Law Firm Leadership: How to Lead Yourself Before Leading Your Team, with Debbie Foster & Stephanie Everett

Episode Notes

Transcript

Zack Glaser:

Hi, I’m Zack.

Stephanie Everett:

And I’m Stephanie. Welcome to The Lawyerist Podcast, just one of the many things we do around here to help lawyers build healthier businesses. Today, I’m talking with my friend and business partner, Debbie Foster, about our new book, Be a Next Level Leader and the First Cornerstone Leading Self.

Zack Glaser:

We’ve broken this. This is a series actually over the next four episodes that are broken into the individual cornerstones of the book that y’all just came out with that hopefully people have heard of because we’ve been doing a push on here and in social media and really anywhere that you can find us. But the book is Be a Next Level Leader, and you can find it now out on Amazon if you want to read it and follow along.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, we’re super excited. This was a fun book to write. I think people are really going to. I mean, the early readers are already reaching out to us and saying, “Okay, you got me. I’m invested. This is good.” And then the best compliment we could ever get, we just got this morning, someone’s about halfway through and they just called us. It turns out this is a firm administrator at a larger firm and they just said, “Hey, I just bought this for our managing partner.” I was like, “That’s the biggest compliment if

Zack Glaser:

You

Stephanie Everett:

Already are like, I know who needs to read this and I’m going to give it to them.” Yep.

Zack Glaser:

I love that. I love that because there’s actually part of this, I spent a lot of my week last week, you and I both spinning up resources that are associated with this if you read the book. And one of them is essentially kind of a. And I was surprised to see this. It was kind of a book club reader in a sense, like a book guide for how you could take this to your managing partner or the people that you manage and kind of lead people along this book. I loved that.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. And you’ll hear Debbie and I talk about that. I think in this episode, we really wrote this and part of what it gives leaders and firms is shared language. And so we don’t think this is something just for one individual. We see law firm leaders using this with their whole team of leaders. And then once you have this shared language, well, you’ll hear me and Debbie talk about it, but we think it makes a big difference.

Zack Glaser:

I like it. I like it. Well, before we jump into that, Ilta Khan is next week. This is going to be my first time going to Ilta Khan and I’m excited about that. I think we’re booth eight, 10. So if you’re heading out to Nashville, my hometown, stop by, say hi, holler at us. Debbie will be there. I know. Bring the book. Bring the book with you and get it signed.

Stephanie Everett:

They’re actually going to sell it at their bookstore.

Zack Glaser:

Oh, nice. Don’t bring the book. Buy it there.

Stephanie Everett:

Or on Amazon, wherever you want.

Zack Glaser:

Or on Amazon. Anywhere, buy it. Just go do. Anyway, here is Stephanie and Debbie’s first conversation on Be a Next Level Leader.

Stephanie Everett:

All right. Hello everyone. I am excited today because I’m joined by my business partner, my co-author, and honestly, my mentor and friend Debbie Foster is on the show with me today. And we are talking about the new book that we just wrote and released, Be a Next Level Leader: The Four Cornerstones of Law Firm Leadership. So Debbie, welcome back to the show.

Debbie Foster:

Thank you so much. I’m happy to be here, especially excited to be here to talk about this topic.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. And so we’re actually going to do a whole series about the book. The book covers what we call our four cornerstones of law firm leadership. And today we’re tackling the first one, which is Leading Self. And maybe this is a great place to start because I think this is kind of a topic some leadership books sort of skip or miss. And so why did we think it was important for us to really start with this concept of leading self? And maybe you could also explain what that means.

Debbie Foster:

So I’ll start off with one of the things that we loved about writing this is how we connected on and built some really strong shared language. And one of the first things when we talk about leading self is the thing that we say all the time, leaders bring the weather. And I think this is such an important part of this book. And the reason why we started with leading self is because it’s really challenging to do the other things if you don’t lead yourself. And it means how do we manage our internal state, how we show up, our emotions, our attention? How do we really think about the impact that we have individually as leaders? And that leaders bring the weather. It really says a lot. And we can all think of meetings that we’ve been in where someone’s shown up like a tornado or shown up like a terrible thunderstorm or shown up like all is right in the world.

And safety and security just comes out of them. And those meetings end differently depending on how the leader shows up. And so I think it’s a really important reason why we started with leading self.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. It’s almost one of those things that when you say it out loud, you’re like, duh, of course. Of course that makes sense. But we need to be reminded and we need to check. And we even tell people, before you go into that next meeting, stop and think about what do I want to bring to this meeting? How do I want to show up? Am I fully present with my team or am I checking my email and 5,000 other things that are happening? What does that state of the team member when they can see that my eyes are not focused in on them?

Debbie Foster:

And they can totally see that. I joke a lot that if I really want someone to know that I’m paying attention to them, I’ll often push my chair back a little bit so they can see my hands and see that I’m not trying to stealthily answer an email. But as stealth as we think we are, people still know that that’s what’s happening.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. One of the other things we talk about in the leading self section is this idea of honoring our commitments. And honestly, we kind of call ourselves out a little bit on this one because I think you and I both often will tell the team, “I’ll get you that today. I’ll do that. Yep, I’m on it.” And not from a place of bad intentions. We have the best of intentions when we say that. And yet we’re busy and we make a lot of promises and a lot of people are coming at us from a lot of directions. And we often then don’t get it to them by the end of the day. And our team is lovely and they sort of let us off the hook. They’ll say, “Well, Debbie’s really busy. I know Stephanie meant to, she just hasn’t gotten to it yet.” But when we do that consistently over time, that really starts to break down.

And now they can’t trust what we say when we say it, when we’re going to do it.

Debbie Foster:

For sure. And I think for me, and I’ve really, when we wrote this book, there was a lot of looking in the mirror for both of us. I was like, “Eh, gosh, can I really write that sentence?” I also think that one of the things that is a struggle for me, and I feel like when I say things like this out loud, I see other people just nodding along like, yes, I say I’m going to do something. I think it’s going to take 10 minutes. I get into it and I’m like, oh, I could make this so much better. And now that we have Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, I can make it even better. And I have to keep thinking about when I say I will get you that. Realistically, when can I do that? Realistically, when can I fit that in? And I think what I have been trying to do, not always successfully, is when I open up my mouth to say that, I stop and say a realistic time commitment is so much better than a broken promise because it is a commitment that we’re making to get something done.

And being the bottleneck, when you think about this concept of leading self, being a bottleneck is one of the things that is an indicator that we aren’t doing the greatest job of leading self because we’re not realistic about our constraints.

Stephanie Everett:

It’s really caused me to stop saying, “I’ll get this to you by the end of the day if I really can’t.” Or if I say that, then I’m like, “Gosh darn it, I got to do that. I got to honor that commitment because my team needs to be able to trust my word. And I want the same from them. If they tell me they’re going to get me something by the end of the day, then I want to be able to hold them to that standard and not let them think that because I slip, they have permission to slip. We could all do better.

Debbie Foster:

For sure. And we’ve already said this is going to be a series and a couple episodes from now you’ll hear about leading operations, but there is a direct connection to this for leading self. What is your operating system? How do you keep track of all of those things? How do you give a reasonable assessment of when you can get something done? That is the self-discipline piece of leading self.

Stephanie Everett:

Love that. One of the other concepts that we tackle in the book is also how you show up as a leader in leading self and how you speak as a leader. We say speak as a leader, not as a messenger. And in law firms and especially a lot of times because you have a lot of layers of management going on, you might have to deliver a message to your team that you really had no control over or maybe you didn’t agree with and you don’t like. And that can be really challenging. So talk to us about this concept of speak as a leader and why that’s important.

Debbie Foster:

Yeah. If I hear about something that you’ve decided, it’s important that I show up and I don’t say. So this is the way that Stephanie says we have to do it because that sends a very clear message. Even if I don’t intend for that to be the message, it sends a clear message. Well, you didn’t say, Stephanie said. So I need to show up and say, this is the way we’re going to proceed going forward. I need to have a good understanding of the why or at least be able to have something that I can share with the team around the why. And I need to, whether I agree or not, show up as a person who is supporting the decision that was made. Sometimes we call it disagree and commit, especially when a group of leaders are together and law firms especially struggle with that consensus, rule everything by consensus.

So you might be as a leader in lots of meetings where decisions get made and you’re like, “That’s not what I would’ve done.” But there’s nothing more important than you stepping out of that room and showing up and saying, “This is the decision. This is how we’re going to go forward.”

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. I think too, because I hear you and I think we see it a lot, even partners. No matter how many partners you have in the room, if one of them doesn’t like it and they don’t realize that when they come out and say like, “Well, this wasn’t on me,” or however they say it, we’ve all heard some version of that. I don’t think people realizes how that undermines them as a leader. They probably think like, “Hey, I’m taking it for the team or I’m on the team’s side, so that’s why I’m going to downplay this change that people aren’t going to like.” But I don’t think they realize that it’s actually hurting them. And so yeah.

Debbie Foster:

And even a casual conversation, and we hear this all the time, a leader walks out of that meeting, they don’t love what just happened. And they just go to maybe their associate that they have a really great relationship with or their legal assistant or the paralegal they work with and they say, “What a mess that was. Here’s what we’ve decided. This isn’t going to work.” And it just feels like kind of like a lamenting conversation, but it’s a credibility issue for sure. And especially when the leader didn’t say what they’re saying to the other person in the meeting. So I think it’s really important that we show up if we are in a leadership role and we are traveling in a pack of leaders who are making decisions that we’re not always going to agree with, that we are united in the decision when it comes to how we message it.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. I mean, we go so far. One of the things I love about the book, so we wrote a book, you have the book there behind you so people can see it. We also have this workbook that goes with it that I’m really excited about. It stays on my desk at all times because I think it was important to both of us that what we wrote was practical and usable and hands-on. There’s lots of books out there around theories and all these ideas. And you and I, we just take such a hands-on practical approach with the work that we do that we were like, “How can we take these concepts and break them down into the bite-sized pieces people need?” So on Monday morning or Tuesday afternoon, whatever it is, they’re like, “Oh, I’ve got this. Here’s that framework. Here’s that resource. Here’s what Debbie and Stephanie were talking about in the book in real life.”

Debbie Foster:

Yeah. And so it’s full of exercises and examples and scripts of how to handle things. And so I think as we were talking about that, our hope was that it is almost like a desk guide, a resource. The book, the workbook. I’ve got to go have a difficult conversation. How am I going to do that? I don’t feel like I showed up the right way in that meeting. How do I make that better? There’s so many practical examples of how to do something or even how to change the way that you’re thinking about how you handle tough conversations or just hard things at work. There’s lots of hard things at work.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. So I just flipped over to the workbook and it’s like, here’s some renegotiation scripts. You realize that you made a commitment as a leader that you’re not going to meet. So you don’t keep quiet. Don’t wait. Hope somebody doesn’t call me out or figure me out. So instead of just, “I’ve just been so busy. Here’s how you can rephrase that. Here’s how you can have that conversation.” And we wrote the words. We’re like, “Here’s the scripts that you can use. Here’s the questions that you can ask.” If maybe you want to get feedback on yourself as a leader, and that feels really hard, we’re like, “Follow this script. Here’s where you go, and here’s what questions you ask. And then here’s what you say afterwards.” You don’t debate the person who just gave you the feedback. You say, “Thank you for telling me that.”

Debbie Foster:

Yeah. And what I love too is that it goes along with the book. The book references the workbook. The workbook references the book. If you’re in leading self, there’s a whole section on leading self. There’s a whole section on leading people. And so it really is a companion practical tool that can just sit on the desk next to you and open it up. I also love that this kind of a. I love a spiral bound thing. I don’t know why. I just love a spiral bound thing. But I also have it sitting right next to me. And if I’m on hold or I’m waiting two minutes for something to start, I love that I can just flip it open and be like, huh, preparing for a real coaching conversation. And it makes me think about something that maybe I hadn’t been thinking about or maybe is going to help me in a conversation that I have later today or later this week.

Stephanie Everett:

I know. And it’s kind of funny too, because we know the. It started little side note history. You and I have been teaching this class to lawyers and our legal professionals because it’s not just lawyers, any leader. There’s lots of leaders in law firms. And so we’ve been teaching this for several years and we’ve always had a little worksheet, some work, a very simple, when I say workbook, not like what this is, but we would, here’s some exercises to do because we like interaction, we like active learning. And we had this idea back months ago, I was like, “Oh, maybe it’d be good to write some words around those exercises with the concepts and that might help those learners really dig into what we’re trying to teach.” And next thing you know, that’s how this book was born. So I love to kind of how it came to be.

And honestly, it started as a workbook with some text. Then I was like, “Oh, I think this is actually going to be a book.” And then it was going to be this massive book with book and exercises. And then we’re like, “Actually, these are two separate things.” And so we haven’t really talked about this much. We really wrote two books because these things are pretty extensive, both of them.

Debbie Foster:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s part of the whole system, which I’m sure we’ll talk about that more later because reading a book, that’s one way to learn. Having a workbook, tools, examples, practice, that’s another way. And then the leadership training cohort or specific for your firm. How do we train our leaders and have a system that we run, all of our leaders run off of the same system, have the same shared language? That’s one of my favorite parts about it is all I have to do is say leaders bring the weather and everyone, three paragraphs of information, scroll through people’s brains. You know exactly what that means.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah. I think that’s what we’re both so excited about with this book and the workbook and the concepts is we are giving shared language to the people who are going to embrace it. And we’re going into lots of firms now are like, we want this for all of our leaders. So it doesn’t have to just be for the managing partner. Anybody who leads. There’s lots of leaders in your firm, even if they manage people. Some people are leaders and they don’t manage a team. But giving them the same frameworks so that they are on the same page and they do have that shared language. And we were very intentional in the book and the workbook to really think about what are those phrases? What are those bite-sized phrases that you could say that carry the weight of that message? Because in real time, you don’t have time to sit down and say, “Well, Debbie, let’s talk about the energy that today.”You could imagine a whole long conversation instead of being like, “Hey, what’s this weather?” And if I said that to you, you’d be like, “Oh, let me pause right now.

Let me check myself. What am I bringing in the stress of a sick grandkid from this morning and breakfast ran late and this thing didn’t happen and the client is sending me an email?” And then I just could say that and you would immediately pause and be like, “Okay, maybe I just need to take three breaths or get up and walk around for a second and reset.”

Debbie Foster:

Totally agree. And one other thing that I’ll add, because I think that this is an important part of our why, we spend a lot of time with the Association of Legal Administrators, lots of time with business leaders, executive business leaders that are trying to herd the cats, wrangle the people, get things done, move the ball forward. And with those people in mind and also learning from their experiences and hearing all of those stories about how do we really think about what leadership looks like in a law firm through the lens of so many of these people that we’ve worked alongside that have taken our leadership training, whether it be for an individual firm or in a more formal training, we have been able to extract some really great information about where people have been successful and where they haven’t, and built these tools around something that they can practically take back.

So even when responsibility and authority are not aligned, even when you have more responsibility than you have authority, there are still practical tools in this book that on the topic of leading self, help you think about how you show up, how you communicate, how you regulate your emotions, how you think about the commitments that you make. And that’s one of the things I love the community of people that we have. I mean, how much fun is it to help a group of people that care so deeply about the law firms where they work? And I just feel like this is such a gift to that community to be able to really learn some new tools, new skills, and think a little bit differently about how to get where they want to go in their firms.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, for sure. All right. Well, we’ve told you that the book has thought-provoking questions and some exercises. The workbook has a whole bunch more. Maybe this is going to be a four-part series. So if you’re listening right now, this is part one and we’re going to be back with the next three cornerstones. So let’s leave the audience with a little homework. Let’s leave them with one question or though that we want them to sit with this week around leading self. So what you got?

Debbie Foster:

I think a piece of homework is think about how you show up under stress. Because if everything is going great and you walk into a meeting and you’ve got your coffee, you’ve got your notebook, you’ve got a smile on your face, but what about the times when that’s not the case? Think about that. Think about the last time that happened. Think about how you could take 60 seconds before you walk into that room. And what is your recovery? If you’re having a bad day and you need to turn it around, what do you do? Do you need silence? Do you listen to your favorite song? Do you pick up a motivational book? What is it that you do and how do you get yourself in that mindset where you can bring the right weather?

Stephanie Everett:

I love it. All right. Well, thanks everybody for being with us today. And Debbie and I will be back to pick up the next cornerstone on leading people. So make sure you stay tuned for that one because there’s a lot to cover for sure.