Podcast 2 - Feb 1st 2025 - Values
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Kathleen: [00:00:00] You are listening to The Thriving Lawyer with Kathleen Brenner and Carla Ferraz. I'm Kathleen, a highly experienced lawyer and an International Coaching Federation accredited coach.
Carla: And I am Carla. Like Kathleen, I am an ICF certified coach and I have worked with top leaders and professionals, many of them lawyers, at some of the world's biggest organizations.
My focus is on using evidence based approaches to help my clients thrive at work and in the rest of their lives. Together,
Kathleen: we bring you the Thriving Lawyer podcast, a podcast filled with ideas and inspiration, as well as practical tips to help you thrive as a lawyer and in the rest of your
life. Let's get into it.
Welcome to episode six of Season two of the Thriving Lawyer with Carla Ferraz, and myself, Kathleen Brenner. It's great to be back [00:01:00] for another episode, and today we are going to explore with Carla the recent conference that she has just returned from about all things coaching in New York, and we'll explore some of the key lessons and insights that she gained.
Play around with how they might apply to lawyers. Carla, welcome to this episode. Why don't you tell us a little bit about where you've just been? Yes, sure. So I got back a couple of weeks ago from New York and it was fantastic. It was a really good conference. It was called Uplift, and it was hosted by Bera.
The company I work for, so I'm still buzzing with all the insights and connections. All the conversations, the people I met and some of the ideas was really next level. Right. But I think my biggest takeaway for the whole conference is that it really reinforced everything [00:02:00] we believe, and we've been sharing here the thriving lawyer.
Like how to take care of yourself for this spirit of experimentation, the growth mindset, how to use F flow. So it really reinforced everything that we've been applying to ourselves at enter the course. So if you're not familiar with BetterUp, but as a company that helps people unlock their potential, like both at work and a life.
So they use the whole personal approach to coaching. They use coaching, AI, and science-based tools. It's all about human transformation. The company's really grounded in positive psychology, organizational science, behavioral science, and they have really smart tech as well. It's where I work. I'm a leadership coaching a better app.
Uplift was their annual conference. It's not really a typical conference because they bring together some of the sharpest mind in organizational psychologists named like Brene Brown, Adam Grant. Andrew McPhee, as well as inspiring leaders from all different industries clients, right? So they work [00:03:00] within the corporate sector in government agencies.
So a lot of those leaders were there as well as some of the coaches. We heard everything from cutting edge research through powerful personal stories, and the whole experience was a deep dive into what truly means to thrive now in this new way of work. With AI and how we thrive both individually and collectively.
So we thought in today's episode, we are going to share some of my favorite takeaways, the stuff that really made me stop and think it's shaping or reshaping the way that I approach leadership growth and what is next. And then we are going to discuss how that translates to lawyers as well. And how might lawyers use some of these insights.
Why don't we get into the first highlight? Why don't you tell us something about it? Cool. So the conference started with a powerful keynote from Alexis, the CEO of Better Ramp, and he went [00:04:00] straight into something that he called a crisis. So he shared some of the better, massive data sets from companies of all sizes, from tech giants to small companies, to large companies, to federal agencies.
Human performance is going down. It's not because people aren't as skilled or smart. It's because something really deeper is missing. While AI performance has been accelerating at high speeds, the human performance is actually in decline about two or 6% since 2019. Now, at first, that doesn't really look like a huge deal, but when you think across the entire workforce in the industries, this is big and Alexis Frame in a way that is not a skill gap, it's an energy gap.
People aren't underperforming because they don't know what to do. They underperforming because they're depleted. And the three core [00:05:00] drivers for human performance, they fuel human performance. According to Alexis, was motivation, optimism, and a sense of agencies, and they're all going down. So those are like psychological levers that actually gets us moving.
You know, that keeps us focused. They help us bounce back when things get hard. When, when you think about your drive, how motivated are you? How are you looking at things with a positive mindset, and what can you do about it when those things are low? No amount of productivity hacks or time management tricks can really fix the root issue.
This whole thing really got me thinking. How are organizations trying to drive outcome? We doubt investing in the humans behind them. It's like expecting a car to run. We doubt stopping to fill up to put gas back in or even service it every now and then. Absolutely. So what was really powerful is that better apps research break down the [00:06:00] job at different levels.
So that is the CEOs, the frontline managers, the middle managers, everyone is feeling. According to their data. But the middle managers, especially our crunch zone, right, because they are expected to deliver without having the space and the support to refill themselves and their teams. And for me, like I coach a lot of those leaders, right?
I see this all the time. People who were once high performance are really feeling stuck. They have lost the spark. It is still brilliant and intelligent people. They lost the spark. So what I think is actually going on there is that they lost the capacity to do a lot of things, like the ability to focus, to reflect, and to recover, and even create the little space in the day to make sense of what is going on for them internally even better.
Up research really shows that it's constant contact [00:07:00] switching information, overload the pressure to always be on. Really draining our cognitive and emotional resources. People are just pushing harder than ever, but we doubt like really intentionally pausing and with so much information, they lose clarity, creativity, and even a sense of purpose.
And the science is really clear, right? Like we've been talking a lot about this at the Thriving Lawyer. Sustained performance requires periods of recovery. It's just like the athletes, right? They need rest between the games or the training session. The same for knowledge workers, especially in high stake fields like law.
So without that, the performance doesn't, it's not even that the plateaus, it's actually goes down. So Kathleen, I'm wondering, hearing all of that, how do you see this showing up in the legal world? [00:08:00] Look, it's really interesting that data around two to 6% is quite astonishing and it's quite scary thing if it's quite, if it's accurate now, I don't know.
Its applicability in the Australian context. There are different dynamics in the US for example, but what I will say is intuitively as an intuitive reaction, all of that. Would make perfect sense and jives with the experiences of what I'm seeing amongst a lot of the lawyers that I know in the profession generally.
And when you talk about the heart of high performance in terms of. The lack of context, switching that ability to focus and also take that rest, the optimism. We were talking a little while ago in our podcast about pessimism and how lawyers are specifically trained for that. So we are already predisposed not to have that optimism.
I. Anytime, let alone in this current global [00:09:00] environment with all the challenges that we've faced as professionals since 2020, and in particular, I think the pandemic, I don't think it's an accident that stat goes from 2019. And also one of the themes was about your agencies and individual. Depending on the nature of legal work you do and how senior you are, you might not actually have that much choice in the workload that you have.
Or even the matters that you get so often despite the high kind of professional status of the profession, often we don't have a lot of that control. So look, I think, I wouldn't be surprised if Australian statistics in the legal profession demonstrated that we've already got really clear data around a wellbeing crisis in law, which we've talked about before in terms of the context of the thriving lawyer.
So I think it makes intuitive sense. I would say the legal profession particularly, [00:10:00] or at least particular pockets of it, have made efforts in recent years. The performance crisis and the expectations of lawyers have been unrealistic for a very long time. I remember dealing and grappling with these issues when I was a young legal graduate, thinking about a kind of career that I wanted to create and what kind of workplace I wanted to.
I remember stories at that point and came out even in the Banking Royal Commission a few years back, of particular lawyers sleeping under their desks. I don't think any of this is new for the legal profession, but absolutely can relate to that notwithstanding some cultural change. There's really real issues for lawyers and law firms, and I think with this environment is not going to get any saner.
Technology keeps rapidly evolving. I think it remains to see how that affects the legal workplace as well. So I think there's a lot of issues that are facing lawyers, and this really [00:11:00] comes to the fundamental rationale of why we wanted to start the Thriving lawyer. Yeah, good point. We've been talking about the performance crisis anyways, right?
Like within the context of flow in Australia. It was interesting to see that happens and being talked about in the launch, like corporate insight as well. It's quite American based, but they have presence in Europe, in Australia as well, in Asia too, but probably not as big as America. Alright, moving on.
'cause we've got a few different ideas here. The second segment, it's about the rise of AI and the manager's new job. Alexis again, the CEO of BetterUp made a a point that AI isn't here to replace human excellence, but it's absolutely raising the bar on what human excellence looks like according to him.
This is shifting the game, the expectations for leaders and managers as well, so. Introduced to an [00:12:00] insightful metaphor. They're using the pilot and the passenger mindset to explain this. They say the people in today's workplace tend to fall into one of the two categories. Pilots are the ones that have a strong sense of agency optimism and adaptability.
They navigate, they're curious, they experiment, they engage with AI as a tool to enhance their impact. And then there are other passengers. They might be overwhelmed by the change. They're hesitant to try new tools or unclear on their roles in this really fast evolving landscape. It's not a lack of intelligence or work ethics.
It's a lack of psychological readiness and support. The interesting start was that only 20% of the employees from the dataset show up as pilots. [00:13:00] The hopeful part is that the pilot mindset, it's not a fixed mindset, they can be developed. One of the biggest factors to develop people moving from a passenger to a pilot is the leaders is their managers, right?
So when managers model a pilot mindset. When they are transparent, when they're open for learning, when they're willing to try, and this was very much on the focus of the ai. So willing to try the AI tools to share the experiment and how they are figuring out what works and what doesn't. That sends a signal like they are role model, their behavior that they want their team to have as well.
They build psychological safety. It gives permission to the team to explore, to adapt. So these kind of managers, they create a ripple effect, higher productivity, stronger sort of team resilience, and they innovate, right? The job of the manager is no longer just to [00:14:00] oversee or just expertise, but it's also about guiding their team through the ambiguity that everybody's leaving.
At the workplace today, it's about showing up with the mindset that says, Hey, I don't have all the answers yet, but we can figure out as a team, and I'm here with you. Catherine, I'm curious here, like in the legal environment as well, I know this is a bit more complex because the legal profession has its unique set of challenges when it comes to adopting new technology, things about confidentiality, ethical boundaries, regulatory obligations, of course.
How are you perceiving these changes? You know, look, I can speak primarily to the Australian context and what I. See, and when I look at the articles that are in the legal magazines and see what's happening on LinkedIn, it seems to me that it's a really checkered story In Australia, some are not doing it at [00:15:00] all.
They're just avoiding it. It's as if it's not happened. Others in particular sectors that might be corners of the corporate sector and the top tier law firms, for example. Might be going through stages of quite significant transformation in exploring the potential here. I think a lot of lawyers afraid of it and they just don't know and they're particularly scared.
There was a wildly famous case about a lawyer in the US who naively and unwisely used chat GPT to do some legal research and got in a big trouble with the court because Cha GPT made up. The case law that was referencing his argument, so that wasn't particularly good for him or his duties to the law. I think a lot of lawyers are afraid, and there's also all sorts of these ethical obligations, so it can feel really difficult and a minefield.
I'm interested to see where it goes though, because I think that the developments are going to be so rapid and so wide ranging that [00:16:00] if lawyers don't engage with it at all, they might find themselves left behind. In some way, and that goes for legal organizations at that managerial level. When you were talking about the role of the manager, I think even in senior leadership, there's a real need to engage with this and think about the implications.
It's really unclear what it will mean for lawyers in the long term. The optimistic view is that we can get rid of our low level tasks and just be really engaged with our clients and doing the high level strategic work. Then what we would need is all of those human skills that we committed to talking about in this thriving lawyer.
I don't know. The skeptical view is maybe none of us will have a job, GPT will replace us, or at least large functions. But then even if that's the case, how are we gonna adapt to a radically different legal profession? I think it all remains to be seen. Good point. And this next segment speaks a bit of that as well, that is not here to replace humans.
It's just like. [00:17:00] How do we adapt to it? And there are aspects of being human that AI can't replicate. So it's more about how do we work together? Yes. And how can we use AI to enhance. Our own role. The insight that I'd like to share was a session with Ivy Ross and Susan Magnuson about what AI can't do and probably never will, and that's where things got really deeply human.
They invited us to the world of Neuroaesthetics, the science of how art design and the sensory experience can really impact our brain and our emotions and our ability to connect. So according to them, creativity is not just a soft skill, it's an strategic diff differentiator. The people that are creative, you know, they will be able to navigate this world in a better sense because what it's requiring now.
To figure out how can we be creative, how can we adapt? How can we enhance [00:18:00] what we are trying to do? They shared really compelling evidence on how beauty, storytelling, texture, and sound can really trigger states of creativity, and people become not just more creative, but calmer and gain more clarity as well.
So in this unpredictable high pressure world, you know that we are all living in essential tools for innovation, for resilience, for even meaningful collaboration because it helps with that optimism as well. They approach it in a way, AI is here, but AI can crunch data, can automate it, workflows, but it can't invoke all.
It can't tell stories that stir our souls. Can't really design the environment that sparks curiosity. It might give you idea on how to do it, but how you actually go and do it and the feelings and emotions that you can have that is really uniquely human. Some of the takeaways were beautifully [00:19:00] simple.
They were sharing, use storytelling in team meetings to build more emotional resonance. Design a physical space with intention add call, aunt Nature that inspire. And not just to fill the space, tap into the sensory elements of sounding, lighting, texture, things that help people feel grounded. They showed some beautiful workplaces as well.
And creativity isn't just about performance or innovation. It's also about recovery can be a recovery tool as well. Whether it is playing music, we talked about the piano, right? Like journaling or even dancing or dancing in your kitchen. Creative expressions can really activate parts of our brain that help us reset process our emotions and regain that sense of agency that a lot of us are losing, right?
In a world that feels like [00:20:00] everything is out of our control. Creativity can bring us back. It is still in our hands, so you don't need permission or a formal setting to get started. It's one of the most accessible ways to restore ourselves. It's reconnecting with something that is meaningful to us. And when you get back to work, you may be, you are renewed.
So I'd love to hear your thoughts. I know you're really big on the arts and creativity, how this may help the legal profession. Before I get to that specific question, I just wanna step back though and say, I discovered their book before you entered this conference, right? Mm-hmm. I'd read it and I was very excited when I discovered this was on the agenda and that you were gonna hear the author speak.
I first listened to them on another podcast where they were being interviewed by Stephen Cotler. We can put the links in the show notes 'cause it was a really fantastic episode. What really came out for me from their work was the degree to which those of us who've loved our [00:21:00] beauty literature or all the arts have intrinsically, at least I've always believed.
That was so fundamental to being HU the A human, the human experience to wellbeing, to happiness, to meaning, connection, just the very essence of who we are. What was so interesting about their work in Neuroaesthetics is actually the hard science that was demonstrating in a empirical way. How that is, how the evidence deports that contention.
Mm-hmm. And if I think about my own experience, I've worked from home primarily since March, 2020, and completely reconfigured my career. One of the important things in that has been the control I have in my workplace design. When I do the character strengths, which we'll talk about in other episodes, and [00:22:00] we explore in the Thriving Lawyer, one of my key strengths is an appreciation of beauty and excellence.
Once I discovered that, when I did that kind of test and suddenly everything clicked, I could actually then more consciously aware, like being sorry, being consciously aware of it, I was able to foster it. And that can be really simple things. That means taking the time to create a workspace with our books.
It doesn't have to be expensive. It can be a postcard. It can be very simple things, but just paying attention and creating that space if you can. Not everybody will. Sometimes you'll have kids around and you're on the kitchen bench, but if you can carve out something when you're working at home, I. For those in the office too.
I think there has to be conversations about if enterprises got their lawyers to come to the office, they need to be creating spaces that enable their lawyers to flourish at work. Perform at their best. And I can tell [00:23:00] you with absolute certainty, having an old style office desk that looks like it's from the seventies is not going to inspire your staff.
So if that's your office, you need to be rethinking that. So I encourage all of you who are legal managers or leaders listening to really think about, are you creating an environment for your staff where they can flourish? But then, okay, let's move apart from that, I think the other part that I really heard from what you were saying then is about simply this idea of taking up some kind of art practice that is about the disconnection from your work.
Because too often, like when we are talking about the formats of lawyers, we are just focusing on how they undergo or do their work, right? It's all about being in that work mode, but. This stuff is all about what makes us humans and to think about, are you fostering some kind of art practice in their [00:24:00] book?
I dunno whether it came up in the talk, but they were talking about all these hard health benefits, hard data, about the benefits from health, longevity and wellbeing. That came from the simple 30 minutes. I think it might've been 10, I can't remember exactly, but it was like about a relatively short period of doing some kind of art practice every day.
If you are, if you don't think you are creative because you can't paint, maybe it's something, start small with trying to engage in something. It might not even be something you traditionally consider art. Maybe it's tinkering with some indoor plants to create a little bit of a garden of sorts. And indoor, it could be anything.
Yeah, it could be writing. We had a really powerful session where we were invited to write a poem. While we were there in the middle of the conference, we all had to, and the stuff that came out, it was really powerful. Some people got to share theirs and, and this was 10 minutes. Wow. Putting your [00:25:00] feelings into words as simple as that.
10 minutes, get in and write about something. Or maybe it is something that requires movement like dance. Yeah, many ways. I think many ways some of the performance pressure, a lot of the issue is that we start to use our phones and computers and we are consumers. So we're consuming YouTube, we're consuming Instagram, we're consuming LinkedIn and Facebook or whatever your app of choice is, but we are not being produced to disconnect properly.
It's about being a producer in some way, even a small way that that links with the control, like the agency aspect of it as well. Okay, so let's move on. The next insight was with Charles Dhe. He's a journalist from the New York Times, and he wrote a book called The Super Communicators. So his talk was about communication and the power of connection.
He was such a powerful storyteller, right? Because his message was really about. [00:26:00] What separate communicators from super communicators is not just the charism or having all the right words. It's about the connection. It's how they connect with people. He made the point that great leaders don't just give you the information.
They build bridges don't just move things forward. They bring people along with them, and he shared some of the insights from his book. He showed that high growth leaders communicate in ways. Cut through the noise, reduce friction and creates like real alignment, especially in the time of uncertainty and change when we don't have all the information, when we don't know everything that is happening.
So he shares five practical tools that require powerful number one. He said, we really need to learn how to listen and listen to understand, not just to respond. So get really curious what is behind the words that someone is telling you. [00:27:00] The second was like match the message to the moment. Emotional moments required an emotional language and a strategic moment.
Required strategic clarity and confidence. Understand what conversation you were having. The third one is how do we create safe space for disagreement where people can feel seen not shut down. We might have different opinions, but how do we spend a moment trying to understand where the other person is coming from?
Not necessarily agree with them, but understand what, where are they at so they can feel understood? They can feel seen, especially in this environment where are a lot of things are known and people are fearful for, for their jobs. And the fourth aspect was to create stories, metaphors that has meaning.
Not just explain, but really connect with people choosing words and things that they will find meaningful. And [00:28:00] finally, to bridge the gap between the identity, the reason, and the emotion. Because real buy-in happens when people really feel that the message resonates with them, with who they are, not just what they know.
With themselves. So spending time on connecting. He asked us to share some insights of the people next to us and connect with them. Five minutes and some people got emotional. I connected with two different people I had never seen in my life because we just were prompt to do it. But it can be quite powerful and it didn't take that long.
So this session really reframed communication for me that it's not just a soft skill, especially on the listening aspect of it, but it's really an engine for leadership. The message was very clear. It's about creating a felt sense of trust because that will help with clarity and driving the direction.
And he said if you want to go [00:29:00] fast, communicate, but if you want to go far, connect. So leading. It's about much more than just setting the direction, right? It's about leaning in. So the best leaders aren't the loudest in the room, but they're the ones that can really turn a conversation into a connection and doing that fast.
That is a concept that didn't come from him, but Martin Seligman, Gabrielle, they shared, it's like the rapid rapport. How do we connect fast with people? Because that's sort of is required this point in time. There's not a lot of, we don't have time anymore. He challenged us to stop treating communication as a checklist and start really treating as a leadership practice, practice empathy, practice alignment, practice sharing the momentum together because the truth is alignment.
It doesn't just happen by accident. It is really building its moment by moment through intentional conversation, say, honor both the [00:30:00] head and the heart. Catherine, I love to bring your insight here as well. Like how might the lenses of the super communicators like maybe shift the way we think about leadership in law, like with clients, the teams, the stakeholders?
It's an interesting question, right? Because intuitively I think that if you asked lawyers, are they good communicators, instinctively they would say yes, of course, because that is at the very heart of what we do. As lawyers, we can't be lawyers without communicating. Well, there were a few things that resonated, particularly from the summary that you just gave, and some of those were that the loudest voice in the room wasn't necessarily the best communicator.
That balance between head and heart, so that importance of empathy and connection, and also that tendency to be right to give advice, et cetera. What that was bringing to me was that Yeshua around lawyers are trained to be [00:31:00] experts in the law, and our idea is to impart that knowledge to our clients. We've got a whole seminar that we're gonna release shortly about coaching skills for lawyers.
This idea as the lawyer, as coach, and shifting that narrative. So to really think about that journey that you're going along with the client, the deep listening, how to actually practice it to two. Get to quite a different outcome with your client because often your client comes to you, they don't know what they want.
They might give you vague instructions, but it's only through that deep listing that you might be able to really understand that actually create a solution or a proposal that is quite different, that works for them. That's an ideal situation. Might not always work that way in the cut and thrust, but certainly something to work towards.
The other thing you talked about there was trust. And the trust that we have with our clients comes [00:32:00] to the very heart of things. I'd encourage lawyers to think about that and think about how might they even do one thing differently from what they've just heard. Just to experiment perhaps. Yeah, absolutely.
We'll share all the links to the books and some of the, the stats that the, that was shared in, in, in the talk. If anybody wants to explore a little bit deeper into any of those topics we are sharing here. So the next segment is about wellbeing as a business imperative. This was really reaffirming like what we've been practicing here, the thriving lawyer, and it really reinforces that we thinking that wellbeing, it's necessary now it's non-negotiable.
So this was Gentleman Dene, so he's a director of the Wellbeing Research Center at the University of Oxford. He is one of the leading voices in the economics of happiness and performance. And he started sharing that wellbeing is not just a nice to have, it's a [00:33:00] performance multiplier. The data he was sharing, it was affirming and eyeopening.
I. He was talking about the surface level perks of wellness initiatives that sit off on the side. It's not just like that. He was talking about wellbeing and a strategy as infrastructure as something that is a directly impact to the company's bottom line and long-term success. And some of the data he shared was pretty striking.
So companies with high employer wellbeing see 21% higher innovation, 17% higher productivity. Significant lower turnover and burnout rates. It's not just about people feel better, it's that they perform better as well and they collaborate more so they stay longer and bring more creativity to the table. In the AI leading world, like creativity seems to be the path to success [00:34:00] and wellbeing is quite linked to that.
So he challenged leaders to ask one critical question, is your culture energizing the people that are working for you, or is it depleting them? Because every interaction, every system, every norm, it either adds to someone capacity or drains it. So if people are constantly operating on empty, you might see short term output, but you won't see sustained excellence.
Because we've been seeing a lot of people burning out, or even the starts that we see in the legal world as well. So what really landed to me was the shift in the mindset that he was asking for moving from wellbeing as a perk to wellbeing as an infrastructure. And so if you're serious about long-term performance, he was calling leaders.
You have to be serious about how your people are feeling. They in and they out. And the beauty of it is wellbeing isn't [00:35:00] just the responsibility of HR or leadership. Every manager, every team member, every policy decision, it's part of this ecosystem. So it's about building culture where energize the people, not just exhausting them.
So you even talked about in a, in an ideal world, like measuring wellbeing like we measure profit. Imagine a world that where your balance sheet includes joy, belonging, purpose, alongside revenue and cost control. According to him, that was the future of performance. How amazing. So if any of those leaders in improved somewhat it their company, I think everybody's waning.
This is a lot of what we talked in the thriving lawyer, right? So it goes to the heart of it, right? The very heart of the dynamic. One of the things we've talked about and that we really acknowledge in a thriving lawyer is that there are some things that are institutional [00:36:00] and cultural that need culture change, but the individual still has power and agency.
We are committed on both levels. The thriving lawyer is about helping individual lawyers. Create agency and work towards their own wellbeing. But if you are a legal leader, that's something you can think about for your staff in order to be able to begin to affect that cultural change. Because I think this is at the heart of the problem with the legal profession.
There are some law firms, which I won't name, but still have 7.5 hour day billing targets. In order to bill that amount, you're gonna have to work 10 or 11 hours a day at least. Now you tell me how it is possible for you to possibly have a high level of wellbeing. If you're an individual lawyer working in that environment.
You've gotta navigate that. Is that something that you can deal with? What's in your power? But ultimately we do have a lot of agency. [00:37:00] There is that massive need to change if, if you are a legal manager. You should be thinking about how can you actually get the most out of your lawyers, and are you getting that right now through working them in that way?
Sure, you might be getting the billings, but is that really giving the clients the best value, legal advice? How are you gonna deal with that as AI comes and the other firms start out competing you? I think there's a lot there for legal managers to think about, and that question that you posed is such a powerful one.
Is your culture draining or energizing your people? How can you, honestly, can you answer that? If you're a partner of a law firm, how are you treating your staff? Are you energizing them or depleting them? And if you're depleting them. What can you do to actually turn that around? Because ultimately it's actually gonna be better for you in your legal practice, whatever that [00:38:00] looks like.
And if you're an individual lawyer, you've gotta start doing those things to look after yourself because you are simply not going to be able to perform at your best, but even just be a human at your best without doing that. Absolutely. Yeah. It's not easy, right? Like it's, yeah, it's not easy, but it is nice that the data is there and it's proving, look, this is not just about taking care of yourself, it's about taking care of yourself.
So sure, but as a tool to actually increase performance and with that productivity and with that revenue and profit, the last segment that we'll discuss is embracing the unknowns in leadership. This was a really interesting conversation with Adam Grant. Alexis, the CEO of Better App, and Andrew McPhee.
He's from MIT, and they were discussing the future of work in the AI age. As we look into the future, leaders will need to rethink what [00:39:00] leadership truly means in this new AI scope. According to them, one of the most important shifts will be moving away from being the subject matter expert. That have all the answers.
To really be the leader that embrace the role of collaboration, being the facilitation, connecting people, ideas, and fostering the collective problem solving. It's in this landscape. It's not about controlling every aspect, but about guiding teams through ambiguity, uncertainty, and constant change. A lot of the conversations that I have is about reorg, is about restructuring, and sometimes with that comes layoffs.
So there's a lot of changing going on and they are rapid and there's some, for some companies is nonstop. Mm-hmm. This shift really also ties with the ethical integration of ai. Leaders who prioritize humanity and approach AI [00:40:00] development with ethical considerations will be the ones leading the way. AI can really enhance efficiency, but it must be integrated thoughtfully.
We need leaders work on committed to ensure that AI tools are developed with humanity in the forefront, creating positive impact. How do we balance efficiency with humanity? AI can really handle like the repetitive task and streamlined process, but as we've been discussing here today, can't really replace creativity.
Emotional intelligence, you know, deep human connections that leaders really bring into the table. So all of these qualities that we are talking about, they foster engagement, loyalty, and the sense of purpose, right? So technology can't quite do that well, let's say yet, like, I don't know, at this point in time, you can't do it.
Maybe never will. In the age of ai, [00:41:00] they share the empathy. It's an essential leadership skill. Emotional like labor, active listening. Meaningful conversations are really important for leadership. While AI might provide data-driven insights, it's the human ability to navigate the emotions and the complex social dynamics.
There will always set great leaders apart. So ultimately it's about like how our uniquely human strengths and our lived experience and our deep relationships and our ability to manage a crisis. These are the areas that we will always excel as humans. AI is not there, right? This is not it. If we are too scared sometimes we might be.
We're missing these skills that we should be developing. How might we embrace one area and really tap into our humanity in the others? That's where, and Anthem Grant came in and said the smartest mindset at this point in [00:42:00] time is the spirit of experimentation. No one really knows how ai, who leadership will evolve.
He was inviting the leaders to treat as a test, try, measure, learn, iterate. None of us have the full map of the future. But we have to embrace uncertainty and continuously evolve. We can still ahead the curve. It's about trying new things. It's about learning from them. It's about being agile in the face of change.
So I just keep thinking like this is example, exactly the mindset we've been inviting with our thriving lawyer, like the profession, it's built on certainty, on structure, right, on our precedent. And now we are being asked to lead with curiosity, with courage, with adaptability. So I'd love to hear your take on that, Kathleen.
Look, I think it goes to the heart of leadership when we're thinking about who [00:43:00] leaders are. Whether you are managing or leading a team as individual lawyers, you're a leader in some way. That spirit of curiosity and experimentation, it's that mindset shift from being the expert in everything, which, yes, as lawyers, we learn a body of law, we develop practice, expertise, all of that.
Yes. I think the real challenges with, as things get more complicated, the demands of our clients are increasing. Often we are getting incredibly complicated demands, both intellectual and emotionally and relationally. Everything that you just talked about resonates strongly. I think about lawyers and how we are trained.
Something that we've talked about before at the Thriving Lawyer is this training and rewarding of perfectionism. And the fact that we can really challenge that by taking a much more growth style mindset. Thinking about what can we learn [00:44:00] and we don't know something yet, not thinking that we're the expert on everything.
Being able to collaborate and draw on others and skills. So look, yes, uniquely human qualities there really what needs to be fostered. Yeah. All right, so just to sum up like all the things that we talked about, really the big idea here is that the future belongs to leaders who can reignite performance by refueling their people.
Use AI strategically, not fearfully. Communicate with clarity and care, create emotional reach, creative environments. Prioritize your wellbeing. This is non-negotiable. Lead with curiosity through experimentation. The Thriving Lawyer course was built exactly around these themes like wellbeing, communication, adaptability, the spirit of experimentation.
So if you're looking to build resilience, [00:45:00] boost your performance, and really, truly thrive, not just personally, but also in your career. The Thriving Lawyer is exactly that. It's coming soon. We will be announcing good dates soon, not yet, but very soon. So you can join our newsletter list. We'll put the links in, the podcast links, and you can also find [email protected] au.
So thank you and thank you, Carla. That was fantastic. I've learned a lot myself. Yeah, thank you. I enjoyed it too. Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the thriving lawyer with Kathleen Brenner and Carla Ferraz, if you like it, please share it with your lawyer, friends and colleagues, and tag us on Instagram at @thriving lawyer or on LinkedIn via the links in the show notes. And if you liked what you heard, please drop a review in apple podcasts.
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If you'd like to work with us, check out our free [00:46:00] resources and our signature course, the thriving lawyer. Which you will find at www.thrivinglawyer.com.au. You can also download our free guide, the lawyer's guide to thriving in 2025. A sustainable roadmap for success.
It's filled with great tips and ideas so that you can begin to make real change. You'll find the link to that in our show notes.
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