
The Law in Lockdown and Beyond, with Hannah Beko
A series of conversations with those in the legal profession navigating the ups and downs of the law during and after lockdown. How has this changed the profession as we've emerged from the global pandemic?
The Law in Lockdown and Beyond, with Hannah Beko
Interview with Ben Grimes, Leadership Coach for Lawyers
In this episode Ben shares his fascinating journey into the US Army where he Blackhawk helicopters and became a military lawyer and then a managing attorney for a large government agency.
Always passionate about leadership, Ben is now a coach for lawyers helping them to develop the skills and unlock the confidence to bring their best selves to work, build great teams, and deliver for their clients.
We have a lot in common and had a great discussion about why great leadership proves so elusive in law and how and why this needs to change.
Ben kindly created some resources for our podcast which you can find here https://www.bkgleadershipcoaching.com/hannah
You can find Ben on LinkedIn here https://www.linkedin.com/in/benkgrimes/
About me, your host
Hi, I'm Hannah Beko, lawyer, author, coach, corporate trainer and speaker focusing on leadership skills and mental health and wellbeing.
I have also created the Build Your Legal Business Podcast, which you can find here: https://authenticallyspeaking.co.uk/p..., and run The Legal Business Incubator membership for lawyers who want to improve their business development skills in an authentic way!
If you are a legal professional, please feel free to join our free Facebook Group for networking, tips and support - Legally Speaking, a group for the legal profession https://bit.ly/fblawyers
Do connect with me on LinkedIn or visit www.authenticallyspeaking.co.uk for blogs and resources to support legal professionals.
You can also find my bestselling book, "The Authentic Lawyer, How to Create More Success in Your Practice and More Balance in Your Life" on Amazon and Kindle.
Join us for an upcoming event - you can find these here:
https://hannahbeko.eventbrite.com
Wonderful, wonderful. I was expecting it to ask me before it did that, but never mind. I will edit that part. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Law in Lockdown and Beyond podcast and I'm joined today by Ben Grimes and I'm going to ask Ben to come and introduce himself in a moment. We're going to struggle to keep this to a short sort of 20-25 minutes so I may need to speak to Ben again but Ben do come and introduce yourself.
SPEAKER_00:Oh thank you Hannah, I'm really excited to talk with you. I am a leadership coach, executive coach for lawyers, and I work primarily with rising law firm partners who are struggling to deal with the overwhelm of all of the new responsibilities that they're dealing with. And together, we just work out the skills, habits, practices, mindsets that help them tame all of that and get back to living their lives in balance in a way that allows them to enjoy the the fruits of their many, many years of labor and sacrifice. And along the way, I like talking about law firm culture and team building in the law firm setting and all of the kind of mission and vision and high-minded, nerdy stuff that helps make being a lawyer so rewarding.
SPEAKER_02:I bet we have so much in common in terms of being really interested in people's mindsets and why they do the things they do and why they act the way they do. I know a word you used there was taming. So it might be interesting to come back to that later in terms of what you notice that they perhaps have as maybe natural traits or traits that they've developed as part of the profession that they then need to work on with you as they move into their new role. So yes, lots of things to get into there. But Before we do, it would be really interesting for people to know a little bit about your background. And yes, I have just pinched this from your bio, but it just sounds so good. So Ben was in the army as a Black Hawk helicopter pilot and a military lawyer. You've also been a managing attorney for a large government agency, led teams, organisations. And now, obviously, you've gone on to do this fantastic work, helping support other lawyers in their careers. But just tell us a little bit about, you know, how did you start out in your career? How did you go from, you know, the army to legal and now into coaching?
SPEAKER_00:So my kind of leadership journey started as I was leaving high school. So I didn't know how to pay for college. I knew that I was going to go to college. I knew that in the States here, that could be a bit of a challenge, perhaps more of a challenge than it is elsewhere in the world. And I grew up poor. My family was not well to do. I didn't know how I was going to do it. And I heard about this opportunity to go to the United States Military Academy, which is very similar to the Sanders Royal Military Academy in the UK. It's a premier institution for leadership development. It's a great undergraduate educational institution in its own right, and it's free. The only kind of investment you have to make is committing to serve in the United States Army after you graduate. And so I did that. I was accepted to West Point. I graduated as a helicopter pilot and realized I wasn't gonna fly helicopters forever. And along the way, kind of coincidence saved me again. And I heard about a program that pays for law school for army officers. And even though I didn't want to, I had no grand vision of becoming a lawyer, I do love to get paid to go to school. And so, I applied for that program and was selected and then transitioned within the Army from flying helicopters to being a military attorney and finished out a 20-year career in the Army as a criminal prosecutor, a criminal defense attorney, a teacher, and a little bit of intelligence law as well. And when I retired, I went to the federal government and had a great job practice doing legal ethics, which I really, really enjoy. I am at heart a legal ethics nerd and realized, though, that I missed helping people grow as leaders. That's one of the things that I really, really enjoyed about being in the Army and looked around for a way to do it and decided that I needed to do it myself. And just decided to start giving back some of the things that I had learned along the way to help lawyers be better to each other, to be better to their clients, and to help the profession not be so hard to live with.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, interesting. Now, you've had about three different careers. I mean, that is just fantastic. And I do a lot of work with lawyers who are perhaps a bit disenchanted. And, you know, I've been there too, 10 years ago, where you think, you know, I decided on this career path a long time ago, I've worked really hard, and I've ended up here, but now actually, is it what I want? And It's actually, I know I've had this conversation with a few podcast guests, it's easier than they think to change within that legal experience and that legal career. It really does set you on a good path for lots of different options.
SPEAKER_00:It really is. And I think it's a matter of letting your curiosity have a little bit of a root. As I said, I was a criminal law practitioner and then transitioned to teaching within the Army context at an ABA accredited institution. But along the way, that gave me the toehold into legal ethics. And that's where I really started to enjoy my practice in a totally different way. And it just opened up my world in that shift from criminal practice to ethics practice.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. And I can hear that throughout your story, leadership has formed a really important part of the different roles you've had and the decisions you've made. And it's interesting because... I've sort of arrived at working in the leadership area, starting from mental health and wellbeing and realising that actually the people who really hold the keys to change in the legal profession are the leaders. So I sort of came about it at the opposite end, if you like, from yourself, where you've always been there with leadership and trying to encourage and support great leadership. So why do lawyers, why does the legal profession have perhaps more of an issue with leadership than other professions, do you think?
SPEAKER_00:I have an answer to that, but first I wanna comment on the idea that for me, leadership is an obligation. Not only is it an obligation of being an officer in the military, which is how I grew up professionally, but I really think that lawyers as individuals have an obligation of leadership within their firms and their communities and to each other just by nature of being a lawyer. And I think that we don't, we as attorneys are not groomed for leadership, even though we have that obligation in two ways. First, the law school experience just doesn't prioritize developing the skills of leadership, of working together, of team building, of collaboration. Everything that we do at law school is all about your production. So your research, writing, your note writing and editing, it's all individual production and that's starting to change. But in large part, that's the law school experience for most people. And then when you get out into practice, your first several years are gonna, again, gonna be all about can you deliver on the assignment that you're given? And those assignments are rarely collaborative in nature. You're working within a team or you're working for a partner, but really the work that you're doing is researching this question kind of in a vacuum or drafting these deposition questions almost in a vacuum of collaboration. And because of that, once folks start to transition into that senior associate status, that partnership status, And they need to develop business, manage legal teams, manage their billables and all of the other kind of committee responsibilities that the firm has for them. They just don't know how to do it.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, I think I've not I don't think I'd really pinpointed it like that before, but I think you're absolutely right. We there's a trait in a lot of. lawyers mainly because that's the way we have been trained and as you say came all the way through education and started the job of this idea of of individualism it is all about that person and that person's achievements and that person's billing or whatever it is whereas suddenly you're then promoted into a leadership role, often without a lot of training, although I'm sure you're working on that as I'm working on that, or without any training at all. It's like, oh, you were a great corporate lawyer on Friday. And so on Monday, you're heading the team and here's 30 people to manage with no training. But yes, it's not just that they've had no training. It's that they've gone from spending that early part of their career and their education just thinking about themselves, their achievement. And then suddenly it's almost put that second, I'm sure you would probably agree that, you know, great leaders, it's put the team and everybody else, the group effort first. Suddenly they're expected to do that overnight.
SPEAKER_00:Right, right, right. It's not, it is more than just that they haven't been trained. It is that they've been trained not to do those things. I think that's absolutely true. And I had a thought and now I've lost it. We'll come back to it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So I'm going to go back to the point you made about taming some of these behaviours or mindsets. So I know I have some thoughts and experiences on this, but I'd be really interested to hear yours. The people you work with to help them progress into these leadership roles, what sort of obstacles and barriers do you see that they have, aside from this sort of, say, lack of training, yes, and also the individual approach, but in terms of taming their behaviours and their mindsets, what sort of things do you find you have to work with them on?
SPEAKER_00:So the first question is, what do they think they need, versus what do I see that they need based on my experience and the work that I've done with folks. What they come to me with is, I need help managing my calendar. I need help managing my team. So how do I delegate work? How do I give good feedback? And how do I do it all? Again, coming back to the calendar management and how do I engage with prospective clients and develop my book of business? That's a huge issue for new partners because that hasn't been a big responsibility. Then all of a sudden it is. But So those are the things that they come to me with. And I think one of the things that is most valuable at the outset is to do some work establishing their values. That work establishing their values is a, it's essentially a compass. It gives us direction. It gives them direction and helps to orient them towards the things that will bring them joy and things that they will find engaging, even if it's not kind of joy inducing, it's engaging. And that makes it easier to make decisions then about where to put your business development efforts. For instance, not everybody wants to be on social media. Not everybody wants to speak in front of a group. Not everybody wants to host a dinner every month. But figuring out where your values sit helps you to make choices later about how you want to develop business and how you want to interact with your team. And I think there are some fundamentals in terms of team development that everybody should be working towards, but how you calibrate that is really dependent on where your values sit.
SPEAKER_02:Maybe it makes us sound very coachy, but I think values are the beginning and ending of working with any client on anything, isn't it? It really
SPEAKER_00:is.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. All of their decisions, the way they see the world. the way they interact with people is so heavily dependent on their values. And often they're walking around having no idea what they are.
SPEAKER_00:But no idea what they are. And even if they have an idea of what they are, very little idea about how to apply them, how they're actually useful in day-to-day interactions, how your values can help determine how you delegate and give feedback.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Definitely. How do you, and this will lead me on to another question I'm just really keen to ask from my personal perspective, because I'm training on it this afternoon and it'd be really useful to get your thoughts. But before we go on to that, post-pandemic, I mean, I know we're four years after the start. I don't know when we say it finished, but four years after the start now. How do you think both sort of law firm culture and leadership in law firms has changed or is changing post-pandemic?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think we're definitely in a period of flux, of evolution. I think that the pandemic and the shift, the broad shift to remote work during the pandemic had many lawyers, law firm leaders kind of throwing up their hands and saying, well, I can't lead in this environment. I can't do the things that I used to be able to do. And it was a convenient excuse in my mind not to be deliberately engaged in the act of leadership. Yes, it looks totally different when everybody's working remotely or predominantly remotely, or even like 20% remote. Leadership looks different and your management style needs to adjust. But I think many folks had blinders on with regard to the possibilities of leadership in a remote environment. And now we're seeing kind of a retrenchment towards return to the office from leadership and management and a kind of digging in at the more junior levels saying, I really enjoy this new balance that I've found. And bridging that gap is gonna be all about how leaders lead, how law firm managing partners and executive and leadership teams do the work of engagement with their staffs and attorneys.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. My personal view is that it's going to be much more encouragement and motivation than telling them what to do.
SPEAKER_00:And quite frankly, that's a great way to get better work product, to develop greater loyalty, so you have lower turnover, and to grow your firm from the inside rather than hoping that you're going to be able to steal the right lateral associate or lateral partner from another firm and hope that they've done the work of training them in a way that adds value to your firm.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, yeah. And I wonder, I'm sure you are, because I do hear it from some of the US firms that I work with as well, but seeing the same issues or similar that we are in terms of the generational divide. I hate to just throw out that word because it sounds so cliched, But it's true and it exists. As you say, there's this tension already between firms and managers that want to have everybody back in the office more. And then not just junior people, I'm sure the senior people too, but a lot of people who want to stay in a more hybrid environment. But yes, there is then this sort of you know, they grew up or started their legal career during the pandemic and after it, and they haven't seen the world perhaps in the same way that some of us more senior people have. Are you seeing that same challenge with the leaders you're working with? And do you have any tips, wisdom? I
SPEAKER_00:definitely am seeing that. And you're right. It's not just about generational divisions because, you know, folks like me, and I like to consider myself a Gen Xer, a senior, perhaps a senior Gen Xer. It's hard to say anymore. It was very easy when I was younger, right? But folks like me who went into the pandemic and had kids in school or young kids and were dealing with all of the all of the new craziness of living through pandemic and realizing that having the flexibility of working from home means that I can not only do my work, I can also take care of my family. And if I don't have a family, then I can enjoy being who I am in a new way. And I think it was revelatory for a lot of folks, not just junior folks. But I think that as we move pandemic as coronavirus gets more in control or has become more in control, what we're seeing is a return to the only way of leading and managing that we have ever learned. And again, it's looking at the need to guide your firm with a set of blinders and not honestly considering all of the other opportunities that are available or not considering them with the same dispassionate view that we look at the practices that we've grown up with. We just assume that those are the best way to do things, even though we've never tried anything else.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And I think it comes back to the sort of the motivating people part, isn't it, rather than just telling them, because I know I was speaking to some junior lawyers this week, and yes, they've only ever known a much more hybrid work environment. So the minute they're told to come into the office more, there is an immediate sort of, you know, recoiling from that. But has anyone sat there and explained to them the benefits of being in the office more? You know, it's wonderful working with your colleagues, networking with clients in person, going to training events and business development events. I mean, that's the fun part of the job. And I just think, you know, rather than insisting that they come in and telling them what to do, let's encourage them and say, look, I know you haven't seen this career at its best yet because you haven't been in it when we could all be out and meeting each other and enjoying each other's company. But now, you know, there's an opportunity for you to start seeing that.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And you are exactly right. And I think that comes down to engagement, leadership engagement, managing attorney engagement. And we often, leaders in firms and other legal organizations don't often do that because we see that time spent as an expense. I don't want to spend the time to talk, to explain to these younger lawyers, these newer lawyers, why this is important, even though I think it is.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Whereas I think if they shift their frame and think about that time as an investment, I'm investing time to help them understand a different perspective. That investment can turn into loyalty, reduced turnover, greater work performance, more team engagement. And we get then out of the 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 hours that we spend investing in a conversation, we get hours and hours and hours of increased performance on the back end. And I think shifting our perception of what that time means to us can make it easier to invest it in those conversations.
SPEAKER_02:I completely agree. I think that's, again, we came into the profession only valuing the time we spent billing the client, etc. And it is quite a big shift to understand that actually we want to let go of that now that's a part of the job you know and the more senior you become as a leader the smaller that part gets and actually it is a valuable investment of time to as you say do all those other things with your team get to know them have those conversations spend time developing the team and the culture It's so true. Which brings me on to, and I say, I do have an ulterior motive for asking this question because it's coming up a lot for me at the moment. So I'd be interested to see how much it's coming up for you. But this idea of how important and how valuable, and I think I know your answer, is leadership to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. How we know it's important, but is it key? What do they need to think about? What tricks are they missing?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, I absolutely agree that it is critical. Leadership is critical on this question of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, accessibility. It is absolutely key. And here in the States, the ground is shifting a little bit. There have been some Supreme Court cases. There was a Supreme Court case last summer that changed the way affirmative action works in higher education, and that is triggering some concern across the profession about how we're going to handle diversity scholarships, diversity or diversity internship opportunities, and then further on diversity hiring or diversity aware hiring. And for underrepresented and minority communities, It is, and I say that as, I mean, folks can't see it on the podcast, I'm a black man, right? For people like me, for brown and black folks in the legal profession, for underrepresented and minority populations of all stripes within the profession, it is disheartening to see an organization that, based on its actions, doesn't seem to care about me as an individual. As an employee, that makes me question how long I'm gonna stay. It makes me question how hard I'm gonna work while I'm there. And as a leader in an organization who is underrepresented or minority in that organization, it really, makes you question all of your choices. It hurts at kind of a core and individual level. And that, I think, contributes to the wellbeing kind of crisis concerns of the profession. So I definitely think that leadership is important. I think it's critical on this issue.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think... I don't want to simplify it because it's a far bigger picture. But I think... The starting point for leadership for me is people creating these, and I am a huge Simon Sinek fan, but these psychologically safe working places, these places where everybody can feel valued and safe enough to bring concerns, worries, and to be themselves, that we don't all have to be carbon copies. We work in different ways. We have different backgrounds. We have different values. And all of those are welcome. and supported. And I think certainly for me, as someone who's been in the profession sort of 20 years or so, it certainly wasn't the case 20 years ago. It was all, you'll all be carbon copies to progress, to get the job in the first place and then to progress. And there's a lot of talk at the moment about that changing and being different. But what I am hearing is that the felt experience, that's not necessarily translating in a lot of places.
SPEAKER_00:I think it is getting better and has gotten better over the last 20 years or so, but that doesn't mean it's good. Better is not necessarily, it's better, but it's not where it needs to be. It's not good yet. And this is an opportunity for leaders in law firms to be engaged, and I talk about curiosity, being curious about the people that make up their teams, not just the legal skills that make up their teams.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, that's, yes, I really like that. Because at the end of the day, and I often say this to people, you know, I'm a commercial property lawyer. There's tens of thousands of us in the UK on the role, commercial property lawyers. How do I stand out? It's myself. It's my personal attributes. You know, I talk a lot about authenticity, but that's why. Because that's our power. Being who we are, we bring our background with us. We bring our experiences with us, the positive and the negative. And that's what we bring to it. We bring to the client relationships, to the business development, to the leadership, to the working within our teams. And if we don't embrace that, then we're missing such a huge part.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, absolutely. We're missing a huge part of ourselves. We are, you know, again, to go back to well-being, that is diminishing our individual well-being, our corporate well-being. And from a business standpoint, for clients that are looking for somebody of a particular flavor, if your firm is a cookie cutter assortment, not assortment, a cookie cutter set of lawyers, then those clients are not going to find what they're looking for with your firm. And so embracing diversity, letting people come to work without their masks on, their figurative masks on, and embracing who they are opens up your potential client pool as well, I think in very meaningful ways. Now that's a business orientation and it may resonate with some people. I think for you and I, it is more important for you and me. It is more important that we are enjoying our practice and lawyers are thriving in their environments. The fact that it's good for business, I think that's a great side benefit.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, yes. I change my message depending on who I'm talking to because you have to sell it to the businesses, you'll make more money, get more clients, then lovely. But ultimately, I care about the people. But yes, Yes, I think you're so right. And I tell you, as a leader myself, and maybe you've got some thoughts on this when you were in your firm as well, one of the most rewarding things for me is to find those really wonderful people that maybe they are a bit more introverted than other people. Maybe on the face of it, they are not so loud and not so confident, but they're absolutely brilliant. And to bring them in and to mentor them them and you know a few of my more recent people I work with I've mentored for probably 18 months two years before they are ready and it's just yeah I think at the end of my career it'll be one of the things I look back on and think how many times was their CV perhaps overlooked or because they weren't so loud and forthcoming in interview did people see that as a lack of confidence and therefore not you know bring them into the firm and yet They are just brilliant.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. I mean, as an introvert myself, that's one of the joys of the work is helping introverts see their own power in an organization and in the legal context. At the same time, one of the things I also enjoy doing is helping extroverts and the big, loud people stop getting in their own way because sometimes big and loud and brash and aggressive is not productive.
SPEAKER_02:No. And I don't know about you, and this could be a whole other conversation, but I have a sneaking suspicion that those people that are all big and loud and brash, it's probably not the truth. It's probably there as another form of a mask to hide. So I think deep down, we might all be more alike maybe than we present on the front, which is the little assumption I tend to work with with people. As I say, I knew we could just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and maybe we will do again another time. But because it is my personal passion and I think you've got views on it as well, what can the legal profession and lawyers do to make us a healthier, happier, more sustainable place to work? I think I noted on your profile, you asked the question about how do we make this profession more fit for humans? It's that question, really.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I think we make the experience of practicing law more humane by actually talking to each other, by engaging each other with curiosity. That simple base of curiosity creates relationship, creates trust, and it is the foundation for more fulsome and more expansive engagement within the community. But it starts with a couple simple questions. How are you doing? What are you working on? How's that going? How can I help? And those questions offered without an agenda are really, really powerful. And they don't set a direction. They are really an offer to engage, an offer to be heard. And when senior folks offer those questions to junior folks or when anybody offers them to their colleagues and their peers, you're really setting the stage for much closer relationships, greater trust, and a much, much more collaborative working environment.
SPEAKER_02:I feel like I could reduce my either two-hour trainings or whole-day workshops just into that little piece you just said at the end there, because if we just do that, wow.
SPEAKER_00:It's a great beginning, and it has such huge, huge potential. It does. It does. And it's not that hard, right? And it's not that hard to try.
SPEAKER_02:No, it's just, it is being human. It's, I guess what it is, I said I wasn't going to add any more. It's, for me, there's so much behind what we do is based in fear. You know, all the things you see about lawyers, the perfectionism, the imposter syndrome, the fear of failure, fear of mistakes, it's all based in fear. Yeah. So if we can learn to let go of that fear or to embrace it and, you know, feel the fear and do it anyway, and then do exactly as you've said, get curious, open up, have the conversations, listen. Yeah.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you, Ben.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, thank you. This has been so much fun.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it really has. Oh, I suppose what I should say is how can people find you? I've got some links in the show notes, but how
SPEAKER_00:would you like people to find you? So links in the show notes, but feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, Ben Grimes, pretty easy to find, or check me out on the web at BKG Leadership Coaching. If you go to, I think it's BKG Leadership Coaching slash Hannah. I think I've got... I think that's what it is, but it'll be in the show notes. I've compiled some stuff just coming out of our conversation. So it'll be there for folks as well. But LinkedIn is a great way to find me.
SPEAKER_02:That's so kind, Ben. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yes. Thank you again. And thank you to everyone for listening. And I hope that you do go to LinkedIn and to Ben's website and learn some more. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for having me.