Lexlee Overton | Beyond Burnout: Building High-Performing Legal Teams Through Well-Being

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast. Welcome back for another episode.

We all know that the legal profession loves to reward hustle; grind it out, power through, keep your head down, and just get the work done. Today's guest spent decades playing by those rules until she realized the real power comes from doing things differently.

In this conversation, we talk about why stress and burnout are so common in law, how law firm leaders can attract and retain talent and build high-performing teams without sacrificing well-being, and what it really takes to help lawyers thrive in a high-pressure environment. So stay tuned. We're going to talk about tools that actually work, whether it's in courtrooms, conference rooms, or anywhere in between.

Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by the Ignite Women’s Business Development Accelerator, a nine-month business development program created by women lawyers for women lawyers. Ignite is a carefully designed business development program containing content, coaching, and a community of like-minded women who are committed to becoming rainmakers and supporting the retention and advancement of other women in the profession. To learn more about Ignite, visit thelawyersedge.com/ignite.

I am delighted to welcome my guest today, Lexlee Overton, who is a former trial lawyer who spent more than 30 years in the courtroom before choosing a different path. After experiencing firsthand how the legal profession can wear lawyers down, she founded Mind Over Law to help lawyers move beyond burnout and lead with greater clarity, resilience, and purpose.

Today, she works with both individual lawyers and legal teams using a science-backed approach that blends mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and practical leadership tools to build healthier, high-performing law firms. Lexlee, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge.

Lexlee Overton: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

Elise Holtzman: I'm delighted to have you. I want to dive right into talking about burnout. Burnout is something we hear a lot about in the law. It's almost become normalized. I mean, I remember even back in the day when I first started practicing law, the number of hours you bill, the number of all-nighters I pulled back when I was young, the late nights, all of that almost became a badge of honor. So it's considered so normal in the law.

For you, what was your personal breaking point, realization point, and how did that experience shape your mission to help lawyers the way you do now?

Lexlee Overton: Yeah, what a great question and so true about the badge of honor. For me, I was very fortunate when I came out of law school that I got to practice with my parents, and particularly with my dad. But that brought its own pressure of a performance in a certain way.

But I was lucky because he put me in the courtroom right away, and I was trying cases right away with him and all the things. About four years in or so, I walked out of a courtroom in northern Louisiana after a motion hearing. I am literally like 30, 31 years old at this time. I thought I was having a heart attack.

It wasn't a panic attack. It was actually physical, well, in panic attack, you can have physical pain. But it ended up being that the ER thought I was having a heart attack too. It gave me nitroglycerin and bottomed out my blood pressure because I wasn’t having a heart attack.

After they did a whole bunch of tests, it was like, "Oh, it’s your esophagus is contracting down and you need to be on medication." I was like, "Yeah, no, this is ridiculous." What's wrong with me is I am working an incredible amount of hours. The stress in this profession is unique because it's so adversarial in what I was doing. That brings its own toll into you emotionally and mentally.

I had a young child at the time that I was trying to juggle and a marriage and all the things. So I was like, "I don't want to be on medication for the rest of my life just to be able to practice law. I want to be able to do this and be able to thrive in it."

So it set me on a path to study things that, some things that were very out of the box at the time, things like meditation, thirty years ago, we didn’t really talk about that much. You hear a lot about it now, like mindfulness practices. But I’ve done a lot of studying of neuroscience, looking at the effect of emotions on the heart, like the physical effects that also physically affect the brain, and how that affects performance.

I just fell in love with it because it made me such a better person first, which helped me to be a better lawyer, to be able to be centered and whole. That role as a person, but then as a lawyer and then as a mother and then as a spouse and all the different roles that we carry.

I practiced law for a long time after that, but taught a lot in different national trial skill programs. People started coming to me and saying the trial skill stuff is great, but "I want to know what's that secret sauce that you got that gives you..." like "You seem to have something."

It was all of these practices that I had been doing. So it just is something over a long time studying different programs that just naturally unfolded into being able to teach this, which is now my passion and mission. I believe that we can be healthier, happier people. We should be. Then when we do that as leaders, then we lead healthier, happier teams.

Elise Holtzman: What kind of attitude do you think that most lawyers and people in the legal profession have towards the things you're talking about? Because it strikes me that you mentioned this idea of not even talking about meditation and mindfulness 30 years ago.

I will confess, I was one of those people that thought that this stuff was all very woo-woo and it felt very uncomfortable. It was certainly outside my experience. I wasn't particularly open to it. I was always open to it for other people. Like, "Okay, if that's what works for them, good, but not for me."

Even when I got into coaching, I remember in coach training, they wanted us to sit with our eyes closed and meditate. I think I was so tightly wound, I couldn’t even get to that point.

What are some of the things that lawyers say to you about this or the attitudes that you experience when you try to talk to people about these issues?

Lexlee Overton: It has changed in the last 10 years. At first, it was people coming to me really for one-on-one who were out of space of burnout. They were like, "I don't know what to do anymore. I'm exhausted."

I think about one client that's been working with me for a very long time. When she first came to me, she was like, "I'm just angry all the time." That's a symptom of burnout. It's a symptom of being in fight or flight for so long that you're just living in this state. The modern-day response is aggressiveness and over-the-top anger.

I used to, as a young lawyer, thirty years ago when I started practicing law, there weren’t many women, trial women, especially here in the South, that were in the courtroom with me. So I was learning from my dad, who was a typical over-the-top aggressive male trial lawyer, which I realized was not going to be my way of doing things.

But on the opposite side, I always have thought, "God, these men are so angry all the time." Now I know that really they were not as powerful as they could be because I understand what's happening.

So when it first started, it was almost like people coming in secret. "Will you tell me what... I need some help." I even had a male lawyer that was a client of mine that said, "My best friend is a lawyer, but I'm not going to come talk to him about how anxious I am and how every day I wake up just with dread. But I’ll tell you about it." It’s almost like a secret thing.

Now it’s different. I don’t know if you have this experience now, but in the lawyer groups that I’m in in different areas, people are starting to really talk about—especially women—how to do this all.

You’ve experienced that in your career, and then that’s a myth. You have to figure out how to balance energy, and you only have so much energy to give. It is going to take a toll if you don’t figure that out. The toll will eventually be something physical happening, like it did with me.

But you're going to lose otherwise, creativity, you're going to lose energy in relationships, disconnection, those things. So now I think we talk about it more.

There was a study that was done by the ABA several years ago. I saw recently that they're actually doing another one, and I got picked to be an anonymous, well, you could give anonymous responses to this study that they're doing again, looking at where lawyers are on the scale of depression and burnout and substance abuse.

Their study, when they did that several years ago, was pretty profound. I mean, the statistics show that we're four times more likely to be depressed than non-lawyers. So I think people are talking about it more. With the ABA’s initiatives of really pushing law firms to take well-being initiatives, that has helped.

Now there's a big push to have at least one CLE on well-being. At the end of the day, what we know is that we can use the term well-being. What I use is I say energy management. It's learning, it’s way more than time management. It's learning how to regulate your energy, which is learning how to regulate your nervous system.

When you talk about closing your eyes to meditate, the first time you’re so wound up, that's how most of us live. People don't recognize that that's actually not normal. There's a complete opposite to that, that actually makes us more powerful.

Elise Holtzman: You mentioned a couple of responses that people were having. One is feeling anxious all the time. One is feeling angry. What are some of the warning signs that lawyers often ignore before burnout hits them full force?

Lexlee Overton: Yeah, it usually comes in really quietly because it's the state that they're used to being in. So it's almost like, "This is how I am every day." They don't know that it's abnormal.

So it’s almost like a whisper that comes in. It starts with things like brain fog, waking up with dread—like I talked about—that's a real thing. Waking up already tired.

Feeling like you’re starting to disconnect from your work and even becoming resentful toward your clients. I hear people sometimes talk about their clients being so demanding and this and that. That’s a warning sign. It’s one of the symptoms of a modern-day fight-or-flight response, which is actually withdrawal.

You'll find yourself even disconnecting from finding that you have the energy to engage in relationships. Maybe you have less to give to friends, or you’re finding irritation when you're like, "Don’t ask me to do something else."

Those things are the early signs that I think we ignore because we’ve had this normalized culture of urgency around everything. We have this idea that we should be able to take care of it all and do it all. And if we can’t, then there’s something wrong with us.

So I think the very first thing I say is: if you just have awareness, that's the most important step. Awareness of where you are, then you can change it. Unfortunately, most of us are just getting up and pushing through and living very unconsciously. We don't have a whole lot of awareness about where we are.

When I say awareness, I mean a simple check of: today, right now, what am I feeling?

I talk about our emotional home because we all have one. If you think about the last week, if I asked you, "What are the top three emotional states you’ve lived in, in the last week?" most people, if we're talking about lawyers and those in the legal field, they're going to name anxiety or fear, or something that's interchangeable word there, stress, but the emotion there is anxiety.

Another top one I hear is anger or frustration or irritation, depression. You also could have, that it might be very normal for you to be, have joy and all the things. It's recognizing that every moment you're having an emotion, and every single emotion affects you, and it affects your physiology. When you can tune into what that is, then you can start to do things to shift your state.

Elise Holtzman: To your point, most lawyers are just go, go, go. They go, "Well, I'm exhausted. I'm annoyed. But that's just part of it. That's just the way it is." How do you get people started? So, for example, is there some simple practice that you can get people to, these hard-driving, somewhat skeptical people, to accept so that it doesn't feel overly woo-woo and uncomfortable to them? Maybe an entry point for them to start focusing more on what is going on with them and how they might be able to start to minimize some of the negative reactions that they're having.

Lexlee Overton: Yeah, I think first we have to talk about, it's a little bit of a mindset shift in looking at that speed doesn't equate to success. Pushing through, grinding through doesn't equate success and looking at where does that come from. Like, why is it that you believe that?

Some of it is the way that the profession is. It trains us that way. Even in law school, I felt like there was a training of, you know, you push through and it's about learning how to do the best argument. Some of that is causing us to disconnect from who we are. You know, we can learn to argue either side of the case thing.

So it's first just recognizing that that isn't necessarily true and that if you really want to have sustainable performance, you have to recognize that there has to be boundaries that are put into place. I think about it, Elise, and I did a conference a few weeks ago in Oklahoma for the Oklahoma Criminal Defense Association. So I had a room full of 200 lawyers.

I sometimes get really nervous when I step in to talk about this stuff because I'm going to make them do some practices. But I talk very open about that. I'm like, "Look, I'm going to ask you to close your computers and your phones. This is not a typical CLE. If you wanted to learn to do something different, to be more powerful, I promise you if you just give it a try, you're going to find something that makes you feel better."

I'm going to tell you that I have pictures of that room, and not every one of those 200, but maybe there might have been five that didn't do it, all gave it a shot, which that tells me is it's just this unspoken, we all know that that's true, that it's underneath and that we're all pushing through and we're not at our best.

So it's talking about that. Then very, very simple is to, I use some of the science. So I just talked about that every moment you're having emotions that are affecting us. What we know is, is that in research labs, when you give research subjects or participants something that's just a cognitive test to do, there are very small changes in the brain and in the nervous system.

But when you give them something that causes an emotional response, there are very rapid changes, big changes in the brain and brain waves and in what's happening in the nervous system that can be measured. So we know that certain emotions affect literally our heart rhythm variability, which then affects the brain waves, which means that certain states we're actually more creative and we're smarter and certain states we're not.

So a really simple way of explaining that is thinking about if you've ever been in an argument or an intense conversation and you walked out of it and two hours later you're in the shower and you think, "Gosh, I wish I'd have thought of that." Well, the reason why you didn't think of it is because you were really triggered into the part of your nervous system that's the fight or flight.

It is really focused on the perceived threat that's not really there, but it feels like it to your system. Therefore, you couldn't access the part of your brain that gave you that creative argument.

Elise Holtzman: I had another coach once explain it to me this way, and I think it's exactly what you're saying, which is that when we are in a state of fight or flight, when our threat level or perceived threat level goes up, that's a base brain response. So our access to critical thinking goes down because that's a higher-level brain function response. That's a frontal lobe response.

Lexlee Overton: Yep. That's a perfect way of thinking about it. I mean, what actually happens is the part of the brain that actually is trying to manage all this neural signal activity, which is also picking up on what your emotion is, the heart is sending that information all the time to the brain.

It's really crazy because we think the brain would send more information the other way. It's not. The brain is just trying to pick up patterns of information and it picks that up from what our emotional response is, like the heart's response to the emotions that we're in.

It's unfortunately, for a lot of us, our emotional home is this part of the nervous system that is fight or flight. It knows it, it trips into it. Like there's a nanosecond that happens and your body is automatically going into a state that's like 1400 different biochemical and hormonal changes that happen almost instantly, which interfere with getting to that higher part of the brain that you're talking about, the frontal lobe that has the critical thinking, the foresight thinking, etc.

Which we're shown that there's a statistic out there that says 40% to 70% of malpractice claims against us and or disciplinary actions involve one or two things or both, and that is depression and or use of substance abuse. That makes complete sense because both of those, substance abuse and the state of depression, actually limit the part of the brain that has to do with foresight and critical thinking and all other things.

So I guess what I'm saying is when the original question is like that like there'd be a pushback. I don't find the pushback as much because I think people are talking about it more, which we need to be. As leaders, you should be leading well-being because you can't have high performance without it.

If your team is in an incoherent state, one team member that comes in is really anxious. I mean, how does that affect everybody else? As my 17-year-old says, when I get really I get triggered and he's the one that can trigger me from time to time. When I get really anxious or upset about something, I got a sharp tone. It comes across very quickly. He'll say, "Wow, Mom, that's a whole lot of energy." He knows he could do that because I've taught him this stuff.

But it's recognizing that one person can totally affect the coherency of a team. So the coherency, which is really the performance of the team being in alignment, connected, harmonious, creative, collaborative, those qualities are associated with team members who are centered, who are calm, who are present, not anxious, overloaded, etc.

We all need stress from time to time. There are positives to that. It gets us out of bed. It makes us write the motion. But it's living in it constantly, even at a low level that's so harmful.

Elise Holtzman: I think this is really important for people to hear because I think most lawyers, most high performing lawyers, and those are the ones that you and I both work with, I think they think that if they slow down, they're going to lose their edge.

They've got to keep running, running, running, and be at that high level of stress. This is their superpower. This is what helps them really achieve. That if they slow down, they're somehow going to fall behind and not be able to be as effective.

What I'm hearing is it's actually just the opposite. So how do you then help lawyers slow down, reframe that mindset shift that you talked about, and start focusing on how to take care of themselves so they can actually do a better job?

Lexlee Overton: That's the thing. This, "If I slow down, I'm going to lose my edge." What that really is, is like we're afraid of being irrelevant. So one of the things I'd ask is, "What's the cost of constantly being on?"

You can't innovate, connect, and lead when you're chronically depleted. I find that there are bursts of that in different types of practices. You know, if you're in a litigation practice, it's really, really hard. It's very draining going through a trial. And it is so hard. I experienced that myself.

I can remember as a young lawyer going through one of my first big jury trials with my dad. I remember it was a good verdict. But I can remember being like depressed afterwards. I talked to him about it. I was like, "Why is like, I feel like I'm depressed." Now, I didn't know anything about energy management or anything like that at the time. But he gave me what he knew. He said, "It's because you're so focused in on something for so long. It's almost like even if you win, then you've lost it."

But really, it's that you've lost so much energy. So there is a cost to that. One of the things I want people to think about is, is if you're waking up tired or if you have physical symptoms, I would really challenge you to look at the state that you've been living in, because most of that can be connected back to living in a chronically depleted state, even if it's a low level amount of stress.

There are statistics that say that 90% of the people who are walking into a hospital in the Western Hemisphere are related to some type of low chronic stress state that then wears the body out. We know that like depression that I've talked about, oftentimes when we're looking at high performers, like what we work with, and they're depressed, it's because of the result that literally their nervous system is just depleted. It's done. It's the part where it's so worn out that depression is the state that comes in.

Elise Holtzman: Well, they're never in a full state of relaxation. They never turn it off. I mean, so many of the lawyers I work with and obviously that you work with, they are on all the time.

So if the client says jump, they say how high. If somebody wants to talk to them on a weekend, they're talking to them on a weekend. Or even if they don't talk to them on the weekend, they're checking their emails on the weekend. It's always on their minds. It's always there, even if they are allegedly enjoying themselves, engaged in hobbies, hanging out with their family, all of that sort of thing.

Let's talk a little bit about how leaders in law firms and other legal organizations need to be looking at this. Why is it in the best interest of law firm leaders to be paying attention to this and not just say, "Look, I'm here to get my people to work hard for me. Yes, I care about them. I don't want terrible things to happen to them. But that's not really our role to be stepping into some of these areas. You know, if people need coaching, great. They can get coaches. If people need outside support like therapy, they can get that. You know, we're a law firm. So we're focusing on delivering the legal work, taking reasonably good care of our people. But this isn't really our sphere." What do you say to that?

Lexlee Overton: So what we, and I do this with teams, when I come in, the first thing I'm doing is teaching the leaders how to be more powerful, which means teaching them this personal awareness, sustainability of performance, how to improve it, having that on an individual level.

Then I show them and we talk about that if you don't teach your people to do this, you're not actually getting the performance out of them that you could. So this is about when you lead this, you actually start to lead high performance because it brings in these states of collaboration and connection.

If you have where, I'm sure you've worked with teams where one person can be toxic and ruin everything, can infect the whole culture. So it's very costly. If we want to put it in money terms, if you don't learn how to manage and inspire people to be better at what they do, it will cost you. It's going to cost you in mistakes. It's going to cost you in turnover.

The mistake comes from when we're in a state that we're stressed out and anxious and we leap like that, we're creating anxious people around us. If your team is doing that, they're making more mistakes and that's going to cost you. It could cost you in malpractice. The bottom line of that is money. So it is important to look at it.

If you're just pushing and the only thing that you care about is billing numbers, then you'll never have the performance out of people that you expect. You will push people. There'll be people who need it. But I bet you have high turnover.

Elise Holtzman: I work with a lot of law firm leaders, whether they're managing partners or chief executive officers or chief operating officers. One of the things that is really current for people and that they're talking about a lot is this whole issue of attracting and retaining talent.

Because to your point, losing talent is incredibly expensive, and we know that that's pretty obvious because we know what it takes to rehire and train and all of those sorts of things.

What you're talking about are some of these hidden costs, both financial and emotional, tolerating this behavior in the workplace, but also tolerating some stuff that may not be toxic to other people, but is toxic to the individuals themselves. I love this idea of showing rather than telling. You're not just saying to the law firm leaders, "Hey, this is stuff that we should be doing with your team members because you're going to have these problems."

You're working with them first to have them see how it actually works and then not necessarily having to convince them because they're then evolving into leaders that are working with these people in a way that's different than what they've been doing in the past. Does that sound accurate to you?

Lexlee Overton: It's totally accurate. I do use techniques that help to show. I use biofeedback with leaders. I can demonstrate that with teams too. It's really cool. They get to see, like literally physically, what's happening in their bodies when they're in a state of anxiety as opposed to when we just practice a little bit of gratitude, which we know that gratitude brings in a higher coherency state.

Coherency is a scientific term. It's talking about alignment between the brain and the heart and the emotional state that you're in. When you have coherency, which is usually the states of caring, collaboration is what we see, but it's the states of being really centered and calm, patient, then we see higher coherency in teams, which causes higher performance.

So we teach them on an individual level how to feel that for themselves and to see it for themselves. But then when you start to put into place, it's teaching the leaders about coherency and being in alignment, them bringing that to their team. What that helps with when attracting people in is people want to be connected to something.

Look, money is not the reason that people will stay in a place. Matter of fact, it's like fifth on the list. So it is about belonging to something. Feeling like they're cared about is very, very important. If you're demonstrating well-being and that you care about it and giving practices and teaching them how to do it and to be better at their work, then they're more likely to stay.

That's how you start to retain people because that's what we really want. We all want to belong to something bigger than ourselves. If I'm just showing up to work and all you want is my money and billing out of me, I'm not even a neutral employee. I'm a disengaged employee that's showing up for a paycheck.

Those are ones that will never, ever give you high performance. You want the people who can't wait to be at work in the morning, who are excited about what they're doing. Those are high-performance. If you're not teaching and leading well-being and coherency, you don't have those. Or they won't stay.

Elise Holtzman: You mentioned that the legal profession is getting a lot better at being open to these things, taking some of these things on, incorporating some of these practices into their culture. If you could wave a magic wand and have it all happen overnight and instantly change, let's say, one common leadership habit in the legal profession, what would you change? What would it be?

Lexlee Overton: I would change this rule that hustle is the only way to win. That's what I would change. I would make that something that people avoided with a 10-foot stick. And led the opposite. Because I think if you are leading that, you're harming people around you, because that's what you're teaching them to do.

It's not sustainable. It comes at a really high cost to people individually. So I think our job as leaders is to inspire greatness in others. So to do that, you have to know how to do that within yourself.

Elise Holtzman: I was with a group just yesterday working with leaders on their interpersonal skills, their communication skills. Everyone in the room, to their credit, was very open-minded about having this conversation. Then there was one leader who is very well regarded. Her group does really good work.

She was stuck on this idea that if you're not doing what she wants you to do, you need to get out. She's going to be very honest with you about that and just say to you, "Listen, you're not producing what you're supposed to be producing and this doesn't work for us and get it together or get out."

So while she was willing to listen, she's been doing this a very long time, no amount of conversation about this seemed to convince her that that wasn't the best way to motivate and inspire her team and to lead them. It was like, either you're in or you're out. Either you're loyal to this practice group or you're not loyal to this practice group.

I know that you talk a lot about the power of emotional intelligence in law firms. When you hear a story like that, what comes up for you? What do you think people need to recognize, especially those of us who have been around the block a few times and maybe a little bit stuck in our ways?

Lexlee Overton: Although the team does what you're saying is they produce good work, I really wonder at what cost. I really want to know about the history of the people and if people have stayed or not. What I hear there is a leader who is not self-aware.

So there's a story there. Somewhere, she's learned a story that this is the way to push people. It was something that's happened that has worked for her in some way. But I guarantee you it's at a cost. I don't believe that it's just like they're amazing.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, well, you and me both. But then I did find out later that there have been some lawsuits around there. Whether or not from a legal perspective, there were actually things that were actionable. There are certainly people left very disgruntled and feeling that this hadn't been a good fit for them.

To your point, I think this was very much learned from the person that brought her up and trained her and to whom she continues to be very loyal. So there's this idea that "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It's been working for me so far. But look, we know that there are a lot of things there that are broken.

And sometimes people can just get so stuck in their ways that they can't have that self-awareness. So they're not willing to have that self-awareness. So that's something that we're working on.

How do you think that EQ or emotional intelligence shows up in a high-performing legal team? Let's look at it from the positive side. What are the kinds of things when at a high-performing legal team where people are happy and feel fulfilled and they're motivated to jump out of bed every day and come to work?

Of course, not everything is sweetness and puppies, but in general, things are really running well, not just for the team, not just for the clients, but for the individuals. What do you expect to see in a team like that? What are some of the characteristics?

Lexlee Overton: Well, when they are a team that is emotionally challenged, which comes down to awareness, like what we were talking about, the very first step, and they integrate some of these practices in, and they're very aware of how that, "Who I am affects who you are."

I mean, science, we know this. Let's say you're with a client who's really anxious, you can become really anxious. Or if you're with someone who's really sad, we could feel the energy of sad. Science is proving that what our nervous systems are doing, it affects the nervous systems of other people.

That's really powerful, especially when you think about, if you're in any sense, but in my practice as being a litigator, I think about the lawyer that is the most grounded in the room, the one who is the calmest, that's the thing that we are unconsciously drawn to because we want that.

But if I am really anxious, it doesn't matter how good of a storyteller I am. If I'm really anxious, we pick that up. Then that makes us naturally repel against that person. Because we don't want to be anxious. So what we see in teams that know this—and you know, there's been a study done by Google that looked at all these high-performing teams and what was the characteristic—it didn't come down to having the most intelligent people or people from the same culture or all that. It came down to being able that the people on those teams had the ability to intuit the emotional states of themselves and the people around them and to be able to work with that and to understand and to communicate on that level underneath of what was really happening.

So what you see is improvement in communication. You see emotional reactivity decreases, which means we're able to collaborate when we're under a higher fire. We can come together to collaborate, problem solve better. Your clients feel the difference in that too and how you handle things.

I work with a lot of teams that are litigators in some way, it doesn't matter. It's a field of law that they litigate in. I talk to them about teaching some of this coherency and management of state. You need to do that with your clients. The clients are going to have to testify, that kind of thing, because it's extremely stressful for someone to be the client of a lawyer, especially if you're in litigation. If you can teach them how to manage their energy, they'll do better. They'll perform better when they're under the pressure of that too.

So there are ways that it benefits. It's so profound in how it seeps out. But when you see teams that do this, the collaboration and the out-of-box thinking, the ability to be like, when we think about high-performing teams like a Super Bowl team. Like a team that seems to be in sync just naturally, that is the team that is coherent. The members of those teams are coherent. That's the reason why that can happen.

You have one person that's out that messes that up. It's almost thinking about like a symphony and if one player is totally out of tune, "You're going to see that and you're going to feel it." High-performing teams are like everybody is in sync. They're collaborative. They're moving effortlessly through even the challenges. That's what you see. It's really powerful.

Elise Holtzman: Well, and we sometimes see in law firms that there is somebody who is toxic. There is somebody who is out of sync and out of coherence with the rest of the team. Yet people are reluctant to let them go, either because they don't want to upset them or because they're a big rainmaker or whatever it may be.

So let's finish up with a couple of questions here. The first one is, if a firm or a practice group or a leader wants to get started with this thing, part of that is bringing other people to the table and having them buy into this, where do they start? What are a couple of foundational strategies to get them going, to get them to shift this culture that can make a real difference and might actually stick even with people who are trained to be a little bit skeptical?

Lexlee Overton: So it has to start with awareness. One of the tools I use with leaders when they come in, they want to talk to me about growth and like, "I don't know, we're having such a hard time with hiring and we're having a hard time retaining people," one of the things I do is I just do an anonymous survey to the team. I ask the questions, what would you improve? What do you think is great about this culture? What's not?

If you do it anonymous, people will answer it. You'll usually pick up very quickly on the things that the leader, once you read the answers to them, might be like, "Okay, yeah, that's true." Most of the time, leaders are just so busy. They think that they've got to be so focused on, we create these business strategies to get to these business goals. But what we forget is that in between those two, what carries that out is the people.

If you would actually learn to invest in growing people, then your strategies would be so much more successful, and you'd be a lot faster getting there. So I think it takes awareness. That's one of the tools that we use, just looking at when we come in to evaluate a team, we get the team to tell us.

I just had a team recently that hired me. As soon as they hired me, like the week of, somebody was leaving. I was like, "Oh, let me see if she'll talk to me. Let me do an exit interview." Wow, did she give me information. She liked the team. But the reason she was leaving were things that they could have prevented.

So it's asking. It's actually creating the conversations. If leaders were more aware, it's so important to have this feedback. You're afraid to ask for feedback, or you're like the leader that you described, my way or the highway. But really, if you would open the opportunities for feedback on a regular basis—I'm talking about the end of your one-on-one meetings with people—"Tell me what's working for you. What's not? What could I be doing better as a leader?" I like to say to my team, "I want you to tell me the thing that you're afraid to tell me, because that's where my growth is."

Elise Holtzman: Well, and it's about the self-awareness, but then also, to your point, the willingness to sit near it and address it and hear it, exactly. Then to actually execute on strategies that are going to help you resolve it.

Lexlee, as we wind up our time here together today—and I think we could talk about this all day but we do have limited time—there's a question that I ask all of my guests at the end of the show. There's a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge, where experts sometimes forget that what is so obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to others.

When it comes to both safeguarding lawyer well-being while at the same time building resilient, high-performance legal teams, what's a principle or piece of advice that may seem obvious to you but is important for people to hear?

Lexlee Overton: What's obvious to me now is that for me or anyone, any leader, to do the best work that they possibly can means that they actually have to work on themselves first. So if you want to have a high-performing team, you have to really ask yourself, are you the best version of yourself? What is it that would help you get there?

If you could do that, then you're going to start to leading a different way. That means that recognizing just what we talked about, that it's not about the best version of me is not pushing more hours, the best version of me actually comes in when I build in boundaries, when I build in space for rest, when I build in space for recovery, and what are the practices that actually do that for me? It might look a little different for you than it does me. But that's actually the most important thing that I could do to be better is to build in that space. That is obvious to me now. It's just something that people miss because we have this badge of honor of just pushing, pushing, pushing the grind.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, that sounds very much like the missing piece. So that's fantastic advice. Thank you so much. Lexlee, thanks for being here today.

Lexlee Overton: Thank you. I love talking about this. Thank you for having me.

Elise Holtzman: Absolutely. I'm also going to thank our listeners for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.