110 - Creating a Just and Efficient Workplace: The Key to Productivity and Innovation with The Crone Law Firm's Alan Crone

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Alan Krohn, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder and CEO of the Krohn Law Firm, and that can be found at thekrohnlawfirm.com. Plc.com in Memphis, Tennessee. Welcome to the show.

That's right, Memphis, Tennessee. We also have offices in, uh, St. Louis and Chicago.

Got the Midwest covered, South.

That's right, the first steps in my, in my, uh, my plan of world domination.

Good, starting from Memphis, center of the country. Way to go. Tell us a little bit about your backstory. We're both— well, how'd you get started?

I'm a, I'm a fifth generation Memphian. Not many of us around. Memphis is a river town, and, and so a lot of people in and out all the time. Um, but I grew up here in this area. I actually, uh, did my 4 years of high school in the St. Louis area at a preparatory seminary in Belleville, and Then came back, went to college here at the— what was then Memphis State University, now the University of Memphis. And my wife and I have known each other for— since high school. We met in the theater. We were doing, doing plays together, and halfway through college we started dating as a result of one particular show. And, uh, then we went to law school together. So she's, she's much more, um, she's much smarter than me. She went to Vanderbilt undergraduate, and, uh, uh, we went to law school at the University of Memphis, Memphis State. And she's done big great things, and, and I just try to keep up with her.

Does she, does she practice with you, or does she have her own practice?

Oh, she, she— I have begged her to practice with me. She won't do it. It would elevate my practice considerably. She actually is in-house. She's a— she is a SEC lawyer, and not the— not the fun kind with whistles, the dangerous kind with gold badges. Uh, she works for a broker-dealer and does compliance work for them. So, um, she is— she's a— uh, she was once, uh, referred to, um, by one of her clients, you know, CEOs, as the Kraken. He would need to release the Kraken. And that was Alison Crone.

So, wow.

So she's, you know, one of those things I outkicked my coverage on, on getting married. And she's always been able to let me do what I need to do and You know, being self-employed, or as I like to say, exploring that line between self and unemployment. Exactly. Is one thing. So it's nice to have a steady paycheck from one person in the family.

That's it. Although I imagine your paychecks when they come can be pretty sizable.

Well, you know, I do what I can. I do what I can. I'm a recovering politician. I, you know, growing up professionally, I did a lot of politics. I was— I worked for the governor when I was in my 20s and worked— I was a party chairman here during the 2000s and I kind of retired from politics in my 40s, and then, uh, right after, I guess, with '51, '52, I did a stint on our city council and then was the chief, um, uh, policy advisor for our mayor for 4 years while I was also running the law firm. I had a, an office in City Hall and an office here, went back and forth for 4 years, and love that. Now I'm full-time CEO here at the law firm. Still dabble in politics, but as I said, I'm recovering. Um, it's— if you can't just go cold turkey on that stuff.

What does that get you excited in the morning? You get up and get roaring.

I, you know, I love the, um, I love the challenge of what I'm gonna, what I'm gonna face that day. Um, you know, we are— my professional mission is to transform the American workplace. And I think that discrimination, uh, there's just a lot of nonsense that, that we put on ourselves in the American workplace. Some of it's illegal, some of it's not illegal. And so we've got a number of different divisions here, and our goal is to make up a a just and more efficient workplace. And that benefits not just workers but also businesses. I'm an unabashed capitalist, and I think that capitalism is great. The American economic system is great. But we live in a fallen world, and, you know, there's lots of things that prevent us from realizing our ultimate efficiency and productivity. And so part of our goal is to help eliminate as much of that nonsense as we can. We do some of that in the courtroom by representing people when things have gotten to a certain point. We also try to do that prospectively by, you know, I do a lot of seminars and programs for businesses to help them be in compliance. And one of my mantras is, you know, legal compliance isn't just smart, because it keeps you out of the courtroom. It's good business, right? And, and, and so I, I, one of the things for business owners is embrace legal compliance. Use that to make your business better. Don't just see it as, you know, some waste of money that you have to get through because America is too litigious. Embrace the idea of, of legal compliance, uh, because it's, it's good business.

Yeah, and if you're, if you treat your employees well, obviously, you know, assuming everything else is working well, you're going to have a profitable business.

That's exactly right.

And when you, when you don't treat your employees well, um, eventually it's going to catch up to you in one way or another, whether it's a lawsuit or people walking out the door, the Great Resignation, whatever it might be. And that's, uh, it's funny when I think— I'd like your assessment on this. My sense is that when people get into leadership roles, they kind of lose, they, they lose their grounding. And they lose sense of the people that are working for the business that maybe are only working from paycheck to paycheck, but they lose a sense of who those people are and what they do and how to treat them well.

And, you know, I think it's more ingrained than that. I think that there is an archetype that we all buy into of the boss and everybody else, right? And, you know, autocratic, all of those kinds of things. And there are a lot of good people that, that become the boss. Either they start their own business or they get promoted, or they've always been in that track, whatever it is. And they've got that architect, that archetype in the, in the back of their mind, or maybe the front of their mind. Well, this is the way I'm supposed to be. And, um, I think a lot of it is breaking that down and realizing that in 2023, for a lot of reasons, the autocratic style of management just isn't going to fly anymore.

Not anymore.

And so we got to get out of that, and we got to realize that we've got to communicate that all life is relationships. You know, whether you believe in God or not, We are created in such a way that we live in community. And I think that the pandemic showed us that, right? That how important that sense of community is even for the most isolated introvert.

Right.

And so we've got to bring that into our workplace in an appropriate way.

Right. I agree that the command and control structures that kind of grew out of World War II in the 1950s and '60s, not appropriate anymore. And, and, but unfortunately, I'm finding that companies are not investing in leadership, proper leadership training, and they're just letting people evolve into leadership without any guidance. And so they just do what was done to them, and, and this, these problems just keep persisting generationally. Absolutely.

And, um, you know, it amazes me, and I'm talking about big companies, small companies, we all know the, the, the manager at whatever level who just has— is just tone deaf to how he or she is perceived and, you know, comes in and runs roughshod over everybody and The turnover is terrible. And again, that's an area where you just talk about it from a business standpoint, right? Turnover. I would rather have a tornado wipe out my physical plant than to have an excessive amount of turnover.

Amazon loses, I did the calculation, I think it's $18 billion a year on turnover.

I believe it.

That's a third of its profit.

And, you know, and that's even worse for a small company. Oh yeah, you know, I mean, if you're a regional company and you've got 100 employees, you have a— if you have 30% turnover, that's expensive. It's expensive to recruit them, it's expensive to train them, it's expensive to retain them, right? And, um, and so it all, it all really comes down to how do you, how do you, uh, as you say, exercise leadership and realize that it's just not a matter of issuing orders, that you've really got to get alignment and engagement. All of those kind of buzzy words that we're hearing from consultants nowadays, right? We got to take it seriously and listen to them because it's valuable information.

What is it that's unique about you that you bring to the table?

Well, I think part of it is my career in politics. Which is, you know, is it's to be successful in politics. I think at least the way I've approached it is I have an ability to make those connections of, you know, what people's motives are, what are they really looking for, and how can we bring that together into a common direction. I think I'm fairly empathetic in you know, can read people on an individual basis, which I think helps with leadership. And, you know, I also think I'm one of the few lawyers that recognized a long time ago that we are professionals. And I always like to dissect that because I think it's important. The reason we're professionals is that we profess an oath. There are lots of industries where you can start a, you know, you can start a business consulting firm and you're not professing an oath to anybody. You're just in business. Nothing wrong with that. Doctors, lawyers, other professionals, you know, as lawyers, we take an oath. We raise our right hand and swear that we're going to uphold certain values beyond just making money. And so I don't ever want to get away from saying, hey, we're a profession and we have certain values and we have, we have certain places where we're not going to go ethically or morally that a lot of other industries aren't bound by, right? But that doesn't mean that we can just say, all right, we're not going to run our, uh, professions like a business. Because you got to be, you got to be businesslike. You've got to have business concepts at play. For a long time, lawyers enjoyed a huge monopoly that allowed us to— and we still do— that allowed us not to have to worry about business, uh, processes. You could make a lot of money, and even though you weren't being very efficient, you, you could waste a lot of money and still take a lot of money home. Well, that, that's, that really is closing. Yeah, and so I'm— I don't want to blow my own horn, but all I do right now is I'm a full-time CEO, and there are not many lawyers who will say that, right? And so we really look at the business side. We really look at, um, you know, how to be efficient, how to support our folks so that they can deliver the best services, um, and and take advantage of all the advantages that we have, but not squander nearly as much of the resources as I might have done 10 or 15 years ago.

So you've got 3 offices: Memphis, St. Louis, and Chicago.

Is that right?

Chicago, yes, sir.

How do you manage that? That's about a 1,000-mile reach.

Well, you know, technology, makes it a lot easier. I don't know that I would have done it. In fact, I did it. I opened the first office in St. Louis during the pandemic, and it's something we'd wanted to do. You know, Memphis is, is a great town, but it's, it's not a very rich town. And so there's limited opportunity in Memphis and West Tennessee. I mean, if you look at West Tennessee, Northern Mississippi, and Eastern Arkansas, Um, it's getting better, but that's— that ain't the land of milk and honey. I mean, there's, there's a lot of issues there, economic issues. Um, so we, we were looking at, okay, how do we expand? St. Louis has got a great economic base, so let's, let's go there. Well, during the pandemic, nobody was going in anybody's offices to begin with, so we were able to open that office. Um, I'm licensed in Missouri, and so We would just see people and we'd form a relationship with them, and then eventually we might have to meet with them. Well, then we get in the car and we go up there, or we say, you know, look, let's do it over Zoom. And once people trusted us and realized that, again, like I say, there really were no in-person meetings. So that's how we do a lot of it. We've got people that are on the ground there. We run a lot of, of our practice from Memphis still. Um, you know, real estate in downtown Memphis is a fraction of what real estate in Chicago is, right? So, um, so that's how we do it. We stay on top of one another, um, trying to keep the communication open. And then I, you know, I'm generally in each office, uh, my aspiration is once a month. Some months, uh, not so much because of just like the holidays and those sorts of things. But it's a combination of virtual and in-person to keep everybody aligned.

This show is called Listening with Leaders, and that's because I'm a student of listening. I think it's the kind of the foundational skill of life. Tell me about the importance of listening in your work as a CEO.

Well, I'm constantly trying to improve my listening skills.. But one, one tactic or one discipline that about 6 months ago I really began to instill is just asking short questions. Why, where, how, what. Why, what, and how are great ways to start any question. And then I make an effort not to say anything. And again, to be really present and not just hear but process what, what the other person is, is saying. And it takes a lot of practice, it takes a lot of, uh, discipline, um, not to form a thought and then want to show everybody how smart you are, or, um, you know, jump in and just solve the equation and move on. And what's great about that is you end up— I end up getting a lot better solutions to problems, a lot better innovations by really tapping into the wisdom that's in my workforce. And again, I think that's something that where CEOs in, you know, my dad's age, You know, they thought they had to be Superman. They had to come up with everything on their own. And when you realize that you don't, man, that's a— what a freeing concept that is. And that's when a company really starts to be successful, when everybody exercises a little bit of humility.

This goes back to what we were talking about earlier about being a leader where you're creating safety in the organization. One of the— one of the, uh, Ronald Heifetz is a professor at Harvard, wrote a book called Leadership Without Easy Answers, and he talks about the three tasks of leadership, which is focus, direction, and safety. And then Amazon came out with a big study a couple of years ago showing that the differentiating factor between the teams of the top 1/10 of 1% and everybody else was that they had psychological safety on in their groups.. And so I think about that a lot because when you can create that emotional safety as a leader, people are gonna follow you. And that got, that's kind of been an offshoot of the listening work I've done. I really, really got interested in it when I started with my co-founder, Prison of, Laurel Crawford, Prison of Peace here in California. We, we're going into maximum security prisons and teaching murderers how to be peacemakers. Uh, and we've been doing that for the last 14 years. But what we've learned is that when they learn how to listen, that's when, that's when the magic occurs, because it's the listening that's going to calm people down. It's the listening that's going to cause people to be heard and to feel validated and to feel safe. And in those environments, there's no violence. So pretty critical. And I think those are lessons that can be brought to bear in the business world as well, whether it's a law firm or a manufacturing firm.

100%. And it takes time to listen. And I think that's one reason why a lot of, a lot of leaders don't listen. It's not because they don't want to hear what everybody has to say, is they perceive there's not enough time.

And that's a perception. I think it's a false perception because I think that, I mean, the title of my last book is How to De-Escalate an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less. And it's true, you can literally de-escalate. It takes 90 seconds to calm somebody down. I mean, that's not taking a lot of time. I think the problem, I think the real problem is that we're not taught how to listen. You know, we're taught, we learn by osmosis, but there's no formal education teaching us how to listen. Now, law school's a little different. You know, you take a trial advocacy course or something like that. You begin to learn how to listen, you know, in a trial to, to, you know, what the testimony is and, and that sort of thing. But that's a different kind of listening than listening to validate. And, and I think the real— I think, I think that's a real lack in our education, that we're not, we're not trained in this skill. We just naturally assume we can do it, and we can't. It creates problems.

Right, right.

How many, how many cases have you seen where if you really look at the root of the problem in an employment case, it's coming down to somebody who wasn't listening?

Oh, 100%.

Absolutely.

You know, I mean, I, I can tell you all kinds of stories, uh, where it's a communication breakdown. I always say there's what— there's the truth and there's what you can prove in court.

That's right.

And oftentimes, because people don't face the truth or accept the truth, um, what you're left with is an inference that it's something else, and that thing may be discrimination or what have you, right? Uh, but if, if we could communicate better— I tell you something else that's not taught, that's kind of the, the, the flip side of that, is we're not taught, taught how to confront each other.

Oh, very good. You're right. And I have difficult conversations.

That's exactly right. And, you know, my favorite story on that is I had a client once— this is years ago— and he had worked for a particular, particular company for 30 years. He was a, in his 60s, Black gentleman, and he comes to my office and he says, they fired me. Let's call him Isaac. I said, Isaac, why, why they fire you? Well, they, they said it was because I was late all the time, but that can't be the reason. I think it's because I'm Black. I said, why do you think that? Well, uh, two reasons. One, I got a new, uh, supervisor who's white, and, um, you know, and the second reason is I've worked there for 30 years and I've been late every day, and it hadn't been a problem until now. And the short version of that story is this new guy had never really confronted him about being late and never asked about why he was late. Well, he was late because he didn't have a car. And in Memphis, it can take you 2 hours round trip to get to work depending upon where you live and where your job is, because our, our, uh our public transit system is terrible. And, and so, you know, if they, if they had had a conversation and, and confronted, said, look, on the business side, look, it's important that you're here on time, um, and from the employee side, maybe there was a way to work it out. I mean, maybe instead of starting at 8, they, they could start at 8:30, but they never really tried to do that.. And so it ended up looking like it was racial discrimination. And, um, and so that cost the company some money because we ended up settling that case, and it wasn't an insignificant settlement, right? I think it could have all been avoided if this—

this—

and the other— and the guy was young— if he had been trained or taught how to have that conversation and not just assume, well, he's late all the time and he's everywhere, he's a bad employee, therefore he's a bad employee. And so what happened there? 30 years of institutional knowledge walked out the door, right? You know, that's not insignificant either. So, uh, and there are hundreds of stories like that that a guy like me can tell where, you know, it really is communication and a lack of confrontation. Um, because most people want to do a good job, you know, they want a good review, they want their, their boss to sing their praises. Now there's some people that are, you know, for whatever reason are lazy or they don't care, they don't have the capacity to do it. But most people want to do it, but most people also don't know what really is what they're being accountable on. They don't really understand, right, exactly what the expectations are. And those are the things that I find more and more could avoid lawsuits.

Yeah, the problem is, I think, as I see it from my coming in as a mediator and a peacemaker is that people are, they're afraid of confrontation because they're afraid the emotions are going to get out of control. And so they'd rather avoid than confront. And, and what I teach people is that you can make a difficult conversation transformative if you make it an exercise in listening. See, it all comes back to listening. And if you can listen correctly, you can have that conversation around that topic and it won't be difficult. It'll be— it will actually change lives. And it's a powerful message for people to learn. And, you know, unfortunately people don't. And so that's why you stay in business, because people, people make these mistakes over and over again. I was just thinking during our conversation about here I am, 73 years old, I've been practicing law for over 45 years, and we still got the same problems today that existed back when I started practicing in 1977. Nothing's really changed. Why is that?

Well, people really haven't changed.

True.

But I mean—

Go back and you read Cicero.

There you go.

You know, when I was in high school, we had to translate Cicero, and as you're reading it, you realize other than the absence of air conditioning, same problems, same problems in ancient Rome that we have now, right? Which, which parenthetically has always been my objection to time travel. Yeah, beyond the 20th century is the absence of air conditioning. But that—

well, we've come to the end of the half hour. Alan, thank you so much for your time today, and I really appreciate your wisdom and your chatting. Chatting with you, it's been a lot of fun.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

Absolutely.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, Would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.