Increasing Business

May 29, 2019 by Molly McGrath

Are You Ready to Say Goodbye to Stress & Let Employees Step Up and Lead?

It’s an employee’s market. Low salaries and minimum paid time off aren’t cutting it anymore, people are job hopping at a faster rate than ever…and it’s only getting worse, seemingly by the day.

The way we see it, you have two options:

Empower the “sleeping giants” already employed by your firm to step up, take action and make business decisions that enable you to focus on your top revenue-producing activities, or…
“Splurge” on hiring a rockstar team member—we promise, the right person will be worth their weight in gold.

Tune in to get the scoop on legal staffing and what it looks like in today’s day and age…

Schedule a FREE Discovery Session with Molly

If Molly’s message resonates, and you’re ready to either empower your existing employees or hire new team members who are capable of making a measurable difference at your firm, schedule your FREE Discovery Session and start brainstorming next steps with one of the nation’s leading experts in legal staffing and employee empowerment.

May 13, 2019 by Molly McGrath

Try These 3 Communication Tactics to Keep Employee Excuses at Bay and Accountability Front & Center

Gone are the days of vertical management structures and strict oversight. Organizations of all kinds, ranging from classrooms to boardrooms, acknowledge the importance of ensuring that everyone has a voice. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but if it does, it’s time to tune in. The bottom line is that employees are more productive, more autonomous, and more satisfied when provided an empowering workspace.

This is fine and dandy when everyone pulls their own weight. But sustaining an open and encouraging company culture is immeasurably more difficult, however, when employees underperform. You won’t do yourself (or your bottom line) any favors if you intervene in such circumstances with an accusing question like, “why did (or didn’t) you…”. Instead, level up your management skills and try out the following 3 communication strategies:

1. Drop the “why.” When you open with an interrogation that points to a fault in an employee’s performance, you trigger the brain’s threat response system, provoking a fight or flight reaction often expressed in terms of excuses or shifting blame. This is a waste of everyone’s time.

2. It takes incredible strength of character to quiet the brain’s threat response. Avoid the need to go there by learning to ask “how,” instead. When addressing an employee’s underperformance, skip over the “why” and go straight to asking how to move forward. State the concern as a matter of fact and present the opportunity for collaborative problem solving by shifting the tone of the conversation toward productive resolution.

3. Opening an opportunity for problem-solving engenders accountability. Take this one step further by asking “what.” There is no better way to empower your employees than by showing them a little TLC. Ask, “what can we do to better support your success?” Not only is this invaluable information, it also demonstrates that you own your role in fostering a healthy, empowered workplace. If employees see you working to improve your performance, they’ll be driven to do the same.

Employee performance issues are tricky to pin down, and as long as human beings, not robots, are behind the wheel, you’ll have your work cut out for you. Though no silver bullet, learning to communicate in such a way that avoids blame and centers accountability will go far. What’s more, “how” and “what” questions furnish you with information that provides insight into systemic issues that require leadership attention. Tweaking these deeper tensions allows for the cultivation of a company culture that, in and of itself, will enhance employee performance.

Ready to get the cogs of communication turning seamlessly at your firm?

We’ve been working with law firms for 20+ years, helping to open the lines of communication between leadership and their teams and empower everyone with the tools and techniques they need to step up and make a difference to your firm’s productivity and profitability. Let’s talk about your challenges and brainstorm some ideas to get your firm on track. Schedule your free discovery session by clicking the button below!

May 12, 2019 by Molly McGrath

What Does She DO All Day?

Okay…let’s be honest. How many of you have silently screamed to yourself, I have no idea what she does all day!!! about one of your employees—all while you juggle client appointments, referral meetings, internal meetings, document reviews, and “emergency” calls from your kids’ schools. I personally hear this no fewer than 20 times a week from entrepreneurs across the map.

These internal commentaries are not meant to be employee critiques. The intent is not to imply that your employee is messing around on Facebook all day. The truth of the matter is that, when a business owner has that feeling of I don’t know what she does all day, it is indicative of a business that is not operating with a cohesive structure, clear job descriptions, weekly tracking and measurement metrics, accountability, and consistent internal communication. It is indicative of a business owner who stays behind closed doors all day in back-to-back meetings, painfully aware of her or his insane schedule, with little hope of addressing a growling stomach, an overloaded inbox, lack of time with the team, and pressing family obligations.

If you have that sinking feeling about any of your team members, chances are it is not the person who is the issue, but rather a training and communication issue. Fortunately, this is a very easy fix.

With the right training and development program, within 30-days you could know if it is actually a case of the wrong person in the wrong role, and how to course-correct. Our 90-Day Training Plan, combined with our “Tips for Weekly Effectiveness” program will take about an hour of your time and get you started on the right path towards running a more cohesive, communicative business…with a calmer day-to-day life. Together, we’ll also conduct a Communication Analysis and perform a Kolbe Analysis to identify the strengths of each person on your team and determine how to establish consistent, effective communication that ensures you never have that rotten feeling again.

The next time you find yourself asking, What does she DO all day? please contact us to help assess your firm’s internal culture and make some changes that will not only eliminate that question from your daily ponderings, but also—ultimately—improve employee retention and loyalty while increasing your firm’s productivity and productivity. Email [email protected] or click the button below to schedule your free discovery session with our founder, Molly Hall.

April 25, 2019 by Molly McGrath

How to Have Conversations that Keep Team Members Content, Engaged & Motivated to Grow Your Firm

You’ve been at this for a while. You know that happy, engaged employees are essential to the growth of your firm. And you know this is cyclical: driven team members drive growth, growth drives motivation, motivation feeds happiness. Keeping this wheel turning is harder than it sounds, though. After all, your team members are not cogs but human beings—and human beings have complex needs.

Think of your firm as a community. Communities are at their best when everyone has a voice. In work as in life, you give people voice by engaging them in conversation. Call it a performance check in if you want but think of it as a targeted chat. In doing so, you address the main reason these sorts of assessments fail: fear. When people sense a social threat, they clam up. Avoid this by turning the tables; encourage your team members to ask you for feedback and engage their request in a conversational tone. Putting employees in charge of their performance evaluations provides a sense of control that soothes the fear mechanism and encourages personal agency.

If you succeed in getting your team to regularly approach you wanting to check in about their work, you’re winning. Don’t blow it by getting caught up in metrics and ledgers. Rather than harping on results, focus on effort, learning, and growth. Again: think of your firm as a community. People want to feel cared for. Part of. Showing an investment in a person’s continued learning and acknowledging their effort keeps them happy. If the culture of your firm nurtures wellbeing and growth, employees will catch their own mistakes and come to see them as opportunities to improve.

Community and belonging are at the top of the list of basic human needs, preceded only by oxygen. Trust me. I’ve got the list and it’s gold. Each of the aforementioned strategies will help foster community at your firm. Take this a step further by inspiring a sense of ownership in your employees, thereby cultivating belonging. The key here is less telling and more asking. When engaging a team member in a performance check in, spur insight by crafting questions that prompt the employee to reflect on their own goals. Thus, your firm’s performance objectives become personal and a sense of belonging is instilled.

Even as organizations become increasingly data-driven and technology-focused, quality conversation continues to be the best method for boosting employee engagement and wellbeing.

Remember to keep your conversations empowering, motivating and loyalty-inspiring by following these 4 steps:

• Think of your firm as a community
• Encourage employees to seek feedback autonomously
• Forget ledgers and focus on education, empowerment and growth
• Rather than telling, ask questions that spur reflection

For more information about how to implement productive communication strategies at your firm, consider downloading the following free White Paper: The 8 Keys to an Empowering Conversation. After all, your firm is only as good as your employees and your employees are only as good as your communication skills!

April 16, 2019 by Molly McGrath

Looking for a Traditional Law Firm Resume is Hurting Your Growth…and Here’s Why

“This resume is totally unqualified, why are you sending me this candidate?” In our 20+ years in the legal recruiting and staffing industry, we’ve heard this question a lot—most recently about a week ago. The attorney we were working with wanted to hire a paralegal with estate planning and probate experience. Loads of it, to be exact. And trying to get this particular attorney to look beyond the words and qualifications listed on a resume was a bit of a challenge. But, we are hired to help law firms hire the right person for their open position, and so our response—as it always is—was, “Trust us. We are the experts. That’s why you hired us. Show up for the 1-hour interview, and if you’re not seeing what you want, let the candidate know you’ve seen everything you need to see and end the interview. We’ll take it from there.” The attorney begrudgingly agreed.

Part of our legal recruiting and hiring process is that we ask all candidates to call us immediately after their 1-hour interview. 3-hours after the interview was scheduled to end, she phoned. Our recruiter’s first response was, “You failed the test. You were supposed to call us as soon as the interview was over. You’ve lost some points…”

And the candidate excitedly interrupted to say that she had just left the interview. “It went amazing! We already started taking tasks off of his to-do list and putting them on mine. I have my top priorities all sorted out…I start tomorrow!”

Attorneys—and most business owners, really—are easily seduced by a rocking resume. We get emails from entrepreneurs all the time. What About This Resume? the subject line reads, and attached is a resume chock full of fascinating skill sets and experience that jumps off the page. Intrigued by our own process, we’ll give these candidates a spot test, jumping on a call with them for some simple research and development. Within four minutes, we’ll know if a candidate is all wrong. If they’re too arrogant, not vibrant enough, lacking empathy or compassion. If they have a mindset of victimization.

Yes, we can tell all of this within just four minutes. And we can determine if the candidate is a poor fit, without knowing what position they are being considered for, or the details of the job description.

Another recent example, we placed an absolute superstar candidate into a position at a boutique law firm in Maine. But initially, when we sent the resume to the attorney, the response was, “I don’t want to waste my time meeting with this candidate, her resume isn’t impressive and I have no idea how she even made the cut to get in front of me.”

“Trust the process,” we reassured.

After the interview, I received a phone call from the attorney. “I have no idea how this candidate made your cut, or why you would even call her solely based on her resume, but I must have her.” Our process had clearly worked. “She is now the standard for every employee I will ever hire going forward.”

It is now this candidate’s third year at the firm, and I still get emails from the attorney saying things like, “I still don’t know why you called her, but thank you. She is amazing! I finally feel like someone has my back, and I can let go and just focus on billable work and growing my firm!”

The point of all this is simple: the skills that are listed out on paper are irrelevant until you get clear on the human side of hiring.

Hiring your first employee is a huge leap of faith and one of the scariest things that an entrepreneur can do. You want a guarantee that this new hire will be a profitable asset and not a financially-draining liability. The problem is that new hires don’t come in a box with a guarantee on it. And what’s worse, more often than not, entrepreneurs don’t get the superstar employees they need, which pushes them to the mindset that “good people are hard to find.”

But you don’t want good people. You want GREAT people. Superstars. Rockstars. People who come “batteries included.” And there are hundreds…maybe even thousands…of really, really great people out there. And they’re waiting to work very, very intentionally for you. And the promising news is that these really, really great people are being overlooked by recruiters because their resumes aren’t flashy…

So, how do you find these people? If you are truly curious and want to learn:

1. How to write a compelling ad that attracts healthy candidates with the mindset, core values, and emotional intelligence you need—all while weeding out the weak;

2. What to look for in a resume that indicates that a candidate knows exactly how to do what you need them to, and eliminates the “I need a job and will be asking you for a raise before the end of the year” candidates;

3. How to conduct empowering face-to-face interviews that create the kind of dialogue that gets to the fundamentals of their motivating factors, mindset, missions and values…

Email [email protected] today. Let’s connect and discuss your firm’s recruiting and hiring challenges. Our process works—we’ve got it dialed in, and have been using it to help solopreneurs and boutique firms hire amazing people for over 20 years now. Your people should be your most profitable asset. We help make that happen.