#193: Lawyer Leadership: Qualities Of A Good Leader

[00:01:19] Heather: Welcome everybody back to the Life & Law Podcast. This is your host, Heather Moulder and I’m excited to have you with me here today because today we have a special guest. Today we have Brian Beckcom.

He is a computer scientist, philosopher and trial lawyer based in Houston, Texas, which is where I grew up by the way. When not working hard to obtain record-breaking results for his clients, Brian also hosts Lessons from Leaders, a podcast featuring military leaders, sports stars, New York Times bestselling authors, scientists and more to discuss important issues of the day.

I brought Brian onto the show to talk about leadership lessons from high stakes cases. We’ve all been in high pressure situations and every one of us is probably going to be there again. So why not gain his valuable insight into how to make sound decisions and manage teams more effectively, even when under pressure?

Welcome, Brian.

[00:02:14] Brian: Heather, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on. I’m really looking forward to the show today. This is one of my favorite topics. The topic of leadership is one of my favorite topics.

What Is Leadership?

[00:02:25] Heather: I find that a lot of lawyers like to listen to leadership topics, but they’re not so good about implementing what they’ve learned.

[00:02:34] Brian: Yeah, yeah, no, I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And, you know, the thing about leadership is there’s different kinds of leadership. Like, you can be a leader and be a bad leader. You know what I mean? Like, you can lead people over cliffs, you can lead them in the wrong direction.

In fact, the podcast that you referenced that I started on leadership, I started that during quarantine. And the reason I started it is because, you know, like a lot of people, I was staying at home with my kids, not going outside. I was on the Internet all the time, and I just saw so many examples of what I consider to be negative or bad leadership. So I said, man, I know a lot of positive leaders out there, and so I want to feature them.

Positive, Impactful Leadership

And so leadership is really big topic. I’m sure you and your listeners will agree. But what I really am interested in is how you lead people in a positive, impactful way.

[00:03:32] Heather: Yes, I would say that’s what real leading is.

At least what we’re getting at, what we want out of leading. We don’t just want people to do something. We want them to do it because they care enough, because they want to, because they’re inspired by you, too. Right? And that produces a more engaged people around you. It produces better work product.

And it also. I think that when you lead in that way, you’re actually helping to develop future leaders as well. That’s the goal, at least part of the goal for us as leaders.

[00:04:12] Brian: No doubt about it. And, you know, it’s been interesting because I’ve had probably close to 100 episodes now, and I’ve had leaders from the military, I’ve had leaders from politics. I’ve had New York Times bestselling authors, sports, martial arts, you know, the whole gamut. And there’s patterns that emerge.

The Ultimate Quality of A Good Leader: Service-Based Leadership

And I really didn’t expect this when I started the podcast, but one thing I kept hearing again and again and again from all different sorts of people, from all different sorts of all different walks of life, was leadership is about service to the people. You lead like that, to me, is the thing that I’ve heard by far the most, is leadership is about serving. It’s about service. In fact, I had. I’ll give you a good example of that. I had a.

A guest on my podcast. He’s a. Has a thick Texas accent. He wears a cowboy hat. He’s a district attorney in a small town. And this was right around the time of the George Floyd protest. And. And when George Floyd was killed by those police officers. And I wanted to have him on because here’s a, you know, you would think stereotypical Southern district attorney and he had set up this program to make sure that the minority community in his jurisdiction was being treated fairly by the.

And when I asked him, I said, man, you’re such a leader when you do this. He responded, I’ll never forget this. He said, I don’t really think of myself as a leader, I think of myself as a servant. And so to me, that’s where it all starts. It’s about servant based leadership and your listeners and you, I’m sure, see all the time people that are really good leaders, but it’s all about them.

And, again, like I’m saying, you can lead people up to a certain point with that style, but the second things go bad, they’re going to jump ship. So you know, it’s like you’re in the military. You want people that are going to be in that foxhole with you. You don’t want people that are leading you because they’re compelled to lead you or follow you. You want people to follow you because they want to follow you. And how are people going to want to follow you? They’re going to want to follow you when at the very outset they know that you actually care about them. So to me, that can’t be, that the whole idea of servant leadership can’t really be talked about enough.

Qualities of Good Leadership vs. Merely Managing

[00:06:34] Heather: Agreed. I think also there’s a misconception by a lot of people, attorneys included, who think leading and managing are the same thing.

[00:06:45] Brian: Yeah.

[00:06:46] Heather: How would you differentiate between the two?

[00:06:49] Brian: So to me, managing is more about making sure that you have everything, whatever it is, your business, your sports, if you’re a teacher, your classroom, making sure that, to use a metaphor, the trains are running on time, making sure that the tasks are being done, making sure they’re being done on time.

Leadership is more about making sure the right stuff is being done and focusing on having the right, right people doing the right thing.

So, for example, I run a law firm and I feel like my, one of my very, very top priorities is making sure I have the right people sitting in the right seats and then staying out of their way and, and letting them do their job. In fact, I found, and I, I, I hate to say this, but it’s true, I find that the more I kind of step away from the law firm, at least the day-to-day business of it, the better my staff performs because they know I trust them and they can take some initiative and they can make some mistakes.

So to me, leadership is more about. It’s not about coercing people to do things. It’s not about coercing them to follow you. It’s about making them feel a sense of agency.

Agency vs. Micromanaging

There’s a really good author by the name of Dan Pink who’s written a number of books. I’m sure you’ve heard of him before. And one of the things, I forget the book he wrote this in, but one of the books, he talks about what people want at work. And, you know, the easy answer is money, of course, but the deeper answer is they really want two things. They want to feel like they have a sense of control or a sense of agency, like they can make some decisions on their own and they want to make. They want to feel like they’re contributing to some sort of worthwhile mission.

So if you can give as a leader your people, whether again, whether whatever walk of life you’re in up to and including just your family and your kids, if you can give your kids, your co workers, your colleagues, your troops a sense of agency, independent agency, and give them a sense of what they’re doing is worthwhile and meaningful, you will have people that you don’t even really have to do much. I’ll give you another good example.

Years ago, over 20 years ago, I worked where I started my firm. I worked for two partners at a law firm. I was an associate for both of them. One of the, one of the partners, every Saturday morning would bring me in and he would tell me every single minute task on every single case I had to work on that week. And, and then the next Saturday we would have a meeting and he would complain about all the stuff I didn’t get done and assign me a bunch of other tasks. The second partner would meet with me once every three or four months and he would say, here, 20 cases.

Go win these cases. If you have any questions during the way, I’m here to answer any questions, but otherwise, just tell me when they’re one. And here’s the, here’s the kicker, okay?

The first partner, Partner A, I did nothing but the precise tasks that he assigned me. I was like, I’m just going to do all this stuff and he doesn’t trust me on any of this other stuff. And that’s all I did. The other partner, I was like, wow, Partner two really, really trusts me. So I worked way, way harder. I went way further than I would have went for partner one, for partner two. Why? Because I feel like he trusted me he gave me a sense of control, he gave me a sense of agency. And so I think those two styles of leadership, there’s kind of the dictatorial style of leadership and there’s more like, I trust you, we’re working together because you’re a smart, capable person.

The first one, you’re going to get some results, but those aren’t going to be very lasting or meaningful results. The second one, you’re going to have people that are willing to run through a brick wall for you again, because you trust them, you give them agency.

[00:10:51] Heather: Yeah. It reminds me of when I was a young lawyer and I worked for a lot of different partners, but there were two I worked with very closely and very similar. One was the biggest micromanager you’d ever.

And by the way, there’s a reason we say micromanage, not micro lead, because real leadership does not include micromanagement.

And so if you think you’re a leader just because you have a title on your plaque, that’s not really what it is.

If you’re known as the micromanager, an argument can be made – you’re not truly leading. But yeah, I had one of those and it just, it was the most unmotivating.

I wanted to just do the bare minimum, kind of like, let’s just get this done so I can go do that other work that is actually more interesting, more challenging, more fun because I had that agency. So you’re totally right. The impact is very different.

The Benefits of Giving Agency As A Leader

[00:11:51] Brian: Yeah. And you know, it’s better for the leader too. I mean, think about it from this perspective. If you’re, if you’re the first type of leader where you’re a micromanager, you got to tell people every single thing that they want to do. You have to constantly be doing all that stuff. You have to be assigning the tasks, you have to be tracking the task, you have to be making sure things get completed on time. You’re giving, basically you’re giving yourself way more work than necessary.

If you’re the second type of leader and you trust your people and you have good people, then that allows you to focus on bigger things. So, for example, in my law firm, again, just use it as an example. Probably the number one thing I do every day is work on the marketing and business development of the firm, like bringing in the new cases.

If I had to get in the weeds on a day to day basis on every single case we had and check that all my lawyers were doing every single thing, I wouldn’t have time to do the thing that was most Important, at least for the production of my law firm.

And you know, I grew up in a. In a military family. My dad was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, granddad lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. My older brother was a Marine, my mom was a nurse in the Air Force, uncle was a chief master sergeant. I was in the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M. My brother was. Both of my boys are. Now, I’ve been around some very hierarchical leadership-type structures.

My dad, for example, as a lieutenant colonel and officer, could basically tell anybody below him to do what he wanted to do, what he wanted him to do. And there wasn’t much they could say about it. It’s called pulling rank. Like, he could say, I’m a lieutenant colonel and you’re a captain. You’re going to do what I said.

My dad said he never pulled rank ever, because he felt like if he had to pull rank, that was a leadership failure. And I agree with him.

If you have to, you’re going to do this because I’m your boss is a leadership failure. In my opinion. You’re going to do this because you want to do this, because you feel like the mission that we’re to both of us together, all of us together, are going after. That’s good leadership. Pulling rank is not. Not good leader. Now, it’s leadership in a way. Like if you want to, if you want to say, well, you’re getting people to accomplish a mission, sure, it’s leadership, but it’s again, it’s not, it’s not lasting, it’s not long term.

I mean, think about Heather in your life. Think about all the people that you really look up to as leaders. I’ll bet you there’s a couple commonalities amongst them. And I’ll bet you every single one of them made you feel like you were better than maybe you thought you were. Like, they brought something out in you that maybe you didn’t know you had. Whereas if somebody is just dictating, do this step here, go here, do this, do that, answer this way. I don’t like this.

Then you’re not really developing any leadership skills at all. All you’re doing is just kind of following a recipe. So what. What I. What I. A lot of this, you know, and, and I don’t like to use the cliche terms, but a lot of, A lot of this is about kind of empowering people to realize their potential. So at my firm, for example, we have a. I have a rule. You’re not allowed to present me with a problem unless you also propose a solution.

It’s so easy. I tell my people, I say, I could hire literally anybody to tell me what the problems are, right? But I hired. And I’ll have this conversation with new employees.

They’ll come and say, hey, there’s these problems in this case. And I’ll say, okay, what’s your solution? Because, see, I didn’t hire you to tell me the problems. I already kind of know the problems, right? I hired you for your brain because you’re smart, because I wanted you to propose some solutions.

And what I found, Heather, kind of surprisingly, that sounds pretty simple. But I think people kind of have a default state where if they’re in an organization and they see some problems, they want to. They want to report the problems and kind of stop there. Like, they don’t want to get too far, too far ahead of the skis, so to speak, because they’re afraid. I think if they propose, they. Either they’re lazy and they don’t want to do the work, or they’re afraid if they propose solutions that the boss won’t like the solutions.

And again, if you give people, this agency, this notion that, like, you’re not here as just a cog in the machine, you’re here because you’re a smart, accomplished, good person that has good ideas, it is absolutely amazing what some people come up with. And the other thing is, smart, capable leaders know that they don’t know everything. In fact, smart, smart, capable leaders try to surround themselves with people that know more than them about certain topics or people that are better than them and certain topics and then get, like I said, and then get out of their.

Great Leaders Must Be Confident Enough To Let Go (& Rely On Others)

[00:16:43] Heather: Way because they don’t feel threatened by that.

[00:16:48] Brian: That’s a great point. You kind of anticipated what I was about to say. It takes some self confidence as a leader to hire people that are better than you in some things, right?

[00:17:01] Heather: Yep.

[00:17:02] Brian: I’ll give you another. I’ll give you another, like, concrete example of this. I’ve got a lawyer that works for me. He’s amazing in terms of his emotional intelligence. Like, he is. So I have. I can run hot and cold in cases sometimes. Like, I’ll get a little. I’ll send an email. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent. Have a phone call. Maybe I shouldn’t have had.

And he never does that. He’s so disciplined, he’s so friendly. He’s tough as nails, but he is so good at dealing with people that he’s actually. He’s better than me at that. And I realized that A couple years ago, I said, man, I need to. I need to kind of copy Brendan’s approach here, because he does a better job, a better job of this than I do. And you know what? I think Brendan. Brendan’s his name. I think Brendan would tell you that I do a better job at some things than he does. And so he learns from me, and I learned from him.

I learned from Patty, my paralegal of 20, almost 20 years now. She’s got some unbelievable. We call her Aaron, the real Aaron Brockovich. She’s got some unbelievable skills, too. She’s not very good at organization. I make fun of her about that all the time. She hates it. But you know what she’s great at? She. She’s. She’s great at dealing with people.

Anytime I have some important new client or some issue that needs a human touch, the first person I think of is Patty, because literally everybody loves her. She’s so good at dealing with people, diffusing situations, making people trust her. And it’s because she’s a real authentic person. But again, she’s better at that than I am.

Good Leadership Means Admitting You Aren’t the Best At Everything

And so a good leader, Heather, I think you’ll agree with this. A good leader realizes that they’re not the best at everything. And so I may be really, really good at, say, five or six things, but if I can surround myself with people that have each have five or six other complimentary things are better, now all of a sudden I’m, I’m. I’m. I’m cooking now. I’m better than most people at, like, 20 things.

And so it’s about kind of leveraging the people around you and using their talents and skills. And I think you said it perfectly. It takes some self confidence, because what you find. And we’ve all had bad leaders, We’ve all had bad bosses. Isn’t it always the ones that are the most insecure, that are like the most micromanaging? I mean, don’t those things always seem to go kind of hand in hand, you know, always?

[00:19:27] Heather: And, you know, I think what this, this really points out something that I think is so important for most lawyers.

They need to get to this place.

And I think this is also why so many lawyers have trouble with leading effectively, because a lot of attorneys are convinced they’re supposed to be the best at everything. They’re supposed to never show, quote, unquote, weakness. That’s too weak if I’m not great at everything, which is really the opposite of what you’re supposed to do.

So there’s a mindset shift that needs to take place if you want to truly lead like this, you need to be okay with. Yeah, I have strengths, but I also have weaknesses. There are things I’m not as good at. Other people are going to be better than me at a lot of things, and that’s okay in order to step into this and truly lead.

Taking Control of Your Ego

[00:20:18] Brian: Yeah. And it’s a, It’s a little bit of a dilemma though, isn’t it, Heather? Because, you know, there’s. It’s kind of like running for President of the United States. Right. If you run for President of the United States, there’s something off about you. I don’t care who you are. Like, you have to have a gigantic ego to think that you could be the leader of the free world. And I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or Republican. Every single one of them has a massive, massive ego. Right?

[00:20:46] Heather: Yep.

[00:20:46] Brian: And that, that’s kind of an exaggerated example, but it’s the same thing if you start a law firm with your name on it. I mean, you have to have some level of ego.

It’s same thing going to law school, I’m gonna be a lawyer, People are gonna pay me to give them advice. That takes some ego, man, but being able to control that. I think the trick is all of us, all of us in a leadership position have some level of ego. We have some level of drive, we have some level of alpha personality. It’s when that stuff gets out of hand that things go downhill.

So again, I’m not sitting here saying you need to be some Zen Buddhist type leader that never loses their cool, never disciplines. And I’m not saying that. I mean, you have to have a little bit of juice, you have to have a little bit of ego just, just to be in the position you’re in. But it’s. It’s having the self-awareness to know when that ego is taken over and being able to tamp it down. That, to me, that’s the, that’s the trick.

It’s kind of, you know, like the Buddhists talk about, which I think is generally good life advice. It’s the middle path. It’s kind of like between the two extremes. You want to be driven, you want to have some, you know, some, some juice to you, but you also want to be self aware enough to know that you’re not the best at everything and you don’t know everything.

What If You’ve Been Burned Before (Letting Go, Delegating, &/Or Relying On Others)?

[00:22:06] Heather: Absolutely. And in addition, I think to that, that mindset shift, there was something else that you said earlier that I wanted to point out. That I think is also key.

It’s this.

And I’m saying this because I get a lot of pushback from clients, especially partner clients or clients who are building their own law firms and hiring people where they claim, I’ve trusted people before and I’ve been burned. I have to micromanage because of. Righ?. And so there’s this assumption that people are just not good enough or lazy or, you know, whatever it may be, not capable, that you kind of have to check because you have to allow people the opportunity.

And you have to allow them a real opportunity where you truly do step back where you do, because then they don’t have agency if you’re not doing that. So can you speak about that a little bit? I’m sure you’ve had, you know, everybody’s a little different, and you’ve probably had those employees where it’s taken a little longer to kind of, like, bring them along.

And maybe you do get to a point where you decide, this isn’t a good fit. So how do you counterbalance that and figure that out and then deal with it to allow them that agency?

[00:23:27] Brian: So when I hear somebody say, I’ve been burned before, I don’t, you know, this trust thing is not work for me because X or Y happened or this happened or that happened, the first thing that goes through my mind is, well, then why did you hire that person?

Like, you were the one that made that choice, right? Like, if you don’t trust the people that you’re working, that you’re working with, and you’re the one that hired them, either you’ve got a trust issue in general or you’re not hiring the right people in the first place. Right. So I read.

The Impact of Remote Working (On Trust)

Yeah, I tell you, I read this book about, gosh, about 10 years ago now, and it was. It’s called Rework. It’s about remote work. And there was a pass. And so long before COVID long before these Zoom interviews, my staff was remote on Fridays. So we did a. Basically an experiment. And it was interesting because literally nobody noticed. I told. I told. In fact, I told patty, my paralegal 10 years ago. I said, one of my goals. She’s got two adult kids who live out of Texas that she loves, Loves to visit. She’s. I said, one of my goals for you is you to be able to be on a houseboat in Austin or I’m in Boston harbor next to your kids, working during the day and hanging out with your kids at night. And guess what? She does that a lot now. But anyway, I read this book 10 years ago and I said, Patty, why don’t you just work from home on Fridays? And 10 years ago that was. Nobody did that.

[00:24:57] Heather: Right, right.

[00:24:58] Brian: And nobody noticed. But the thing that really struck me about this book is, and now that a lot of people are work from home and remote and there’s not the same kind of water cooler culture that we used to have, the thing that really struck me about this book is, and remember this is 10 years ago, the objection that a lot of bosses had to people working from home is how do we know they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing? How do we know they’re doing the work? How can we monitor them, how can we watch them? And the guy made this point which I thought was unbelievable.

He said it’s actually far easier to judge the quality of people’s work when they’re remote than it is when they’re in the office. Why is that? Because when they’re remote, that is the only thing you can judge them by. Whereas when they’re in the office, a lot of times it’s the guy or the girl that has the best water cooler banter or the guy that loves to come down at 5 o’clock and crack open a beer and shoot the bull with you for 30 minutes. But guess what he’s been doing all day long? He’s been playing games on his computer and getting no work done. Like, in other words, you can misjudge somebody’s productivity. Somebody may be in the office 16 hours a day and get absolutely nothing done, but you know what, they were there 16 hours a day, so they must be working hard. Well, I don’t know. Whereas if they’re remote, I don’t care how long they work, all I care about is the output. And it’s a much more objective way to judge the output. But there’s again, like you said, there’s this trust issue. There’s like, I mean, how do, for example, how do I know right now that my paralegal isn’t walking outside at 3 o’clock with her dog? How do I know that?

The answer to the question is I don’t and I don’t care.

[00:26:52] Heather: That would be my, like, I would care less as long as she’s doing her job.

[00:26:56] Brian: That’s what I’m saying. I just don’t care. One of my Lawyers has a 3 year old boy and that is the center of his universe, as it should be. And he picks him up from school at 4:30 every single day. He’s with him every single evening.

I don’t bother him on the weekends. He could be right now playing Frisbee with his boy. It’s 3:00 in Houston right now. And I could care less because I trust him, because he gets the work done. And so as far as I’m concerned, he can go wherever he wants. I mean, I know, and you probably know this too, Heather.

I know big law firms that the second quarantine was over. They immediately rushed everybody back to the office. And my question is, why? Like, like, maybe that’s a, maybe that’s a good idea. I don’t know, maybe there’s a good reason for that, but maybe it’s not. I mean, you know, I sit here and think.

I mean, think about this, Heather. When I started practicing law 25 years ago in Houston, Texas, I would wake up in a box, my house. Then I would get in a smaller box, my car, and I would drive down the highway for 30 minutes in this box. So I could go to a building and go up 50 floors in an elevator and sit in another box for eight hours a day. And then I would go down the elevator, hop in the little car box. The hour on the highway. I mean, what is this? Like, this is ridiculously time-wasting.

Now what I do is I wake up in the morning, I go to my home office, knock out a bunch of work, go exercise, come back, do podcasts, and knock out some more work. I am 10 times more productive when I don’t have to, like, physically go to some other location simply to say, I’m going to say, you know what I mean?

And again, there are definitely benefits to being in person. And so, like my team, for example, we like to meet in person four or five times a month. I’ve found that there is some benefit from a brainstorming perspective to sitting around in a room together and whiteboarding stuff and just letting things kind of ideas bounce off of you. You can’t really get that by zoom. At least I haven’t figured out how to do that. So I’m not saying no in person. I’m just saying balance when in person is really effective and it’s better than remote. Do in person, when remote is better for you and the people you work for do remote. But what I see most people do, and quite frankly is they don’t. They just don’t think about it. They’re just like, okay, quarantine’s over, back to the office. Oh, you don’t, you don’t want to do remote work. You don’t want to come to the office? What’s wrong with you?

Well, I don’t know. I was 10 times more productive during quarantine with you not coming in my office knocking on the door every five minutes saying, got a sec? I’m a. I don’t like conventional wisdom. Okay. Because I think it’s neither wise nor conventional. I think people need to question, like, why? I ask this question why all the time. Like, why? Why do I have to have a paralegal that lives in Houston, Texas? I could have a paralegal that lives in wherever she wants to live in the world. She can live in a houseboat in Boston Harbor. She can be super happy doing whatever she wants to do, plus accomplishing my mission. And I think people are, they’re making a real mistake with this in person office thing. If they haven’t questioned the assumption of, like, why, why 9 to 5, Monday through Friday? Like, where did that come from, Heather? Like, where did this Monday through Friday, where did, where did this rule come out that all professionals on Monday at 9:00, we’re in, in the building. Then I got a lunch break and then they’re off at 5 or 6 and they do that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then they have Saturday and Sunday off. Where did that come from?

Literally, if I were to sit behind my computer Monday through Friday from 9 to 5, I would be less productive than if I sat in front of my computer Monday morning from 7am until 10am and really focused hard on three hours of work, then stepped away for two or three hours, then came back, then stepped away. Maybe take Friday off if everything’s going well, maybe do a little work on Sunday morning. You know, like this. The, the, the. And the, the great thing about quarantine and Covid. If I, I hate to say it that way, but it gave us an opportunity, I think, to question a lot of the assumptions about what it is we do and how we do how we do the work. You know what I mean?

The Question To Ask Yourself (& How To Trust More)

[00:31:35] Heather: Yeah. When it comes down to this trust issue and being burned, I always ask the question when somebody says that to me also, like, okay, so what part did you play in that?

Because oftentimes what I have found is they gave an assignment without any feedback – here’s what to do or without anything. They may have had something in their mind, but they didn’t really say it clearly. They weren’t concise about what it was. They didn’t follow up. They did, like, there are things you can do to build guardrails around. Here’s what’s expected, here’s the time frame, right? There’s check ins that you can have. Like there are things you could do. It’s not like you have to just say here and trust them to go do it all and know exactly what they’re doing.

I think that there’s this misconception around training and what training really means. That it means we have to walk alongside them for every single step and practically tell them what to do every step of the way and have to do it for them in order to train. When in fact, better training occurs when you give some clear guidance and guidelines, allow them to come ask questions, check in with them upon occasion, but let them have agency over the how and the doing part. Yeah, I think people get it more quickly then.

[00:33:05] Brian: I agree with that completely. And what I try to do, here’s another kind of concrete example of how I try to put that into action.

Whenever somebody at my firm says, hey, we have this issue, here’s what’s going on. Here are the different things that are going on. The first question I always ask is, what do you think we should do? Like, and I, I think again with this, you know, the, the, the, the idea that all leaders have some ego. All leaders, like, hey, you know what, Heather? I’m a damn good trial lawyer. I know the answer to the question that was just asked because I’ve seen that question 25 times. And, and the tendency for a lot of people is to just jump in and say, do this. Like, do this. Oh, I know the answer to that. I know the answer to that. I think the better and more mature approach is to say, well, what do you think?

How To Learn From Leaders (Especially The Bad Ones)

And that by asking that kind of question, you’re like, we’ve been talking about, you’re giving people agency, but you’re also giving them a chance to grow and learn. And you know, the. How do you think I learned more about being a trial lawyer from the first lawyer who micromanaged everything I did or from the second lawyer who gave me a lot of latitude and a lot of space to do what I needed to do?

It’s kind of a rhetorical question. Of course, I learned 10 times more from the second lawyer. Although I will say this, and this is, I think, a really important point that I want your listeners to focus on.

It is a good thing to be around bad leaders, okay? Because I learned a lot from lawyer A. I learned how I didn’t want to do things right. And so, you know, sometimes you might find Yourself in a situation where your. Your boss or your leader, whoever it is, isn’t very good.

[00:34:57] Heather: Right.

[00:34:58] Brian: And so what do you do in that situation? Well, you can leave most of the time. If that’s not an option, then you can learn like, you can learn like, what is it about this person that makes me dislike them or not want to follow them or. Or. Or trust their wisdom. I mean, you can learn. In fact, I.

I would be willing to say you learn more from bad leaders than you learn from good leaders. Just like I learn more when I. When I lose a case, which it doesn’t happen very often, but when I lose. So every time I try case, I have a little note that I take afterwards. And when I win, it’s literally, oh, you’re great. You did a great job of this, this, this, and this. But I don’t learn anything when I lose a case. It’s 10 pages to do this. Try this. You did this. You need to do this different. You know, I learn way more when I don’t win a case. Just like I think oftentimes we learn more from bad leadership than we even learn from good leadership.

[00:35:59] Heather: Well, I think it. It makes more clear why, like, why is this bad? What is it? What do I not want to do, and why do I not want to do it? Which then helps you to flip it into a more clear, this is how I would approach it, or this is what I would do differently, or that it gives a more clear framework, I guess, around not just what not to do, but what. How you would prefer it be done.

[00:36:23] Brian: Yeah.

[00:36:24] Heather: As opposed to great leaders. Sometimes it’s hard because it’s not as clear to you. Framework wise. Okay, what are they doing exactly? How are they doing it?

You can identify that. You got to think a lot harder. I think sometimes.

[00:36:38] Brian: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not as good leadership is subtle.

It’s less hard to pick up on precisely what people are doing. So I’ll give you another example of this.

I was asked to give a speech to a bunch of Air Force officers on leadership a number of years ago. And the speech, basically the speech was the five fundamental lessons of leadership. And it was what all the different leaders on my podcast had said. Number one, servant leader. We’ve already talked about that. Number three, though, was trust your instincts.

And because when you get into a position of leadership, that almost always means you’ve had good instincts at some point, like you’ve. Or you’ve developed some good instincts.

There’s a. There’s a security expert named Gavin De Becker, who provides security for Jeff Bezos and all these famous, you know, world leaders and stuff, he said one time on a podcast I was listening to, he said, if you’re in a situation like, let’s say you pull up a gas station late at night, something doesn’t feel right in your stomach. Listen. That’s important. That’s a sign, like, you’re.

We’ve evolved to have these gut feelings or instincts. It’s the same thing with leadership. When I look back, Heather, on the last 20 years of my journey, whenever I did something against my gut or against my instincts, it was wrong, right? When I. When I followed my gut and I followed my instincts, it was almost always right. But because that’s so kind of ambiguous and hard to, like, quantify and stuff, sometimes when you’re seeing a leader follow his gut, it’s really hard to learn from that. But you know what you can learn from when you see somebody doing something they know is not the right thing, like, oh, yeah, I didn’t feel good about that. There was something, maybe something off about that. Turns out it was the wrong decision.

So, again, good leadership is.

You know, good leadership is an art.

It’s like a. It’s like. It’s like playing music. It’s. It’s not like following a certain recipe. And that. That makes sense, right? Because every single person is different, and you have to adjust the tune of the music just a little bit based on the personality of the person you’re dealing with.

Bad leadership, by contrast, is like hitting. Hitting the wrong note. Like, that’s jarring. And. And you can kind of. You can kind of like, when the note is off, it’s like everybody knows it immediately. Right, Right. So I think it’s easier to pinpoint bad leadership than it is to kind of really describe in words every single aspect of good leadership. I mean, I’ll give you an example from politics. I think most people, Republicans or Democrats alike, would agree that there’s something about Barack Obama that’s very charismatic.

What is it? Is it his smile? Is it his big ears? It is his way of speaking.

Is it his way of moving?

I mean, it’s probably all of those things, right? It’s like a symphony when it goes into place. But isn’t it hard to really pinpoint what it is about? Winston Churchill, everybody, I think, would agree, was a. Was a fantastic leader. But what was it about this little, short, doughy, kind of overweight guy that spoke with a lisp and was bankrupt half the time? I mean, why. I don’t know. It’s because the guy, he knew how to play jazz. He. And what was it about? Adolf Hitler was a great leader. I mean, when I say great leader, he was great at leading people to do horrible, horrible, horrible things. It’s a little bit easier for us to pinpoint exactly what it was. Or Joseph Stalin. Joseph Stalin led a lot of people. A lot of people. But to do very, very, very bad things. It’s a little easier to pick out what the bad leaders did than to kind of mimic the good leaders, in my opinion.

How To Become A Better Leader

[00:40:49] Heather: So then what would you say to somebody who’s like, okay, I would like to be a better leader. Where would they get started? What are some practical things that they could be doing?

[00:40:59] Brian: I would say, like we’ve been talking about, I would say the very first thing you need to do is you need to set your frame of reference that your job is to serve the people you lead, to care about the people. There’s an old saying, it’s a little bit of a cliche. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. That is absolutely 100% spot on true. That’s the number one thing.

The second thing is, I think it’s important for people to know that you will not ask them to do anything at all that you wouldn’t be willing to do yourself. Like, they have to know that you’re not putting them out there in a situation that’s going to expose them to something that you’re not willing to be exposed to yourself.

Number three, trust your instincts. Okay? Trust. And that sounds fluffy, but, but, but it’s actually a very concrete example. When you feel something is off, listen to your instincts. When you feel something is on, listen to your instincts.

And then the final thing I would say is you have to, in order to trust the people that you’re working for, you have to trust yourself. Like, you have to trust that you made a good decision in putting this person in this seat. You made a good decision in hiring this person.

Hey, maybe they’re not going to do it exactly like I would do it. Heather, maybe they’re not going to do it exactly like you would do it. Maybe you want to jump in and say, well, you know, I would do it this way, or I would do it this way, but just step back, call a timeout for 10 seconds, and let them do it the way they want to do it. Look, sometimes when I write an email, it’s fairly aggressive, okay? That’s just the way I do things. Brendan. On the other hand, much more diplomatic.

I try to adopt some of his stuff, but if I wrote exactly like him, I wouldn’t be me anymore, I’d be Brendan. Right? Just like if Brendan was trying to copy me and be really aggressive all the time, he’s not Brendan anymore. Right. And so one of the reasons I think it’s hard to trust employees and one of the reasons I think people, people feel like they get quote burned is because they expect people to do things exactly the same way they would do them. And that’s not real.

Number one, it’s not realistic. Number two, you’re not going to maximize the potential that people you’re working with if you’re forcing them to do things in a way that’s not comfortable for them. So this trust thing is so important. You have to, you have to first of all trust yourself that you’ve got the right people in the right spots. And then you’ve got to trust them to do things in their own way. And you’ve got to trust that that’ll be effective even if it’s not exactly the way you would do things.

[00:43:43] Heather: Perfect advice. And I would just say, look, everybody’s people still will make mistakes and that’s okay. It’s not the end of the world. It’s part of the training and learning process.

And don’t like, I think where we also mess up is we, we’re perfectionists. And so a small little thing that’s really not that big of a deal we blow out of proportion and make into a big deal. So you’re going to have to like step back and stop doing that or this won’t work.

[00:44:13] Brian: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 100% agree. And you know, at the end of the day, what, what are we, what are we doing here? Like what, what’s the objective here? You know, what’s the purpose of life? I, I don’t know the answer to that question.

But you know, I tell my kids, for example, I don’t know what the purpose of life is, but you’ve been given a certain set of talents and skills and getting the most out of those God given talents or skills is a pretty good way, I think of leaving like trying to maximize the good you can put into the world with whatever skills and talents is, is a pretty good compass, pretty good way of leading your life. And if you can do that as you lead people, all of a sudden it’s not just you. Now you’ve got a whole team behind you doing the same thing. And that kind of continues to build on itself, which I think is frankly very, very exciting.

[00:45:04] Heather: And I think that’s a great place to end. So thank you so much for joining us today. Why don’t you tell people how they can find you if they want to connect with you online?

[00:45:14] Brian: Yeah, sure. I’m most active probably on Instagram. Brian Beckham, Lawyer and the website for my law firm is www.vbattorneys.com. that’s V as in Victor, B as in Brian. Vbattorneys.com the Leadership Podcast is Lessons from Leaders with Brian Beckham. The website Brian Beckham.org can also find me on YouTube and all the other social medias. But I, I, I don’t know. I’m a, I like Instagram a lot, I gotta be honest.

[00:45:45] Heather: Interesting. Okay. Not a lot of lawyers I know are on Instagram.

[00:45:49] Brian: I love Instagram. Yeah.

[00:45:51] Heather: Okay. And I will have links to all of those major places in the show notes so that people can find you as well. Thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:45:59] Brian: Thank you, Heather. It’s been a real pleasure.