All That’s Left to Say This Year – Part One
By Alex Gertsburg, Esq., Co-Managing Partner
Our Awesome All Hands Meeting This Week
Every Tuesday at 10 a.m. sharp, we gather the troops into our board room for a one hour All Hands Meeting. It’s a tradition I first learned in my twenties in the army, then brought it over to the in-house corporate legal department I ran in my thirties, and which we’ve been doing most weeks for the better part of the last ten years.
It’s incredibly valuable.
We start every meeting with recent Wins. We review our “dials”, which contain our most important metrics, like client satisfaction and other targets. We run through housekeeping items and any messaging from the leadership team about issues, policies and processes we’re working through. We tell stories. We make sure we leave enough time for open discussion, ensuring that we always end with the question: does anyone want to talk about anything in the world? Everyone has a voice. For the folks who don’t feel comfortable sharing publicly, we leave lots of channels for sharing afterwards – in Microsoft Teams, through a survey we link at the end of every meeting, or just through sticking-around-afterwards to chat.
Honestly, I think the All Hands Meeting is one of the most important leadership-, organizational- and communication-tools I’ve experienced professionally. They’re not always amazing from a content standpoint, but they’re always amazing from a whole-company-gets-together-once-a-week-to-connect standpoint. It’s a phenomenal organizational habit.
This week, because it was the end of the year, we spent the entire All Hands doing an extended Wins session. Taking a cue from Dan Sullivan’s Moving Future exercise, and consistent with the goal of slowing down our thinking we expanded our Wins into three questions:
- What are we most proud of from this past year?
- What are we doing right now that’s giving us the most confidence
- What are we most excited about for the next twelve months?
Below is a download of the tool we used for this exercise. I think it is worth sharing for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a great exercise that works well for both personal accomplishments/mindset and for teams of all sizes. Second, walking through this table together really helped our team identify the incredible achievements we had this year (We launched a software product! 15 new hires! A super-positive culture and happy employees!), the monumental things we’re working on right now (great IT and intranet upgrades; expansion into new states), and the super-exciting year we’ve got coming up ahead of us.
When we completed the exercise, the three columns together were like a canvas, a work of art, showing a lot of great things that our employees are feeling really positive about. And the painting of that canvas – the conversation – was inspiring. We’ve got a really amazing group of people.
Here’s our painting . . . (please note that we’ve redacted anything sensitive that we’ve set up for the future. Those things will just have to be a surprise in next year’s edition of this exercise.)
The Gertsburg Licata Moving Future
| MORALE | MOMENTUM | MOTIVATION |
|---|---|---|
| Pride | Confidence | Excitement |
| Last 12 Months | Next 4 Months | Next 12 Months |
| Winning Achievements? Looking back over 2022, what are the things that make you the proudest about what you have achieved? | What’s Hot? When you look at everything that’s going on today, which areas of progress are making you the most confident? | Bigger And Better? Now, looking ahead at 2023, what new things are giving you the greatest sense of excitement? |
| FIFTEEN new awesome faces have joined the firm this firm | Further syncing up on our vision - knowing what it should look like | Redacted - confidential |
| We converted from an outdated matter management and billing systems to a new one - tons of moving parts - tons of effort, analysis; huge new capabilities | Our IT is top-notch | Redacted - confidential |
| We got Randi! Compliance and CoverMySix firepower. | Business Development is at al all time high | Redacted - confidential |
| We launched CM6 - the first tech-enabled legal audit for businesses | GL Acquisitions has increased engagements ten-fold | Redacted - confidential |
| Oliver developing as an attorney; developing junior lawyers | CoverMySix is a highly innovative game-changer for our clients, future clients, the firm, and the profession | Redacted - confidential |
| Ana joins the firm; buys house; connects to the universe | Melissa will be here for one year in 2 months; feeling confident; reliable; loves working with her lawyers | Redacted - confidential |
| Support staff is top notch; the best we've ever had | Our firm intranet is VASTLY improving | Redacted - confidential |
| Connie is managing support staff phenomenally | Entire support staff are very happy with their assignments and their lawyers; working well with them | Redacted - confidential |
| Colin joins the firm, happy about his move; feeling welcome | 2 new lawyers joining the firm in January | Redacted - confidential |
| We continued an outstanding culture of learning and growing, warmth, welcoming | Redacted - confidential | Redacted - confidential |
| Marketing / Cassie blew it up this year; the video shoot and release was a huge hit; we've had a massive increase in web presence and inbound marketing | Redacted - confidential | Redacted - confidential |
| Tiffany is crushing it in GL Talent - lots of great recruiting for our firm and our clients this year | Redacted - confidential | Redacted - confidential |
| Mark has brought in several top-level opportunities to the table | ||
| Hired a new COO who's led an elite professional team; systems and processes constantly upgrading and optimizing; | ||
| Huge cases litigated well and down to the wire; great learning | ||
| Visionary Leadership |
Feel free to use this PDF download to paint your own canvas . . .
