Throughout my career, I have learned a lot from watching others and from reading. I have also watched what I have done well and what I have done poorly. There has been no shortage of mistakes.
Two of the most impactful discussions people had with me about my performance came from untraditional sources. Each piece of advice, I believe, is applicable across much of business. These are discussions I recall vividly and that had huge impacts on myself and my professional development.
1. Build teams. When I started to build a healthcare practice, I had did so purely organically and in the traditional manner in which lawyers build practices. I had visits with lots of clients and prospects, I did a lot of speaking and writing, I tried to be very helpful to clients and to be very responsive, smart and accessible. At that point, after initially building a practice, I stared to consider how people build more significant practices.
Then at an American Health Lawyers Association meeting, I visited with one of the true deans among healthcare lawyers, Jerry Peters from Latham & Watkins LLP. He generously shared core concepts with me. He essentially said you can't build a substantial practice unless you build a great team. In essence, the two things have to go hand in hand. He would have never been able to build a great practice without developing a team of great lawyers.
This concept, as elementary as it may seem, was a very clarifying discussion. It allowed me to both redouble my efforts on practice development and greatly enhance and focus my efforts at the growth of a team. That team was then developed around very bright and achievement-oriented people, i.e., great people with exceptional skills, attitudes and brains. It was a game-changing discussion that has stuck with me fully.
2. Don't ever yell at an employee. A second very impactful discussion came from a lawyer whom I worked with on my team nearly 15 years ago. This lawyer heard me, and I am not proud of this, rip into a junior lawyer who had not done the job I thought the lawyer should do. In my own mind, I probably — and wrongfully — defended the concept of ripping into the young lawyer based on the sense that "this is all part of how we get excellence out of our lawyers" to deliver great results for clients.
The lawyer who gave the advice, a different lawyer than I yelled at, took me aside. His name was Marcelo Corpuz. He articulated to me that a key problem with this approach (among many problems) is that you are harming both the person that has done the work and the whole team. He explained to me that when doing this it ruins the culture of the entire group not just that person.
As an aside, the person I yelled at went on to have a magnificent career and is a wonderful person and leader. Fifteen to 20 years later, it still embarrasses me that I yelled like that. To Marcelo's credit, he was willing to share with me his thoughts about how poor a strategy for managing people I had. Further, his willingness to stand up and explain that to me and pull me aside in a non-embarrassing way was incredibly helpful towards me gaining a much different perspective and completely revamping how I managed. It was a life-altering discussion.
In short, a brief thank you to each, Jerry Peters and Marcelo Corpuz, who probably don’t recall their advice as vividly as I do.