Debbie Foster | The Importance of Leadership AND Management in Law Firms

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast, where I sit down with successful attorneys, legal marketing specialists, business leaders, and authors to talk about how lawyers and law firms can grow and sustain healthy, profitable businesses.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Lawyer’s Edge Podcast. I am so thrilled to welcome my guest today, Debbie Foster, the CEO of Affinity Consulting.

Debbie is a nationally recognized thought leader on people, strategy, efficiency, and innovation, and professional legal organizations. She has more than 20 years of experience working with law firms and legal departments to help them build a future-proof organization and to navigate the ever-changing legal services delivery landscape.

Debbie consults with firms across the country, helping them solve their most challenging issues. She's very active in the Association of Legal Administrators, known as ALA, the Law Practice Division of the American Bar Association, and she was the chair of ABA Techshow 2010 and 2018.

Debbie and I met more than a year ago when we worked as co-chairs to design and deliver a conference for women in law firm leadership. We had a lot of fun, both personally and professionally, and I will tell you, we laughed a lot. So I've been looking forward to having her here on the podcast so she can share her wealth of knowledge with all of us. Debbie, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge.

Debbie Foster: Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Elise Holtzman: I'm delighted. I'm so glad that we're finally making this happen. I want to talk about your early career and how you wound up doing what you're doing now because I did a little stalking you online as I do sometimes.

I learned that early in your career, you did a bunch of different things that I think are really interesting, especially given what you do today. You were an emergency medical technician, an EMT. You ran a chain of dry cleaning stores.

You helped computerize a restaurant back in 1994. That was way before most businesses were even thinking about technology. How did you wind up spending the last 25 or so years becoming a leader in the legal industry?

Debbie Foster: So that's a very long story that I'll make very short. As I was working for the restaurant, a restaurant magazine came. That's how I found out about this cool system. They didn't use actual PalmPilots, but they were devices like PalmPilots where the waiters and waitresses could go in and put the order in and it printed out the ticket in the kitchen.

It was pretty fancy. They just go back and dock it. I loved it. I really loved doing that, even though I would have said that I was not a tech person. Interesting turn of events, one of my really good friends from high school married a guy that had a computer company and they said, “Hey, we're going to a home show and we're going to sell custom-built computers. Would you come with us and work in our booth?”

I was like, “I mean, I don't really know how to sell a computer, but sure, I'll go do that.” I did that. They hired me. I sold computers. In the process of that, I sold computers to a few lawyers. This is back in 1995, 1996. I'm selling computers to lawyers. They don't even know how to use them.

We were literally setting up a computer, giving the lawyers a mouse, teaching them how to play Solitaire, and then going on to the next lawyer, so the lawyer could learn how to use a mouse. That's how you learn to drag and drop, double click, single click, how you learn the difference between those things.

But we were selling computers to lots of different people, not just law firms. I left that company and started my own company, which eventually became Affinity in 1998, and I was working with all different kinds of businesses just on helping them with software.

One day I came back to my office and I would go to a real estate agent, to an insurance broker, to a doctor's office, a dentist's office, and a manufacturing company, it didn't matter what kind of business it was. We helped them use their software.

I went back to the office one day and said, “This is exhausting. What do we have the most of right now?” The person who was helping me with my billing said, “I think you have the most law firms.” I said, “Okay, let's just work with law firms then. Let's figure out how to really double down on that and learn.”

So we started working with law firms. Over time, everyone who wasn't a law firm ended up falling off. That's how it happened. It was really not planned. If that billing person would have said something different, I would have said, “Let's do that.”

Elise Holtzman: Well, I love this story for so many reasons and on so many levels, one of which is that as somebody who works so much with lawyers on business development, I love the fact that, first of all, you narrowed down. You said, “I can't go market this stuff to everyone and their mother. I've got to narrow down my business.”

You focused on one particular area, one particular industry. And you said, “Well, I could do this for anybody, but who do I really need to learn more about? Who am I already serving?” and then chose that and obviously went narrow and deep on law firms.

Debbie Foster: Yeah. Back then, there weren't very many people. Well, first of all, it was harder to understand the universe, the universe of products, the universe of people who did what I did because the internet was brand new. I'm not a paper person.

In fact, if anybody ever walks up to me with paper, I'm like, “I would happily take a picture of that, but I'm not taking that paper with me. I'm just not a paper person.” But I do have one binder clip of paper left.

It is the original, when I called the 1-800 number and they faxed me information about the two different software programs that we started with in law firms, I still have that original paper.

I think as we dug into—and I had a very small team back then, there were four of us—as we dug into, how can we really help law firms, the first 10 or 12 years of my career were getting lawyers to adopt technology, getting them to have a computer on their desk.

These are the days when there was a single internet connection and it came into the library. If you wanted to get on the internet, you had to see if anyone was sitting in that chair so you could sit in that.

I mean, this was early, early in the days. My job and the role of our team in working with law firms has changed so drastically from the original getting people to believe that having a computer on their desks and using technology to run their business, like we had to convince them of that, now, it's all different.

It's about people. It's about leadership. It's about change management. It's about attracting and retaining talent. It's about thinking differently about how you get your work done.

Our business has evolved. We started off as a technology company. But it's evolved into a transformation company. How do we help firms transform digitally, thinking differently about how they get their work done? How do we help them transform how their businesses run, thinking about new business models and new ways to attract and retain the clients that you want and the people that you want to do the work for your clients and taking client's satisfaction to a new level and strategically thinking into the future about how does your law firm stay relevant? It's just a completely different business today than it was.

Elise Holtzman: You anticipated my question because I was going to ask you that. What looks different now? You've seen so much change and you were working with law firms on different issues at the beginning of your career than you are now. I think the first thing is to just think about how remarkable it is that change happens and it happens so quickly.

Debbie Foster: Oh, my gosh, yes.

Elise Holtzman: I think you and I are similarly aged and staged. I always say I was the last college class to go to college with a typewriter. My husband came along two years later and he had some crazy word processing thing, it wasn't a Commodore 64, but it was like something along those lines, and how much has changed.

I also remember when I was at a law firm and the law firm one day announced that there were no more paper memos, that everyone had to use email as a memo. When I tell you, there was almost a coup staged at the firm because lawyers could not understand how they could possibly survive without papers literally coming into their inboxes and literally putting them in.

There was always a guy who would come around and collect the folder with the paper in it and take it wherever it needed to go. Now look at us all, we all have computers in our pockets. We can't live without them.

Look, we're still talking about technology because technology is changing rapidly. I know you work with law firms on that. But I'm curious, I'd like to dive more into this concept of people management and organization, efficiency, and talent retention and all the kinds of things that you just mentioned and that I hear law firms talking about all the time.

I know that we also talked about how lawyers were not trained to be leaders. We weren't trained to be managers. We were just given a little bit of a foundation in the law and then kicked unceremoniously out of law school to go live our lives.

What are some of the things that you are seeing going on in law firms right now that do relate to people management, talent retention, running law firms in a way that helps the client, but also helps the law firm grow and succeed?

Debbie Foster: That's a great question. My mind went in like seven different directions. So I'll just tell you, I'll give you a couple of the little anecdotes that are rolling around in my head right now.

First, one of the things that I tend to push back on is this concept that lawyers don't know how to run their businesses because they didn't learn how to do that in law school.

While that is in fact true, in some respects, it's irrelevant because you went to law school, you learned how to be a lawyer, and then you left law school and then you became a lawyer.

You built on what you learned in law school. If you're 20 years out, you can't say, “I don't know how to run my business because they didn't teach me that 20 years ago.” Because even if they did, like geometry, anyone? They taught you that 20 years ago. Do you know how to do that? Algebra, anyone? Maybe the basic things.

US History, name every country, we all learned a lot of things 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago that we have no idea how to do now, which leads me to the next topic, which is you become really good at something you are a student of.

If you learned how to run a business in law school and then you left law school and you started running a business and you did that for the next 20 years, you'd be really good at running a business.

But you went to law school and you learned how to be a lawyer and then you were a lawyer and you learned how to do that and you became good at being a lawyer. At least we hope that's what has happened.

If you want to now say, “What do I need to do to be a great leader?” it isn't read a book and then you'll be a great leader, it's practice it for 20 years, five years, or six years.

The reason why you and I are really good at what we do is because we are students of our businesses. We are students. You are a student of marketing, business development, you're always thinking about it, always thinking about new ways to do it.

I am always thinking about a better way to run a law firm, a better way to manage people, a better way to lead people, a better way to get change to happen in a law firm, a better way to challenge people to think differently about how they get work done. That's what we do.

The typical law firm, I was just at a conference in Salt Lake City last weekend, I had a room of, let's call it, a hundred executive administrative professionals that run law firms.

I said, “How many of you started off at your firm as a receptionist, a paralegal, or a legal assistant?” 80% of the room raised their hands. Then I said, “Okay, put your hands down. Of all of you that raised your hand, raise your hand if you got formal leadership training.” Two hands went up in the room.

Just because you can play doesn't mean you can coach is one of the things that come to mind. You're a great paralegal, we're going to make you in charge of the paralegals. You're a great lawyer, we're going to make you a practice group chair.

You're a great paralegal, would you like to be our billing clerk? Would you like to be our firm administrator? Would you like to be our executive director? Nothing. No training comes from that.

I am super, super passionate about the people part because I think that law firms, you can't say—you can, because they do it all the time—but you shouldn't say, “I want to attract better talent and I want to retain people,” without saying, “and I want to figure out how I can create a team of leaders that make that happen.” It doesn't work if you don't do both of those things.

Elise Holtzman: You and I are probably preaching to the choir about this because the point that you made about people learning these things because they're students of it, they're curious about it, they get excited about it, you mentioned the people in the room at your conference, you and I, as you pointed out, are examples of that.

I started out as a lawyer. I was doing commercial real estate transactions at a big firm. I wasn't managing or I might have been managing a deal, but I wasn't managing people, I wasn’t leading people. I didn't know diddly squat about business development. Nobody even mentioned business development to me when I was practicing law.

But when I started coaching, I started getting excited about the idea of growing my own business. I mean, this was purely selfish. I started taking every course possible, reading every book, starting to do my own marketing and business development, and then accidentally noticed that I was helping my lawyer clients with it and then got even more excited about it.

You did the same thing. We talked about you running a restaurant, a friend of yours asked you to help sell computers. The next thing you knew, you were off to the races. I agree with you.

Look, research demonstrates, lawyers tend to show up in the workplace, and I say this all the time so people who are listening to the podcast on a regular basis can throw tomatoes at me because I say this so much, but they didn't come to college and say, “Hey, we'd like to take a random sampling of all of you and put you into law school.”

We self-selected in, and we didn't necessarily self-select in because we were risk-takers or wanted to be salespeople or were big visionaries. We like to check off boxes. We like to drive things across the finish line. We like structure.

What do you see as some of the most important things that law firm leaders can do to help cultivate these skills, this desire, and this curiosity in the people that are working for the firm, whether they are lawyers or whether they are other kinds of administrative professionals, executive leaders?

Debbie Foster: I think the first thing is to make a decision that you are going to put some intention around what your firm looks like from a culture and a leadership perspective. Otherwise, it just happens to you.

Maybe they’re lucky, and maybe it happens in a good way. But more times than not, you don’t get lucky. You know this, there is a hierarchical structure to a law firm that makes how they think about and embrace leadership and management a little bit different than your average business.

It's just, I wish it wasn't a reality, but it is a reality. I think I and my brain are connecting a couple of dots here. I'd never heard this whole “we self-select into law school” until you and I were talking the other day.

I've actually thought a lot about that. It's such an important point that it is not a cross-section of the general population that becomes a lawyer. It is people who said, “This is appealing to me. I want to go do this.”

When I think about law firms, which you, I'm sure, see the same thing I do, when they say, “Our firm is really unique, let me tell you a little bit about us,” I try not to chuckle. Then when they tell me about that one partner that's really unique, I want to say, “I've already met him or her,” it's just someone with a different name in a different firm, there's a lot of absolutes that you can apply to every firm.

Then every firm has like their five or six weird nuancedy kinds of things. I think that that is a lot because of what you just said about the whole we self-select into this. So it's not an accident that so many of these firms struggle with the same things and we see a lot of the same repeating patterns.

It starts off with saying, “What do we want this firm to look like? How do we want our people to feel about coming to work?” I feel like you and I could talk for seven hours about this because another one of the dynamics that has to do with how the legal industry has changed and just how we as humans have evolved is that leadership style that is so common in a law firm, the hierarchical challenging style actually worked 20 years ago or 30 years ago.

The people that you were hiring, you were hiring them for life. They were going to work there forever. The pairing of a legal assistant, a paralegal, a legal secretary, or whatever you want to call them, and a lawyer were like marriages.

Sometimes they even became marriages, but they were like marriages. It doesn't work like that anymore. The rules of the game have completely shifted. That means that we can show up and try to pretend like it still works the way we did it 10 years ago, 15 years ago, or 20 years ago, but the truth is it doesn't.

That speaks to the attract and retain problem. The reason why attract and retain is so hard is because we're hiring a different kind of person and we're expecting what we had before of that person and it doesn't work. So we have to be intentional about thinking about what it should look like.

Elise Holtzman: Without going too far down a rabbit hole, because again, you and I could do that all day, one of the things that comes to mind for me when you say that is generational differences.

I know I work with generational differences. I work with generational differences. I think it's so profound what you just said that we are hiring people for a structure that was right for the prior generation, that worked with the prior generation's mindset and vision and how they did things and the way they grew up and how they were raised.

Yet we're hiring generations into the workplace that look at the world very differently. They didn't grow up in a top-down environment necessarily. They grew up in an environment where their opinion mattered, where they could debate topics, where we trained them, we enriched them, and we brought them to 26 taekwondo lessons a week and that sort of thing.

We ask them, “Hey, what do you think about this?” Then we hire them into a top-down world and it doesn't make any sense for anybody. The older generation gets frustrated because they can't understand what the younger generation wants.

The younger generation looks up and says, “Who are these people? What do they think they're doing here? This isn't the way the world should work.” That's a whole other of, like I said, bucket of stuff to talk about.

Debbie Foster: Well, let me just add to say one quick thing, because you and I talked about this the other day. It's what makes people in law firms say, “No one ever had to teach me how to [insert something here.] No one showed me how to develop business. No one showed me how to build a client relationship.”

The people that were hiring today, that's actually what they need. So we can dig our heels in and say, “Well, no one had to tell me that I had to do that.” But no one wins when we do that.

Elise Holtzman: It's like the old expression, like, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?”

Debbie Foster: Right. Exactly.

Elise Holtzman: It's true because in the older generations, the ones that came before us, their parents didn't ask them what they thought. Their parents didn't give them enrichment and training, a baseball coach, private baseball coach, and all of that sort of thing.

We're the ones who raised these folks and now they're coming into the workplace. I think it is important for leaders and managers of all kinds to be thinking about the issues of different sorts of personalities, different sorts of skills, and different generational approaches, not to be critical of them, but to understand them. I know that's what you spend a lot of your time doing.

It occurs to me that I just mentioned, and you've mentioned, leadership and management. We're saying them in the same sentence. How are they the same? How are they different? Does it matter? Is it just semantics? Who cares? How does this impact the work that you do?

Debbie Foster: I actually think it really does matter. I would go back to that Peter Drucker quote about management is doing things right and leadership is doing the right things. There's a lot of different ways to think about why it is important to think about leadership and management differently.

For me, I am a manager and a leader, and I literally think about them as different hats. Am I showing up as a leader? Am I showing up as a manager? Am I showing up to be part of the team to cheer people on? That's a leader. Am I showing up to say, how come this isn't done yet? That's a manager.

A leader is focused on people, inspiration, brainstorming, letting people fail and make mistakes, and building confidence into the people on their team, while a manager is making sure that rules get followed, is looking at a task list, gives people direction, and shares cascading messages.

A manager is a much more tactical role and a leader is a much more people-oriented higher-level role and we need both. If we don't think about them differently, we end up with too much of one or the other.

Too much leadership without management is like a rudderless ship and too much management without leadership makes people feel like they are literally box-checkers; they are just there to get the things done. They're not inspired. They're just like the rote work. In law firms, we don't do rote work.

Elise Holtzman: Let's talk about this in the context of a law firm. Because one of the ways that it's been explained to me over the years and that I've done it is that management is really getting the trains to run on time. As you say, the tactics, and what's wrong with this track or did this electricity panel go down or whatever it may be.

Leadership is more about the future. Like, how are we going to be effective and have this organization and the people in it succeed when we don't know what the future looks like? How do you think most law firms handle leadership and management? Do you think that most law firm leaders and managers understand the difference?

Debbie Foster: I would say, generally speaking, probably not in a way that they could articulate it. Intellectually, I think people could get there. If you said there is a difference between leadership and management, what do you think it is? I don't think that there would be a lot of people who say, “There's no difference. It's exactly the same thing.”

In fact, it might even make them sit back and say, “Hmm, let me think about that. Let me think about what that looks like.” They might not be able to roll it off their tongue like I can.

I also think that because what you described before around the generational differences is not something that has only happened in the last five years, law firms have been dealing with this for 10 years, for 12 years, for 15 years, since the first millennial arrived and they were like, “Why are these people so lazy and why don't they get any work done?” We've all heard that before.

Law firms have been dealing with this for a long time now, but COVID really amplified how we need to think differently about this. I think that there are a lot more people today on a journey to try and figure it out than there were before.

I work a lot with executive leaders; a law firm COO, executive director, director of HR. I'm working with a lot of people who are obligated to make sure that the trains run on time. That is sometimes what their role is viewed as by their leaders.

But they're also intrigued by this idea of being inspiring and figuring out how to get people on board with a vision for the future. There's a lot more people who are tuned in to both sides of that, even if they can't say it, quite articulate it that way.

Elise Holtzman: What about the people who are not yet in leadership or management roles and they're trying to prepare for their future in the law, what are some of the things that you think that they can be doing to prepare themselves to be successful in the future and not just think about doing, doing, doing the legal work and being the individual contributor that finishes the brief or drafts the contract?

Debbie Foster: I think there's some really simple things. There's a podcast that I listen to and I can't think of the name of it. It's called Culture by Design. They talk about taking care of people to the right of you and taking care of people to the left of you. That's a Simon Sinek thing too. He talks about that a lot.

Leadership is taking care of the person to your right and the person to your left. That is a very simple directive that every single person can say, “How do I do more of that?”

Little tiny example. I was at a conference in Boston a few weeks ago and I had to sit at the front of a bus. It doesn't matter why, there were like 60 lawyers on the bus. Sitting at the front of the bus, I had to get something from the back of the bus, but I couldn't do it until everyone left. 60-ish people, exactly five people, said thank you to the bus driver.

I was sitting right there. Five people said thank you to the bus driver. To me, that is a leadership problem. Because I think being a leader is taking care of the people to your right and the people to your left, no matter where you are.

I don't care if you're in an airport, you are at your law firm, you are with your family, or you are on a bus. It is taking care of the people to the left and right of you. What can someone who is aspiring to be a future leader be? Someone who cares about the people to the right and to the left of them.

Building relationships. It is the heart and soul of our businesses. Building relationships. Build them early and often and not just with people who you think you can get something from, people who can get something from you, like all of these relationships are two ways, like you were on my podcast a couple of weeks ago and here I am on your podcast, how do we help each other?

That is a mindset. That is something that it's like how do we build new habits. We think about how in the next week can I help 10 people with something? It could be anything, it could be with directions. It could be looking at someone in the grocery store who looks lost and you don't really know where anything is either but say, “You look lost, is there something I can help you find?” Like, “Whatever, I'm good.”

It's reading signs and that looks like that's in aisle seven. How do we just think about taking care of people that are to our left and to our right? If you do that, you will learn about leadership because you will be presented with opportunities that you never ever had if you didn't think about the person sitting next to you on the left and right.

Elise Holtzman: I love this because it's so simple. It's not a huge big deal. It's really about being human. It doesn't have to be these crazy lofty goals, like, “I'm going to run a law firm someday. I'm going to run a company someday,” and it's doable. You don't need a degree. You don't need some kind of training program.

It really is the start of understanding other people, understanding what makes them tick, what they're afraid of, what they're excited about, and what motivates them. I think that's great advice.

Debbie Foster: Sure. There's also so much free information. If you are aspiring to be a better leader, search for Simon Sinek and go watch every one of his YouTube videos. That guy gets it. He is like the human's human.

There's a hundred others like him. He happens to be one of my favorites. I really respect and like his advice. He talks about leadership and management and the difference as well. He also has some books.

But you said this earlier, be curious. Ask questions. Be curious. Be willing to step outside of your comfort zone. Be willing to do something that you would have maybe 10 years ago been like, “I would never do that.” Well, do try it. Try something new.

Elise Holtzman: I call it conducting mini-experiments. To your point, you're not wedded to anything, try something. If it doesn't feel like you, if it doesn't feel like a good fit, if somebody didn't react the way you expected them to, then just try something different.

You also mentioned intentionality. I'm like the poster child for beating people over the head with the idea of intentionality. Because understandably, lawyers, law firm leaders, executives, anybody who has a role that requires a lot of hard work—and who in a law firm doesn't have a lot of hard work—gets bogged down in the minutia, gets bogged down in the day-to-day, gets bogged down in the list checking and trying to drive something over the finish line.

It does require intentionality for us to take ourselves out of that day-to-day grind and ensure that we are achieving what it is that we want to achieve both for ourselves and other people.

Debbie Foster: Yeah. I think that doesn't have to be big. To build on your example about simple things, if you were to think about like, “I need to start exercising, I think I'll sign up for an Ironman,” that would be bananas. Just go walk outside for 15 minutes a day. That's better than nothing.

I think those are the kinds of tips that can be super helpful to someone who's trying to figure out what's next in their journey. For example, let's say you're a lawyer in a law firm and you're like, “I need to do a better job here at this.”

Start off with 15-minute one-on-one meetings with the people that you work most closely with: your legal assistant, your paralegal, your associate, another partner, 15 minutes and you don't talk. “How are you? What's going on? Is there anything I can do to better support you?”

“What was like a frictiony thing that happened to you this week that maybe we need to think about making better?” Google questions to ask in a one-on-one and you'll have 10 million options. Start with that.

Don't be afraid when that person sits down to say, “This is weird and awkward, and we've never done this before.” “I acknowledge it. It's probably weird and awkward. I hope you don't think you're in trouble,” because that's when you get called to the office for the 15-minute meeting. That's what happens.

Give people a little bit of a beat to just take a breath and say, “This is a good thing. We're going to start doing this.” Send something out ahead of time and say, “I feel like I need to be a more intentional leader and I need to invest in all of you because I know I have as much to learn from you as you might have to me from me and maybe more.”

Because how did I get to learn how to be a good leader? I'm still on the journey too. I made 10,000 mistakes and tomorrow I'm going to make another one. I'm going to pick it up and do the next thing.

Elise Holtzman: That requires vulnerability. I think that there are a lot of people, understandably so, in leadership and management positions, senior to other people who are afraid to admit to people who are either their peers or people who are senior or less senior, that they don't know everything.

I think that that's something that we have to let go of. I think that it's hard for everyone. I don't think there's a person on the planet that wants to go around admitting their failures on a regular basis. So it does take some vulnerability. How do you talk to leaders about that?

Debbie Foster: I mean, some of it is to start with there isn't an easy way to get to vulnerability except to just pick something that you feel like you can do and just do it. I do always recommend, often recommend the Brené Brown books because she talks a lot about vulnerability.

I think that there's an intellectual component. I am not a psychotherapist. I have none of that. But I also know that vulnerability is about safety. We feel like if all of our things are just kept tucked away inside and no one else knows about them, we're safer.

There's a lot that goes into getting someone to be intentional again about letting someone in. Some of my basic suggestions are you walk into someone's office and maybe you've never said, “How come you have a Florida Gators poster over there?”

You just ask them a question about something that is on display. Suddenly, you have just put a little tiny crack because you've taken it a little below the surface. You ask about safe things, “Is that your cat? I have a cat too. Is that your dog? I have a dog too.”

We start sharing information with people. That is how we build trust and where we feel safe is with people that we trust. How do you build trust? You build relationships. Little tiny things like that can be a great place to start.

Elise Holtzman: One of the things that I have thought about and I've even said it to my own children is that when you admit that you've made a mistake or you admit that you haven't done something perfectly, it's not a referendum on your value as a human being, it's simply an acknowledgment that you don't know everything.

We're all human and we make mistakes. You mentioned the intellectual. We know that intellectually, but getting from “I intellectually know that I don't know everything” to “I'm going to make it clear to people that I don't know everything,” that's a big leap because we have emotions involved.

But we tend to feel like if we admit that we don't know something, somehow it diminishes us as human beings. I think that there's so much opportunity there to be a little bit more vulnerable. I think that we can all be better people, let alone managers and leaders if we're able to do that.

Debbie Foster: Yeah. I would just say to that, people are thinking about you and me way less than we think they are. They're just not. They've moved on to the next thing. You say something and like six hours later, you're like, “Oh, my god, I can't believe I said that,” it is very likely that no one has thought about that.

Elise Holtzman: No one because they're so busy with their own bucket of crazy that they're not even thinking about it. Debbie, as we wind up our time here together, I want to ask you 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 effective leadership and management in a law firm, what's a principle or piece of advice to emerging leaders, to existing leaders that may seem obvious to you, but is really important for people to hear?

Debbie Foster: I think that we underestimate the micro-relationship-building tactics that are available to us every day, all day long. It's so obvious to me saying thank you to a bus driver is like a micro thing that doesn't seem like it matters, but it does.

Walking through the office and saying good morning to people, it doesn't seem like it matters, but it does. I think that I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that something very tiny and what seems to them to be inconsequential is really meaningful.

I believe that with every single fiber of my being. It is so obvious to me, why can't we just thank the bus driver? Why can't we say thank you to the bus driver, honestly? But people think that things like that don't matter. What is this theory called?

Elise Holtzman: The curse of knowledge.

Debbie Foster: Curse of knowledge. I often say once you know something, it's impossible to remember what it was like to not know it. It's the same thing.

Elise Holtzman: It's the same idea, yeah.

Debbie Foster: You say thank you to a bus driver and the bus driver looks at you and says, “Thank you for saying that. That really made my day. Not very many people say thank you to me,” would be life-changing for so many people if they heard that feedback.

It doesn't take something big to make an impact with people, to be a more intentional leader, to be a more intentional manager. It doesn't take something big. The way that you learn that that is true, so you two will never forget it, is to start micro-dropping all of those things everywhere that you can, “Hey, thank you for staying late and finishing that document for me yesterday. It really meant a lot to me that you did that.”

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, the power of the compound effect of doing little things over time is tremendous. Great advice, Debbie. Thank you so much for being here. I love talking to you as you well know. I'm sure the listeners are going to enjoy this as well. Thank you also to our listeners for tuning in.

If you've 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.

Thank you for tuning in. If you've 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.