#4 - Dr. Larry Richard Explains Lawyer Personalities and Psychology

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Hello everyone and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Mary Ocarl and today we are going to find out what's the deal with lawyers. My guest today is the amazing Dr. Larry Richard. He is the leading expert on the psychology of lawyer behavior. He advises law firms on leadership management teams, change management, talent selection, and so many other things. Having gathered personality data on thousands of lawyers, Larry is well known for his insights on the lawyer personality, which he refers to as, quote, the lawyer brain, something that I've personally referenced a lot you may have heard in many of my talks as well. So I'm thrilled to have you on the show. Welcome, Larry.

Well, thank you, Mary. Good to be here.

So, Larry, you know, we go back many years. I have heard you speak several times now. And what I love about it is each time I always learn something new. I, I learned something very useful and I always laugh a lot. So no pressure.

But seriously though, this is such a great topic, right? So many of us in the legal ops space or just generally in the legal ecosystem, be it at a vendor or consultant, we come into this world as non lawyers and frankly, none of us kind of knew what we were in for. I just chatted with one of my many new mentees last week. She's brand new to running a legal ops function at a huge big name household company, but she comes from a finance background and so she's telling me how she's approaching these projects with data and analytics and reasoning. And literally her first question to me was, what is the deal with these lawyers? You know, they don't listen, they don't want to do any of the things and they just tell me that everything is going to fail. She's like, I've, I've never worked with people like this before. And I just, I kind of chuckled because I've been there, right? And my response to her was, oh, girl, you are in for a rude awakening, right? These aren't regular people, these are lawyers. You've got to learn to treat them differently. But in all seriousness, that's a lot of what you've taught me, right? You've taught me that there are reasons for this. And how to win at it. Sometimes I feel like it might be insulting when I say stuff like this because I'm not a lawyer. And we all say we can't. No one can insult our families except ourselves. But you, you're actually a trained lawyer and you've kind of been studying them for a long time. I'd love to hear your reactions to that story, but also hear how you kind of went from being a lawyer to studying them and understanding what makes them tick.

So let's actually start with the background because I think that will help give context to the rest of the stuff that we're going to talk about. I did practice law. I actually came from a family of lawyers going back three generations. My grandfather was a classic Philadelphia lawyer, and my father, uncles, aunts, cousins, the family was just filled with lawyers. And so I just never even thought of any other career. I went from high school to college to, you know, pre law in college and went right to law school. And from day one, I really didn't like law school, but I stuck with it because it was kind of the family business. I got out, I got a very good job with the government. I was a litigator, practiced for not even a year and a half. And I just said, I got to get out of here. And I just started jumping from job to job to job. I don't think I held any job long, longer than 18 months. And most of them were shorter than that. And finally, after 10 years of doing that, I woke up one day and I said, it's not the job, it's the career. I'm in the wrong career, believe it or not. And it was just hard to accept that. But once I did, I said, let me do some soul searching, look through my kind of past evidence and see if there's anything that pops out. And what popped out was very clear. And there was just a through theme that was unmistakable. I love understanding people, helping people. In other words, psychology was my calling. And so at that point I just said, you know, I'm going to go back and I'm going to get a PhD in psychology and I'm going to study lawyers. Wow. And that's what I did. My doctoral research was what steered me accidentally into the personality field in my effort to transition. The I left out an in between step, which was when I had a small law office in New York across the street from my office, across the hallway from my office. One day, this empty office, I saw a sign painter putting a sign on the door. And it turned out that the people moving into that office were two psychologists, actually two brothers, both PhD psychologists, and they were starting a career counseling company. And I thought, wow, this is great. And I knocked on their door sight unseen. We had a conversation. I said, do you have a lawyer? They said, no. I said, let's barter. If you teach me everything about careers, I'll teach you everything. You know, I'll do your contracts and set up some standard forms for you and blah, blah, blah. To my surprise, they said yes. So I ended up taking. I ended up taking the Myers Briggs, which I had never heard of.

Okay?

And I fell in love with it. So when I was in graduate school, I said, I'm going to give the Myers Briggs to every lawyer I can think of. And my dissertation advisor wanted me to give it to like, you know, pick 40 people at a law firm in Philadelphia. And I said, no, I'm going to study 3,000 lawyers across the entire US and he said, you're crazy. It'll take you 10 years to do your dissertation. And I said, no, I'm going to do it in three years. And I did.

Right.

So I did the study. It's actually the only nationwide scientifically done study of lawyer personalities. And what I found shocked me. The people who go into law are dramatically different from other people. And at that time, that was in the early 90s. That was completely novel and surprising to me. But now, fast forward 30 years. It's the story that's continually told. I've been testing lawyers for all this time, and I see this over and over and over again. We are consistently different from the general public, from what you inelegantly called non lawyers. We all do that. But I get pushback from all of those people. And I like to use a term like other professionals.

Right, right.

And the reason we call them non lawyers is partly we've been trained to do that and partly because lawyers. One of the things I've discovered is that we're really low in resilience. We're very insecure and thin skinned. And how do you compensate for that? You build yourself up by putting other people down. Right. So if we can refer to others as non lawyers, and now they've even got you doing it because they've taught the non lawyers to call themselves that.

I know, it's terrible.

They're pretty good at persuasion, you know what I mean? But I'll call them professionals because I think it adds some dignity. Anyway, the point was, this insight that lawyers are different led me on a quest which I'm still on to try to mine the data, to try to look scientifically and study as many lawyers as I can. At this point, I've surveyed over 25,000 lawyers with personality tests of different sorts all over the world. I mean, most of the data are from the US but I also have lots from Canada, South America, Asia, Australasia, Europe. And the data are the same. What's interesting is a lawyer is a lawyer is a lawyer. You give me a lawyer from Hong Kong, a lawyer from Paris, a lawyer from Argentina, a lawyer from Kansas. The profile is going to look like lawyer to me before it starts looking like something from that location.

Right.

And that's, that's fascinating.

It's totally fascinating. And one of the early questions I had for you was so you're studying them after obviously they've become a lawyer. You know, they have the title of a lawyer. So they're, you know, they're grown adults and all. How much of this can we infer is nature versus nurture? Right? You said that a certain profile of people are attracted to the law, but how much of it is maybe like, you know, the way we train lawyers in school and in law firms that also maybe emphasizes some of those, those qualities as, as positive and reinforces them. Tell me more about your test, like how does it work?

There are a couple of ways to explain the answer, which is it's both. And there is a self selection process. People who have some of these traits already self select when they choose law school. There's also a weeding out process so that during the three years of law school, law students who have less lawyer like scores, especially low skepticism, tend to drop out at a disproportionate rate which further concentrates the high skepticism among those who remain. And then there are certain traits, namely skepticism, resilience and empathy, which are more learned. Most personality traits are more genetic, which means if you find lawyers with those traits in practice, they didn't become that way because the practice made them that way. Because the traits are pretty wired, they're biologically based. About 75% of the trait is contributed by our genetics and about 25% by our social environment and learning. The exceptions to that are the three traits I mentioned, resilience, empathy and skepticism. Those are more learned and as a result more exposure. Let's take skepticism. This is the classic illustration. We have tested 1Ls 1st year law students and the public on every trait averages at the 50th percentile. The test I use, the caliper profile, which is a Much more industrial strength, reliable and valid scientific test than the Myers Briggs. The caliper has been around since 1964 and it measures traits on a 0 to 100% scale. So if you take any group in the public, they're going to average close to the 50th percentile. There's a little slippage, but it's always going to be between 40 and 60% literally for each of the 18 traits. But lawyers are different. Seven. I'll repeat that. Seven. Of the 18 traits. The average score for lawyers is below 40 or above 60. That's just astonishing. Any way you cut it.

Yeah, absolutely.

When you look at that, those are the traits that stand out, and I've studied those in law students. So let's again take skepticism. We start with a public average of 50%. So the law students are all selected from that public, but the people who end up in law school already have a 10% higher skepticism score. There's something about law school that seems to attract a little bit disproportionately people who are innately skeptical. Then we get another 8 to 10% dropping out of the low skeptics dropping out over the three years of law school. So by the time we get to those who have finished law school, the average skepticism score, instead of being 50, is about 70%. And then over the next 10 years, most of the data I have comes from partners. And partners by definition had three years of law school and in practice for about 10 years, give or take. So that's 13 years. At the end of 13 years, the average skepticism score is 90%. You can see it keeps going up with exposure to skeptical thinking. And it started as a self selection process. So the answer is both and yeah.

Okay, so I'd love to get into all this because this is exactly how you describe, you know, what is the lawyer brain and kind of these qualities that are different than the general public. And what's great about these qualities is they actually help make you an amazing lawyer. Right. There's, there's certain traits that help you in the profession and then there might be some downsides that I often point to as the reason why we haven't seen a lot of change in our industry, not a lot of innovation. This industry has been stuck for a while and I point to that as one of the drivers of that. So let's start with skepticism. I'd love to hear about some of the others. But what is it about that trait that makes you a great lawyer? And then what are the other parts of that Trait.

So in order to answer that question, I have to mention that 25 years ago, the main thing that lawyers did is they practiced law. That was it.

Right.

But in the last 25 years, the number of additional roles that lawyers are expected to play has increased significantly.

Very true.

So let me name some of the other roles which lawyers play today. Manager, supervisor, mentor, Leader. Which is different from manager.

Yep.

Rainmaker, Colleague, Coach, Committee chair, Outward facing person in the community. Board member. These are all roles that lawyers frequently play. And literally every one of the other roles requires relationship building, which is founded upon trust. What do you think the opposite of skepticism is? Trust. The more skeptical you are, the less trusting you are of others. But it's a reciprocal trait. Which means if I'm skeptical with you, guess what I engender? I engender your skepticism in me. So if I'm going to be a good leader, I not only have to get better at trusting you, I have to lower my own skepticism. Not just for my sake, but because if I'm skeptical, you, you're going to be skeptical. So it helps me to lower it for both myself and for you. And that's the challenge. So the basic idea is that every personality trait is not inherently good or bad. It's just neutral. And depending on the context, the trait can be useful and helpful, or it can be an impediment. It can make it harder to. To do whatever you're trying to do. Let me give you a concrete example. Sure. If I want to be a good leader, one of the things that we know from the leadership research is that leaders take risks because leaders are by definition operating in a world of uncertainty.

Yep.

So they never know if what they're doing is right. So they have to try new stuff.

Yep.

Sometimes they're wrong. Lawyers don't like being wrong ever.

Right. Right.

So what happens if you're a risk averse lawyer and you've been put in a leadership role? You have to take risks now. Whereas your previous role, your lawyer role, when you're wearing your lawyer hat, you have to minimize risks. When you're in your leader role, you have to at least take some risks.

Sure.

So what do you do if you have a trait? There is a trait that measures your comfort with risk. It's called cautiousness. And it's actually not atypical. Lawyers are distributed just like the general public. We have some high caution lawyers and low caution lawyers. But if you're one of the high caution lawyers, which is more what the reputation of lawyers is, in fact, some People are shocked when I tell them there are low caution lawyers. Every firm has them, which is what makes chief operating officers pull their hair out because the risk profile is a little high. But if you have some high cautiousness lawyers, they're going to be very comfortable in their role of practicing law because they're naturally cautious and they don't take risks. But when they are placed in a leadership role, they're comfortable. Comfort zone is going to be to act just the same way, which will kill their ability to lead.

Interesting.

So they have to step out of their comfort zone and start taking risks. And that's a learned thing. You can't get comfortable. You're just going to have to be uncomfortable. In fact, I believe, Mary, that the secret to life. If we were to find that famous mountain with the guru sitting at the top of the mountain, and we climb the mountain and we finally get there and there's the guru and we say, guru, what's the secret of life? I am convinced the guru is going to say, learn to be comfortable with discomfort.

Oh, I love that. I love discomfort. Yeah, exactly. When I coach people or mentor people, I'm always pushing them to things that make them start getting uncomfortable and squirming physically in their seat. I'm like, that's what you need to be doing.

We need to do another interview to probe that in depth.

Oh, and I have taken the caliper test with you, and if I recall correctly, I think my personality traits were almost the converse, the opposite of what you were finding in the general population of lawyers, which I also thought was really interesting. So I tell myself I would make a terrible lawyer, and I'm glad I didn't go down that path.

What are some of the other traits we've talked about? Skepticism. We've talked about. What was the last one?

Low resilience.

Resilience. Okay. What are some of the other big ones?

So lawyers are also extraordinarily high in autonomy. They just don't like anyone telling them what to do.

Oh, yes, this is a big one.

And even if it's a benign request, even if it's good for them, if you ask them to do it, like turn in your timesheets, their immediate reaction is, oh, yeah, why should I?

And part of it is autonomy. And then skepticism reinforces that, like, why should I do what you're asking? These traits interact with each other and support each other. The next trait is lawyers are very high in abstract reasoning. They like using their large brains. They like solving problems. They like analyzing things. They Love arguing? Yeah, yeah, they just love arguing. And sometimes they get stuck in analysis paralysis. But it's basically the main thing that attracts them to the legal profession. I mean, that's what lawyers do all day, is analyze and think and use their intelligence to solve problems, solve some of the toughest problems that clients bring them. So that's a, you know, a trait that has a strength. You know, it's the strength of figuring things out and solving problems. But it's also the downside in the wrong context of overdoing it. Analysis paralysis and getting stuck in your intellect. Every trait has two sides. Next, they're really high in urgency. If they're listening to this podcast right now and they're tapping their toe, they're going, okay, I get it. I'm a quick study. Come on, come on, come on, come on. Yeah, that's urgency. The clock is ticking again. High urgency is terrific for the most part, because in a law firm. Let's step outside the law department for a minute. In a law firm, lawyers who you hire, they know you want them to solve problems that have to be resolved yesterday.

Yeah, that's right.

And so they feel the time pressure. They know that the client needs it yesterday. And it, it is a plus that lawyers innately want to cut to the chase. They want to be responsive to their clients. So where's the downside? What could be bad about urgency? Well, the downside is in their leadership role. Leadership is a two edged sword. Urgency is good because it helps leaders push initiatives forward, but it's bad because no leader succeeds unless they get the buy in of their constituents. And how do you get buy in? You talk to them and you listen to them especially, so they feel understood. They feel like you understand my point of view. And even if you don't execute on my point of view, I feel like it was taken into account. If you're urgent and you shut people down before they feel heard, you won't get their buy in. So urgency becomes a terrible disadvantage in a leadership role in that respect.

Got it, Got it. I'm terribly high on urgency as well, so I get that. And sometimes we do have to slow down and listen and get everyone kind of on the same page before we move along.

That's why we'll move on to the next few traits that I haven't mentioned already. There are two traits left. One is low sociability. Lawyers are very private and kind of suspicious around anything having to do with relationships or intimacy. High sociability. People are people people. They're very Open. They reveal a lot about themselves for the purpose of deepening a connection with people. They want to be vulnerable, and they want to spend time getting to know somebody, remembering the details of another person's life and sharing those details of their own life. That's high sociability.

That's high. Okay.

Most lawyers hearing me say that last sentence have already left the room.

I'm off the charts high. I love that, of course.

But that's atypical. So lawyers who hear any words having to do with relationships or intimacy, like relationship connection, vulnerability, empathy, they're just trigger words that make them feel threatened. And you'll hear them call that touchy feely and other disparaging things. But that's really unfortunate because the science that's emerging on the value of vulnerable, authentic connections is that it is the single most important thing that we have that produces all the outcomes that human beings most dearly want in their lives. It produces high levels of life satisfaction and work satisfaction and long term relationship success and even longevity and good health.

Yeah.

So it's kind of a shame that lawyers treat it as a triviality, but that's quite widespread. And then the last trait, the one that those six traits that I've mentioned so far, high skepticism, high autonomy, high urgency, high abstract reasoning, low resilience and low sociability, those have been outliers since I started gathering this data in the early 90s. The newest trait is low cognitive empathy, taking the perspective of others. And that's only recently dropped low enough to be considered statistically an outlier. And that's been solidly an outlier for about three years or more, going on four. And what it basically means is lawyers are more focused on their own goals, their own needs, their own efforts, and less inclined to put themselves in the shoes of. Of colleagues, junior associates, clients, other people. They're just not as inclined to do that. And that actually mirrors a drop in empathy that's been measured in the general public, particularly among millennials, people under 40. So as the empathy level's been dropping in the general population, it's also been dropping among lawyers, again, mostly among younger lawyers.

Got it.

To which millennials said, yeah, whatever.

So they say to everything, right?

Yeah, right, right.

So this is also interesting, and I'm sure a lot of people listening are nodding their heads because there's a lot of what you're saying that resonates with the way as we are trying to innovate and make change in an industry and work with lawyers, we get a lot of resistance, a Lot of pushback, right? We get the autonomy come through when we try to tell them this is there's a new and better way to do something. It's an immediate, like, don't tell me what to do. There's the, you know, the need for knowledge sharing and collaboration, and that's that low, sort of social, I forget what you called it, but, you know, not wanting to sort of be in a group and work together and collaborate.

Low sociability.

Low sociability, right. It, you know, it starts to contribute to that where we say, no, we want you to get together and share your ideas and make templates together and agree on language. It's suddenly, well, I do my thing my own way. And, you know, we start to, we start to see, see a lot of that as we try to make change and transformation in the departments. And the more I talk to you and hear about some of these studies, it helps me understand how to work with them, how to kind of make that change happen. Do you have tips and tricks of how to work with lawyers? And what is the approach that we should take when trying to get some of this stuff done?

That is one of the most frequent questions I get asked. And I have some tips for you, but I should preface it by saying the tips that work best are context specific. So if you tell me I'm trying to get somebody to turn in their timesheets, I can give you much more effective tips for that particular task than a generic. Here are some things to do because there's a lot of complexity in the way that you use your knowledge of these traits to help lawyers do the right thing and so forth. I also should preface it by saying lawyers frequently hire in their own image. So the other professionals that we've been talking about, they don't test exactly the same as lawyers, but their traits on these seven outlier scores do test in the same direction. So they do have elevated skepticism. Not as high as lawyers, but when I test coos, for example, they're more skeptical than the public. They're lower on sociability than the public. They are more urgent than the public. They look just like mini versions of lawyers. So it rubs off. Whatever the lawyers have going, either it rubs off when they're working there. Skepticism certainly is vulnerable to that because it's a learned trait, or the lawyers have hired people that are, hey, this person's just like me. Let's hire them.

Right, right, right. Yeah, I see that a lot.

So what can you do to work with lawyers? Number one, the most important Two traits in my opinion are high skepticism and low resilience. They are always on the table. You can never assume that you are free of those two traits. So what can you do if you know that to be the case number one, because lawyers are skeptical? Never arm wrestle a lawyer. You're going to lose.

Absolutely agree with that.

Instead, know your facts and always present facts that you want to introduce in the form of a question rather than an assertion. Because an assertion. Lawyers are trained to treat every assertion as a challenge. And they're going to treat the challenge not as something they accept, but as something that they now have to counter.

Yes.

As in, oh, yeah. So instead of saying, it looks like a sunny day, Mary, where you would say, well, I don't know, might rain later, you know, I might say, what do you think? Does it look sunny to you or not?

Yeah.

And that's much more likely to evoke the actual accurate answer, hey, it is sunny. Than if I said to you what I think it is and hoped you agree with me. So that's the first point. Don't ever use a frontal approach in trying to influence lawyers. You will lose. You'll do the opposite of what you're trying to.

I love that. I just want to make one comment, which is I always say, instead of asking the lawyers, can I get some of your time to talk about a new idea that we have for your team? You immediately get a no. You shut that down. I always like to say, would you be open to a conversation? When we present some ideas and they can't really say no to that. It's ask a question, but asking them the right way.

You can even make it easier for them by asking a question that results in their saying no. Because the word no is music to their ears. They like saying no. Right. So if you say, are you open to a conversation? They still have to say yes to get into that conversation. But if you say, would I be disrupting you if we had a short five minute conversation? Oh, no, no, not at all.

That is brilliant. Brilliant.

So they like saying no. So anything you can ask them where the answer no is actually an affirming of what you want from them, you're in good shape.

All right, that is a huge tip. Everyone should write that down. All right, what was your next one?

Now the next one is low resilience. So low resilience. Let me give you the classic example of low resilience. Low resilience. People are basically insecure and they hear any sort of a statement from someone else, potentially as A criticism of themselves. So two quick examples. If I say, you're talking too loud, my ears are very sensitive.

The lawyer hears you are a defective human being.

And they're like, no, I'm not. What I want them to hear is, I'm experiencing discomfort, and I'm reaching out to you to see if you can adjust your behavior to reduce the amount of discomfort I'm experiencing. I'm focused on my discomfort and hoping you can reduce it. And what you're hearing is, I'm focused on your character and how bad it is.

Interesting.

You know, even when I coach lawyers, it's hard for them to recognize the distinction I just made, that they're like, say that again.

So what you want to do is not trigger that reaction in the first place. So let me give you an even more dire example. Classic example. We're walking down the main street of whatever city you're in. We pass a beautiful clothing boutique, and I look in the window and I say, oh, Mary, look at that outfit in the window. You would look smashing in that outfit. Well, that's a compliment. Anybody who heard that would say, thank you.

Yeah.

Except for a low resilience lawyer. What do they say? They say, what, you don't like what I'm wearing?

Oh, stop.

They immediately insert the criticism. Somehow that compliment got turned into a criticism because I have a filter of what's wrong with me. So that's the filter. Okay, so what do we do about that? You can use what I call pre mismatching. Mary, you're probably going to tell me that this is, you know, out of line, but it would be so helpful if you could turn in your timesheets. Now, I'm going to disagree with you, but I've given you something benign to disagree with, that this is going to be out of line, and you're going to go, oh, no, it's not out of line. I'll see what I can do. Yeah, right. You want to do something that puts the energy away from the thing that might make them feel insecure to something innocuous, inert that they can disagree with. That's one way to defuse resilience. The other one is to talk about their criteria, what matters to this individual. So if I know that it's important to you to be well regarded by your peers, I can say, I get so much great feedback about you from talking to the people that you work with, and I have a piece of feedback you probably won't want. There's a pre mismatch. You probably won't want to hear this, but based on what I've heard, this could actually help you be more well regarded by your peers. Are you interested?

Yeah, of course.

So I've used your criteria.

Yeah.

Being well regarded by your peers. Now I'm doing it in a very blunt, explicit way. In the example I just gave you can be done more subtly, but the basic idea is you want to align what you're saying with something that's already the way they're thinking.

And that bypasses the resilience trap. It's less likely to trigger that insecure thing. Because my saying yes to you now, if I'm in your shoes, saying yes to Larry gets me more of what I want. So I'm more likely to say yes.

Yeah, that's right.

That's a tricky one. That takes a little bit more planning, a little bit more thought. That's a little bit more the advanced course.

But it can be done.

Yeah. So there is a lot to think about and it is for those who are experiencing it. You're not crazy. There is a subtle way to sort of work with lawyers that is different. And especially if your role is is trying to change their behavior, insert yourself into the way they're currently doing their work and possibly asking them to do something very new. You're gonna get met with a lot of this, and approaching it in a way that makes it easy on you is really key to your success.

Absolutely. In fact, let's take one more example. Let's take high autonomy. So lawyers don't want to be told what to do almost anything. Why would you be interacting with them? Usually it's because you want them to do something.

That's right.

Whether it's you're doing it because you're directing them because you're the leader, or you're doing it because you're influencing upward and you need their help or just they're a peer and they have some information that you need. You need to do that in a way that doesn't make them get defensive. Like, I'm not going to have anyone tell me what to do. Let me give you an example. I was once in a CLE lecture and I was bored because I didn't need cle. I wasn't really practicing law, but I was still license at the time. And I'm twiddling my pen in the back of the room and it pops out of my hand and it rolls under the seat of the guy sitting next to me and there's a lawyer in the front of the room. Lecturing, I don't want to disturb him. So I said, I lean over to this guy next to me and I said, could you hand me my pen? It rolled under your chair. Instead of handing it to me, he says, it's your pen. Get it yourself.

Oh, God.

And I said, I said, yeah, but it's under your chair. He says, yeah, but it's your pen. Well, now we're in this arm wrestle about the damn pen and I realize we both have like, super high autonomy. Neither of us is going to concede because it feels like we're giving in. And I didn't have any interest in controlling his autonomy. I just wanted my blankety blank pen. So I finally got on hands and knees and picked it up. But it illustrates how easily this trait is invoked if you're a high autonomy person. So what can you do? Always, again, use an indirect approach. Instead of saying I want X, you use language that's kind of precatory in nature. Mary, would it be okay if. I'm sure this would be a major inconvenience to you, but if you could find it in your heart to give me the time for five minutes to interview you. It reminds me of a friend of mine who's from Tokyo, and I once asked her, what's the main difference you see between the US and Tokyo? And she said, when I'm home, here's how I ask for, like if I'm at a family holiday dinner with three generations sitting at the table, she said, here's how I ask for the butterfly. Oh, humble father, I am so unworthy to be even taking your time to ask this question, but if you would deign in your great imperiosity to pass me the butter, I, your humble servant, would be more than eternally grateful. And I'm like, I'm paraphrasing here. But it was something like that. And I was like, you've got to be kidding. I mean, that was just. It floored me. But that's an illustration, in an exaggerated way of the kind of surrounding language that we need to use to diffuse autonomy. You want to be in the position of a humble servant asking permission to get them to do something as opposed to ordering them or requesting them or telling them to do something, because the latter is surely going to trigger a defensive oh, no you don't. Heels dug in reaction.

So interesting. Immediately thinking about personal life and how to talk to my 12 year old to make her clean a room and such. So this triggers a totally off the wall question, which I hope is okay. To ask why are there so many married couples that are lawyers and lawyers? I feel like there are more lawyer lawyer couples than any other profession. Is that a fact? Is that true or am I just observing something that's not really a thing?

I certainly have met a lot of lawyer couples. I don't have any data on that. And I don't know if it's just we tend to notice that, even if it's a very infrequent thing or if it's actually more common. So I have no way of knowing if it's more or less common than the public. But I do know that lawyers have one and a half times the divorce rate of the general public. That's not a good thing. Yeah, it could be that lawyers marry lawyers, number one, because the most common way that people meet their spouse is through proximity, you know, working near them. If you work around other lawyers, it's a convenient place to meet people.

Yeah, that probably is it.

And it might lead to those pairings. Also, they understand each other, they speak the same language, and they're less likely to misinterpret when someone use as a lawyerism, when they say, in any event, you know, people without legal training often go in any event, like, what are you talking about?

Whereas other lawyers just go, well, the answer is. And they ignore it. It's just a phrase that's quite common. So I can see good reasons for lawyers to marry each other. The challenge is staying together.

Yeah. Okay, so let's go back to. You mentioned the changing role of the lawyer that we see. I often talk about the changing role of the general counsel. It's the same idea, right, that you have so many more requirements and traits that you need to bring to the table to be successful in your role. I know that I get asked a lot, well, what classes should I take? What skill sets should I get trained up on as a lawyer to improve and to be successful as the lawyer of tomorrow? And my response to that, and I have a feeling yours is the same, is it's not really a skill set thing. It's a mindset shift that we need. Right. And you're nodding your thoughts on that. I mean, we definitely see that, we hear that, and I know you talk about that quite a bit. What is that mindset shift needed and how do we get there?

So there are a couple of mindset shifts that I think are important. Number one, in my opinion, the most important mindset, which kind of is a skill, and it's a little bit related to personality, but it's to me, the most important thing that we need in the world of increasingly volatile change that we're gradually moving into or rapidly moving into. And that is the quality of adaptability because the world is so complex. There was an article in Harvard Business Review last year about frenemies. Companies that are like Apple and Microsoft. They're competitors and they also collaborate.

Yep.

How do you work across the aisle when you are adversarial in some respects and you are contractual partners in other respects? That requires adaptability because you can't use the same approach in both of those roles. The same is true in personality. If I am a lawyer in one role and I have to be high in skepticism and I'm a leader in another role and I have to be high in trust, and they're the opposite of each other, I have to be able to adapt. I have to be able to take my skeptical hat off and put my trust hat on. So it's adaptability is needed in personality. Adaptability is needed in the kinds of relationships that the complex world we live in are fostering today. So that's my number one mindset shift. Number two, there is a deeply embedded mindset that lawyers have, partly because we're skeptical and we're pessimistic and we have a negative outlook by our training and by the personalities who go into this field, we look for problems. That's what we do. That leads us to when we get outside the practice of law and we enter into the back office to how do we design talent programs, professional development programs, how do we recruit people, how do we retain people, how do we engage people? The mindset that is quite pervasive for a lot of lawyers in those professional development roles is people can't be trusted. You have to be skeptical about them and create rigid rules and check up on them. And you have to find what their deficiencies are and give them periodic feedback about those deficiencies. You can close the gap and bring them up to the speed where they should be that fix your deficiencies. Mindset is what I call for this whole package I'm describing, and it's actually been for 100 years, the prevailing mindset in business. It's the way business has been thinking traditionally about developing people. Yeah, we do surveys, we do assessments, we do 360s. We figure out what are your deficiencies, we give you a performance plan, and we tell you what timeframe, here's how you're going to improve, and what the latest research, including neuroscience research, tells us is that approach sucks. That's the technical term for.

Simply doesn't work. There's actually neuroscience research showing that it shuts down the hippocampus, which is the center in the brain for learning and memory. In other words, the very goal of doing these feedback sessions is to help people learn. And the way we're doing it is actually completely shutting down their learning. So it's like a useless exercise. It is a totally useless exercise. What we need to do instead is to shift to a strengths based mindset. The Gallup organization has spent 70 years or more studying, researching, publishing, cultivating details about how to build a strengths based workplace. There's so much evidence not only about how to do this, but about the extraordinary eye popping payoffs for using a strengths based approach. Two examples to illustrate. Number one, Gallup's data shows that people who have a manager, that's the term that's used in industry, that is a strengths based manager, they focus 80% of their time, for example, on finding what you're good at and helping you get more time to use it and bringing out your best. Yes. Managers who have that approach have employees that are six times more engaged than people who have a fix your deficiencies approach. Number two, there's a study, you may have seen it, I've used it in a number of presentations. That was done in 1950. Don Clifton, who created the current modern Gallup organization, Don Clifton did this study in University of Nebraska in 1950. And they looked at speed reading and they took an average group of speed readers and a sophisticated fast group of speed readers. And, and they said what would happen if we exposed both groups to the same training? And this wasn't like an hour of training, this was six weeks, eight hours a day of intensive speed reading training. And what they expected is the group that needed to improve the most, I.e. the average readers, would have the greatest benefit from the six weeks of training. Remember, they got the exact same training.

Yeah.

So the group that was given the training that was in the average group, they had about an 80% improvement. They went from, I think it was something like 190 words to 250. Something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

The other group started at 350 words a minute and that was the outstanding group. They improved to 2, 900 words a minute.

That's crazy.

I mean, look at, look at that improvement. It's hundreds and hundreds of percentile improvement points. And this made Don Clifton say, we're doing it all wrong. We can't have a fix your deficiencies approach. And he in that moment decided to create a strengths based consultancy. And that's what he did. And Gallup has become to this day the largest and unassailably number one global strengths based consultancy. So strengths are an extraordinary, extraordinary thing. And you can help lawyers by focusing on their strengths, by bringing out their best. You can't eliminate skepticism, but you can quiet it down. You can't eliminate low resilience, but you can build it up. You can't eliminate urgency, but you can make people really interested. Because when people are experiencing their strengths, it brings out their best. And when people are at their best, they're more patient, they're more tolerant, they actually are more inclusive. So diversity and inclusion improves naturally, not because you've put somebody in a training program. It has all kinds of side benefits when you use a strengths based approach. So the shift in attitude here would be to shift lawyers from there's something wrong with you that needs fixing to how can I spend time understanding what makes you so good at something and help you spend more time doing that and get even better at doing it? If they can make that shift, it would be revolutionary.

And that's exactly the talking point that we need to do as professionals trying to modernize an organization is we want to give you more time to do the things that you love and that you're great at. Thank you, Larry, as always. I feel like I learned so much from you and I'm sure that all of our listeners did as well. Such a pleasure. We could probably talk for another hour. Thank you so much for your time and for being on the show.

Absolutely. My pleasure. Mary, good catching up with you and good doing this podcast.

We'll talk soon. Thanks so much.

Bye.

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