433. Everything You Need To Know to Overhaul Your Firm’s Culture with Cy Wakeman [Encore Edition]

(upbeat music) - The main difference between millennials and me is millennials have a low tolerance for inefficiency. Thank God. - That's Si Wakeman, workplace drama researcher, leadership consultant, and New York Times bestselling author. - So when you're like, please put that in triplicate, file it in two places, and then can you scan it and send me a picture? Millennials are like, you're holding an iPhone? - No, I'm not doing any of that. Take your own phone out, take a picture of the document, file it in your own place. I wanted to go have impact in the world. (upbeat music) - I'm Michael Mogul, founder and CEO of Crisp, the nation's number one law from growth company. I've built my business through practice, not theory. Crisp started which is $500 to my name and has grown to over eight figures in revenue over the last few years. Learning a spot on the Inc 500 lists of the fastest growing private companies in America. Our approach has been to take everything we've learned about generating massive growth within our own organization and help the country's most ambitious and committed law firm owners do the same for theirs. In each episode of this podcast, I sit down with innovative market leaders from the legal industry and beyond to learn from those who thrive in the face of adversity, challenge the status quo and define what it means to be a true game changer. Today we're revisiting one of our most popular episodes of SciWaykman, New York Times bestselling author and founder of Reality Based Leadership. Her work has helped leaders ditch work place drama and embrace accountability, making her a top global leadership expert. I sat down with SciWaykman to discuss why accountability is the true driver of engagement, had to reduce emotional waste and resistance within your team and what reality based leadership is all about. - What people do is they complain as if their standards are high and they lead us if their standards are low and you can't have both. That's coming up on the Game Changing Attorney podcast. (upbeat music) Before we begin today's episode, I want to remind you that we aren't beholden to any sponsors or run any ads on this podcast. This allows us to present all of our episodes raw and unfiltered. I'm not gonna push any made to order meal services on you or try to save you any money on your car insurance. That being said, I have one small request. If you receive any value from this podcast, please give it a five star review. Pay the fee so we can keep this podcast free. We'll say welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. - Our organization were obviously huge fans of yours. We've read everything from no ego to reality based rules of the workplace, reality based leadership. And when I first read no ego, right off the bat, it seems like you're a bit of a, almost like a contrarian when it comes to anything relating to HR. And I'm curious as to what led you down that path. - You know, and I've been, no one as a contrarian, I would rather see myself more as a researcher. There's so much pop psychology that hit the vendor halls at HR conferences and people speaking without really evidence behind what they were claiming. And I started out life as a therapist. So when I got into leadership in HR and I started hearing some of the things people were recommending, it did not sink at all with what we knew from the research, what we knew about human behavior. And so rather than being a contrarian, although I've really myth busted a ton of things we often say, I would propose that and more trying to bring back evidence and human behavior psychology into what we're telling leaders to do. - And this is like the swan song of anybody who's been a leader or management because there's things that you read. So you always see some study that says that they surveyed employees or team members and they said that these are the things that would lead to them being happy and more engaged. That's oftentimes the surveys themselves or bit misleading because they're interviewing people based on what they believe that they would do and how they believe that they would change. - Or they're interviewing the victims on how to keep victims happy. It's a huge flaw. One of the surveys I talk a lot about to show how this can be flawed is gallup, interviewed people leaving their position and asked them the main reasons they're leaving. And I think that's like 50% of them said they're leaving because of their leader. So leaders got this big slap on the hand. It didn't matter how you led if people didn't like it, they left. So we did something a little bit novel. We said rather than ask people why they left that job which we're just asking for an excuse, we looked out the same people over time why they left multiple jobs. So when you track them over time, it's weird. They left all four jobs because of the leader. So then when does it not become about the leader anymore? So there's one thing to get a survey to build a headline you wanna lead with on your next book and there's another writing a book reporting out about really good research and there's a lot of really good research lacking in HR and leadership. - So some of the terminology I know you speak a lot on drama and emotional waste. How do you define both of those two? - Perfect. - Drama basically is the funky name for what we call emotional waste. So emotional waste is any energy that's taken away from results or happiness i.e. engagement at work. So when you think about it, it's disruptive behavior which is stemming from usually unproductive thinking. - And what would be some examples? - Examples of emotional waste. - Taddling score keeping, venting, blaming, resisting change with holding by and holding the organization hostage giving terrorist demands in order to get my engagement. There's, and these are very manageable behaviors. - So early on, I believe it was in no ego, you put a stat in there that left me shell shocked in the amount of time that leaders in organizations spend dealing with emotional waste daily, weekly, monthly. I believe it was at least over two hours a day. - Yeah, it's crazy. They actually figures two hours and 26 minutes a day at work. The average person spends in drama. And what's sad about that is it's not only the lost productivity, it's not that people aren't working. They're working hard, but they're working hard with the grudge. They're working hard without full access to all of their intelligence. Like there's just a part of them that's distracted and resentful and feeling taken of the image of. It's time that people spend feeling miserable at work. That's unnecessary. It's just itself and post-suffering. - So the challenge always I've found is that since we're talking about human beings here, at the end of the day, we're dealing with human beings which are unpredictable, is it possible to have a 100% drama for organization? - So I think if you ask my team, I can't say we're 100% drama free. When I robots, we get our eagles hooked. But I would say that drama just doesn't take the tolder that it used to. Because the average organization if you do the map, is 8,000 and 16 hours per person per year. And a lot of us aren't feeling like we have all the staff we need. And just think of you good upcycle 8,000 and 16 hours of drama a year per person and add people feeling like they liked each other rather than judge each other. - So this has me wondering, how much of this is you brought somebody who was high drama into the organization and you just hired incorrectly versus this is just something that you need to mitigate on a continuous basis, regardless what the people you already have. - The answer is both. I always say if you've got drama, you either hired it, you allow it or you are it. Those are really the only three types of drama in your organization. A really key thing you can do is hire differently. And we tend to hire, we overvalue technical skills and undervalue the behaviors and skill sets it takes to move through the world, what I call skillfully to move through drama free. So you definitely can hire to not bring in the obvious cases. But I would tell you that all of us are egos pretty tricky. It can mutate. Even our best performers can get self-righteous and quit mentoring and start eating their own young. Every one of us needs to be walking kind of a path of evolution to say out of drama on a daily basis. So the answer is both. - Do you have a good way to screen this on the front end and you are hiring to potentially identify that this person could be high drama because there's been some Academy Award winning performances during interviews. You see great resumes, they do great assessments and then a few weeks in or a few months in. You're like, this isn't the person in the interview. - Exactly. It's like, what did you do with the person? I had a couple of things that I tell people. First of all, get really clear about what's important to your organization if you're committed to a drama free or at least drama evolving organization. And I say this because we believe they did the bait and switch but a lot of times we're the ones doing the bait and switch. We don't believe people when we see the first time, we don't believe them the first time they show us who they are. We also say we want one thing but when we get in and we see a bright, shiny resume where this person served under a judge such and such as a clerk or whatever it was, we lose our minds over that, right? So we have to get very clear and be willing to go through quite a few candidates to take our time. And a lot of people have weird beliefs that they haven't looked at. A lot of people say, oh, Si, it's so hard to find good talent. And when I hear that, I don't experience that as an employer but then I see the flannel logic. They think they have to win the talent war in their city for people in that profession. And I'm like, no, you just have to be the best place for high accountables to work and some very hard competition. So like if you and I are being chased by a tiger, I don't have to beat the tiger, I just have to beat you. So I just have to have a clean workplace where high accountables love working. So I have to really clean up my own view and move my own ego out of it and really hold that confidence. I have to be willing to suffer some discomfort to hire the person I want. The second way is rather than waiting for the interview as your data point, I like to always be recruiting. So if someone is serving me dinner and a handle a tough situation, well, I'm like taking note of that because I can teach you to be a receptionist or I can teach you to be my personal assistant, but it's harder to teach some of this other stuff. So I'm kind of always dating out there. For me in hiring, who knows my stuff, who's active on social media so that I don't have to have an interview be my only data point. When people do come in, I ask a lot of behavior based questions. Tell me about it time in the last two weeks. I make it current. So you don't have to go back to the one time in college, you screwed up. Everybody's screwed up in the last two weeks. Tell me at the time in the last two weeks, you've screwed up. And that you didn't deliver what you promised. And I let them tell me that. And I listen to they start out with my boss was a nightmare. I got this dumped on me. They start out with the backstory. They're not yet my candidate. And then I'll say, you know, I listen for eyes. So I didn't properly scope this. And so I ended up in a situation and I needed to, I love the word I. And most of us in interviews, they're egotistical. They use the word I. No, if they're claiming credit, it's ego, but if they're owning it, it's important. And then I ask them, by the way, the word I, what's your part of that? And then I test people. So I don't just have people come in. I have people for interviews. I have people come in and shadow. And I test them as simple as I have my assistant call me out of the interview. And I have her sit down and I just say, I'm on question three. Why don't you continue? And I want to say how they handle that or they resume it. They disrespect people younger than me because my whole company is young. So there's a lot of things I do like that. And then just because you hired them, I don't know. Depends on the state you're in. We have 90 days probation. And if you can't live up to your interview, we'll either extend it, but probably at my company, we'll just say, you know, we're going to be testing you and you're going to be testing us in the 90 days. And that's tricky. A lot of people say, well, nobody's going to risk coming to you if they know they could lose their job in 90 days. Oh, yeah, high accountable as well because high accountable is that nothing to fear. So this was a major turning point for us, even something you said earlier that was so interesting to me is that so many organizations try to be the best place to work for all of America. Yes. And rather than trying to be the best place to work for high accountable people that align with your organizational values. Exactly. So we tell people this all the time, we're the best place to work for people that like doing this type of work that love working on a team like this, that love the accountability that comes with it, the love the commitment that love all those things. But if those things don't appeal to you, this might be the worst place to work. Exactly. And we got to quit lying to people. People say, oh, family is really important. It is to us. But we don't tell you, you know, if you need to go to your kids' little league game, we'll make sure it happens because that's not the case in our organization. Most of my people travel five days a week. We work hard. We play hard. Now, will you get over the top crazy trips to Cabo? Not crazy in like HR terms, but fun trips. Yeah, because we have the ability to take advantage of some of our miles and stuff that other people don't have. But I don't promise people that you won't be here till midnight. It's flexible. If you're here till midnight, you might not be in the next morning. You can work from home. But what's not flexible is that you can never miss a deadline. What are your thoughts then on, and this became popularized, I think, in the last several years, it was almost as if maybe it came out of Silicon Valley where organizations would compete based on who had the ping pong table, the water slide, all different levels of like just things that they felt could draw in talent that they offered. I think it was stemmed around really work-life balance and making work a fun place to be. Sure. Well, you don't have the right people on your team if work's not fun because for me, work and pleasure aren't separate. So I want people that really are passionate about it. But I would tell you I'm working with a lot of those companies now and what they've realized and what we've shown in the research is that if you overrote it on engagement, buying people's love, engage them without accountability creates entitlement. And now they've kind of created the monster that they can't feed. And some of those companies have the luxury of doing that. I'm all about engaging folks. I would tell you that if you only have high accountables in your workplace, they're easy to reward and engage. I will give them anything because anything I spend on them comes back threefold. But if I'm trying to buy somebody's commitment or love or buy in, it's never going to happen and it's never going to be sustainable. So for me, let's have organic fun. For me as a boss, I need to watch my ego and not be overly money focused or trying control. I need to be willing to fund the experience of my team and do it well. But they have eating preferences. I mean, if you came into my company, you would say your people are incredibly spoiled. It would look like we're buying their love. We're not. They're incredibly dedicated. So if they would rather drink all in milk than something else, we will definitely have that delivered. It is the motive behind it, I think. And it always comes back to accountability. It seems if you could speak to the difference between the feedback you will receive when you're doing things like feedback, surveys, engagement surveys from members of the team where you'll have ones that are high accountable versus low accountable. We see a lot of leaders that want everybody to be happy. Yeah. And what I would tell you from my backgrounds at therapy is this is one of the things when I first came into leadership, they're like, we're doing the engagement survey and 10% of your bonus is based on whether or not you keep people happy. And I said, but 90% based on results that I produce. So I'm not going to go chasing after the 10% keep everybody happy. Now while I treat people with respect, I try and pay attention to my own bias so that I'm not leveraging somebody's diversity, absolutely. But what I found out in the whole engagement piece and that focus on keeping people happy is it didn't play out in what we know from psychology because the same behavior cannot please a high accountable and a low accountable at the same time. You will always be ticking somebody off. Now what do I mean by that? We are going to implement change so that we stay at the forefront of delivering progressive things for our clients. Well, someone who is going to say low accountability is anxious when change is happening. Somebody who's in a state of high accountability is anxious when change is not happening. But yet we say change is hard. But it's only hard for the unready. So my high accountable are like, Si, why aren't we doing this? The competition is doing X, Y and Z and I'll lead it. Let's test it. Let's experiment with it. The low accountable is like, you know, it's only been on the market like eight years. So we're really sure that we're going to stick with this and I just want to do the bare minimum. So when I started doing engagement surveys, it floored me that your vote on the engagement survey, one was anonymous, which I think kills accountability. If you have to beg all of this, wait for a survey to tell me you didn't have the tools to do your work, we got bigger problems than your engagement. But that every vote counted the same. Every single vote with you on performance plan or you are my top star, your vote on the engagement survey count the same. And to me, that's corrupted data. And the second thing everybody talks about is that engagement drives results. And we know that that's simply not true. It's a shadow factor. Accountability drives engagement. People high in accountability choose engagement more often than people. Low in accountability in the same circumstances. And accountability drives results. So accountability is really the holy grail. So we have an engagement survey that we created that lets you survey for engagement, but also give psycho assessment testing on your accountability levels. And then we clean up your data before you see it. We show you what the medium and high accountable said, do the credible witnesses. And we take out the noise of the low accountability. And it's amazing. People feel like they've actually been able to wave a magic wand over their data. And I think we've absolutely over rotated on, can I buy your love? Instead of, here's an open imitation. It's shared accountability. I will try and do my best to do right by you. We will learn about each other, but you've got to step up to the plate. So with that, how much of a leader's time and really where should a leader's time go when they've got both types of people in the organization, the high accountables and low accountables, how much of it should be spent aiming to rehabilitate versus focusing on rewarding and perhaps developing the high accountables? So to protect yourself from a legal environment and to be fair to your employees, you need to spend a bit of time with those that are low in accountability. And I would tell you that time needs to spend, not coaching, suggesting, cajoling, bargaining, inquiring. It needs to be spent, just performance managing. Here's the basics I need from you. Here's the essential behaviors I need you to exhibit or move them off your organization. But the average leader spends 80 hours extra on one person that is either resistant or not performing. And that extra time, that's what you need to feed your mid-high accountables. Because that time spent with them, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really gets you an ROI. And so you will get whatever you feed. And if you want to feed low accountability with your time, do it, but that's what you will get. And then be very careful, 'cause a lot of times we build a dream team. And then we put someone that is low-accompanied on that team and we say, you know what, if you can get this by Ed, it will be a good idea. And as if Ed is the throttle by which you're gonna run your company. And I believe in turning Dream Team's loose, get only high accountables onto a project, let them break the curve, feed them, you know, the resources they need, let them show you what possibilities there are. Then you can go back and say, look, my data as whether or not this is possible isn't corrupted by your resistance, we proved it possible with a homogeneous dream team who are all willing. Now let's go back and now that we know what's possible, let's find the ways to scale it and standardize it for everybody else. We end up working harder for someone's success than they are. And that's pure codependency to me. A lot of leaders call that servant leadership and other things, but servant leadership's good stuff if you're a healthy leader. But most of us aren't healthy leaders. Instead of talking directly to someone that's setting a boundary, we talk about them and you know, which they read our minds. - And on that note, I mean, you look at this and this is something that over the years, perhaps I've even evolved in this sense because we as ourself's leaders grow, we wanna see that growth in other people and there's so much thought about coaching. Of course, you wanna help people grow and develop. You don't want them to make those mistakes, to make the poor decisions that will either exit them from your current organization or exit them from every other organization though moving to moving forward. But can you really change someone or can that only happen if they themselves are willing to change? - The key ingredient people are like, well, this person change, it depends on their willingness. It's absolutely willingness. I believe from a skill set standpoint, people are pretty unlimited in potential. It's the willingness. And so one, when you're working with somebody before you figure out and think, oh my gosh, what can I do to get them more successful? Go to them. What's your level of willingness to really evolve in this situation? And if they're like, I'm not willing at all, I only agree with the strategy. Help me understand there's some key objections I should know about. No, it's just not my preference. I don't like work in that way. Well, that's where we're heading. So what's your plan to get on board? I am a have one. You have to ask this. What's your plan to transition outside the organization? Because most leaders let people have a third option. They're going to stay in vents and stay in complaint and stay in resistance and stay in slow your day on. I own my own company. This is my money not in the market. It's in my company. I want the ROI. I'm not willing to have that. So if leaders are going to coach, they need to not tell, but they need to ask questions. So we believe feedback is important. But feedback needs to be short and self-reflection long. And so coaching is helping people be curious about themselves. And I just say coaching is like, look at your results. And notice you and how you moved through that situation. And what did you observe? And what would you like to be more skilled in or to do differently? And how do you want to change your approach? And one of the things that I think we want to as leaders sometimes is we want to give people what they need so they can have impact in the world. And it's incredible value how people are impacted by the world. And we're just there to help them make sense of it. So you got to give your people challenges. We know this about accountability. They got to be challenged. They have to experience accountability. They have to experience some natural consequences. You give them some feedback, but it's a lot of self-reflection and a lot of just making sense of it. As you say, making sense, it almost seems that leaders spend a lot of time trying to make sense of their people. So when they are challenging them and the person to may not be responding in the right way, they think, well, there's some other organization that's enluering them. Maybe they think the grasses greener. And they still try to make sense of poor performance, or poor accountability. If you're wanting your organization to be world class, and it isn't today, and you know what accountability it takes to get there. But you've had people there for 10, 15, 20 years that have gotten used to a certain standard, and you're about to raise that standard significantly for them. Can you really get that organization to where it needs to be without just cleaning house? Absolutely. Absolutely. One of the ways that we keep ourselves from taking any action is the ego story. That if I raise standards, I'll lose everyone. And that just doesn't play out in the actual facts. You have three groups in your organization. You have a group that you will lose, and you should lose, because the fact that you're thinking a warm body is better than nobody, or that there's nobody else out there. And then you'll have two other groups. You'll have people who will be thrilled that the standards are higher, and that people are going to be held to those standards, because they were already meeting those. Unfortunately, you took work away from the people not doing their work, and you gave it to the people who are overperforming. Then there's the middle group, and they will come your way. They are highly implementable, and they will come your way. So when people say, "I add these people here. They've been here 10 years. They're good people." They're doing bad math. Just because somebody's been here 10 years, doesn't mean they have the skills to take you to the next level. It doesn't mean that they're even loyal to you. People are like, "They are loyal to me." I'm like, "You should have heard what I heard in the bathroom. They are not loyal to you. They are using you." Now, it doesn't have to be this big battle of wills. It's not your decision whether they stay and go, whether they grow or not. You gotta get out of all that manipulation, which is ego, and ask them. Here's what the standard is that we're going towards any year from now. Are you willing to join me on that path? I will support you. I have responsibility in this. I've let you set for a few years. So I will jointly help train you up, but are you willing to go there? And you're willing this will become obvious to me, with your growth and your development. And if you're not willing to go there, it's okay. I'm not gonna hold you hostage, but most of us do really bad bath. I hear it all the time. Say you don't understand. They're the only expert in the world on this particular topic. They're like, "Well, let's see if that's true. Google it." Oh, that's right. You can buy that talent. You can rent it. There's a hundred ways to get that expertise. No one is an expert anymore in their own right. And a lot of people are like, "Side they're a rock star." I mean, they can't get along with anybody. And I have to give them a private office and I have to have a handler. And I even at times have to take three approaches to talk to them. I have to see what mood they're in, but they're a rock star. And I'm like, "Stop calling them a rock star." It's not technical performance any longer. That's almost past fail. The true value of an employee, they need to deliver what the organization requires. A lot of people have technical knowledge, but they won't deliver it for the organization. They hoard it. They have to deliver what the organization requires, but then they have to be growing and developing. So they will assure us they'll be relevant into the future. And then a big number of most people don't think about is what's their true cost? What's the cost of them in addition to their salary and benefits? What's their freak out factor? What's their maintenance fee? What is their hassle factor? They're a drama question. And a lot of people, the ego, forgets that stuff and accepts it as a cost of doing business. And over values the other stuff. We really do poor math. And we do it in a way that keeps us safe so that we don't have to make hard decisions and confront things. And that's where a lot of business owners use hope as their strategy. - So speaking of math, there's an equation, an metric that you've used is called the employee value equation, which leads us to believe that, no matter how good someone may be, if they've had a high enough emotional waste of score. If you look at just the amount of negativity they bring in, doesn't matter if they're a top former, doesn't matter if they're your best salesperson, whatever it might be, keeping those people at your organization. Let's say that they're in terms of emotional expense in this a three or four or five, they've come out negative. - They would come out negative. And I'm not telling you you need to fire that person. I once had a neural surgeon, the only one in the three state area. But I didn't lie to myself about it. We had him come through a different exit. We limited his interaction with staff. We didn't pretend that this person was a rock star. We pretended, or we didn't pretend the reality was, he was a decent surgeon, although even a surgeon needs good team skills. And he was all we had for now. But I think it's important because that's where people emotionally blackmail you. In a lot of cases, people are like, well, if they left, they would take all my customers with them. What is your part in getting your company to a point of risk where your customer's interaction is only with one person who tends to withhold information from you? They're like, well, that's a big risk. I'm like, well, then put a plan in place to mitigate that risk because every time someone gives me a reason why they have to keep somebody who costs more than they're worth, it leads back to that leader's accountability level. - It seems like you shouldn't have to justify. There's so much, yeah, but through this, or either they've been here a long time, or with me when we first started the company, whatever that might be, and it puts a lot of just responsibility and accountability on all of us to continue to learn and grow and develop and ultimately contribute. - Yeah, and a key is, if you're conversational about these things as they're happening, you never have to get confrontational. Part of this is 15 years of cleanup for things you haven't done. But I hear that a lot. in people who started their maybe practice or business and then they've grown. They see people like family. But if they had an uncle who acted the way that employee did, and I said, "But you need to have a two hour lunch with them every single day, even with their family." They would say, "No way. I'm only gonna see that person at Thanksgiving." And yeah, we're willing to work with people. We call them family. The Dalai Lama, I think, said it best. I love his stuff, but he said, "If you're suffering, there's really only two ways forward." 'Cause all suffering is needless. If it's fixable, fix it. And if it's not, then own it, accept it. Just know it's part of your reality. But most of us want the third option. We don't wanna fix it. We don't wanna own it. We wanna vent about it. And that is the lowest level of accountability, a leader in an organization can be in. - We've got a rule in ours, and this is actually even extends to my wife and I, in the sense that you're allowed to complain about something once or someone. I'll hear you out. It's the same thing goes with me. I can complain one time. But then either do something about it the second time or don't complain again. - Yeah. I love it. It's exactly what I'm talking about. It's such a good rule. And now, we may set time aside to better understand something that we need to sit with for a few weeks to figure out what's going on. But that's moving towards fixing it. And a lot of people want that third option again. I don't wanna fix it. I'm not willing to give grace and tell me to mercy and accept it. So I just wanna vent about it or complain about it. And a lot of people lie. They go, "I accept it." I go, "Well, that comes with not complaining about it." I'm not talking about people's quirkiness. I'm not talking about people's diversity. If you came through our office, we have a lot of people's preferences catered to. They would tell you that they're not terrorist demands. They're inquiries in, "Hey, it would help me to have an extra monitor "and is that seem worthy to you?" I want them to work with me because they won't work with me. But other people enable them and buy them off and then try and keep them. And I mean, that's a tough go of it. - So let's say you bring on somebody who's great and they've been great for a very long time. Let's say not even a very long time. Let's say six months a year, but it's their first or second job. And then like maybe the perspective of where, how things are somewhere else. So they hear that the grass is greener somewhere else. What are some of the things or can you do anything to give this person perspective? Or do they just need to learn on their own? - I think the answer again is up to that person, but the worst thing you can do is be the one that tells them that because you're not a credible witness in that moment. You have too much to lose. I wouldn't take your consults under advisement. I also believe that I can be the point of truth for somebody then. And I have to tell them that I'm not an unbiased person here. I think my organization is pretty dandy, but that's my ego. I haven't been in another organization for 10 years as an employee. - So you mentioned it a few times. You've got a book that has ego in the title. And I wanna talk a little bit about ego. Is ego the root of all evil? - I think that ego is not the root of all evil. People not knowing how their mind works causes a lot of problems because we get played by our ego all the time and we're not educated about things like stop believing everything you think and good mental processes. So I think judgment is a big root of all evil that comes out of ego. So I guess I would give you that. It probably is the big cause of trouble. - But it seems that for many business owners, if they don't have the confidence to drive the change that they feel is necessary in their organization and they feel like, well, what if the team responds in this way? What if they leave me? What if this person leaves and I'm not able to find somebody else? A lot of it is based around perhaps fear or just this belief that rather stay with what I know and have this consistency that I have here. Even if it's consistently bad and consistently stressful and consistently dramatic, then the belief of am I really gonna be able to replace this person? - Yeah. Which back when I was in marriage counseling as a therapist is everybody's reason that they settle is 'cause they compare what they have to the worst fears of as if they had nothing to do with making that better. It's fine with me if you settle. Just quit lying about it. So I used to go to my physician for my annual physicals and I wasn't losing weight and in fact, it was gaining weight. And so he would talk to me about all the choices. I knew, I know nutrition, I know movement, I've run marital bonds, I know that stuff. And he would ask me, he's like, do you wanna be this weight? And I'm like, no, I'd like to cut some weight down so that I could be healthier. And he's like, well, you know what to do then. And when I would see him, I wasn't getting the results I wanted and my approach was excuses. Oh, but you don't understand. I travel all the time. It's so hard. I get in at midnight. I'm up at like six. I, you know, my metabolism is shut down. I'm older. What I needed to do if I'm gonna say the way that I'm gonna stay is just stop lying about it. People are like, "Side, are you trying to lose weight?" And I'm just honest about it. I'm like, well, let me think about what I have for breakfast. No, it doesn't appear like I'm trying to lose weight at all. So for me, it's like, you can keep those people just quit playing the victim. If you walk into some place, go, you know, I have a firm, I have mediocre results. I spend a lot of my time on people that I don't enjoy being around. And that's my strategic plan for next year as well. Stop lying about it because what people do is they complain as if their standards are high. And they lead us if their standards are low and you can't have both. Oh, I love that. And I've got to ask you this because we've got to talk about millennials in the sense that, you know, for many law firms, as we came into this age where a lot of millennials entered the workforce, they look at them as almost like alien in the sense of, I don't understand these people. They behave differently. They want different things. But what do you see as the differences in the millennial workforce? And then also, are there some better ways to perhaps manage millennials or different ones? I think so. You know, my take on millennials is kind of controversial because anytime you divide up by a group and then generalize in stereotype, you're brewing an excuse. Instead of me modernizing my leadership skills, you know, over 20 years, I use the same skills and they don't work with the modern population in the modern world. And then I blame the people that they don't work on. So my whole team is millennials. And the other thing is a lot of people like these are millennials. Well, most of them are 35 with two kids and a mortgage. How long you gonna go on blaming people, you know, entering their 40s? So for me, I just really say, stay away from stereotyping. And if you want to classify people, classify them by accountability levels because no matter what your age, your human condition is you have this ego and you have issues with accountability. As I really think that it was a popular excuse for folks, now do I need to modernize my leadership approach based on many things, based on what we've learned about unconscious bias, based on what we've learned as far as microaggressions and, you know, harassment. And yeah, I need to be building a more inclusive workplace. I need to be looking at my own unconscious biases. But that has nothing to do with the millennials that has to do with us as humans, hopefully evolving. And so I think a lot of things just get thrown at the millennials. This situation where in this human condition, it's not an age situation, it's a human condition. So here's what I say, pick good people, coach them. A lot of people got off track. Millennials were delivered up to them. And they were like, these people came undeveloped or underdeveloped. It's like, well, develop them. And then get flexible in the workplace because most people who haven't self-reflected and their skillsets aren't high have problem with millennials. The main difference between millennials and me, of course, I'm kind of a cross-generation, is millennials have a low tolerance for inefficiency. Thank God. Great. So when you're like, please put that in triplicate, file it in two places. And then can you scan it and send me a picture? No, I'm not doing any of that. Take your own phone out. Take a picture of the document, file it in your own place. And we're like, they just aren't willing to pay their dues. They aren't willing to enable you to stay dinosaur in your approach. And that's why if people have control issues, if they're commanding control, they get nervous. Where are these people? Their butts aren't in the chair. How can they be working? My team can work from wherever they want, don't miss deadlines. Be where you need it when you're needed. And what I would tell you is that when I've done this, I lead less in my company. My strategic plans now, my people, it's like Shark Tank. They bring me their ideas. I sit back. I haven't thought of a single one. I shouldn't. I'm old. And they bring me their ideas. They pitch them. Their bonus is a percentage of what ideas I accept. I just sit with someone from my legal team, someone from my accounting team, some of my board members that are innovative. And we see the pitch. They came to me one day. They said, three years ago, say, give everything you do away for free. We're going to film everything. We're going to podcast everything. And I make, that's your business plan. We stop charging for things. They're like, yeah, we're going to put it out and social media. media, like Gary Vaynerchuk does, it's gonna triple your business. Now, if that were left to me, I'd be like, that's ridiculous. There's like, no, Garth Brooks, like, gives all of his songs away and everybody wants to see him at concert. I'm like, this is a stunningly ridiculous proposal. And I got outvoted and we did that and it's tripled our business because I'm not the best reference point for what the market needs today. Yeah. And it puts a responsibility on leaders to really just evolve. What was acceptable or how the world was, let's say 20 years ago, may not be, how it is 20 years from now. And so much of it is, I always like to ask people who are closest to the problem, ones that are on it. So we hear from people a lot of times, they'll say, well, I'm not on social media, but that doesn't mean your clients aren't. That doesn't mean that the world doesn't. So just- I've said the group of people are like, we gotta get these employees off Twitter. And I'm like, are you on Twitter? Have you ever been on Twitter? No, then you don't even know what it is. And by the way, don't put people go put all your phones away. We're having a meeting. My team bring all your technology. We'll probably have to do a bunch of Google searches to figure out what the competition's doing. I think it's so important. So sad. Thank you for this and to close this out. Because this is really a podcast around game changes. You're certainly a game changer in the leadership and drama research space. But what would you say that's being a game changer mean to you? To be a game changer, you need to foster curiosity. You have got to say super curious all the time. You've got to focus on your own evolution. It's not you that is going to think of what's next in the game changing. It is you that need to facilitate different conversations. So a lot of people think game changers are, I come up with an innovative idea. That's not true. I'm willing to say curious and bring people together and say, let's keep thinking about this. But this differently, that's the biggest thing. The leaders I find that aren't game changers. The more you're complaining, that's the sign for the more evolving you have yet to do. So I think it really is being a citizen of the world. Game changers are people that will get out there in the mess. I'm going to try this. I'll screw it up. Let's just with compassion observe it. Let's fail fast. Let's do what we can do. I hope you enjoyed revisiting this episode of the Game Changing Attorney podcast with our guest, Si Wakeman, and have gained new insights from our timeless conversation. If you found this episode valuable, here are three free ways that I can help you grow your law firm. Number one, download the first chapter of my book, absolutely free, at Game Changing Attorney.com. Number two, you can shoot me a text at 404-531-7691 and I'll answer any question that you've got from me. And finally, number three, if you can lead this podcast a five-star review, it'll help us gain access to more influential thought leaders and bring their lessons learned here to you. For more information on our interview with Si Wakeman, see the show notes for this episode in your podcast app or visit legalpodcast.com.