Stop Training Your Team, Start Coaching Them

Darryl Cross: Training is not coaching. So training is teaching people a skill so they can go do it. Coaching is helping them do better when they've already been trained, but they're not doing as well as they could. But I see one of the downsides of coaching quote-unquote in law firms is we're just training.

Neil Barrow: Hi, welcome to I Hope This Email Finds You Well, a business development podcast for professional service firms. My name is Neil Barrow, I'm your host. I'm the founder of EnabledBD, a business development consulting firm and UndergroundBD, a business development professionals community. I'm joined today by Darryl Cross, who is the Chief Global Collaboration Officer at Norton Rose Fulbright, where he helps lawyers build cross-border practice teams to tackle complex business issues for their clients.

Really interesting. He's also the author and you can see it behind him of Cultivating Excellence: The Art, Science and Grit of High Performance in Business. More interestingly is Darryl is also a rugby coach and Master Trainer certified by the National Academy of Sports Medicine, which influences his philosophy on continuous improvement and the power of teams. I love that.

And I love your analogies around physical fitness to business development. It's awesome. Can't wait to get in it. Darryl, thanks for joining.

Darryl Cross: Hey, thanks, Neil. I appreciate you having me here today.

Neil Barrow: Yeah, well I'm excited. So let's get into the combo meal. So combo meal is three for five Darryl's, three BD takes, and we're going to bandy around for 5 minutes giving you the good stuff right now. So the first menu item is selling happens in the future.

You don't sell by talking about the past.

Darryl Cross: Yeah, that's a big one of mine. Actually. It was talked to me by a mentor of mine, Keith Hawk, who worked at LexisNexis. I worked under him for a long time.

Fun story about the connection to sports with that too, if we get to that later. But his big thing was, you know, the SWAN principle, sell what's available now. So don't sell things you haven't made yet, right? But don't sell by relying on the past.

What you've done, who all of our customers are, that it's nice to have representative clients and cases and all that, but why someone's trying to hire you is for something that hasn't occurred yet. So if you are constantly talking about the past, you're not talking about something that's relevant to them. Even though it may make you qualified, it doesn't help them picture you with their future with you in it. And I think that's a common mistake that we see.

And so that's why it's one of my mantras.

Neil Barrow: No, and I love that I've never heard the SWAN principle before, so thank you for sharing that. I think that makes a ton of sense. I think we, what you're describing helps us with these fears around cross selling and future opportunities with our clients. It's that mindset and the way that you framed it makes a ton of sense.

And I'm sure like, yeah, I'm really interested to talk more about that and how you've, have you seen that in action?

Darryl Cross: Software companies are really guilty of this. They're always selling their road map instead of how they can help people right now.

Neil Barrow: Right now, yes. Yes. Not for the future. I love that.

OK, you must have a reason to collaborate, not just an intention to do so.

Darryl Cross: Yeah. So my job here is to build cross-border collaborative teams to help clients. That's what we that's my entire job. I have a team to help me do that.

I have a great firm behind me with it. But a lot of people will want to collaborate just because we should. We know we should, we should. We can make more money that way.

We can do this. We can do that, but there has to be a reason and that reason is usually the clients trying to expand in Europe, the clients facing new competition, the client, whatever it might be. Usually the word words begin with the client and I liken it sometimes to the physical fitness. Everybody knows they said exercise and lose weight, but if they have to do so for their wedding in 12 weeks, that's the reason they do it.

And so when you collaborate, you have to have a mission and the ultimate what you're trying to get to.

Neil Barrow: I love that. OK, so your last menu item here is walk backwards in a client's shoes to figure out how to help them succeed.

Darryl Cross: Yeah, I think it's just goes to the point of perspective of what does the client need us to do for them. And so if we're going to be hired by this client, which involves them saying to their present firm, we're not going to use you, we're going to use this firm instead. What would the thing that would have to happen right before that and what would have to happen right before that and what would have to happen right before that? A lot of times what we do is we start going, we could show them this and we could talk about this and we could do this and bring this person in.

We haven't once thought about the client's perspective of why they would do this in the first place. So if you're trying to help a client expanded to Europe for the first time, think about what do they need that they don't have. Let's talk about that. And who have they thought about that?

We could show them all like, let's do that. So we walking backwards in the client's shoes to figure out the path of how to get there.

Neil Barrow: I love these, the way you're wording this and the way it helps me organize these things that I think about and some of the problems that we're seeing again in collaboration or business development or whatever that looks like in growth for firms. Excited to weave that into our conversation, but let's back up a little bit. Well, tell me how you got started in business. Development.

Darryl Cross: Oh, how far back do you want to go, Neil?

Neil Barrow: Well, as far back as you want to, yeah.

Darryl Cross: You know, my first job in selling, because that's what the rest of the world calls it when we're outside of a law firm is selling. And what's what my law firm calls it too, by the way. But my very first job, I was 16 years old and I got a job at a gym called Burke Nautilus that was right down there, one of those old Nautilus places with a Big Blue machines. Are these enormous?

It was the size of maybe a Subway sandwich shop, tiny place. And I was there just a few weeks. I was just a trainer, you know, holding people's clipboards. And the manager quit and the owner came in to me and another person said the two of you are selling memberships now and we'll pay you $12.00 for every membership you sell.

This is a long time ago, but still. But that's great. That was life changing money if we could do a lot of it. I didn't have any idea what I was doing.

My mom actually said, you know, there's an office park across the parking lot. You should just go talk to someone that's in charge over there and try to sell a membership to like the whole company at once. And so I went over there and did that and sold 101 day times 12. I'm now a rich 16 year old.

Absolutely. And I spent that money immediately. But I'm like, wait a minute, I get to go and just have these conversations and if they like what I have to say and go through the process and talk about what they get out of it, they give me money and I can do it as much as I want. Oh, that's how I got started.

So it was a very early kind of introduction to it by FIRE. My book of business at the time was 0. But if you talk to the right people in the right way, instead of waiting for them to come in the to you and knock on the door, it works a little bit better. And that's always kind of influence my approach to it.

And I guess it was through naivete to get started and idealism, and I still have to fight that from time to time. But that's how I got started and it worked pretty well.

Neil Barrow: No, I love that. I think there's a common thread I find between successful business developers or salespeople or whatever we want to call them. It's, it's getting punched a little bit early and doing some uncomfortable things that kind of build some character and some grit around what it takes to do those to be successful in generating conversations and holding effective conversations. And so that's a great experience for you.

And then so you progressed obviously. And where did you, where did you end up on the BD front?

Darryl Cross: You know, so I ended up by into law firms by accident. I went into I was doing corporate medical. We were going in and selling these big packages to companies like Wampler Longacre, Turkey processing plants, like a 3000 people in it doing occupational medicine and all these types of offerings with them. So we're selling that and the associated kind of hospital services and some, one day a recruiter named Jim Lyles called me up in DC and said, Hey, would you like to work in a law firm?

I was like, why? I work at hospitals, law firms, hospitals, same difference. Lawyers, doctors, it's not, but that's where it was. So I immediately transferred over into law firms, not knowing at the time that law firms don't do sales per SE.

And like in 1997 or so it was I started running sales training at my law firm, this thinking that's what you do, not knowing that was a horrific word to say out loud in a law firm. But they started coming and I said, well, we'll just keep doing that. I joined the Legal Marketing Association and it just kind of grew from there. So ended up eventually as a chief marketing officer of a law firm, Benesch in Cleveland, which is his fabulous award-winning firm with that there and continued that approach.

We won an award for building a sales culture for a law firm in 2003. We were doing Friday sales training at that too and then just kind of progressed through joint LexisNexis after that. I was on the CRM side to start, but then migrated over into performance development, which was a division where we trained our own people, 1500 salespeople and half of them were lawyers. But we also, I would go around to about 300 law firms a year and do consulting with managing partners and practice group leaders and speak at corporate retreats to teach them how to do better collaboration, how to build their books of business.

And lo and behold, you know, buying LexisNexis products would help them do that, of course. But you know, I was going there as the consultant to do it. But the other thing that gave me exposure to I would participate in these TerraLex and Lex Mundi and Meritas networks that these law firm affiliate networks. So I go to this event where there's a hundred lawyers from 100 countries and have the same kind of conversations.

And then we would just spread out like rot wildfire. So in all these instances of my career, I found if you find the hubs, you can spread your message really quick. Instead of trying to reach everybody, you reach these hubs. I can spread this word out there.

And then eventually I found my way to here at Norton Rose Fulbright. And it was, it's just been a great for they hired me originally as their executive sales coach, which I think it was the first title of its kind. I was in house by the managing partner, great visionary Jeff Cody and then you know, work directly with our awesome Emily Rogers, who is our Chief Business Development officer to really build the structure. And we just said, hey, let's take this global and that's where I am today building global cross-border teams.

So it started at a gym is now here. I'm constantly always try to figure out the way to connect those dots together because I think they all are related. I, no,

Neil Barrow: and I agree. And you've laid that common thread across it, right? And I think it's the skills that you're building, right? The skills that you're helping your people build.

And tell me a little bit about, so you went from selling at hospitals into a marketing role. Was this marketing that was actually business development or was this like you were also doing marketing initiatives as well? Like tell me a little bit about your move up into the CMO realm and like how did marketing and business development play out at that time there?

Darryl Cross: Yeah. The it's funny, I moved into the law firm and within about 3 weeks it was called David Hagner, CUNY and Davison. It's now Womble Bond Dickinson, a bit of a bigger firm, but great firm. But when I got there, I realized within three weeks, I have no idea what I'm doing at all.

I think this is not what I thought it was going to be. And I had a friend of mine who called me, he's a truck driver, so completely out of the industry, one of my best friends from college. And he said, what do? What do the lawyers do all day?

And I paused and I said, I have no idea. They just sit in their offices all day. And that's what occurred to me. It's like, how are they getting clients if they're sitting in their offices all day?

And that's what really spurred to say. I just didn't know the answer to the question. So I say, well, let me teach them how to go out and talk to clients about these kinds of things because just the math wasn't adding up for me. It's like we don't have any clients walk in the halls here knocking on doors.

That doesn't make sense. So Darryl, go to the office park and that's what I was going to teach them to do is how to go to the office park. And so we started talking about, you know, why would a client hire us over someone else? And my natural thing it was, well, what do they need?

And they would say back, well, they need people to review their contracts. And I would answer, well, what contracts? What are they for? Because I didn't know.

And then that got into a conversation of, oh, well, they're trying to do AB and C. It's like, why don't we go talk to people trying to do AB and C? Because they, I know they need contracts. And they went, oh, that's a good idea.

It was just those kind of me trying to figure it out a little bit. And then I noticed the pattern that this is a common thing. And so when I became a Chief marketing officer, I was like, all right, it's time to start building systems. How do we do this at scale, Not one person at a time.

And it's been a big quest of mine over the years. And as I got into CMO Advantage, that's what we were building. We were business systems and structure and a culture of business development, not just a bunch of activities surrounding it.

Neil Barrow: And I think that's what everybody's searching for, right? Is like, I think that structure that you're talking about building kind of help that builds the culture as well. And it's, they kind of feed into each other, right? I think it's the culture piece and the, and the system piece, the structure piece.

And they do go together. But I'm curious, what did you learn early on when you were doing these sales trainings for your partners and your people, right, practitioners there? What were you, what were you learning there that maybe has translated to what you're doing now? Like what were some of those early learnings for you doing those sales trainings?

Darryl Cross: Yet so one of the biggest things is, you know, when I was at this firm, my very first firm, you know, I was a one man show and I was building. So this is, you know, the mid to late 90s. I'm, I'm building the website, I'm figuring out how to do PowerPoints, use Microsoft Publisher to do so. I'm doing all of these things.

So you have to fulfill like the production requirements that come Abd and that's still really with us now of, you know, RFPs and pitches and bids and let's put out press releases and brochure all those things. The production of it, and that is always heavily influenced business development, selling and law firms is the production of materials, taking the things that we've done, put it on paper and send it to people to prove our worth, our credibility, our value. And I think one of the things I learned is because of that way of doing it and also the way that most lawyers think, which is based on precedent, how things have been done in the past. So therefore this is how we do it in the future.

They're heavily reliant on what I talked about before, talking about the past, credibility, reputation, and all those things. And what I noticed along the way is no matter what firm I talked to, they were all talking about the exact same things. So it'd be like trying to sell a car by saying our car comes with this thing in the front called the steering wheel and what we all have those. So you can't, there's no different differentiation with that there.

So that's one of the big things I learned is as law firms really worked hard to look very similar to each other, to prove that they were credible and worth it. And differentiation was something that they shield away from. Actually, I did a brand, a brand. We work at a rebranding at a firm.

And it was the biggest fight of my life because I wanted to introduce the color orange into it. The just the natural resistance to doing something new and innovative. I heard things like Death of the Firm, the end of our era, things like that because we were going to change a color. And it took me a while to really realize this is the world we live in.

As much as I would like it to be a little more innovative, these are the people and they are the owners. So we got to take it on a journey and do it a little bit of a step at a time and not just try to throw them in the deep end and see how they do because they're going to throw me in the deep end and probably with something to hold on to.

Neil Barrow: Probably so, yeah, I've I've noticed that, right. I think the change is hard on that, but I think when you're looking at the production and the skill sets that you're trying to get them to look at it in a maybe client-centric view, right, instead of a US and our credibility view expertise for you. I know that bled into, as you know, you moved into a Chief marketing officer role. How did you start thinking about those, the production and the skill sets and the systems and all the things that you need to do?

How did you try to organize that for you as part of like a plan?

Darryl Cross: Yeah, I one of the challenging things about doing in a law firm for anybody that hasn't worked inside of a law firm is it's, you know, all the partners are owners and the people that are very large clients, books of business, they have a lot of influence. It's almost like Congress, you know, there's certain people that are in charge, but there's certain people that have a lot more power than others. And so you're taking lots of different opinions and have to serve lots of different masters with that there. So you have to start building systems to do that and start trying to make choices as best you can.

So some of that is how much can we automate the small stuff as much as we can. You know, we can't be, we're not a, we're not a newspaper, we can't be writing articles every day. We're not a wedding planner. We can't be having events every day.

So we got to automate a lot of these small things as much as we can and keep trying to push them towards this concept. I like to say don't confuse capability with probability. So yes, we can do work with any of those thousand clients, but the likelihood of working with these clients are much higher. And so we're trying to build automated systems around the small things and extremely focused systems around the big things.

And so when we start getting traction on a an industry, a sector and approach, we double, triple, quadrupled out on that. When we see volume, we think automation as much as we possibly can, not only to make it more efficient, but to make it so we're serving partners that want that stuff, but we can't spend as much time on it. So we're trying to balance the tactical and the strategic at the same time.

Neil Barrow: Yeah. And that's a common challenge for everyone is we get bogged down with all the tactical stuff and we have no time for the strategic stuff and the big picture things and the stuff that's actually going to contribute to moving us forward and evolving because we're putting out fires consistently wherever we go,

Darryl Cross: Yes, and so.

Neil Barrow: What I'm I'm I'm really interested in. So you were leading as CMO at a firm and then you started moving into the coaching. I know that you probably did that as well right when you were at your stops, but I find that so interesting because I think that one of the biggest missing pieces for a lot of firms is like individual business development plans and making it personal and having everybody understand what role they play and what they should be doing in business development. Could you explain to me and how you think about coaching and about programming and training and like those skill building at law firms?

Darryl Cross: Yeah, I think it's a like marketing, business development, sales, whatever. We use those words interchangeably, but they're very different when they are. We do the same thing with coaching, training, managing, mentoring. We just say those are all kind of the same.

And So what I think I was in the beginning of my career was a trainer. I was, I was more of a trainer. I would take, you know, teach people how to do it. People that didn't know how, it's the first time they're experienced as a fitness trainer, you're showing people how to do it.

You're counting the reps saying good job, you know, work them all in a little bit. You're teaching them how to do they've never done it before. If you think about a sports coach, you're talking about Olympic athletes, professional athletes, you know, Rugby World Cup players, they're the best in the world at what they do. You are finding tiny pieces of behavior and technique at that point.

And so I think that's a big piece of it. As I learned along the way, eventually training has to end and people have to perform. And that's where coaching comes in. So and you can run simulations to get people ready to do it, but eventually they have to go out and do it.

And then you come back and I do this thing called reflective coaching, that sole subject of this book, You know, you're talking to Olympic level people in the legal industry, you know, and you can't just wag your finger at them like they're a six year old learning how to play soccer. You coach people like that, but you coach them in a certain way with that because we're just trying to get an extra percent or two of performance out of them. But training is not coaching. So training is teaching people a skill so they can go do it.

Coaching is helping them do better when they've already been trained, but they're not doing as well as they could. And that's a big difference in the approach. And you do have to go back and forth. But I see one of the downsides of coaching, quote-unquote in law firms is we're just training.

We're saying, oh, well, have you tried sending them an email? Oh, have you put a business plan? Let me show you how to handle this argument. That's training.

It's not coaching. So performance is required for coaching to be involved. And I think that's an aspect you have to be able to go back and forth between that and know the difference of what they are.

Neil Barrow: I think it's fascinating. I've never had anybody explain it in that way to me. I think that I've learned with my, you know, being in business development and having enablement responsibilities as well as origination responsibilities and then doing some of the training and the coaching and the presentations like the nuances around that where you're talking about training is teaching the skill right and encouragement. And then coaching is we're trying to get that one or 2% better.

Like these are people that are performing that we just need to hone in some things, right? And I love that because I think also one of the challenges is for firms that they need to be able to do this themselves. Like, yeah, it's great to have an external help, right? And a voice in the room sometimes around that.

But ultimately you've got to do it yourself. And how are we set up to provide the training and the coaching? Because those are two different skill sets as you're talking about. And I love how you describe that because it makes it very clear what those two things are.

Darryl Cross: Yeah. And the way I do it, I call it's a proficiency model. So there's a certain level of minimum expertise or performance that we expect from everybody. I remember at LexisNexis, I worked with somebody there and they're the vice president of large legal sales, great guy.

And I asked him, I said, what do you want everybody to be able to do in their first 30 days here? And he said, I want them to be able to go into a client for 30 minutes and not look like an idiot. OK? That's the minimum level of what we want to do.

So that's what we're going to train them how to do, and then we're going to practice it and send them out. And, hey, did they look like an idiot? Yes or no? You got it.

OK, let's move up a level now. Yeah. Right. And so the same thing with, like, learning how to fly a plane.

What is the minimum thing you have to know to have to be able to fly a plane, how to land the plane? That is the minimum level. Everybody goes. Well, how do we make fighter pilots?

No, we're starting with landing. Everybody has to know how to land. And once we get everybody there, then we move them up a level. And so this proficiency model I think I've always used in law firms is not how do we make more great rainmakers?

How do we get more people to be able to have a basic conversation with clients and come back and know what to do next? That's the proficiency. And so if we get everybody doing that, the entire performance of the organization raises because the danger is if you only focus on certain rainmakers or on the other side people that are deficient, there is such a small rounding area level up effect that you can have. So proficiency model keeps bumping up the standard and it allows you then that's the automated part.

And then you can spend time with the top 20 rainmakers to bump up their level while you're doing this. But the whole thing's raising at the same time. And I think that's a model that's been proven in sport. That's how you train astronauts.

That's how you train Navy Seals. That's how you train lawyers. How to sell.

Neil Barrow: And I, and again, I think, I think everybody's searching for how to either install a system or the new technology that's going to solve our problem around this skill set development or let's, we're going to put them through this training program that's external, which are great, right. But ultimately, we've got to own that proficiency movement up the scale. Like we have to own that as leaders at our firm and we've got to be able to because that's something that I hear often from firms of all sizes, which is we need to get our young people going. I hear that a lot.

So how do you think about is that is all the levels no matter what level you are, you're on the proficiency scale or do you segment it by level of like seniority at your firm?

Darryl Cross: Two ways about doing that. So, you know, no one has an inherent kind of skill of knowing how to sell and especially complex legal services and work with general counsel. There's some people that have a knack for it. And so we go, oh, that person, this is a natural.

It's like, no, they have a an aptitude for, but they still need a lot of work, right. So I do associate kind of experience level with probably how good they are at it. So at my firm, we start training folks at year one of how to sell, how to, we don't call it selling for them probably. But how do you spot issues for clients proactively?

How do you determine what they need or what their business and their industry is going through? And then as they're in their younger years, it's how do you bring that idea to a partner and put it in front of them? The partner goes and gets it. Well, guess who they're going to use on the matter?

The associate that brought it to them. So it's in your interest to do it. So we're teaching them how to spot issues, how to think from a client-centric point of view. We're teaching them what to look for as they become partners.

Now it's about building your book of business and distinguishing yourself. And now we're teaching them how to do it in teams. So the it's the level of complexity gets higher, but the core tenets and the foundation is exactly the same. You know, we have a methodology we use in my firm.

It's not a magic methodology, it's just a consistent way of thinking about this. So like proficiency, as you get more, we add more things to it, but you're learning the same skills over and over and over again, just in different ways. Yeah.

Neil Barrow: And I like that because I think, I think what you're describing is no matter the methodology, it gives us a shared language and things to rally behind and train towards. And I think that's that's great. And so you're training these folks and then now you're, you're coaching, right? So what have you learned over the years about what effective coaching looks like for partners?

Darryl Cross: The really good coach is the one that comes to you and, you know, talks to, hey, Neil, how'd that last appointment go? And what did the clients say? And instead of jumping right in and say, well, you should have said this instead, try this next time. Well, now we're training and coaching is like, I know the answer.

I've been doing this for 30 years, I don't need to do that right now. I say, why do you think he responded that way? It's like, is that how it usually is? Have you seen that with other clients, you know, does this, you know, so you're asking these questions, these reflective questions, almost therapeutic in nature to try to get them to the spot.

They go, oh, yeah, I guess I didn't talk about that at all. It's like, you know, they just did this major strategic acquisition 6 months ago. Did they mention that? Did you ask about that?

Oh, no, I didn't do that. And it's insinuating that maybe that was a good idea and they could, but they need to get there. These are Harvard trained 30 year millionaires going out there and they're frustrated with how they're doing and berating and teaching them what they should have done better is not how you teach people that way. It'd be like cannonballing Michael Phelps as a coach, telling me he's not going fast enough.

It's just not going to work. So that reflective coaching, letting them get to the answer, getting it slowly there till they have that aha moment. And I'll just take a nugget right there that we can build on.

Neil Barrow: But I think the other part of it too, I don't know. Do you do a lot of work with simulations and using experiential training and some of the work or people you've worked with?

Darryl Cross: I think it's it's one of the key things that we can do. You know, I go back to, I mentioned astronauts before. I like using the example. First of all, no adult doesn't like astronauts.

It's like kids and dinosaurs. You can talk about astronauts all day long and everybody loves it. But no one on planet Earth, no pun intended, knows how to be an astronaut. No one.

It is brand new from everyone. There's no knack, there's no aptitude, There's no, my dad did this in the family business, none of that. They have to be taught from scratch. And they're usually like unbelievably talented people.

So they teach them through simulation. They simulate everything, how to put the suit on, how to climb in here. What if this goes wrong? How do we do things in space?

The underwater buoyancy tank. And they do it over and over and over again. But in most organizations, firms, corporations, we send someone training for 8 hours and then say, see you next year. Well, of course it doesn't work.

There's got to be that element. So coaching is part of that. That helps keep it going. But constant practice and simulation, that's the way we keep our skills tight and then slowly accelerate them by making the simulations harder.

And then they go out into the field and go, oh, that worked, teach me something new. And that's so you have to be able to spoon feed a little bit along the way.

Neil Barrow: Yeah. And so I loved your six personas. I think that's really great, you know, and I definitely fall victim to that. But I, I do have a, and I love the path of your astronaut analogy.

I 100% agree. But how much of your coaching has kind of bled into the therapy range, right? Because I think, I think when you're asking really good questions and you're, you're trying to find out what's behind some of the behavior, right? And getting towards them and getting to aha moments for themselves.

I'm curious as how much does that bleed over into feeling like a therapist at times?

Darryl Cross: Well, it is. I mean, I describe reflective coaching. It's kind of modeled when we wrote about it because we heard from all these people. That's how they were coached.

That's why they're really good when we're doing research and Carl Rogers is, you know, Rogerian therapy is what it's called. It's called client-centric therapy. And that's what he used. And that's a, you know, form of therapy where you do ask these questions about it.

And it does, you know, a little bit of a cliche of, well, how does that make you feel and why do you think that is? But it does work. It has to be directed and you have to be engaged with it. But I would find, you know, with the coaching I do, which is always 100% confidential with partners, I don't share the contents with anybody.

You'll ask, you'll start to know his pattern said start to sound like a lack of confidence or they lost their biggest client last year and I have no idea how I'm going to replace that. That's what the issue is. So it is therapy a little bit and you got to help them get that swagger back, that confidence or give them these little tiny things to just start boost that because a crisis of confidence really effects their ability to do that. I think,

Neil Barrow: I think moving into kind of expanding this coaching program globally, right? And now you're the global collaboration officer. You know what, I guess my first question just because I'm curious about it, like what differences do you see across borders, right. When we're doing building relationships and thinking about business development in different areas around the world, I'm sure there's differences, but what's the do you find a lot of differences there or talking and spending your time talking about the nuances around those groups?

Darryl Cross: I do. And I'll start by saying, you know, Norton Rose Fulbright, we're a very big firm. I mean, over 3500 lawyers get 50 offices around the world. I think we're the 20th largest firm ranked #4 in Bloomberg the other day it was very good.

But I'll say about that, Despite that size, the culture is just outstanding and the leadership is outstanding. Some of the nicest people I have worked with in 30 years, you know, really good, decent, very talented people. But they still have their own fiefdoms, opinions, way they see the world. And I think with something that big or there's just a few offices in a firm, you know, people have their own view of the world.

There's certain cultures you got to be careful of, you know, that are not as pushy as others or the way they handle clients. But I still think lawyers and law firms in those areas, they're just reflections of their clients themselves. So if clients don't like pushy, the lawyers don't want to be pushy. If clients want to be more collaborative, those lawyers tend to be more collaborative.

They're always driving it. So the best way I always to do that is analyse what the client base is and how they like things to be done. And then we coach based on that. So it's always focused on the client.

So people can say, well, this is not the way I like to do it or this is not the way this office does it, but it's what your clients want and then they're OK. I guess you're right. That's that's a better way to do that. And so now when I'm, you know, I'm not so much coaching individual one on ones, I'm working with big teams or sector leaders and then I do opportunities come up and then I coach the teams trying to build that piece of business with that.

And that's where we incorporate all those big tools. So that's how we go and start building scale. And I do believe though, that if we can teach everybody in an organization that has where they face other people, if they can learn how to coach 5% of the time a little bit better. Now we have hundreds of coaches walking around.

So coaching is more a verb than coach being a noun of a person. And I and I think a coaching mentality is something very important to develop.

Neil Barrow: I love that. And when you're thinking about like scaling and building, like what are you excited about? Like what are some of the things that you're working on in your role over the next 6912 months? What are some of the things that you're excited about that are coming up for you?

Darryl Cross: Well, I do think it's an exciting time to be in legal and a lot of other industries. I mean, technology is going to be fantastic for us. You know, you have experience management databases and CRM and you know, AI and all these different tools that are pulling all this data all the time and helping make sense of it. And I think that's one thing.

Law firm, ours, they are content generation machines. We just make documents and emails and opinions all day. We have financial data coming out of our ears all the time. It's a relationship business, but it's hard to but when you put all these things together, you get like this when I'm trying to build both, you know, kind of system wise and eventually technology wise would be great.

It's almost an Amazon like functionality where they say, hey, I'm buying a camera and it says, oh, people that buy cameras tend to buy tripods and camera cases. Oh yeah, that's a good point. I think I'll have that. And so when I'm approaching a client about a merger, it starts to say to me, hey, you know, six months after mergers, firms tend to have cyber breaches because of pulling 2 IT systems together.

We should maybe talk to them about that. That's the kind of predictive wisdom of the crowd, things that no one person could know, but the wisdom of all of us together could know that. And when you combine that with clients, what they tell us, we can start predicting 6/12/18 months ahead. And when you can do that with a client, they will never leave.

So that's, those are the systems we're looking to. 1st is to teach people to think that way. And then we build the systems and then we leverage technology to scale it. And that's that's the big thing.

So we're going to try to do.

Neil Barrow: Man, I love that. And that really goes to your point of like the vision of the future working with us, right? Creating that and I like how you're taking it like starting with the individuals and then the groups and the teams. And then now that we have this information, it's then how do we surface this across the firm, right, for all of our teams to be able to use.

I love that, Darryl. Darryl, thank you so much for sharing your experience and talking through these. Like really, and I'm not just saying this, these are critical issues for firms where we've got to help our people get better. And how you're doing that and how you think about it.

I think you're, I look up to you from on the coaching and training standpoint for what you're doing. And if you wouldn't mind leaving us with a thought maybe from your book, like what are some of the things that you're trying to get across on that? I think that would be super helpful to our listeners.

Darryl Cross: Yeah, the so the big take away from my book which I wrote with my father. He was a fighter pilot and a retired Admiral and an aircraft carrier commander in the Navy. Smart guy, real talented guy. We wrote this together and what we are looking for is what is the secret recipe?

What is the secret sauce of individuals by some people get so much better than others. We got halfway through the book and said that is the wrong premise. What we found out is a bunch of above average people. That leverage teams and coaches to become awesome, become elite.

That was the whole thing, every single solitary one of them. So the thing I leave with people is that your biggest enemy to higher performance is a closed door. You have to get out and work in teams and collaborate to do these things. And when you put someone from this practice, this country, this point of view together, it creates something unique that another, no other firm can replicate.

That is your most powerful tool. It is teams and collaboration. And the lawyers that don't do that, not only are they less successful, they tend to be more miserable trying to figure it out themselves. Teams are the way, collaboration is the way.

And the more we lean into that, the more successful we will be. I love that and thank you for collaborating with me today on this podcast. Speaking of that, and thanks for joining me, Darryl. Yes, and thank you all for listening and we'll catch you next time on.

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