Jonathan Fitzgarrald
For most of the week last week I was at the Legal Marketing Association‘s Board of Directors’ & Leaders’ meeting, preparing for a busy 2013 with our incoming leadership teams. As such, I missed the 10th Annual LMA-LA Continuing Marketing Education conference. And, from what I am hearing, I missed one heck of a conference. From Allen Fuqua‘s post, A TED Conference LMA-style – Part 1. Guest post by Allen Fuqua:

True innovation in the law firm industry is a rarity.  And I was fortunate to witness and be a participant in it on September 28, 2012 at the Legal Marketing Association’s Los Angeles CME event. The LA group hosted a Continuing Marketing Education event based on the TED big idea format. 23 speakers spoke for 20 minutes each on a big idea about which they felt passionate.  Actually it was 17 solo speakers and 2 panels of 3 speakers each. With an LMA Los Angeles membership of some 110 professionals, the event was at capacity with 110 people registered for attendance.  The quality of the program may have been best represented by the fact that even for the last two sessions of the day-long event, the crowd remained entranced and enthusiastic.  I had the privilege to be the last solo speaker of the day and I was impressed by the numbers, the engagement and participation of that audience that endured.

I am so sorry I missed the conference. Congrats to Jonathan Fitzgarrald, David Fish, and Nat Slavin for a great, great job well done.

TRUST. If you ask me, the first rule of our profession is trust.

Without trust we cannot do much in our firms. Without trust we cannot learn and share with one another. Without trust we cannot mentor, or be mentored, by the incredible leaders of our profession, who are still around. Which says a lot about who we are as a community.

We had a breach in trust yesterday.

I started a Facebook group for legal marketers a year or so ago. I had a question I needed to ask. I should have known the answer, but I didn’t. I didn’t want it posted in a public forum where it would live there forever. So I started a group with a dozen or so of my legal marketing friends. Not all LMA members.

I invited my friends to invite their friends, and the group has now grown to 257. I don’t even know a lot of these folks. But I still feel comfortable openly sharing. If I trust you, and you trust your friend, then I trust your friend.

Per Facebook rules, the group is “secret” so that our conversations remain completely private on our personal walls, but is open to all to join. (If you want to join the group, send me a message on Facebook).

But whether on Facebook, in an e-mail thread, at an LMA meeting, or a board meeting, we legal marketing professionals openly share with one another.

We don’t collude or plot, but we share our difficulties and frustrations that come with our jobs, and seek out solutions to our challenges from our peers.

This level of trust amongst us has allowed us to create something really, really special: friendships.

I count amongst my closest friends members of my profession and/or professional association. Some are service providers. Some are competitors. Some are true peers.

These close friendships allow me to not only do my job better, but allow me to be a better and more authentic Heather.

I trust you to see the vulnerable me. The real me.

When I am mentoring new members of our profession, I always start by telling them about this trust thingie we have going on. How you can pick up the phone and call anyone. How you can ask a stupid question.

In the past 14+ years that I have been doing this, I can honestly say that breaches in trust are few and far between, but the damage one breach can cause can be immense, and can do great harm.

However, I would caution all of us to not allow these rare breaches of trust to impair our culture of trust. It’s what makes us special. It’s what makes us a better community. It’s what makes us better legal marketers. And it’s what makes us better friends.

We are all members of a team, whether at work, on a board of directors, a committee at our kid’s school, a sports team, your high school reunion, in our personal relationships, etc. In all my years, I have yet to hear of a team that was not dysfunctional in some way or another. However, until Catherine MacDonagh recommended The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, I had never realized that there is a simple solution for these dysfunctional teams. Note: I said “SIMPLE” not “EASY.”

The Model

  1. The first dysfunction is an absence of trust among team members. Essentially, this stems from their unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group. Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation of trust.
  2. This failure to build trust is damaging because it sets the tone for the second dysfunction: fear of conflict. Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments.
  3. A lack of healthy conflict is a problem because it ensure the third dysfunction of a team: lack of commitment. Without having aired their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy in and commit to decisions, though they may feign agreement during meetings.
  4. Because of this lack of real commitment and buy-in, team members develop an avoidance of accountability, the fourth dysfunction. Without committing to a clear path of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team.
  5. Failure to hold one another accountable creates an environment where the fifth dysfunction can thrive. Inattention to results occurs when tea members put their individual needs (such as ego, career development, or recognition) or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals for the team.

And so, like a chain with just one link broken, teamwork deteriorates if even a single dysfunction is allowed to flourish. (pp. 86-87)

Wow. That’s some truth. Catherine got me hooked on this book when she spoke of “artificial harmony.” Sit on that term for a moment and digest it. That’s what dysfunctional teams do:

  • We create artificial harmony.
  • We leave rooms unspoken.
  • We vote yes when we’re not ready to vote yes just so we can move along.
  • We don’t buy in, so we don’t do.
  • We go along with the group because we don’t want to create conflict.
  • Or, God forbid, have someone not like us.
  • We find ways of getting around the dysfunction, but all that does is create more dysfunction.
  • And, worse yet, we just accept it as a given.

We work at a law firm = we work in a dysfunction environment. But, as long as it isn’t as bad as the dysfunction of that firm over there, we’re doing okay. But we’re not. We, as members of the legal industry, just accept dysfunction as a given. That there is no way out. But this book gives me hope.

Another way to understand this model is to take the opposite approach – a positive one – and imagine how members of truly cohesive teams behave:

  1. They trust on another.
  2. They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
  3. They commit to decisions and plans of action.
  4. They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans.
  5. They focus on the achievement of collective results.

If this sounds simple, it’s because it is simple, at least in theory, In practice, however, it is extremely difficult because it required levels of discipline and persistence that few teams can muster, (p. 87).

So, there is hope for us. At the least, there’s a whole new consultancy practice waiting to be formed. Catherine???

Clearing out my reader right now (which anyone who follows me on Twitter can tell from all the @reading posts I’m shooting out) when I came across this gem from the folks at Getting Things Done, David Allen’s company:

How’s your perspective, after a 3-day weekend? (Or did you have a 3-day weekend?)
——————————
Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer; since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose your power of judgment. Go some distance away because the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony or proportion is more readily seen.
—Leonardo Da Vinci

You know what? My perspective is great this morning. I came in, ready to work on our conference for next year. I’ve been checking in with my bloggers getting our end of the legislative session posts together. I booked my gym appointments. I’m even looking forward to our Girl Scout meeting tonight.

I have to credit my attitude in the fact that I barely engaged with work this weekend.

Oh, I checked my emails a few times, but didn’t read any. I didn’t even delete the spams. Just made sure there were no emergencies, which are rare at my firm.

And, I was able to take a 3-day weekend from my hectic life as well.

My kids were off with their dad for the weekend, enjoying the beach. The sports dude had some stuff to do. And me? I had a blank calendar. I had a couple things for Girl Scouts I needed to get done, and I did the minimal amount of work necessary for that.

What did I do?

Nothing.

I watched some HGTV and Food Network shows. A couple movies. I went to the market.

I enjoyed all my Sunday talk shows, and finally finished my blog post: A Word to the Wise: Social Media and Politics.

Sports dude and I went to a movie. We saw The Campaign, which I thought was hysterical.

But, really, I did nothing.

And, in doing nothing, I did something. I recharged.

So, here I am. It’s Tuesday, and I am ready!

How’s your perspective?

Words count. Words have meaning. Words on Facebook, Twitter and in the comments section of online publiations are searchable, fully visible, and can define you.

My friend Jayne Navarre at the Virtual Marketing Officer recently wrote this post, Facebook and Politics: Do they mix? Yes, no, maybe? taking on politics on our personal social media accounts.

For the record, I’m in the “maybe” column, as you can see from my comments in Jayne’s post.

As far as I am concerned, it’s not that you are doing it, it’s about how you do it. And here’s why (from Jayne’s post above):

Case on point. I had an opportunity yesterday to refer a professional and I had someone in mind. But, unexpectedly I found a Facebook post from that individual just before I made the call. It was a link to an inciting article, filled with negativity, along side his personal, polarizing comments. I immediately crossed this person off the list. I decided this referral would be wrong for my client—on several levels.

Will it make or break their bottom line, probably not. Still, it made me shiver a bit to realize thata single Facebook post—which is certainly within anyone’s right to free speech—impacted a business opportunity so decisively.

For the most part, people refer business and hire people they know, like and trust. Screw with one of those three and the stream of business you count on to pay your bills and feed your family might start slowing down and you will never know why.

I’m not saying we should never talk about politics. I’m a political junkie, and I enjoy a very thoughtful debate and discussion.

In fact, the sports dude and I had dinner with my sister and her boyfriend last night. It was a libertarian, an independent, and two progressive liberals chatting away. No voices were raised. No one was disrespected. We definitely did not agree on everything discussed. We avoided some topics entirely and on purpose.

We were most definitely spirited and passionate. And that’s the way it should be.

Now you take that “conversation” online, when you are alone, and at your computer, and all sense of decorum seems to get tossed overboard.

You share a meme or a video from a truly biased (right, left or “neutral” until you read the supporters) organization. You comment on that post what you really think. You tweet out a 100 character slam with a couple hashtags.

When you do that, no matter what you share, roughly 50% of the population is not going to agree with you. Add to that mix this truth: You, for the most part, have no idea which of your clients, referral sources, and influencers are in which 50%.

Sitting home alone, you don’t get to see the eye brows raising, the hiding of your posts, the unliking or unfriending of you all together.

A colleague called me last week to brainstorm on a speaker for a program he wanted to host for his firm. Almost in unison we agreed, “Well, you know so-and-so cannot be considered,” based on some online comments and actions.

The person in question just lost the ability to speak to their target audience, and they have NO idea that they were removed from consideration, from a prime opportunity, because of how they conduct themselves online.

I don’t care how locked down you think your Facebook page is, it really isn’t. And I don’t care if you think all of your friends agree with you, because they don’t.

Make no mistake, these things can happen IRL (in real life) as well:

You’re having a private conversation at lunch, and the new general counsel of that company you’re about to meet with later in the day is sitting at the table next to you. He recognizes the person you are talking to, they are acquaintances, which is how his attention made his way to your table and conversation. He is overhearing what you are saying, and he doesn’t like it. You just got bumped off the “go-to” list, and you’ll never understand why.

That’s what sharing an inflammatory meme, video, or article can do. It can show up in someone’s thread because when you share open content, others can see it as well, and can make judgments about you from that. This is often referred to as “listening with your eyes.”

I fully understand that when I comment on CNN’s Reliable Sources Facebook page (my favorite Sunday morning talk show, which I watch with my Twitter Politics List and political hashtags open on my Tweetdeck), everyone can see that, even though my personal Facebook page is closed.

When I share that meme from George Takei, everyone is privy to the fact that I did that.

When I Tweet, and add a hashtag, that is now part of a public conversation and is exposing my words to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people I don’t know.

Any reporter or publication can pick that up and quote me without me knowing about it, until the Google Alert I have set on my name pops up in my reader.

I’m not counseling you to not share or comment on politics, but to be aware of what you are sharing. When you are on a social network, liken it to an IRL open mike, or replying all to everyone at the office when you think you’re not.

Great advice today on CNN’s Reliable Sources from Roll Call’s Associate Politics Editor David Drucker. His comments were in response to the firing of Yahoo! News Washington Bureau Chief, David Chalian, and how reporters need to monitor themselves:

I don’t know how many times per week, I write up an e-mail with a snarky joke to somebody, or a tweet that’s snarky or sarcastic, and then I delete it. Because you have to be careful how your words are going to be interpreted and represented.

Before you hit “post” or “send,” take a look at that snarky e-mail, tweet, post or comment, think about it, and then hit the delete button.

No matter what we do, be it lawyer, legal marketing, consultant, chief, we are representing a brand: be it our firm’s brand, or our personal brand.

It is up to you to manage it.

So, my counsel: Don’t ignore the elections. For the next 60+ days it will be the news around the water cooler. You need to be aware and informed, even if you are not a political junky like me.

However, be respectful of all political opinions. Use judgment. Be observant of the people NOT chiming in on the conversation (those are the people who do not agree with you).

Treat online commentary the same as you would in-person converations. And, remember, you never, ever, ever know who is listening with their eyes.

At the end of the day it always comes back to who do you “know, like, and trust.” We don’t all have to agree politically, but we need to be respectful of differing opinions, as we all have to interact and work together.

Now, go out there and vote early, and vote often.

Well, this WAS going to be the last in our series of Favorite Blogs, but I found one more topic for Monday.

For those who haven’t been following along, Jonathan Fitzgarrald (Bad for the Brand) and I have pulled together a collection of our favorite blogs that help us do our job better. So far, we have prepared for you a collection of the legal press, the legal industry, and marketing and social media blogs we follow.

For today, here are our favorite blogs for technology know-how:

As always, this post is not mean to be 100% exclusive. If we’ve missed a favorite blog of yours, please add it in the comments and I’ll update the list.

We’re almost done. Jonathan Fitzgarrald (Bad for the Brand) and I have pulled together a collection of our favorite blogs that help us do our jobs better. So far, we have prepared for you a collection of the legal press, the legal industry , and general business and management blogs we follow.

For today, here are our favorite blogs for Marketing & Social Media:

As always, this post is not mean to be 100% exclusive. If we’ve missed a favorite blog of yours, please add it in the comments and I’ll update the list.

As I mentioned last week, Jonathan Fitzgarrald (Bad for the Brand) and I have pulled together a collection of our favorite blogs that help us do our jobs better. So far, we have prepared for you a collection of the legal press and legal industry blogs we follow. For today, here are our favorite blogs for general business and management know-how.

As always, this post is not mean to be 100% exclusive. If we’ve missed a favorite blog of yours, please add it in the comments and I’ll update the list. Next up, Favorite Blogs: Marketing and Social Media.

As I mentioned yesterday, Jonathan Fitzgarrald (Bad for the Brand) and I have pulled together a collection of our favorite blogs that help us do our jobs better. Yesterday we prepared for you a collection of the legal press that we follow. Today, it’s all about the legal industry: marketing, business, PR, gossip, etc.

This is not mean to be a 100% compilation of all the blogs out there, but the must subscribe to for anyone’s reader. If you have a favorite blog to add to the list, please do so in the comments below. Next up, General Business and Management, followed by Marketing and Social Media.

Jonathan Fitzgarrald (Bad for the Brand) and I spoke on a webinar today for the Legal Marketing Association – Capital Chapter on Best of the Web for Professional Development.

One of the things we did was comb through our Google Readers, email folders and the like, and made a list of all of our “must read” blogs, electronic newsletters, etc.

To round out the lists, I asked Tim Corcoran (Corcoran’s Business of the Law) and Jayne Navarre (Virtual marketing Officer) to add their favorite blogs as well, and thanks to Catherine MacDonagh (Legal Lean Sigma) for making sure I hadn’t missed anything (which I had).

The point of these lists is to not be 100% inclusive, but to share our “go-to” blogs so that we can fully informed on the subjects of Legal News; the Legal Industry; General Business; Marketing & Social Media; and, Technology.

Legal Press

Blog Aggregators

Not to go without mentioning:

  • Local legal journals
  • Firm blogs (yours and competitors)ma
  • Clients

I know there are more blogs out there, so if you have some to add or share, please do so in the comments section.

Check back for more Favorite Blogs: