Episode Transcript
Gabriel Stiritz (00:01)
Hi and welcome to the relay presented by Lexamica. My name is Gabriel Stiritz founder and CEO of Lexamica, the leading attorney referral network. We are leaders who are passionate about leveraging technology and AI to enhance law firm practices. Our listeners are the owners and C -suite executives at Personal Injury, Social Security Disability, MedMal, Consumer Class Action, and other plaintiff side law firms. My guest today is Mary Ellen Murrah, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Vista
Gabriel Stiritz (00:29)
I've known Vista Consulting for about the last five years since I entered into this industry and they have been guides in my journey as I've learned about the plaintiff's space and specifically about plaintiffs' motor vehicle accident injury law practice. So Mary Ellen, great to have you on the show today. thank you so much, Gabriel. Thank you for that beautiful introduction there. It's
It's been really neat getting to know you and seeing your businesses grow as well. thank you very much for coming on. I'd love to hear for the listeners. Just give us a 30 second background of yourself. You've had a really interesting professional journey before we dive into our topic today, which is talking about mining for conflict internally within your organization. Super excited to talk about that, but just for a little background on who you are. Absolutely. I've spent my entire life in this.
exclusively within the
spent 17 years at Needles Case Management Software.
there so got to know a lot of firms a lot of personal injury law firms and their struggles with implementing software and that case management journey and then transitioned over to working for Vista and that has been a really neat experience for me as well to get to know firms not just from a software perspective but really from a holistic perspective all of those things under roof that have to do with the business of running a law firm. Fantastic well I think you
uniquely qualified then to talk about this side of the business. So you wrote an article a few months ago about the complaint department, the gift that keeps on giving. And one of the things that you talked about is why listening to and eliciting complaints internally, we're not talking about legal complaints, for you law firm owners there, we're talking about the old fashioned time where people are saying something's wrong. That's an important part of the business. And that stuck out to me.
One of the books that changed my life in the business world is Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull who started Pixar. And one of the things that he talks about in any enterprise, especially one that's creative or growing is the importance of mining for conflict. Because as a leader, we are the last ones to hear about what people are talking about at the water cooler in the hallway on those Slack channels called hashtag the bosses and invited. So how do you get those things out?
We all know what's going right, but as leaders, our job is to understand what's going wrong and then to deal with that. So I'd love to hear why did you write this article and is this from personal experience? Is this something you've seen in other law firms and businesses? Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned in
included having us read the book, Complaint is a Gift. And we really did live the culture in that organization really was we need to listen to customer complaints, we need to listen to wishlist items and things like that. But it really does extend so much more than that into what is happening in your internal team, right? And sometimes it's easy to say, everything's going well. And it's so interesting when we go in at Vista, we do what's called a law firm assessment.
We go into the firm and before we ever even step foot on site, we send out a survey and that one survey goes to the owner, a different survey goes to the team members. And then we sit down in a room with those team members and have a conversation with them. And honestly, so often your team knows what's wrong. Your team feels the pain of a process that isn't working. They feel the pain of
who's maybe not a great culture fit at the firm that has been there for too long. They feel the pain of a leadership style or a management style that maybe isn't serving the team well. And so they know what's happening. And oftentimes they have really great suggestions about what a solution might be for that issue as well. If we take the time to actually sit down and hear those things and hear them from a place of, I want to know these issues so that I can work to fix
And a lot of firms miss that piece. And sometimes, you know, when we go in for the assessment, we have the conversation with a team member and we bring it up to the owner. It is a surprise to them. Hey, I didn't know this was an issue or I heard some things about that, it never, as you suggested, really reached my desk. It wasn't something that I was aware of. It's just something that's kind of happening over here, boiling up over here that maybe I only hear about when it becomes a major problem. So a couple of things I
firm owners and leaders at a firm can do to dig into those issues. I mean, it sounds so simple, but talk to your team. I mean, if you're not having one -on -ones with your team, that's a really good way to start developing that trust, start developing that, hey, I can have a conversation. And it doesn't always just have to be about clients or about work or about, you know, a process that's happening in the firm. Sometimes it's
how you doing and in that natural human conversation of how you're doing, some things come up. Hey, I'm really stressed because this keeps happening or I feel really overworked because of this. And as you dig deeper, if you were able to have those probing conversations and develop that trust, a lot of times it will come out. And if each leader is doing that with their team,
if we all have our circle of influence, right? If we're all doing that with our own circle of influence and having those conversations and then talking to each other as a leadership team, sometimes those issues that don't have to be major issues because we don't treat them, they come up and we have the opportunity to look at those complaints as gifts and say, hey, this came up, this process isn't working, what can I do to make this
And I would say, yeah, that's fantastic. I think you just did the entire podcast there. So listeners, you're welcome to sign off now. Mary Ellen has successfully done an episode, but to drill down into what you're talking about, I think that a lot of times there's, there's a lot of fear around asking for not just how you're doing, which is a great place to start. Open -ended is certainly better than let's just talk about tasks and what needs to get done that way.
I would argue that there's a deeper level that you need to get to to be truly successful, which is where you're starting to ask pointed questions around what's going wrong. And I think for some leaders, for a lot of leaders, and maybe just intuitively true of all of us is we're afraid to ask questions because we think that that's either going to give people an opportunity to just start to complain because we assume that that's what's going to happen
that because we're asking the question of what's going wrong, it's going to make things go wrong. But what I've found in asking questions like, you know, how can I better support you? Or, you know, what are things that, you know, are not ideal right now? People generally, and I think you've kind of alluded to this, people actually want the best for their employer, for their company
But if that's not true, then you've got deeper problems and we can't address those on this podcast episode. That's another podcast episode. But if you're in a place where generally your people know that you care about them, that you want the best for them, when you ask them for those suggestions, they've, that's probably the stuff that's keeping them up at night. But there, lot of times they're just afraid to share that with you because they don't know how you're going to react. And if you put yourself in the shoes of when I was working for someone else, what do I not want to tell I don't want to tell them the
going wrong. don't know how they're going to respond to that. And so I'm going to hide that stuff and try to solve it over here by myself. So when as a boss, you ask for that specific, Hey, what are, what's keeping you up at night right now? That can elicit very direct feedback of the things that you really need to know because it's keeping someone up at night. So I believe in very pointed questions and silence after you ask that question, right? Like don't immediately jump in and start another
train of conversation just because it feels awkward, which it absolutely will the first few times you ask that question, you got to shut up and you got to just stop talking and let that person start to share the things that are keeping them up at night. That is such a hard skill that you just described that. Let
And it's one of those things, know, people sometimes shy away from candid conversations or shy away from high conflict conversations. And so they tend to want to fill all of that space with talking. And if you can nail that, what you just described of I asked a question and I sort of let it sit out there for a minute. And it's really awkward sometimes when you say something and then there's a very long pause where someone is thinking about what they want to say or.
how deeply they want to go into something. If you can master that, so many things come out of that by just shutting up and letting somebody else get their words out. I, know, when you were talking just then, what came to my mind is creating this culture of psychological safety. I feel like that word psychological safety. I love it. I love to talk about it because I feel like if you're successful in creating a culture of psychological safety, so many things come out of that, not just in people sharing.
what's wrong or where they might be stuck or issues they may be having with another team member or things like that. But it allows for innovation as well. It allows for me to be able to feel comfortable trying something, failing at something, talking with my leader about why something failed and why that failure may not be ultimately a failure because it taught us something that we don't want to do going forward.
Great, great observation. Another question, and we just use this, we just completed our one -on -ones with our internal. Well, I can just jump in for real, and let's talk about psychological safety for a minute, because I do think that it's important, but also can be misunderstood. True psychological safety is absolutely your people being able to share what's going on, the mistakes they're making, know, have got this half -baked idea, or, Ham, I'm worried about this and what's going on. I do think it's really important, though, that it's not entirely
one directional, because one of the things that we've really focused on at Lexamica, at the law firm that I work is, is that I would call it psychological safety, but it does not mean pulling your punches in either direction. has to be a place where both sides trust each other enough, besides being, you know, boss, employees, you know, teams with each other, that they can not pull their punches and they can be totally transparent. But oftentimes that looks like pretty real conflict. Like
I consider myself a bit of a referee in a wrestling ring a lot of times because to me, the wrestling cage is the safest place because you know you're not going to get killed and you also know you can punch as hard as you need to, to fight for the things that you know are right or you think are right. And then you can lay it all out there and at the end, you can agree to move forward together without having a sense of like, Hey, I had to hold back here. Like I didn't want to hurt this person's feelings because this is their baby
And I try to lead with that and just say, listen, I want you to tear me to shreds. Like I'm going to have ideas and I'm, you know, I'm the founder, I'm the product owner. Like it's, that's a really dangerous place for me to be in because people can look at me and think, well, this guy knows he founded the company. He knows the product. knows the industry. He's got all these customer relationships. And like, I tell people every time we meet for product meeting or what, tear me down, just shoot my things to shreds. Because if you can't do that to
we're gonna end up doing stuff just because you're deferring to me, just because I'm the boss, you're gonna say something you think I wanna hear, and I need you to bias toward just tearing me to shreds. And that's the kind of psychological safety, it starts with me, but then it also, I also have to ask for the permission as the boss to say, listen, I'm going to do the same thing to you, not because, and you're gonna have to stand up to that and say, listen, no, I disagree with you're disagreeing with me.
And there has to be this cage match style and not everyone has to be that brutal about it. And I'm not saying like we actually come to, you know, to, blows, but it gets really heated. And I think it's really important that everyone on the team, whether you're coming in in a, you know, this is your first week or you've been here for three years. If you believe something's right, I encourage everyone. You have to fight for that. And it may not be that you get your way.
But if you're not coming in here willing to go to the mat for the thing that you think to be true and back that up with why you think it's true, we all suffer, we all lose. And so I think like various organizations will have different degrees of like how you build that safety. But I think what I've seen work a lot of times is a pretty kind of brutal form of safety where you're just kind of wrestling with each other intellectually because you trust each other enough to know that it's in everyone's best interest to do that. Yeah. And great
point in that it has to flow both ways and there has to be a level of authenticity and willingness to have those difficult conversations on the part of leadership or it's not going to work the other way. It can't just be that one directional flow for sure. And I think there's a lot that goes into how you create that psychological safety. It's not a flip the switch and suddenly everything's great. I mean, you have to put in that work and set your culture up in a way
that does feel like something that is safe and that we do talk about. And I think that a lot of that, and as cliche as it might sound, a lot of that does come down to, have we established what our mission and vision are and what our values are? And if we can have those conversations with those things in mind, then we can absolutely disagree. You may think we should handle it this way or go down this path. I think we should handle it this way and go down this path.
but ultimately we trust each other and know each other well enough to know we're both moving towards that mission and vision. We're both operating within our set of values. So we can absolutely disagree and whatever path we take, one of us may win on that conversation, but really it's the firm that wins because we're all rowing in that same direction towards the same vision. And if we can all be emotionally intelligent enough to be aware of how
have those conversations, they can be incredibly productive because you're passionate in your way. I'm passionate in my way. Hopefully there's a good conversation that happens there with other people where the right way forward, regardless of whose idea it was, of presents itself and we can take that and feel comfortable with it. Absolutely. And look, we're talking to CEOs, second in commands, first in commands at law firms. Honestly, like if this is valuable, which
believe that it is, it's in your best interest as an owner to bring these things out to the table. We're not saying, hey, you know, be vulnerable for the sake of being vulnerable or create psychological, you want to run your business better. This is the way to do it. Like you're, if you're people running around scared, a, I think that's a pretty horrible way to run a business and your life is going to be meaningfully worse for that. But also it is the best, the best businesses do this. This is the way it's done. And if you think that you're somehow going to
better than the best run companies in the world by having this really top down authoritarian view. You're not right. Your team needs to have a sense of ownership and the ability to bring their best ideas to the table. Doesn't mean they're good ideas. It means that they're the best ideas and they should be willing to fight for them and not to be put down for bringing the ideas to the table. So yeah, I absolutely agree with that. As we get close to time, Mary Ellen,
We'd love to hear real quick, how does Vista engage with this? This is not a salesy podcast, but I brought you on. You've given your time as a guest here. What are some of the things that Vista does to help law firms with this? Yeah. So, typically when we go into a firm,
And one of the pieces, we look at a lot of different things. What does your intake process look like? What does the life of a case look like? What's your accounting look like? All of those things that obviously you would know we would look at are there. But one of the things that's really valuable of being on site with the firm when we do this is we get that taste of what that firm's culture is like. We have those conversations with the team members at the firm and get sort of
hopefully unvarnished opinion as much as possible about what's happening under roof at the firm. And then we advise that firm on, hey, there are some culture issues here. There are some pieces of your infrastructure here that could be set up in a way that would make your team feel more psychologically safe, that would make your team feel more comfortable coming to you with suggestions or make your team able to say to you, hey, this thing is just straight up broken and we need to revisit this because.
it's a major problem for us and for our clients. So those are all things within our purview that we discuss with firms. And then we generate a report for those owners and C -suite executives who would have access to that report to say, hey, here's kind of the things that we would suggest putting into place for the most early yardage with your team. Absolutely. I think that ties in. Look, you can start to do this on your own. You can bring Vista in to help you with that. If you're trying to get a jumpstart on it, one of my favorite metaphors is that
You don't ever have Olympians out there without coaches. I think all of us need coaches, advisors, consultants. I certainly have that for Lexamica and for my businesses and even my hobbies. If I want to run a race, I'm not going to just try to do it myself. I'm going to get someone who can help me stay accountable and do things well. So I firmly believe that the best outside consultants and advisors, it's going to be a massive return on your investment, which is one of the reasons that I love talking with folks who really are at the top of their craft. And I would say the other thing
in closing here outside of you have to be mining for conflict. If you just do one thing coming out of this podcast, start asking pointed questions of your direct reports in one -on -ones. If you're not having one -on -ones, you have to have those. Otherwise you're ruining your business and you also have to be mining for conflict. Otherwise your business is going to explode and everyone else will tell you, hey, I could have stopped that 90 days ago because I saw that coming. So do those two things. You can do it with Vista. You can start to work on your own. You can figure
But just take that time, do the one -on -ones. It's super easy to get out of the habit. Personally, it's something that I have to carve out on my calendar. I'm traveling 30 conferences this year. I do one -on -ones, even if it's scheduled weekly and I get to it once a month, it's still critically important to have those open -ended questions because your people know what's going to ruin your business long before you do. So that's our main takeaway. Mary Ellen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Really a pleasure to have you here. Thank you, Gabriel. A pleasure to be here. Appreciate it.
