Is Your Firm in the Right Gear? How to Evaluate and Shift

Melissa: This is an Ultraman race. This is not a sprint. There's no finish line right away. There's nothing you need to hit right away. And you cranking harder keeps you in a sprint, and you need to step out and be able to look longer term.

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Hi everyone. Welcome back to The Law Firm Owner Podcast. I'm excited to have you with us this week. We're going to be talking about gears. What gear are you currently operating in? What gear is your firm currently operating in? We're going to talk about how we tend to think that we are in a higher gear than what we actually are. So when we get really honest with ourselves, we'll evaluate where are we now and where do we want to be?

Okay, so now we're going to define the metaphor of the gear. When you think about a car, there's low gear, mid gear, high gear, and then red line. This translates beautifully when we're thinking about you and about your firm. So low gear, there's not a lot of activity going on. It's a bit slower, there's a bit more space, and if you are not intentional about being in a low gear, it's all happening because you're unfocused, there's high distraction, usually your priorities are not in focus. So, that's the low gear.

But there are times where maybe you choose to be in a low gear. There's not a lot going on. This could be because you are recovering from a really hard push or coming out of a red line, which we're going to talk about in a moment. So low gear is not inherently bad. It is where and how you end up there that matters more than anything. Are you intentional about being there, or are you just finding yourself there?

Mid-gear, this is where there's some level of consistency, things are humming along. There tends to be a routine. It's just like how my voice sounds. Doot-doot-doo. That's kind of how it's going. You're busy, but maybe not fully productive. And so I'm at the moment, I'm talking about you, and we're going to apply this to your firm, all of these steps as well.

Now, high gear. High gear is focused. It is productive. You are very clear on what you're shooting for, you're lined up with it, your calendar reflects that. Everything is moving along and with such a good pace, not because you're out of breath, but because everybody is dialed in.

Red line is not where we want to spend time. That is where you are pushing beyond limits. It is not the healthiest space to be in. It usually means that you are overextended on your calendar. You're doing too many things. And this is where you feel like there's just not, there's literally not enough time to do all the things that I'm trying to do. That is where you are in the red line.

There is crazily enough, because there's such high focus in the high gear, but when you cross over into the red line, your focus starts to dissipate. You're reacting to a bunch of things. It's impossible to juggle everything you need to juggle. So that's the red line. Now that's for you as an owner and how you're operating, what gear are you operating in. But when you think about your firm, it's very similar. Your firm should be able to operate in a high gear consistently.

There is no world in which you say, "My firm needs to be in a low gear," or "My firm needs to be in a mid gear," or "My firm should be red-lining it." Those are not conscious, intentional choices that an owner would make or that any a board of a company would make. A business is supposed to function in a way to serve clients and keep things moving and be highly productive and focused. If you aren't in a high gear, if your firm is not in a high gear, what ends up happening is that you become bloated in terms of you're probably spending too much for too many people. There's inefficiencies in the systems.

Your customer experience isn't quite dialed, but it's fine. Like that's not really where a company wants to be operating. So the trick here is finding how can your company be operating in a high gear all the time. And for you deciding consciously for the season that you're in, what gear you need to be operating in and lining yourself up with that.

It's important that I reiterate, not one of these levels, not one of these gears is inherently bad. It's about intentionally choosing. And even red line, which could seem like, "No, that one's bad. You don't want to be there." Listen, as an owner, you may very well be choosing to be red line for a week or two. It's not something that you can sustain for long periods of time, but if something major and unexpected happens in the company, you may very well decide to red line it for a week or two. Maybe somebody important, a key team member leaves. Maybe a key team member is coming in, and you need to give attention in those periods in different ways. So, again, it's not about good or bad. It's about where you're choosing to be.

With that in mind, I think we need to talk about for a moment, where are you? How do you decide where you are? How do you check in? And the most important thing is that you're honest. When you ask people, what gear are you in? They'll often times answer with a very high score. Like I do this thing with clients and members and myself called the engagement scale. And when you look at the engagement scale, 10 is just as engaged as you could possibly get towards a result. Zero is clueless. And when you ask people where they fall, which is really kind of what gear they're in, they'll say an eight or a seven. I'm like, no, you're a three. If you were being more intentional, you're probably legitimately would be higher on that scale. You would be in a higher gear. So when you are evaluating this, it is important to be honest. The kind of honesty that we often don't offer ourselves because we don't take the space to be quiet and be honest.

So in your situation, there's a few questions you can ask yourself to see what gear are you in. The first, are you spending time on things that actually move the needle? If you can't answer that honestly with a yes, you're not in a high gear.

Are you being proactive, generally speaking, proactive, or are you reactive, generally speaking? If you're proactive, you may be in a high gear. If you tend if your tendency is to live in reactivity, there's not a world in which you are in high gear.

Are you clear on your priorities? Or are you just responding to what's loudest? Which again, this sort of goes with reactivity, but the way this is worded may help you think of something different. Do you know what you're aiming for? Because if you know what you're aiming for, it helps you identify and be locked in on the priorities that matter the most.

The misalignment that is exists for many of us is very normal. It's very common. It's part of what happens when we start running faster in the business. But here, with this episode, is an opportunity to just stop and take stock. When you're evaluating this, answering those three questions, identifying what gear you're in, or identifying where you are on the engagement scale that I just gave some hints on. By the way, there's a whole episode on the engagement scale, number 212. You can go back and listen to that for more information on that.

When you're evaluating and you're getting really honest, it's not about judgment. This is just data. It's information that you can use to identify what makes the most sense next for you. So often times when I'm talking to people and when I do this for myself, it's very easy to be critical of where you are right now. There will be voices in your head about why you're there. You're not hardlined enough around this with your team. You don't have boundaries with your clients. You distract yourself and scroll when you really should be doing other work. And so that's why you've ended up here. There's not room for any of that here. It doesn't help anything. There is zero upside into bringing that in or entertaining that. It's natural, but the second that you catch it, just set it to the side. There isn't room for judgment here.

Now, once you look at this honestly and you set down your judgment, that's real awareness. And that's what something you can start to shift. You can put yourself into a different gear with much more ease, less friction, than if you have all this judgment around it and if you're not being honest. So you'll be getting yourself to a really great starting place.

The other note to mention here, especially if you were doing thinking about the engagement scale and working with that, or this works with the gears as well. You're not trying to jump from low to the tippy top of high gear. You are trying to find ways to create new normals for yourself. And that often times means going from a low gear to a mid gear and settling there and being very conscious of what got you to be a mid gear and why yet you're not a high gear. And then you can do this evaluation and ask yourself some questions so that you can figure out what it's going to take to get yourself to the high gear.

Then, once you are in the high gear, it's more about maintaining your status there in a way that doesn't suck the life out of you or deplete you. You want to try to maintain here as much as possible. And that means focusing on your highest value you can bring to your firm, relying on team members to bring their highest value that they can bring to the firm, which means your clients get the best service and the company is staying at a high gear as well.

So when you are looking at this, and now I'm going to jump to the engagement scale. If you rate yourself in terms of how engaged you are really at being in, you know, your next gear up, so to speak, then make sure that you are not trying to jump from a three to a 10 on the engagement scale. That is a flame-up, flame-out situation that is inevitable. And listen, I'm here. I'm right there with you, listeners who that's how you've created the success in your life. You have just driven hard. You've gotten fixated on something and you've created a result. But that's not actually a sustainable way to go.

This is a marathon. Actually, this is not a marathon. This is an Ultraman. We are not in a sprint. And when you fixate and push so hard, you burn out. That's the flame-up, flame-out scenario. When you try to jump from a three to a 10, when you try to jump from low to red line or low to high, you are at great risk of having an inability to hold that. So it's not about jumping, making a huge jump right away. It's about making really intentional decisions for what's next.

So how do we shift gears intentionally? How do we shift gears on purpose? There's a few tactics. You know, we talk a lot about principles on this podcast and things to abide by for yourself. But we're also tactical. So right now, I'm going to get into some tactics. When you're trying to evaluate yourself, if you audit your calendar, you will see why you are in whatever gear you are in. Audit your calendar, look at the activity types that are on there. Look at the activity types that you're doing that aren't on there. Like really assess how you're spending your time. Your calendar should be a reflection of how you spend your time. And if it's not, that can be a clue of what gear you are likely in.

You can also use whether it's a Monday Map Friday Wrap, which we teach and we love, but some sort of rhythm or cadence for yourself to check in and evaluate how this week has gone. What do you notice? What do you observe? What are the lessons learned? What do you want to shift for next week? Having some sort of frequency or rhythm around being intentional and taking space for yourself is the very thing that will allow you to continuously move in the right direction in terms of what gear you want to be in.

The last is to match the gear to the season. This is important. You know, if you are coming out of a red line, you can't expect yourself to run hot all the time. If you want to deliberately shift up a gear, there's a few things you're definitely going to have to do. Number one, first and foremost, is to eliminate distractions. What distractions do you currently have? And I don't mean just the dings and pings on your phone and your computer or the email inbox, though absolutely those are on the table to have a look at. I mean distractions. How often are you getting interrupted in the day? How often are you finding yourself distracting yourself because you don't want to do the work. You get up and you go get a snack instead of working on the thing you said you were going to work on. Like you have to figure out where your distractions are, whether they are chosen by you or whether you're being pulled.

The second thing you're going to have to do if you want to shift up a gear is to recommit to your most important priorities. They get lost in the shuffle sometimes. They get lost in the busyness. What is top priority? Something for me that I figured out recently that we are actively working on shifting is that I need more time to train my team and uplevel my team and develop my team. If I don't do that, we're going to stall out, and the company is not going to be performing at in a high gear. That is something we have to do. We have to make the change. And that is reconnecting with a priority. What does it look like for you?

And the last thing if you want to shift up a gear is delegation or automation. How do you get stuff off of your plate that shouldn't be on your plate so that it frees you up to actually spend time with the things that are a higher priority for you. Instead of being bogged down in the details, this is your chance to get out of the fray and get things off of your plate so that you can focus on what matters most.

Now, let's say you need to shift down a gear. We talked about none of these are bad or good. They are choices that you make intentionally. So if you need to shift down a gear, instead of with, you know, your eliminating distractions, you're going to need to block more white space on your calendar. You need to make sure that you have room to breathe and move and not be back-to-back because it's not something if you've coming out of a red line or if you're dealing with a major life transition, for whatever reason, the season that you're in is calling for a low gear, then you have got to honor that low gear by giving yourself white space in your calendar.

Another thing you can do is build in more recovery. This could look like for you as the individual. So recovery and go make sure you're taking care of yourself. Do you need to go to yoga? Do you need to go to breathwork class? Do you need to meditate more? Do you need to go for walks? What do you need to do to recover? White space will help a lot, but thinking through what you need to recover so that you can get yourself back to the ability to run at a high gear is very important.

The last thing you can do is to let go of pressure that doesn't serve you in this season. Many of you watching this, which I obviously, if you've been around me for a long time, you know this about me as well, you can be really hard on yourself. And that has to take a back seat. You have to relieve the pressure that is coming from within yourself. This is not the time for that. This is a time to take space. And you pushing harder in a space where you should be in a low gear, but you're trying to drive just as hard or sort of just as hard, is not recovery. So it means you're going to have to spend a longer time in a low gear. If you want efficiency, you need to really give yourself the gift of a low gear. Some of the criticism or the, you know, the stressors that come may come from the outside world, and you're going to have to put boundaries in place for that as well. That's taking care of yourself and that's ensuring that you actually get the low gear that this season is calling for.

Okay, remember, the gear that you are in may be different than the gear that your firm is in. And that is okay. It's supposed to be that way sometimes. The firm, you want to get it to where it's running at in a high gear. You? Sure, that's optimal to be in a high gear. We all like being there. We like what that feels like. But there's going to be seasons that call for different things. So don't forget that though you need to consider for yourself where you should be, you should have standards for your company that keeps it in high gear or does your best to do so.

Here are some gear related patterns I see all the time in law firms. Probably the most common is stuck in mid-gear. And this is where things are steady, but growth is stalled out. You aren't really moving in any direction towards your vision. This is often times where you are not doing the highest value of work. You are doing things that other people in the firm could technically be doing. And so there's something missing there and you've got to start to put your time into the things that are going to move the needle for your firm.

The second thing I see probably second most often is people thrashing in high gear or red line. This is where everything is urgent. They are constantly reactive. They can't handle the workload. It's not going well. Everyone is stressed, everyone is frazzled. There's a sense of this generalized burnout that's not bad enough to put people on the floor, but it's not great enough to have them smiling all day long. This is not where you want to be.

The third most common that I see is I would say defaulting to a low gear. And this is usually because they the owners don't have a clear vision of exactly what they are aiming for. And because they don't know exactly what they are aiming for, they don't have any plans in terms of what needs to be done to get them to the thing they're aiming for. So when you are being honest with yourself about where you are, if you are unclear about your goals, about the outcomes you'd like to produce for yourself, for your life, but also for the clients you serve and for the team that you have, if you want to see what's what's possible, but you don't have anything concrete there. And by the way, more money and more freedom and more time isn't concrete enough. That is not an aim. That is an aspiration that you need to put some specifics to. So if you don't know what you're aiming for, you will be, it's likely that you will be in a low gear just by default because you're not lining yourself up with anything specific.

If you know what you're aiming for, then it allows you to make really solid plans to get there. And that alone puts you into a different gear. Maybe it's mid because there's still some refinement in terms of eliminating distractions, etc. But your chances of creating more of what you want to create and kicking into a new, a higher gear that feels better and more appropriate, kicking the firm into a higher gear as well, that's more appropriate, everybody wins.

So remember, the smartest move can sometimes for yourself intentionally downshifting a gear. But the whole idea, the reason you would do that, it's all for the health of this company. It's all for the health of the firm. If the firm is healthy, it's there's not a lot of excess in the firm. Everybody is knows their job descriptions and is doing a really great job with the output and the service that they're providing. When the team rallies around and rows in the same direction of where it is that you're going because you are clear on where it is that you want to go, then there's so many other examples, but systems and process are in place. You have plans, well thought out plans. You have accountability built into your firm. All of that means it's a healthy firm. Healthy firms exist in a high gear. You, however, may need to intentionally downshift in order to create that healthy state for the firm, that high gear for the firm. It depends on the season, it depends on what's going on, and intentionally choosing is more important than anything else.

So leaving you with a few questions. What gear are you in right now? Getting honest about that and deciding what gear do you have like what gear feels appropriate for you to move into? That may be up a gear, it may be down, but deciding intentionally what is needed so that the firm can start to move into a higher gear. You cranking harder is not the thing that puts the firm in high gear. That is what will kill the firm over time if you're not intentional. So really think through this. What gear are you in right now? And what gear is your firm in? And what would best serve the longevity of this firm? This is an Ultraman race. This is not a sprint. There's no finish line right away. There's nothing you need to hit right away. And you cranking harder keeps you in a sprint, and you need to step out and be able to look longer term.

There's a concept that I've talked to members about and it resonates a lot is you're riding your bike, you're riding, riding, riding. You can see the horizon, you're riding towards the horizon and you are cranking. And people think that's their only option. And really what I'm asking you to do with this is to get off the bike and maybe get into the car. You'll get there faster and with more ease. If you keep doing what you're doing, you're not going to get there. So use this episode as a way to check yourself, get intentional, put yourself in the right gear and get your firm into the high gear. All right everybody, have a wonderful week. I'll see you here next Tuesday.

Hey, you may not know this, but there's a free guide for a process I teach called Monday Map Friday Wrap. If you go to velocitywork.com, it's all yours. It's about how to plan your time and honor your plans so that week over week, more work that moves the needle is getting done in less time. Go to velocitywork.com to get your free copy.

Thank you for listening to The Law Firm Owner Podcast. If you're ready to get clearer on your vision, data, and mindset, then head over to VelocityWork.com where you can plug in to quarterly Strategic Planning, with accountability and coaching in between. This is the work that creates Velocity.