Developing and Managing High-Performing Teams
Gina Rubel: Welcome to today’s episode of On Record PR, where we dive deep into the strategies and insights that matter most to law firm leaders. I’m Gina Rubel, CEO and General Counsel of Furia Rubel Communications. Today I’m joined by my colleague Leslie Richards, who is our Chief Innovation Officer. Welcome, Leslie.
Leslie Richards: Thank you so much, Gina. Great to be here.
Gina Rubel: And thank you for letting me talk you into this.
Leslie Richards: Not a problem.
Gina Rubel: I really appreciate your insights, and I’ve learned so much from you. So today, I really want to talk about how to develop and manage high-performing teams. This is something you’ve been doing for several decades, and it applies not only to our team here at Furia Rubel, but to law firm practice groups and law firms in general.
Leslie Richards: Yeah.
Gina Rubel: And there are other departments like knowledge management, business development, marketing and so many others. So, I’m going to just jump right in. Leslie, how do we build innovative teams?
Leslie Richards: It’s such an important topic because I think law firms are feeling pressure to innovate, and I think that innovation is perhaps not the goal or the focus traditionally for law firms. It has been that stability, authoritativeness, expertise, and innovation hasn’t always been a place where law firms had to really put energy. So, we can borrow from industries that have really focused on how to build high-performing innovative teams, and try to bring that into law firm culture as a way to grow, stretch, and really begin to leverage some of the data that’s out there about building innovative teams.
Google did a two-year study called Project Aristotle, where they interviewed and analyzed the behaviors, patterns and leadership styles of teams that were highly innovative and very high-performing. They came away with some key factors in terms of what builds those really innovative and high-performing teams. Among those things were, work with meaning, work that had impact, clarity of direction, and one of the really big ones was psychological safety. Psychological safety is absolutely key to innovation and to really high-performing, innovative teams.
Gina Rubel: That’s really interesting to hear because psychological safety is not a term we normally hear in law firms. Or in any big corporate setting for that matter. So, can you explain what that is?
Leslie Richards: Environments where there’s a sense that taking risks, and possibly making mistakes, is something that is accepted as long as it’s moving a team forward and used as a way to learn and grow. This creates a space where people are willing to be creative, where people are willing to think outside the box, and where they are willing to innovate solutions to client problems, to practice management to any number of issues that a law firm might face. Because they know that there is a tolerance for exploration and that there’s an underlying safety in that culture, and that that you can breed that as a leader by encouraging open communication, modeling vulnerability, acknowledging and rewarding contributions and encouraging people to think openly and communicate openly.
Gina Rubel: But doesn’t that mean that there would have to be some non-billable time, especially in the firms that bill by the hour for attorneys and staff members? Well, staff is not typically billable, but for attorneys in particular to be allowed to be innovative.
Leslie Richards: You know, I think that gets into pricing models and structures in law firms. I know you’ve done a number of podcasts on that, Gina, and how law firms value certain kinds of activities and how they structure their billing. But I think the long and the short of it is that, as different service models develop, as technology moves forward, as certain parts of the industry consolidate, the pressure on firms to innovate is going to be ever-increasing. So, taking a page from the book of industries that have been focused on innovation like tech, and they really explored and studied what breeds innovation in organizations and what is right. That’s a useful place for law firms to begin to explore as they try to build those teams internally.
Gina Rubel: That’s interesting. How do you create an environment where people feel psychologically safe?
Leslie Richards: Sure, I think we talked a little bit about encouraging open communication, being willing to take ideas from different places, different parts of the firm, people at different levels of seniority, acknowledging those contributions. I think there are also different leadership styles, and I think the ones that are more effective in a knowledge economy are different than maybe some of the traditional leadership styles that we might think about. Right? So—
Gina Rubel: OK, I’m gonna stop you right there. What is a knowledge economy? I’m not familiar with that term.
Leslie Richards: So, if you think about knowledge workers, think about people who have to use a skill set, usually an academic skill set of some kind and expertise, and they need to apply that to their work. So, fostering an environment where there is curiosity, where there’s intellectual growth, where there’s professional growth, is key to retaining those kinds of workers. And it’s different than managing somebody who is performing, say, a routine task or somebody who is in a manufacturing environment. You know, you think about late 18th, early 19th century managerial styles, and that’s kind of what we’ve inherited today, even though we’re managing workers who are doing very different kinds of work, right? We’re managing workers who really have to apply critical thinking. They have to be curious. They have to be investigative in the way that they think about things. They need to be problem solvers, and I think maybe that’s the best way to put it. Somebody working in a knowledge economy is somebody who has to solve a problem and they need to use their expertise to do it.
Gina Rubel: Which is what lawyers do every day. And what’s interesting, you know, I had a conversation with a friend of ours through the legal marketing association, and she runs their knowledge department. She was talking about when they were doing some gen AI testing that they knew had to do “X”, and if it was going to fail, it had to fail within “X” amount of time. Then, they had to move on to the next phase and it was such an, again, we’re using the word innovative and we’re talking about innovative teams. And it was so innovative for a law firm to think, “Oh, OK, we could fail and it’s OK.”
Leslie Richards: Yeah.
Gina Rubel: That’s not what we’re taught in law school. I mean it’s a really interesting, like, you’re just taught that you’ve got to have the right guidance all the time. And so that this idea of testing and taking those risks, it’s, you know, we’re a very risk-averse industry.
Leslie Richards: Yeah. And certainly, there are places that are appropriate to take risks and places that are not.
Gina Rubel: Which would not be with client work.
Leslie Richards: Exactly. But that idea of failing fast is important. So maybe the risk or the innovation is in how you structure that client team, or how you approach your messaging to an industry, or how you sort of mesh your professionals and your attorneys and how they work together. How you adopt AI. What your tech stack looks like.
All of those are the kinds of innovations and things that attorneys, firms, and firm and law firm leaders can think about as places where you innovate. Where you’re not sort of touching that core of the work, which is the expert advice that attorneys provide to their clients. You’re sort of touching everything around it as a way of making your firm more effective, more client-focused, more agile, and a place that is gonna retain upcoming talent because they see an innovation mindset. They see a growth mindset.
Gina Rubel: I think you just hit the nail on the head because retention and acquisition of talent is just as important today as retention and acquisition of clients.
Leslie Richards: Yeah.
Gina Rubel: And we’re seeing a lot of the old school, especially the smaller and midsize firms, getting eaten up, acquired and or merged with because they haven’t innovated. And we know this is a big topic in the legal industry, that innovation is do or die. It’s not an if.
You have to innovate. So, I’m gonna ask you one last question so that we keep this pretty tight on a timeline. But tell me a little bit about leadership styles and how some of the leaders can approach innovation in the way that you’ve approached it at Furia Rubel. Because, you know, I’m not easy to work with and—
Leslie Richards: Yeah, I don’t know that I want to assume that I have a perfect bead on my own leadership style. But what I will say is that there is really great data at this point and it’s really well-documented. The leadership styles that work with knowledge workers, it’s in that kind of an environment. We’re not talking about producing widgets in a factory here. We’re really talking about growing a garden, right? People who are thinking. People who are blossoming in their careers. People who are really able to think creatively to solve problems for clients and for the firm.
So, if you were to sort of look at management 101, it would be transformational, management style, leadership styles, servant leadership or kind of a coaching leadership style. And I think maybe if we think about one takeaway for our listeners today, if you want to think about who you are as you approach your team and whether or not you are the right fit, these are the three things I would think about.
Are you an transformational leader? I think a transformational leader is somebody who has a big vision. They’re the big idea person, right? And they’re able to communicate that effectively so that their team is excited about the future and working towards what that future vision looks like. I would say that’s a transformational leader. A little charismatic, very inspiring.
That’s one kind of leadership and not all of us are that kind of leader. Servant leadership, which doesn’t sound perhaps quite as glamorous, but I think is a really effective leadership style. This is one in which you’re really focused on building trust, supporting your team, making them know that they’re supported again. That’s really that underpinning of psychological safety that we’re here in a collaborative space to really grow a team and to solve problems, to grow a firm. And you sort of reduce the fear of failure in that environment. So, servant leadership, that would be another style.
Then third, would be sort of the coaching approach as leadership, right? Where it’s really almost more of a one-on-one mentor-mentee. We’re really talking about the personal growth of a specific member of that team as a way of moving forward.
Gina Rubel: Well, I think it’s important just to note that understanding that there are many different size law firms listening to this, and law firm leaders, that it doesn’t mean that the managing partner or the executive committee has to do the coaching or the one-on-one. It’s really about providing the resources and tools. So other people, whether it’s your practice group chairs, or outside consultants, or whatever the case may be for an internal professional development department. I don’t want listeners to think, “Oh, I have to do that now too, because as a former practicing attorney, there’s only so much time in a day.”
Leslie Richards: Yeah.
Gina Rubel: But I think those are really important keys.
Leslie Richards: But making those resources available and being the kind of leader that makes sure that those resources are there for your team, yeah.
Gina Rubel: So give me one takeaway.
Leslie Richards: Sit down. Take a good look at yourself. An honest look at yourself. What skill sets do you have in that kind of portfolio of leadership styles and which kind of leader are you? Then think about how you augment that and whether or not that’s the right fit for your team. As your team is responding to that kind of leadership, do they need you to make an adjustment?
Gina Rubel: And I’m going to add to that, ask yourself why you should care. And you should. Every leader should care. You mentioned an article, Aristotle something. Can you tell us what that is again?
Leslie Richards: I mentioned a project which was Google’s research project on high-performing teams and innovative teams specifically, and it was called Project Aristotle.
Gina Rubel: All right, perfect. So, I want to thank our leaders for joining us today.
Leslie Richards: Yeah.
Gina Rubel: We do welcome your feedback on our new podcast format and any topics you want to hear about. We are here for you, law firm leaders, so please e-mail us at podcast@onrecordpr.com and if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Honestly, it really does help us. We want to get the word out there on how we can support law firm leadership in the constant evolution. Leslie, thank you so much for joining me today.
Leslie Richards: It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Gina Rubel: Of course, and listeners, we’ll see you next week.
Leslie Richards: Bye bye.
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/FuriaRubel