotel ballrooms downtown where we're just in the, yeah, we don't like that. We like being where there's nature, there's paths. You can go walking. Zach usually leads a group to run in the morning, running.

[00:04:42] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:04:43] Speaker 2: Yeah. Hopefully they don't get lost one year. They did not get lost.

[00:04:46] Speaker 1: So there's, there's one, one.

[00:04:48] Speaker 2: Yes, but that's, you know, it's, it's a, it's a really cool community. And we, if you're listening to this, you're part of the community. If you're wondering, should I go, would I fit in? I don't know. That feels scary and intimidating. Like it won't be, we actually create very, or very intentional about how we create this community. It's small on purpose and we're introverted first, which I know sounds weird too, cause I'm talking to you to my introverted friends. Like I've done a lot of research. I am not introverted. I will be the first to admit, but I've done a lot of research and we have introverts on our team. And so we've done some things that are a little different with this conference of like how we bring you in and how we introduce you in the room and how we make you feel comfortable and how we give you space and time to recharge at the end of the day. I think you'll find that it's really curated in a different way. And I know, I remember the first time I went to a lawyerist event way back before I was even on the team and I was like, can I go to this? And so if you're thinking that right now, my answer to you is, of course. We would love to have you in the room. We'd love to meet you. We embrace everybody. If you're not sure, let's just have a call. Get on a call with me. We'll talk for 20 minutes. I can answer your questions and I'll make sure that, I'll guarantee, this is Stephanie's personal guarantee that you will come to this event and you will get something out of it. And I'll back that with money if I have to refund your registration. I've never had to refund anyone's registration fee because people come to me and they're like, this was amazing. But if for some reason you come and you engage and do what we ask you to do and it does not benefit your firm, then I will personally give you your money back.

[00:06:34] Speaker 1: Well, and you can reach her, if you're looking for this, at stephanieatlawyerist.com. PH. With PH, yes. Well, now let's hear my conversation with Smith AI and then my conversation with Sean about his new book, Pause.

[00:06:50] Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Maddie Martin. I'm the GM of Legal at SmithAI. And SmithAI is the intelligent workforce for your front office. We've got AI, we've got humans, and our opinion is that a mix of both is best for building trust and growing revenue.

[00:07:22] Speaker 1: Maddie, good to see you again. Thanks for being on the show again. A pleasure to have you back. This is, I've actually seen you in, this is weird, I've seen you in person more recently than I've seen you virtually. So it's really good to have you back on the show. Thanks for being with me.

[00:07:39] Speaker 3: Thanks so much for having me. Good to be here with you, Zach.

[00:07:42] Speaker 1: So Maddie, as you said, Smith AI can obviously help attorneys with their intake. what's broken about law firm intake? What's, you know, we've got a lot of opinions on that from people. What's broken on law firm intake?

[00:07:59] Speaker 3: So many things. I will highlight just a couple. A lot. The main thing that's broken is sort of operating based on what is the lowest common denominator, right? So let's go back to like grade school math. The lowest common denominator to me means you're just outsourcing to a receptionist or you've hired a receptionist who has a limited skillset. And you're really not thinking about like where the bar could be for that role and how to best use technology to get way more out of intake to relieve the other highly skilled roles that you've invested in, like your senior intake specialist, your paralegal, maybe even attorneys at the firm. Intake is fundamentally broken for a lot of firms who have thin use of their technology, poor data quality going into those systems, and then a lot of time spent sorting and fixing data when frankly, if we look at the Clio reports, we can see that attorneys already are only spending over two hours, just about over two hours, out of an eight-hour workday on billable work, where do you think the rest of it goes? It goes to administrative tasks. It goes to some business development work. There's really not a whole lot of margin there for you to spend more time fixing and cleaning up the business when all your business relies on really high-quality intake.

[00:09:38] Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's kind of like it's broken because most people are saying, I just need somebody to answer the phone and then throw that call into a bucket and I will sort it out later. And what you're saying is we can do significantly more than that and significantly better.

[00:09:53] Speaker 3: Yeah, to me, what does better look like? It looks like clean structured data. It looks like consistent capture of the same information for every case type. It looks like defining what good is first before delegating it, instead of trying to do both in tandem. So you hire someone and you train them once and the training wheels are off and buyer beware. That's really not how it works. We have a 30-day money back guarantee period for a reason. That's actually really meant for you, the lawyer, to be invested in the back and forth that needs to happen when you initially send us your set of instructions, but you may have just come up with the night before, sorry, but it's true. And we realized like, well, there's some gaps here. And when we encounter this scenario, we don't have clear instructions. So it needs to be a conversation and not just chucking something over the fence, lobbing the hot potato over the fence.

[00:11:02] Speaker 1: Yeah, and that makes sense with the lowest common denominator. Lowest common denominator is just answer it, lob something over the fence and let's see. And then I run into a lot of firms that are like, my intake's not working. It's just not working. I'm like, have you designed it? How is it not working? And so I think that's another question is like, how can firms know, I guess the other way, that their system is working, that they're not just lobbing things over the fence?

[00:11:31] Speaker 3: Well, two ways. One is qualitative and one is quantitative. So the qualitative one is pick up the phone and call your firm and see what the experience is like. Because that is a single best way.

[00:11:43] Speaker 4: Oh, secret shop.

[00:11:44] Speaker 3: Oh, secret shop, absolutely. I mean, that is the number one easiest, no tech skills required. Just call, pretend to be a client, and see how your team does, whether it's in-house or outdoor, see how it goes. You know all the questions to ask. You know how to play that role of the uninformed consumer. most people haven't worked with a lawyer before, right? So they're gonna ask questions. Is your team patient? Do they steer back to the main checklist of the conversation where intake needs to happen? So that's the qualitative part. And on the quantitative side, not that you couldn't quantify if you made many calls that side of the experience, but the quantitative side is also looking in your CRM and saying out of the calls that I got that are new leads, what percent of them are qualified? And under inspection, are those ones that are qualified truly accurately qualified? Are the ones who are unqualified accurately unqualified? Are we doing that job properly? Because you don't wanna kick the can down the road so that when the intake specialist is asking for documentation and the police report and all the paperwork and the medical treatments and all of that, that they're not getting down all that work and wasting time on something that's really not a case that you want to take or retain, right? So up front in that sales funnel, so to speak, how many leads are turning into qualified leads, sales accepted leads, so we say in like the tech world, and how many are truly deals that you want to accept and work that would be, so to speak, your pipeline? Well, okay, so let's dig a little

[00:13:31] Speaker 1: bit deeper into how do you define quality of this work? To me, I would look at your historical

[00:13:40] Speaker 3: benchmark for how well you're qualifying your leads, meaning what percentage can you expect out of the new lead callers you get to convert into new clients. And if you have multiple practice areas, I would do it by practice area because those benchmarks are going to be different. And then I would say, of the elements that make up that conversion rate, where is there the most variation and where is there the most consistency? And where there's the most consistency, is that an area where we could make improvements? Where you want more clients than you're getting, or you want to be pickier about the clients and actually reduce that rate, actually? and then where there's inconsistency, how do you first focus on consistency before you focus on moving the rate?

[00:14:33] Speaker 1: Okay, how do we hone in where there's consistency and then where there's inconsistency, how do we get that better and a little bit better in the first place before we really start to try to like push the button or move the needle on that? I like that. And that's the quality, it's not so much the quality of the leads, that's the quality of our process as opposed to like, yes, there's quality of leads, sure. So that's the quality of our process. So obviously, Smith AI has AI in it and has had AI in it for a considerable amount of time. What role does artificial intelligence play in this whole process? Because I think that's in the back of people's minds right now.

[00:15:13] Speaker 3: Man, it has changed over the years so much. I'm really lucky to say that I have been here for over nine of our 10 plus years. But early days, AI looked like really exceptional spam detection, sales call screening, and then AI generated call summaries based on the data the human receptionist was capturing on the call. Then we moved into more AI-assisted workflows, again, for those human receptionists, until the technology got good enough and the consumer expectations were flexible enough to accept AI on a phone call, which was very recently, right? But as soon as that happened, the market immediately exploded with AI receptionist tools people's, you know, out of thin air, out of people's garages, out of companies that just wanted to be in that business. But thankfully, because we've been in that business, we have been in the business for so long, we knew the right way to set up AI on the phone call is to make sure that there are humans always available as backup because AI is still not at the point where it can and handle every scenario, judgment call, problem solving, creativity sort of solution that is a situation that callers find themselves in on these calls, especially to lawyers where they don't know how that call is going to go. They don't know what they're gonna be asked for. They don't know what questions to ask. And sometimes they're caught off guard by the questions that are being asked of them. imagine criminal defense questions, immigration questions, questions about detention, people are very hesitant sometimes to share information. Now, sometimes, interestingly, they're more willing to share concrete facts with a very neutral third party, let's say AI, right? We find that people are very compliant, actually, on these calls with AI. But when something goes awry, or when someone has this sense of, I need to talk to a human, you need to be able to fulfill that without contacting the firm. Because another Clio stat I'll cite for you is that 42% of lawyers and staff are already feeling burned out. So the last thing we want to do is have our escalation path be to the firm. we want to handle that end-to-end, right? And end-to-end doesn't just mean screening to intake, to scheduling, to retainer in the best scenario, sure. But in the escalated scenario, end-to-end means get that AI call over to a human, a Smith AI receptionist, to complete the rest of the call and make that person more comfortable, right? Or there's a sensitive matter want to talk to a human or they have some questions and they want to talk to a human or in some cases AI flunks and we need to escalate to a human because the system's overloaded there's so many AI users there's all these reasons why AI sometimes has a blip right sure we don't want our tech stack to determine whether or not you get a complete intake we want to say okay AI is is having a problem right now, we need to get that caller to a human to complete this call without error, right? There are a lot of reasons why that so-called hybrid mix is the best of both worlds. It's really not either or for us, but you can see that the evolution really was AI behind the scenes and now AI in the driver's seat in a lot of ways.

[00:19:24] Speaker 1: I'm gonna harp on this a little bit and I'm gonna editorialize a little bit if you don't mind, because I, in my role at Lawyerist, get a lot of, get connected, let's say, to a lot of quote-unquote AI intake platforms. And there, as you had said, there are a lot of them that are spinning up by the minute. There are probably 14 that spun up today because people are saying, oh, I have access to OpenAI's API, or Whisper or whatever, I'll just put an AI bot in between attorneys and their clients and I'll charge them for it. And those are, again, this is the editorializing part, pissing me off because there's so little thought that goes into what attorneys actually need. And so I wanna harp on this moment because Smith AI, yes, has been doing this with AI for 10 years now and has fundamentally approached this from a different place. And so I wanna just highlight what you're saying about that. You're saying you're fundamentally approaching it from a different place and I wanna just cheer and say, yes, you are.

[00:20:47] Speaker 3: Well, man, I mean, we don't have enough time to talk about all the facets of what you're raising, but I will emphasize that 67% of clients still want access to a human. And what that means is a lot of your AI calls, especially if you're using a subpar AI tool, are going to end up ringing your firm, which is the thing you're trying to solve in the first place. Not to mention the fact that if you say, oh, I'm going to find ways to eliminate those escalations, you are by nature, now going back to the beginning of our conversation, you are by nature going to trim the utility of that tool down to the least common denominator that they can be successful with without triggering escalation. And now you're back to paying for something that is extremely basic glorified voicemail, right? And what does that mean? What do you have to do with voicemails? You have to call them back. So now 100% of your inbound has to be chase outbound. and we all know the connection rate, sorry, sucks for Outback. So why not end to end on that first call, get all the work done and have a tiny marginal increase in the cost of that call, which saves you as an insurance policy from all of the legwork and time and money spent on the chase that won't be at nearly the same conversion rate as if you had just done on the right thing in the first place.

[00:22:20] Speaker 1: Yes, get it done right the first time. Like you said, we could probably do an entire series of podcasts on what I had raised back there, but we do need to move on a little bit. If someone's listening right now, what should they actually go do?

[00:22:39] Speaker 3: I'll go back to the secret shopping. If you've heard me talk anywhere in the last nine years, this is something that I always recommend for two reasons. One, you wanna look for like the emotional acuity and tenderness to some degree of your callers by whoever your representative is answering that call. And two, you wanna look for accuracy. How thorough are they being? Are they asking the right questions? And are they giving the right impression of how the firm is going to manage that business if they're lucky to get it from that potential client. So that is something you can easily do. And I would do a few reps of that, depending on the time of day or your staffing schedule. I would try and listen to calls from multiple team members if you're keeping it in-house. And even if you've outsourced it, many vendors like SmithAI have a wide array of receptionists. And of course we have both AI and humans. So you'll want to get a small sample. And that is the number one thing I would do. It's not going to take you more than a few minutes. And I guarantee you, you will fill an entire legal pad of all the observations that you want to talk to your team about after that single call, not multiple.

[00:24:00] Speaker 1: I love that. And then Smith AI has its own catches and quality assurances built in as well when we're talking about the qualitative stuff also.

[00:24:12] Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. I mean, when we talk about quality, when we talk about infrastructure, we can't talk about those things, and even the AI and human mix, without talking about monitoring proactively for quality. We do that, we've always done that on the human side. We actually have our receptionist file reports if instructions are unclear or they can flag a call. And we now do that with AI on the human side and on those AI calls. So we are proactively monitoring for the goal achievement of that call. For example, it's a different goal if it's a new lead versus an existing client call, you know, did you transfer or did you schedule an appointment? And then we have health metrics, so to speak, that are part of that quality system that are baked into every single call that we handle. So you're talking hundreds and hundreds of thousands a month that we are processing.

[00:25:09] Speaker 1: Okay, well, if someone's listening to this and they're saying, how do I go get Smith AI? How do they go get Smith AI?

[00:25:18] Speaker 3: Well, there is an exciting new development that we actually do now offer on the AI Receptionist, a freemium plan. So you can have 25 calls a month for free. Every single month, it's not like a trial period. And then you can elect to have that live agent fallback on that plan that is at a fee, but it's just on a per call usage. And obviously we have our virtual receptionist and then there are hybrid plans that combine both, but getting started is so easy. Just go to smith.ai and sign up or elect to talk to our sales team if you wanna have a conversation about how we can custom tailor a plan to you.

[00:26:04] Speaker 1: Once again, you can do it either automatically or with a human, I love it, love it. Well, Maddie, thank you for being with me and explaining all this. We've probably gone way deeper than we intended to go, but I always do that when I'm talking to you. So thank you for being with me.

[00:26:22] Speaker 3: Zach, thank you so much. I love talking to you and this has been a pleasure.

[00:26:26] Speaker 1: Fantastic, thank you. We'll see you next time.

[00:26:30] Speaker 4: Hey, I'm Sean Vanderhoeven, author of "'Pause, How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World." I'm a partner of the Wiseman Group and I do leadership research and training around the world. And it's really, it's an honor to be on with you today.

[00:26:44] Speaker 1: Sean, thanks for being with me. I really appreciate it. And I just read your book, Pause. Thank you for getting a copy out to me. It was, I think I read it in like three days, just blasted through it very quickly. I had a lot of good information. One of the things in here, and this is just kind of background, I forget that there are people that do research on leadership. You know, there was a lot of places in here where you were saying, you know, in my research, in my studies, how did you get into like researching leadership?

[00:27:15] Speaker 4: I know there's a couple geeks of us running around out there that call ourselves leadership researchers. I'd always wanted to do something connected to leadership when I was younger. When I was in my early 20s, I loved The 7 Habits. I was one of those productivity nerds where I'd get the latest productivity book and carry it around me with a journal that I just started. And I was into this. I loved reading nonfiction books, business books. Throughout my career, I tried as much as I could to apply the concepts that I was reading about and studying. And at some point, I did my undergraduate in history. I thought, oh, I really love the research process and I would really like to do this in business and leaderships particularly, and wanted to take on a question and bring insights to learn from other great leaders and to bring that to leaders. I've been influenced by some incredible leaders and I've struggled with some leaders that weren't as good. And so I was drawn to this idea and wow, if you're a good leader, you can make a big difference for people in their life. And Gallup status supports that. Everybody wants to use their God-given talents to have a good job and contribute and everybody needs a good manager. So we know that these two things are intrinsically connected. So I moved, after working in software for 15 years, I moved to Silicon Valley, worked with somebody, a writer who was into personal productivity. After that, I met Liz Wiseman and joined her team. She was working on the second edition of Multiplier, so I got a chance to learn from her and how she researched and work on that project. Staying on at the Wiseman group, I'm still there. So I still work as a partner in her firm, have been there for 10 years. and looked for a research question that I was really interested in, finally found one, and then spent three years doing the research, and then another three years writing this book. But that was my entry point.

[00:29:11] Speaker 1: I love that, I love that. So talk to me about Paws, and the book that, I guess it's just coming out, right? Is it on sale yet? August 4th. August 4th, okay. So Paws is coming out on August 4th. We'll put a link to where people can find it. you've already got a webpage and all that. So they can certainly find it and I assume pre-order or something like that. But yeah, let's talk about Paws. Paws, it's obviously a book about leadership. It's how to lead brilliant work in a busy world. As the title kind of would lend to say, it's about taking a second, right? What I saw is it's kind of about taking the time to get clarity before you move forward, but it's clarity in like a lot of aspects of what we do. Talk to me about the ideas here behind PAWS.

[00:30:06] Speaker 4: Well, first of all, it was a bit of a surprise. I'll tell you a little bit. I'll tell you how we found it. It was the research question was born of some research data. We were asking people, what was the number one thing that was holding them back from doing their best work? And a really common response was, I just can't get into things. I'm being pulled in a thousand directions. I'm in and out for a little bit into one project and then I'm yanked to another one. My environment's hard to focus in. And seeing that correlation over and over and over again, I can't do great work because I can't focus. It drew me into the asking this question, what are the best leaders do to create space for focus? And what do leaders do maybe even unintentionally where they make it very difficult for people to get into focused work. And so we started the research with that question and interviewed hundreds of people from all different types of businesses, from people who are working in law firms, small and large, to people in healthcare, hospitality, loads in tech. I live in Menlo Park, California, so I'm here in Silicon Valley, and so do lots of tech research, big companies, small companies. We took back these behaviors, observable behaviors that people could remember and explain what the behavior was and how it connected their ability or inability to focus on priorities. And when we looked at the data, we took in thousands of data points, surveys and interviews alike, and we mapped out the most frequent observable behaviors that either help people focus or were amplifying distraction. The news was the behaviors that help people focus were all a form of slowing things down, not stopping per se, but tapping the brakes. Like, you know, you don't accelerate through a corner. You hit the brakes just at the right time so that way you can, you know, hit the corner, slow down just a bit and then keep your momentum or gain momentum and accelerate out. Similar in business. These people were very good at clarifying what the priorities were and when the priorities shifted because they always do. They were good at tapping the brakes to re-clarify those priorities. And in contrast, the 12 top behaviors that amplified distraction, they were all a form of foot on the pedal, not slowing down when it was needed, assuming that people were clear on things, assuming people had space to do their best work. And so they were pressing for speed, they were pressing for more, they were pressing for being on. And as a result, people were just, they were overwhelmed, overcommitted, and they didn't have space to focus. And it was fairly, you know, I wasn't expecting it, and I want to admit something. If there's anybody out here who listens to this podcast and they're like, but we know Sean, you will know that I have this deep bias towards action, and I have a tendency to over-commit my teams, and I love to set big goals, and I really struggle to slow down and clarify things. So in a way, this book was really for me as well. I wouldn't have written a book called Pause, How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World because I didn't do that. But even for me, just learning from these brilliant leaders, I was able to start applying these concepts and see huge, huge changes in the teams that I lead.

[00:33:21] Speaker 1: I think that, so that's one of the things that struck me here, Sean, is you do have, you do like lay things bare about yourself and your style. And I really appreciated that throughout the book. But there was the element of like, but Sean, I've got too many damn rocks. How do I, okay, like I get it. I would love to pause. That'd be fantastic. I would love tons of focus time and all that. But we live in a real world, right? And so how the hell do I do that in the real world?

[00:33:55] Speaker 4: You know? Yeah, you remember, I'm gonna date myself, but there was a long time ago, Stephen Covey had this demonstration that he needed to do where he had a table. So imagine the table with a jar, a big jar. Next to the big jar was a jar of a bunch of little rocks. And then there was a bunch of really big rocks on the table. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was clear, just by looking at this setup, you could see that all of those big rocks were never gonna fit into that jar. Or maybe they might just fit, but then there was all the little rocks first. And the whole idea was he would put all the big rock, he would put all the little rocks into the jar, it would fill it up halfway, you can imagine that. And then he'd try to put the big rocks in, and they wouldn't fit. But then if you reversed it, if you put in all the little rocks in, or sorry, you put in the big rocks first, then you put in all the little rocks, everything would fit. and he called this the first things first. Well, let me tell you why that miserably fails. In today's day and age, there are so many big freaking rocks. Those rocks represent what's important. There is always today more important pieces of work, more opportunities that any one of us could pursue. It would be ridiculous to think that we could do all the important things. The little rocks represented trivial things, things that were less important. Yeah, forget that stuff. Just focus on the big rocks. There's way too many opportunities. There's too many important projects that are coming to us. We live in a world where a huge part of what we do as leaders is have to decide where we're gonna place our bets. And it can't be on everything that's important. And so I think right off the bat, just to empathize with what you're saying, we have to admit as a leader, you have more opportunity, more important projects than you could ever pursue. With that reality, if you try to do all of them, you will do very few things well. So then the question becomes, how do you develop the skill to choose what you will lean in on, what you'll go big on, and sacrifice the things that you won't, and make sure that the people around you are clear in the same way? And so I think to some degree, it's a reality check for all of us, and that might be hard for some of us. It definitely is hard for me. I'm a sucker for good opportunities. I hate saying no to good opportunities. I hate letting people down that are wanting for me to say yes to their opportunities. But I think if we're realistic with ourselves, we know that the world we live in, there is too much to do, and there always will be. And so if we don't learn how to make decisions and place our bets and try to get clear on things and help other people around us, people are gonna do very poor work.

[00:36:31] Speaker 1: So this is one of the places, and I bring this down to chapter four, is where I ran into this in your book, and it's the invite dissent chapter. And this is where you talk about, I really appreciated bringing the Stephen Covey thing in, but then also saying like, I've got too many damn rocks. Like I've got, how do you go through that and say like, okay, well, a good leader can figure out which rocks to focus on, which rocks to let go, because we are letting go of important things. Are there things that people that you studied did in order to actually make those decisions?

[00:37:13] Speaker 4: Yeah, there were. And boy, it was such a relief to me because I tested these practices and they've worked. The first one was they were really good at exposure therapy. They would lay out with their team. So first of all, they approached prioritization as a team sport. I'll just say that out loud. It wasn't about them and back in a room, you know, like figuring it out in their journal and then come and reveal to everybody, you know, as an oracle, what the things were going on.

[00:37:37] Speaker 1: From the beltway.

[00:37:37] Speaker 4: Yes. So they realized that prioritization is a team sport and also that it's a verb. It's something that we're doing together over time. Prioritization is not a thing that we do. It's not a noun moment. It's a verb that we're engaged in. So they had that idea. So trying to leverage people's brain power to make better trade-offs, recognizing that they couldn't do everything. So they understood there, from a mindset perspective, we call this the or mindset versus the and mindset. And is really good for improv, you know, and this, and that, and brainstorming.

[00:38:11] Speaker 1: Yes and, yes and, yes.

[00:38:12] Speaker 4: Yes and, yes and, really good for those things, but not great for prioritization. You want or. It's gonna be that or that. It's gonna be this or that. That's what you want when you prioritize. So with that mindset, that you can't do it all, now the second piece is the mindset that we wanna use people's intelligence. And so now with those two things, I'll place a behavior. They were brilliant at doing exposure therapy. They would round up the things that were really important, that they were going to at least explore saying no to, and they would ask, if we don't do that project, if we don't do the Johnston project, man, what are we going to lose? And now everybody has a chance to hurt a little bit because it is going to hurt. And so one thing that you can do is exposure therapy. You can explore the things that are, it's either this or that, and explore the pain and the gains that you would have with each, ultimately so you can make a better decision and informed decision and to recognize that there will be pain. So that's idea number one.

[00:39:11] Speaker 1: I like that a lot because that's actually kind of a flip. Instead of saying, what do we gain, you know, at the beginning, what do we gain from doing this project? It's what would we lose if we don't? And I think that really gets to a little bit more of a core.

[00:39:24] Speaker 4: Yeah. Face the pains before the gains. I love that you said that, because if you do, then now all of a sudden, that realism gives people a chance to let things go. If you don't do that, people won't be able to let things go. So the second thing that I loved that we saw was they were really good at saying, okay, we gotta find all of the reasons why, once you face the pain and you recognize, okay, this is gonna hurt, now between A and B, let's look at all of the reasons why we shouldn't do A and all the reasons why we shouldn't do B. Meaning these are the marks against those things. You can do that pretty quick and rapid fire. So now you face the loss, but then you simultaneously face the things that are reasons why you shouldn't do that. And then it's easier to make a decision. Another little trick that you can do is you can declare minors. We know what this is like in school. That's easy. But then what's important is you gotta, sorry, you can declare your majors. We know what that is. But you've gotta declare your minors too. so I'll articulate more clearly. Everybody understands that you can't have five majors

[00:40:31] Speaker 1: in an undergrad. I certainly couldn't.

[00:40:34] Speaker 4: And few people that can do double majors, they tend not to have minors.

[00:40:38] Speaker 1: Good on them, you know, I can barely have a major.

[00:40:41] Speaker 4: Yes, but yes. Yeah, right, so if you have a double major, you can't have minors or life, but if you have a major and you have 15 minors, well, now you don't have a major.

[00:40:51] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:40:52] Speaker 4: And you got 15 minors. So you have to balance this. Now, if you've got something that's a sizable piece of work, but it's not the thing that you're going to go big on, but you can't let it go, it's too important, well, you can declare that as a minor. But minors need to be sized properly. You have to be realistic. Like if that minor is going to take 10 hours, then you probably can't have three minors and a major. And so a trick that these people would do is they would say, let's declare our minors the things that are important that we can't say no to, but it does not get the lion's share. And then the question is, and how small can we make that effort to make sure we do good on that minor? And so this is another way to kind of get in there. But you see what these strategies are. Yeah. These strategies are about realism. They're about using people's brainpower to size up the truth about what it will take. What's the return on investment? What is the risk? And as we get into that, there's something kind of exhilarating about it. It's a bit of a game, if you will. Now, all of a sudden, prioritization is less about fitting everything in. And it's It's more about trying to fit things in your life in a way that you have the space and ability to give them what they will need for you to be proud of.

[00:42:01] Speaker 1: I wanted to take a second real quick because I want that to land. I think that's awesome. That idea right there, instead of saying, how much can I do? I think somewhere in this book, and I think it was probably this chapter, you say, what What will it take for you to do this and be proud of it? What will it take for you to do this the right way? And I think that's an interesting way of framing it instead of saying, can this get done? Can you do this? Well, yeah, I can do it. Okay. What will it take to do it right? And I really liked that framing.

[00:42:41] Speaker 4: Man, it's a question you can even ask in a moment where you're just trying to consider a quick delegation. So as a leader, if you go to somebody and you just give them something, hey, I got something, it'll only take five minutes. We both know that it will only not take five minutes. That's so manipulative, right? That's my way to like get people to just say yes to me. Hey man, hey Zack, I got something that I just got from the boss, man. Can you take a look? It's only gonna take five minutes. Okay, that is, exactly. We all know what that means. But what instead if I go to you and say, hey Zack, I've got this thing from the boss. So before I share it with you, what do you got on your plate? Like, what are you working on? you tell me, and then I say, okay, here's now, okay, now that you've told me, I get a chance to decide if I'm gonna throw this way or not, but you tell me, then I say, okay, now that I know what you're working on, here's this thing, ask all the questions you have, and then once we're done, tell me, what will it take to do this well? And then now you and I are both getting a chance to size up. Here's what Zach has. To do this thing well, here's what it would take. Okay, now we got a trade off to face together. Now that is what we call a tune in. If I jump in, I just come by and say, Hey man, you got five minutes to talk this through before I leave this with you and like run the other way so I don't have to think about it. That's a, you know, jump in, you just go drive by delegation, you just give things to people and you take off. Nobody likes that. Everybody feels disrespected and it totally melts their ability to focus on their big thing. But if you tune in, if you ask what's going on, and then in one of those tune in questions that we shared from leaders in that chapter, it's called tune in before you jump in, is what will it take to do this well? and I just love that you love that because, man, it just gets a whole different part of your brain on board. Okay, you've got it right there.

[00:44:21] Speaker 1: I got it underlined in the book, yeah.

[00:44:23] Speaker 4: Because it's like, if you can get people's brains on board to make these decisions, if you say, hey man, I loved it, you said it, can you do this? Well, yeah, I can do it. But what will it take to do it well? Well, that's a different question, isn't it?

[00:44:39] Speaker 1: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, and what will it take for you to be proud of it, you know? And that kind of extrapolates out to these rocks and these majors. Because I think of this like the major is a rock, so is your minor. Minor is a rock too. And we had to choose from, you know, you go to college and there's tons and tons and tons of things that you can major in. There's, I mean, and I would love to major in paleontology. Would I love to be able to study dinosaurs? Absolutely, but I had to choose something else, you know, I had to choose from a lot of good options. And so I like this framing of pride in it. What would it take to do it? Well, because that is one of the things that I have to look at or one of the ways that I that helps me decide I'm terrible at this, by the way, like actually picking which one of the things I want to focus on. But which one would I be prouder of? Which one aligns to what I do better? one would I do better, you know? And I think that's an interesting way of framing it as well, because when we get to a little bit more in the tune in before you jump in, there's a trade-off. You have to, like if you do one, you can't, you probably can't do the other, which I hate. I hate that. I hate it with every part of my being. I want to do all of it at the same time, and I want it done yesterday. That, like just full disclosure, that kills me. It is one of the things, I'm terrible at saying no to things and saying, okay, yes, I'm happy to do that. I think you had some really good advice on how to say this. Essentially, like, I'm happy to do that. Which of these do you want me to get rid of?

[00:46:25] Speaker 4: Yeah, because boy, when your boss comes to you and they just want Christmas, you know, they want for you to just say, yes, of course, and yes, and yes, and yes. Bosses love if you have the yes and mindset. I'm so good at saying that. So you can say, okay, boss, I want to do all those things. This is how you start it. I want to do all those things. All these things you talk about. So which of these things do you think are the most important? And can you help me know which of these things I shouldn't try to do? Because I can't, you know, like I want to do them all, but I don't think I can. So help me pick. And now all of a sudden you turn their brain on to go, oh, right, of course. Yes, of course. You can't do them all. And if you if you I'll tell you what if your boss it doesn't turn their brain on and they're still like no I want them all all the time. You got to get a new boss, but most people most sensible humans will go. Okay, right? Thanks for that. I think you should do this one. Not that one and boy that is really helpful You don't have to be a prima donna You don't have to tell them that you have a deep work plaque in your cubicle And that you will not say yes to things unless it's in a written contract. You can just simply say okay I want to do all this but tell me which of these things are the most important and tell me which of these things you Think I shouldn't do now all of a sudden your partners

[00:47:38] Speaker 1: I like that a lot and I I in every one of your chapters at the end of the chapter You have a place called pausing up and for our listeners There are probably a lot of listeners here that have somebody that they report to but there are probably a lot of listeners You know, we're we're a we appeal to small firms and people running their own law firms there are probably a lot of listeners who are trying to figure out how do they manage their people. Well, really you can look at these pausing up things and say, am I making space for my people to do this? Even if you're looking at the pausing up, you can say, do I see myself in that? I love those, how do you talk to the people around? How do you approach these things? You've got a lot of really good practical aspects of this. The last thing I want to get to, there's a lot of stuff in this book. You can probably tell from my excitement of talking about this, but the thing that I wanted to end on and the thing that you end on is holding a clearing. This one, this chapter kind of got me and got me in a different way than some of the others because like it actually brought up past irritations because I imagined moments that I've had this the festering issues with co-workers or with people that I've worked around or things like that talk to me about holding a clearing what's what's the idea

[00:49:10] Speaker 4: there well it was hard to figure out what to do with this part of the data because there was there was a bunch of in the data we saw these appearances of leaders who had created systems to make it easy to say hard things. Now, I wanna admit that I hadn't worked for very many leaders that had created systems to make it easy to say hard things. Let me tell you what I learned what that meant. I'm actually working for one right now, which is brilliant, but in my career, I didn't have a lot of examples like that. So this was foreign to me. I had to really dig and go find examples of this, but here's how it works. So the one that we report on in the book is from a company, Gooder. They're like the fun sunglass company.

[00:49:49] Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I've got like 13 of their sunglasses.

[00:49:51] Speaker 4: Yeah, they won't fall off your head. That's what's so fun about those, is that you can just have all the fun with them because they're so cheap. So we were interviewing a bunch of folks on their team and they told us about this process that they called, was called the clearing. And the way that it worked is, they were all trained to do this thing. So let's say that I do something super annoying to you, Zach, and you come to me and say, Sean, can I clear something with you? And I know what that means. That's code language for, you're getting ready to tell me something that's really bothering you that might be hard for me to hear. And then I'm trained on how to receive it. So we set up a time. And I only do one thing. You tell me what I did that was really frustrating and why it affected you. And I restate and ask questions, open-ended questions. Tell me more about that. Only open-ended tell me mores or what else. And then I just reflect what I hear until you confirm, yeah, that's it. That's the thing and the idea is we're trying to make it easy for you to get those cards on the table. You're anxious, you're ruminating, you're irritated, you're a little pissed off at something I did, whatever it is, we're just trying to get it on the table and the theory behind the clearing is if you can make it easy for me to say a hard thing or hear a hard thing and we can get it on the table, we're 90% more likely to work that thing out downstream and that's what the purpose of the clearing is not. It's not to create, give people a framework to solve the problem. That's very complicated and was beyond my capability to report on in the book. But if you can get people's cards on the table, the thing that is stealing their attention, like every time they go to try to write on that brief or work on that case, they can't stop thinking about that thing that Sean did that was so damn disrespectful. And and now they can't get deep. Well, if I know that's stealing my concentration and I can go tell Sean, like, hey man, can I clear this with you? And we have worked out a way in the company that we've been trained to get something out in a non-crazy judgmental or like violent way that someone would feel super crazy offended by. Not to say people don't take offense, they do. I'm way more likely or you're way more likely to clear that thing with each other. So that Bridgewater does this. Some people that are listening will be familiar with Ray Dalio's firm Bridgewater. They had this whole transparency thing. They created systems to help people say hard things. And that's what we saw. If you want people to say hard things, the things that are stealing their ability to concentrate, you gotta create a little system that helps people get their cards on the table and wow, it can make a huge difference.

[00:52:31] Speaker 1: I, like I said, I felt this like viscerally because I've worked at companies like Lawyerist and Affinity that have created to varying effect, created safe spaces to do this and ways for us to respectfully. And then I've worked at companies that didn't. And I can, I mean, I went to a specific moment in time where weeks were thrown off. I was thrown off for weeks because of this thing in the back of my head dealing with somebody that I was working with. Not just the talking about getting clear and having the clarity, but the idea of why you have this, is it helps you get past that niggling thing in the back of your head that's taking away 50 percent of your capacity. It did, it took away a significant portion of my capacity in dealing with that. So I really liked this chapter.

[00:53:38] Speaker 4: Oh, dude, when you're bearing those burdens and you've got things that you can't, you know how it is. There are some things that bother us that we can be like, that's fine. Yeah, let it go. I can just focus on this thing. And then there are those things where, man, you can't. No, you can't. It's like it's grabbing you and it pulls you out of the thing that you're doing. Man, if you can say those things, it helps you, it loosens its grip. And you don't have to fix the whole thing, but it loosens its grip. And it's a real service to people as a leader if you work with your team to design some kind of a clearing system.

[00:54:11] Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that, I love that. Okay, like I said, I could talk to you about this book for a while, but obviously people can go, they can go read it, you know? That's the beauty of this. They don't have to hear what I think about it, they can go read it. But if you were to leave our listeners with one thought related to pause on leadership and getting clarity or whatever you want to leave people with. What would you say to them?

[00:54:41] Speaker 4: Well, do you mind if I cheat and do two thoughts?

[00:54:44] Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely.

[00:54:45] Speaker 4: OK, so one thought will be very quick. One thought is I was shocked in the research on how few people said that they were clear at work, that they knew what the priorities were, that they knew what they should be leaning in on, that they knew what success looked like, that they knew what the most desired actions they should invest in were, and, and, and. So you can just do a little bit of a gut check. There's a chapter in the beginning of the book called Pick the Priority Target, and I was super worried that this was just gonna be too basic and not very useful. The feedback that we got from early readers, around 300 of them, said this was one of the most valuable chapters to them because it was good for a gut check. And the question is, is do people know what the priority targets are, the big things you're betting on? Do they know how to measure success? And do they know what lead actions they should invest in? And if people don't have all three of those and you continually update that, they're not clear. So I thought that was good for me. I was like, whoa, yeah, of course. Like, the people that I lead are never clear. And it was true. As I went back and interviewed people that had worked for me in the past, they were like, oh dude, working for you was like being spun around and then being expected to make deliberate steps, walking a straight line. It was just, nothing was ever clear. And so that was the first thing I'd say, is that just assume your people are not clear or that they could be clear on what matters. And if you do that, you will figure out what pauses you need to make. You will figure out how to get clear and that will make a big difference for people.

[00:56:08] Speaker 1: There's one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:56:10] Speaker 4: The second thought that I'll say is, what I learned about these pauses, I was really worried to call the book pause. And the reason why is because these are all actions. Essentially, we're presenting these 12 actions that brilliant leaders do to create space for focus. And it's not taking a break, you know. Right. It's tapping the breaks. Those are different. You know, one's a noun, one's a verb. And that if you are trying to pause because you don't want to make a decision, because you don't want to act, because you don't want to move, that's not a pause, that's a break. But if you are doing these pauses to deliberately bring clarity, to deliberately move forward, to deliberately help your team go faster, man, you're crushing it. These will work. And that's cool because it's not, I didn't do this stuff. I learned this through the eyes of the affected, people that worked for bosses that were brilliant at creating clarity so they could go faster on the bigger things, and who worked for bosses who just made the chaos even worse. And so these pauses are about actions that are intentional investments in impact. And if you invest intentionally in people's ability to have impact, it will change their work life. And what we know from the research is that will change their life.

[00:57:28] Speaker 1: I like that. And I like that you open with the festina lente, the make haste slowly. But one thing that I have to get to that couples with what you're saying there, you have a story in here about F1 drivers and talking about them hitting their brakes. and this description of F1 drivers, braking being an action, a difficult action, putting on the brakes in and of itself, and then dealing with all the stuff that happens with that. And I think that was a really good metaphor in here of like, you're intentionally doing this, it is taking a lot of effort and strength and all that to do, but you know you have to do it in order to get around this corner faster.

[00:58:18] Speaker 4: Thank you for bringing that up. My wife wrote that story. So my wife and I wrote this book together. And she put, this is at the beginning of a chapter called Coach Through Failure. She put easily 80 hours into studying F1 racing to get this story teased out. And it was really amazing because you are right, that is not just a little action that they have to take. Like they're like doing full on leg presses over and over and over again to break. It's this very difficult action. And I think that that's a nice analogy, and I love how you brought that to life, that it takes effort, it's a real action, it takes energy to do these pausing, to tap the brakes, but as a result, your people will go faster and bigger.

[00:59:03] Speaker 1: I love that. Well, Sean, thank you so much for talking with me about this. I really like your perspective, your expertise, and I really enjoyed reading the book. Thank you.

[00:59:12] Speaker 4: Thanks, Zach. It was really an honor, and I love your work. Thanks, Sean.

[00:59:15] Speaker 2: You