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Building, leading, and scaling legal teams | Bonus Episode
90 Plays11 months ago
How do you build and scale a high-performing legal team?
Beyond legal prowess, GCs must master leadership, finding and retaining the right talent, allocating resources and advocating for budget, and more. Join us as we dive into intriguing stories and advice shared by top leaders in the in-house legal industry.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-24
Topics
Introduction: 00:00
David Lancelot on transforming processes to empower lawyers as strategic leaders: 01:46
Gary Spiegel on hiring adaptable players and fostering a growth-oriented culture: 08:17
Brian Chase on allocating resources strategically and nurturing talent: 13:41
Akshay Verma on how well-being and values contribute to professional success: 20:03
Adam Glick on strategic hiring for expertise and problem-solving skills: 22:17
Celaena Powder on team success through coaching, brand building, and open culture: 30:38
Lydia Chuek on demonstrating trust in employees and retaining great legal talent: 34:00
Seth Weissman on developing trust and leadership synergy within teams: 36:56
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Connect with us:
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
Featured guests:
David Lancelot - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidlancelot/
Gary Spiegel - https://www.linkedin.com/in/gspieg/
Brian Chase - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-r-chase/
Akshay Verma - https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshay-verma-esq/
Adam Glick - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adglick/
Celaena Powder - https://www.linkedin.com/in/celaenapowder/
Lydia Cheuk - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiacheuk/
Seth Weissman - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethweissman/
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Transcript
Introduction to AI in Contract Management
00:00:11
Speaker
Before we get started with today's episode, I want to tell you about Spotdraft. If you spend hours every week drafting and reviewing contracts, worrying about being blindsided by renewals, or if you just want to streamline your contracting process, let's talk about an end-to-end AI-powered system that'll save you time. Spotdraft is a contract lifecycle management system
00:00:33
Speaker
that helps in every stage of contracting. From creating and managing templates and workflows to tracking approvals, e-signing, and reporting via an AI-powered repository, Spotdraft does it all. And because it should work where you work, it integrates with all the tools your team already uses. Spotdraft is the key that unlocks the potential of your legal team. Make your contracting easier today at spotdraft.com.
Career Growth in Legal Teams
00:01:02
Speaker
Welcome to The Abstract, a podcast where we interview some of the biggest voices in legal to uncover how they've grown in their careers, handled thorny challenges, and become leaders within the industry. For this episode, we've collected some of the most interesting stories and advice we've heard from our guests about building, leading, and scaling legal teams. It isn't just important for GCs to be great lawyers. They also have to be great managers to their teams.
00:01:30
Speaker
Today's episode is just a small sample of the helpful tips that we've picked up over the last two seasons.
Building Trust in Legal Teams
00:01:37
Speaker
Let's begin by focusing on developing a strategy for your legal team. Before you begin the hiring process, you need to know which roles to hire for. David Lancelot has had a fantastic career building legal teams at eBay and QVC, and he's currently the chief legal officer at Lawview.
00:01:55
Speaker
I asked him for his take on the best way to build a team of legal experts while also inspiring positive change within the company. And he had this to say. I think that there's totally two sides to the coin to that change. Both sides involve trust. I think that the common thread there is building trust with
00:02:15
Speaker
other people in the business and whether that's the lawyers or the business people. I had the real honor and I guess luck to have some really strong business leaders in the big class and QVC. They gave me the opportunity to build something
00:02:35
Speaker
which was relatively innovative, an approach to lawyering that was relatively innovative. And so I build trust with quantitative factual reporting to finance, strategy, and the CEO, as well as just working my butt off. We're proving your value, getting your seat at the table, owning your seat at the table. Doing that requires an enormous amount of effort. And lawyers, that's easy for lawyers to do. That's all we do.
00:03:04
Speaker
We actually need to ramp that down, right? And be like, okay, working as hard as you can all the time leads to burnout. Yes. And it doesn't lead to effective management and acceleration of a business. So doing that, having a vision, going to your, your business leaders and saying, here's the metrics, here's the numbers, right? Here's the financial outlook here. Here's how it aligns with our strategy, right? Our business strategy, really understanding that strategy and where we want to go.
00:03:31
Speaker
I think another thing is to build trust with business people, just enthusiasm. Just straight up enthusiasm about the product. Whatever you're doing, this is really cool. This is really interesting. Yes, I've read the report on the competitive situation. How can I know more? Can I come to the meeting? Great. Come to the meeting.
00:03:53
Speaker
Of course, you can't do that many times because you don't have time, right? Because you're spending way too much time doing boring, repeatable, soul destroying work, right? And so it's true. Part of the vision and the journey is how do we get rid of that so we can do more of this, right? Partnering with the business and really enjoying the wins and the losses, right? Learning from the losses and enjoying the wins and then building trust on the
00:04:18
Speaker
So then the other side of the coin is, okay, you've built enough trust with the business so that they will let you either spend more, from my perspective, it's usually just invest in a different way, right? So you're talking about like, do we wanna hire...
00:04:36
Speaker
X more lawyers or spend X more on external counsel or do we want to bring in a legal operations leader? Someone who's relatively senior, you always want to hire people smarter. Somebody who knows better than you about the problem you're trying to tackle. So bringing in that ops leader, reinvesting in that and then going to your team and saying like the way I always set it up is this isn't about, and there's always fear,
00:05:02
Speaker
Fear, change, there's always fear. I mean, I have fear from change too. I've been through plenty of change and there's always that visceral, you know, fight or flight thing. I go into your team and saying, this is not, as I said, twice already. This isn't about just being faster and cheaper, right? This is about making your life better. Yes. You are, and I mean, lawyers in general, I think, are, I mean, not in general, they are incredibly smart, hardworking people who are also really creative.
00:05:31
Speaker
They're almost like artists. Strong sense of themselves, too. Strong values, strong ethical compass, etc. That's why we become lawyers. We have something in our background that says, you do this. They're super driven, they want to succeed. And you come to them and say, well, I'm going to take 40% of what you do.
00:05:51
Speaker
and do it this way, that's way faster and more effective. And the automatic reaction that I always see, almost always is, you're taking my talent. I'm taking myself. Which, you know, if you've built trust, there's less of that. But if you don't know the people that you're dealing with, that can be that automatic reaction. And that is not the case.
00:06:11
Speaker
Clearly, I don't want to lose great people because we're making things more effective and efficient. I want those people to become the great, creative, innovative in-house lawyers that they can be, and business leaders. And I think the simplest piece of advice you could give to anybody in business or otherwise is just trying to create that headspace. Take a step back. Open your mind a little bit.
00:06:40
Speaker
to the possibility of doing things in a more modern and effective way. And I think if you, also, I mean very practically, test case, that's what we did with this contract management stuff, is focus on a place where you can win. And I think for us it was the UK or Australia at the time. English language, they were all about it, very innovative environment.
00:07:05
Speaker
We did it there, it worked great, and then they become your evangelist. Then they're like, oh, because it works great, I have way less of that garbage. Everyone should be doing this. Everybody should trust the boldness. And then it just sort of goes from there. And we actually talked about this, I think yesterday on the panel, like the idea of reaching a tipping point where you get to a certain amount
00:07:27
Speaker
place, they're having a good time partnering their business, spending more time in meetings and off-sites and understanding the strategy and becoming really strategic leaders.
00:07:39
Speaker
There's a time when that happens somewhere, and somebody says, oh, I get it. It's working. It's working. And for us, it was sort of like 40% of the volume is now off their plates. Not 90%. That takes a long, long time, a lot of work. But 40% is off the plates-ish. And then we literally had people come to us and say, I've got some extra budget. I want to give it to you. That's amazing.
00:08:07
Speaker
When
Strategic Hiring for Legal Teams
00:08:08
Speaker
Gary Spiegel was tasked with building a team of more than 20 lawyers at ANAPLAN in the run up to their IPO, he prioritized his immediate needs and then he drew on lessons learned from his time at Adobe. Yeah. So, you know, I mentioned in the beginning, I was, since I was the only person, I was doing a lot. So I would say the first hires were really geared around keeping me sane.
00:08:33
Speaker
I'll be honest. It was a very interesting set or a very easy set of criteria for I don't need to do this anymore and I desperately need someone to do it. So let's hire that person. And so actually one of the first hires since we were a broad international based business, even as a 150 to 200 person company, we had offices in 12 or 14 places. Wow.
00:09:03
Speaker
Having an EMEA understanding, an Asia PAC understanding, and being able to do close to real-time business there was important. So one of the first hires was an attorney who could handle the EMEA business. And we actually hired him in Minnesota first because there was a still bulk was
00:09:29
Speaker
was uh us but we had enough amia so that we figured the time zone was a little better and then we hired an amia attorney after that um and so that was kind of how we the first thing was very revenue contract based um so it was very i would say reactive i didn't have a great strategy there i'll just to be candid i in hindsight i'd probably think about doing things a little bit different in the sense that i think more about
00:09:57
Speaker
Which I did, I think at the next stage of hiring more about multi-purpose players, you know, cause then you're getting into the series D and E and F type of a scenario where you're not really sure exactly what you're going to need, but you need people who are flexible and can react quickly and are willing to jump in on unknown things.
00:10:17
Speaker
So for me, that was really important at that stage. And then as we got closer to the IPO, I knew that we needed specific skill sets. I knew we needed somebody who was dedicated or knew a lot about privacy, knew a lot about product development, knew a lot about SEC reporting. Those types of things became more important. So that's on the skill side. But I also really tried as a manager with a growing team to be conscious of the fact that
00:10:46
Speaker
My experience in the past was I was very fortunate to have great managers along the way, people who are very understanding and forgiving, if I made a mistake, and people who were interested in my growth and my team and the team's growth as a whole. So that stuck with me. I always had, like, for instance, one of my managers at Adobe, he was always, every time we would talk about our weekly accomplishments and goals,
00:11:15
Speaker
He always would say, well, what did you get out of it? Was it something that personally made you happier? What do you want to accomplish? It will be a personal achievement for you. That was always part of it. And I appreciated that. It wasn't just, here's the corporate objective. What are you doing, A, B, and C? It's a mutual relationship. It's not a one-way thing. And then also at Adobe, I got to credit them
00:11:42
Speaker
They created the most fun environment. I mean, the group there, we had these amazing offsite
00:11:49
Speaker
you know, could just be go out to dinner or it could be we had a couple off sites where we went up to the Seattle office, you know, as a group for the the team I was on. Things like that just created this bond, this culture, this closeness, even though geographically, we were spread out a little bit. It just felt like we were family in a lot of ways, it just felt so comfortable to work with that group. And I always wanted to recreate that.
00:12:16
Speaker
to the best I could. I don't feel like I was as successful at it as they were. But I think that was another thing was really understanding that I always would prefer hiring for people that make the workplace feel like a better place to be, then let's focus on the skills, like make it where people want to be part of it.
00:12:41
Speaker
Whether that's remote or in person, you know, that's it doesn't really matter. You've got to invest in building that kind of cultural tightness. So those are things that I really, I probably thought about that on the later side, particularly as we got into the public company side, because once you get into the public company side, I felt like
00:13:02
Speaker
It was more, we also had to focus on redundancy or ability to scale at the right time, but not overspend on our hiring or like the hiring became much more tactical about, but you still have to hire the right fits, you know, for your team. But it was really like you're more, I felt like we were more constrained because we were a public company and the GNA, you know, spend thresholds to become more important.
00:13:28
Speaker
Lawyers often find themselves in situations where budgets are really tight. When he encountered this at Foursquare, Brian Chase searched for young professionals with the flexibility and cleverness to grow into what would become bigger roles. He's used the same approach to great success as the General Counsel of Service Channel. Yeah, I think...
00:13:49
Speaker
I don't know if it's a good sign or a bad sign. It's probably a bad sign. I apparently don't have enough negotiating abilities to get myself more budget. And so for all of you who have been able to build out large legal teams, kudos to you. I always end up in the situation where I'm seen as a cost center and where I start out with the budget at the beginning of the year to get a general counsel or an associate general counsel or a corporate attorney that they then chop it and they have to figure it out. And so when I was at,
00:14:19
Speaker
Foursquare, that was the type of situation is that I was definitely overwhelmed. And there was just a lot of stuff going on and trademarks and just managing contracts. And so I went to hire a trademark contract, a trademark paralegal with contract management experience.
00:14:35
Speaker
And the story I like to get, I like to share about this is as I was hiring people, I had a long slate of candidates and it was an interesting time. This was 2012. I got for this job role, I got a lot of attorneys who applied for it. It was really interesting. But my third interview came in and at the end of the interview, I asked the question, it was like, hey, do you have any final questions for me? And her question was, how do you handle constructive criticism from those who report to you?
00:15:04
Speaker
And that's a good question. Exactly. And I knew at that moment that I was going to end the rest of the interview process and offer her a job. We have now worked together for over a decade. And after a month of being at Foursquare, she had all the trademark stuff cleaned up and she had all the contracts organized and said, well, what else can I do? And so I said, hey, you want to rest in learning NDAs? So I taught her how to do NDAs. And then we moved to.
00:15:32
Speaker
I think it was co-promotion agreements and then to license agreements. And now she, I would say she manages 99% of our commercial contracts here and that goes toe to toe with law firm trained or law school trained attorneys all the time. So here at Service Channel, I was looking for somebody to.
00:15:51
Speaker
to just help manage with the privacy program that we have and hired a person with that focus quickly saw that the woman that I hired had a lot more abilities than just tracking paperwork and she now manages our privacy and compliance program.
00:16:09
Speaker
So I'm very lucky that the paralegals that I've hired have wanted to do much more than just the initial jobs. But I feel like it's been fun for me as well, though, just to get to...
00:16:22
Speaker
to see these individuals grow and learn. And it teaches me as well, because when you're teaching something, the gaps in your understanding are become very apparent because when they ask the question and you say, I don't know, I don't know everything I think I know. So I think it also improved my abilities and things as well. In the same conversation, Brian also shared his thoughts on the best place to find this sort of rock star candidate. I
Advice for Law Graduates
00:16:49
Speaker
am a huge proponent for
00:16:52
Speaker
law school graduates to go to a law firm. I feel that my foundational experience is the foundation that I have from my law firm days has assisted me in becoming the attorney that I am. So I generally would push people and say, hey, don't just go be the first general counsel at a startup, like go get that training. That said, there are individuals who are not law firm trained that will have skill sets that we can use, in particular in the world today where
00:17:21
Speaker
We're using so many different legal tools, different processes. There may be those who a legal-minded person won't understand how to use that legal tool or to set up the back end of the rules and the workflows and those things, but somebody who is not a lawyer may. And I've been lucky to find individuals who are like that. I hired an individual just this past winter who I hired to be a vendor compliance associate. So his role was specifically to confirm that
00:17:51
Speaker
these contractors and these plumbers, electricians, those who come into our network to be used by our customers, that they have the proper certificates of insurance, proper licenses, et cetera. And that was the role I had for him. But what we ended up having a situation where we needed a standard work put together and I didn't have time and my other two paralegals didn't have time. And I said, hey, will you put this together?
00:18:17
Speaker
And one of the cleanest, most detailed, structured standard to work I've ever seen. So now I keep on having him do that. Like, because he has this skill set. And yes, he still has to do that other stuff, because that's what he's hired for. But
00:18:32
Speaker
Had I not hired him, I would have never found this person who is like a standard work machine, like a process machine. And so I think you've got to be creative and there may be people in other groups. You may be working with somebody in SalesOps who is a little bit more interested. Maybe they want to help with initial creation of drafts of agreements because you know, initial draft creation doesn't need really a lawyer if you're using your forms. So yeah.
00:19:00
Speaker
Especially if you're running lean like I am, if I find anybody who is interested, they're going to get grabbed. I'm going to find something for them to do. Hiring is a two-way street. As a hiring manager, you need to consider what you're looking for in a prospective employee, but you also need to understand what candidates are looking for in their prospective workplace. Akshay Verma offered an intriguing perspective on how to attract top talent in today's world.
Attracting Top Legal Talent
00:19:29
Speaker
When we spoke on the podcast, Akshay was the director of legal operations at Coinbase, but he's since moved on to a COO role right here at Spot Draft. I have seen an incredible evolution in the priorities of law students and law grads, particularly over the last five years that I've been teaching. And I think even non-law student
00:19:53
Speaker
early stage professionals are voicing this as well and surveys and data will reveal this. Well, people care a lot more now about mental wellness, balance in their lives, whatever that means for them. I don't think it has to be even, even, you know, work life, like what the right balance is for you is important. Those kinds of priorities have taken over things like
00:20:20
Speaker
compensation, choice and autonomy matter a lot more. For all its ills, the pandemic has been a really good thing for professionals in whatever sphere they tend to work in, but particularly the legal profession in terms of the choice that they want, over what they do, how they do it, when they do it.
00:20:39
Speaker
So to all the employers out there, whether you're hiring fresh grads or not, you need to create an employee experience to be competitive. And that has to do with more than just your compensation and your stock option packages and so forth. There's an element of that that is incredibly highly prioritized, particularly by these law students. And you hear it from them as we engage in this material.
00:21:02
Speaker
So, you hear about it from their values. Those have changed. I used to hear a lot about success and money, right? Values. Which I had when I was a law student. And now it's more family and time and autonomy and happiness. I just think that's a great thing for human beings.
00:21:20
Speaker
Adam Glick, VP of Legal Affairs and Corporate Secretary at Front, also recognizes that building a high-performing legal team isn't just about hiring great individual lawyers. Instead,
Aligning Legal Hires with Business Needs
00:21:31
Speaker
you need to develop a team that's responsive to the evolving needs of your organization. Here's how he prioritizes hiring in his legal department. Yeah, it's challenging. For me, what I've done in the past when I come into a new role is I really think about building out some form of
00:21:48
Speaker
what's called a 30, 60, 90 day plan. There's other terminology for it, but something similar like that, just to help guide and prioritize your time. Just have a list of what you want to accomplish during those time periods, because you're jerking through that proverbial fire hose and you need to stay disciplined. You can get pulled in so many different directions. So it's critical to stay disciplined and make sure you have a plan of attack.
00:22:11
Speaker
And I guess my initial focus when I started is really based on three different principles or three different concepts. The first one is make sure you delve deeply into the business and the product and understand the business and the product. It's just so important to understand where the business is trying to go and the products that they've built. And then number two, understand the strategic initiatives for the business, right? What is the business trying to accomplish? What are their goals? What are their objectives over the next,
00:22:39
Speaker
two quarters, four quarters, six quarters, whatever timeframe you can ascertain from speaking to other leaders within the business. Because you're going to focus your efforts and energies on ensuring that you're helping move the company forward with those objectives and goals. And then the third one that I think is really important as well is you need to focus on meeting people across the organization to start building relationships. We keep talking about relationships.
00:23:05
Speaker
as well as understanding what's working for them and what are some of the challenges that they're facing when they have legal issues to overcome. How have they successfully worked through legal issues in the past? Have they actually worked through legal issues or have they avoided them? That's something that you should know as well. Again, build those relationships. Take detailed and copious notes to the extent you can because there's going to be so much coming at you.
00:23:30
Speaker
And you need to really capture it and be able to recall it as you think through how you're going to even prioritize over those first few quarters that you're there. And then once you understand the business and where it wants to go and what you need to focus on in order to build those partnerships and provide those services, start to consider where you need to put resources. This is assuming you have headcount and hopefully you do because the business is growing and you need to be able to keep up. Here's an example. If the business is very transactional in its nature,
00:23:59
Speaker
Perhaps your first hire is going to be a commercial counsel to help you negotiate all those contracts. Or if the business is very product oriented and builds complicated products for large customers, perhaps you consider someone with product and maybe privacy experience, especially if you're processing or you have a lot of data from your customers and you need someone that can help you think through the complexities of the product and all the privacy implications of the data.
00:24:25
Speaker
And you can hire that person and they can partner very closely with the product and engineering team. Or your business may be highly regulated and maybe you need someone that you bring in with applicable regulatory and compliance experience. You've really got to understand the needs and wants of your business and then determine how you're going to prioritize hiring. You may even be focused on a particular geo outside the US as an example.
00:24:49
Speaker
if you're doing a lot of business in the EU. Maybe you're first buyer with someone in the EU because I'm sitting out here in California. If we're doing 75% of our business in the EU, maybe I go hire someone to go sit in London or some other European country who could be there and give me the eight hours of time zone coverage when I'm sleeping to help accelerate all the work that we need to do. I think that's really important to think through as well.
00:25:16
Speaker
And then I guess one last thing to consider is be thorough, but be quick in your decision making as you're going through this analysis. Don't overanalyze and waste too much time deciding where to put your resources because it's going to take you a while to find the right person. You really want to find the right person that's going to sit within your culture and that you're going to mesh with.
00:25:37
Speaker
And if your business is growing quickly, you need to move fast. The last thing you want is to become a blocker because the legal work will just continue to accelerate for your company and you don't have enough people on your legal team to be able to support it. And you're slowing down the growth of the business. I think that's something you need to consider as well.
00:25:57
Speaker
Just like Akshay, Adam also recognizes the importance of wellness and emotional intelligence when it comes to identifying great candidates and stacking your legal team with all-stars. I really focus on some particular criteria when I'm hiring people. First of all, do they have some level of subject matter expertise?
00:26:16
Speaker
for what I've identified as a need. As an example, are they commercially oriented? Are they product oriented? Or, and this is a big or, do they have the ability to learn it pretty quickly because they're interested in doing it? That's the first thing I think about. And then the next thing I consider is
00:26:35
Speaker
Are they problem solvers? Are they solution-based lawyers? Can't they be creative and figure out workarounds for some of the sticky legal issues that are going to come up over time as they advise and counsel the business? Because that is really important, especially when you're a small and nimble startup. Can they provide legal advice, but can they also evaluate creative ways to help the business overcome some of these legal hurdles?
00:27:03
Speaker
It's telling the business you just can't put down that path. It's against the law. That's, that's, that is not the right answer. And that's not going to be a successful answer. You're going to get a lot of blowback from your business. If you're hearing that about people you hire. You need to think about risk. You need to think about creativity and helping the business figure out another path. That's just so vitally important. And then last, but definitely not least.
00:27:28
Speaker
For me, does this person have not just a high IQ, but a really high EQ? And what I mean is, can this person build relationships? We've talked about relationships throughout the podcast. Can that person build those relationships both personally and professionally? Again, they're building the professional relationship with their internal client.
00:27:50
Speaker
But can they build that personal relationship? Can they divulge what's going on a little bit in their personal life so they can bond with their internal clients? Can they create a relationship that is going to help them accelerate their professional relationship with the client? Is the person relatable? And if you find someone that has experience or is hungry to learn and is a creative problem solver, I think that's just a great addition to your legal team.
00:28:14
Speaker
And it's funny, one of the things that I liked to do, it's a little bit harder now that we've moved to more of a remote environment. As I get through the interview process and I identify a candidate and sure we've interviewed and we've had conversations and we've talked about, are you a value at risk? And we've talked about indemnities and we've talked about privacy or employment, whatever it may be. But then in the end, when I've identified a candidate, I really want to hire. What I like to do is I like to tell that candidate,
00:28:42
Speaker
You're great. I'd love to meet you for a coffee. Let's go grab a coffee. Let's sit down and just see how we work. Let's see how we interact. Let's see how we talk. Tell me a little bit about yourself. Let me tell you a little bit about myself because we're going to be spending a lot of time together. It's a little bit harder now that COVID has come and people aren't working in the same area or going into the office. But I think that's just a really helpful sort of last step in hiring or making a formal offer.
00:29:06
Speaker
But building your legal team is just the first step. How do you show up as a manager to let the lawyers who work for you thrive in their roles?
Coaching and Growth in Legal Teams
00:29:15
Speaker
As general counsel at Seismic, Selena Powder learned that the best way for her to lead is through coaching and guidance. We are not fonts of infinite time and energy. When I joined, a lot of it was frankly brute force. I needed to prove to the business that something worthwhile, but
00:29:34
Speaker
That was a, that was a tough year and it was a lot. I'm an energy trying to tackle a lot of different things by just saying yes a lot. But you are absolutely right. Everyone can believe in me and can love me, but I am not in all rooms. I now have a team of eight on the legal side and another eight on the security side. And so that trust needs to extend from me down and.
00:30:00
Speaker
I think a lot of that comes from coaching. I take bets on people who are talented, who show a lot of potential and I invest in them. And so for me, coaching is a daily thing. It is, it's not necessarily a quarterly, let's sit down and have a two hour coaching conversation. It's the being available to ask questions. Hey, how do I navigate this? Or, Hey, do you mind if I send you a draft of this response so you can give me feedback to
00:30:30
Speaker
Being on a call, things getting a little hot, and me shooting a Slack message, or seeing the emails get a little spicy and saying, hey, take a lap. You need to pull down, take a lap. Lawyers can run and pull back. And we get maybe defensive when people challenge our advice and our opinions. And so a lot of my coaching revolves around, look, ask them for their perspective. Ask what they are thinking about. Engage with them. Educate. Really explain the why and why you have this lens.
00:31:00
Speaker
Just because somebody is questioning if that's the right thing to do, it doesn't mean that they are questioning you personally. It's that they have a different perspective and they're weighing the pros and cons in a way that's different than you. And by the way, their weight that they apply might be correct. We might have a lens that isn't necessarily always going to be the correct lens for every problem. That doesn't mean it's not a valuable lens. It doesn't mean we can't add a different perspective.
00:31:28
Speaker
But this is a collaborative process. Coming to decisions on big ticket items requires a lot of back and forth. And so I work really closely with my team on all sorts of things. And I think the success behind that comes from a place of openness and a place of opportunity. I talk to my team all the time and I tell them one of the greatest gifts we can give in our department is the opportunity to fail.
00:31:56
Speaker
And I truly believe that I think the opportunity to fail, to give somebody a shot at something, allow them to make a mistake and go try it again is incredible. And I think that's how a lot of people learn. That's how I've learned. That's how a lot of folks on my team have seen success. And so that's always where I start. Sometimes managing means stepping away and empowering your legal team members to tackle opportunities that will help them learn, grow, and lead themselves.
00:32:24
Speaker
In my conversation with a Waze General Counsel, Lydia Chuck, we discuss strategies for motivating and retaining talent. That's a good question. I think about it a lot. I think there's a few things for me. I provide my team with a lot of autonomy because I think that's what people want. Right. So, I mean, I can also do that because they're amazing. Right. Like they do great work. They're very committed to the company. They're very good professionals and.
00:32:53
Speaker
Most of them are, I mean, I also don't have people on my team who it's their first job out of college, like that kind of thing. So I think providing autonomy, if you can, is invaluable to employees. They also, for the most part, get to work completely remotely, which is not true. That's not true of all the other teams in a way. But to me, that's a retention lever. And also something that I always try to offer
00:33:22
Speaker
is the opportunity to learn and to do new kinds of work. So I always say, even when interviewing and recruiting for my team, I always say we decide on what the role is working on. It's based on two things. One is the needs of the business, but two, it's what are you interested doing, right? So it's both of those things. I also asked Lydia, for her opinion, on the best way to establish a unified culture, not just in your department, but across the wider organization.
00:33:50
Speaker
I mean, we talked about it much more in the past, but they've been together with me for a while, right? But I think I've been very clear and I think they agree, like how are we going to show up? So how do we show up to the rest of the organization? So obviously within our team, like we're a total safe space, but I think I've made my expectations extremely clear as to like how we should show up to the rest of the organization. And it's not a problem because it's
00:34:16
Speaker
what they want as well, I think, which is we will always be helpful. We are always business first. We will be your thought partner. We will help you come up with a creative solution. And I think being business first is, number one, really important. But number two, I think sometimes other teams find that refreshing because they've had experience with maybe legal teams at other jobs they've had where they haven't felt that.
00:34:43
Speaker
One final story before we go. The pandemic brought frightening new challenges and uncertainties to people all around the globe.
Building Trust Through Vulnerability
00:34:52
Speaker
Seth Weissman had to navigate the best way to build culture and manage his more than 50 employee legal team at Marchetta. Faced with such a challenging environment, Seth chose to lead with compassion. I think FinTech, Solarside had its own challenges. FinTech was harder because, again,
00:35:11
Speaker
It was completely make it up as you go along. It was very much a new industry and it was on fire like blowing up. It was also COVID. Yeah. You know, none of us had done talk about being comfortable with the uncomfortable, you know, how to build, you know, relationships and trust and be vulnerable this way. This was unheard of to lead team meetings. Yep.
00:35:40
Speaker
And I think I just went back to the basics, which is trust is the foundation of all human relationships. The precursor to trust is psychological safety. Knowing that you can be a version of your authentic self, say what you're going to say, do what you're going to do, make mistakes, and be human. And the way you build psychological safety, the precursor to that is being personally vulnerable. Now, if you don't tell people about your health concerns, as a leader, you don't say, you don't share, hey,
00:36:08
Speaker
You know, you can't believe this health issue we're having. My doctor says no. Hey, I'm not perfect either. Hey, I'm concerned or I'm challenged by this too. I'm human like you. And that creates a psychological safety, which creates the trust, which creates the team. And so I went back to those principles, which had been drilled into me, having been coached for 20 years.
00:36:34
Speaker
and haven't read all the coaching materials and the books that really formed my understanding of what leading was. If you start with those basic principles, most things will follow from that. Back to the unique selling proposition, come here, I'll invest in you. It was really hard, Marchetta, because we were building an IPO-ready company as a distributed workforce across the country, and there wasn't a template for how to do this again.
00:37:05
Speaker
I hope you've enjoyed these conversations as much as I have. Thank you for listening to The Abstract. Make sure to subscribe to get notified as soon as we release new episodes. And if you're an in-house legal leader tuning into our show, I'd love to know, what do's and don'ts have you learned from building, leading, and scaling legal teams?
00:37:25
Speaker
Let's start a conversation. Share your stories and expertise using hashtag the abstract and tag us on LinkedIn. We'll add links in the description or just drop a comment below. See you all next week.