Episode 10: May 6, 2025 | Cornered: Amy Gardner on Executive Presence

Show Notes

• 0:32 - Episode Introduction - Amy Gardner
• 2:17 - How do you define executive presence?
• 4:05 - What is unique about lawyering that offers exceptional challenges to those in leadership roles?
• 8:59 - What sorts of benefits could a firm's team expect to get from leadership coaching?
• 14:10 - Wrapping up - Thank you, Amy!

Transcript

00:00:01 Oh, you're an attorney. I have a friend who…

00:00:03 I've been meaning to update my will, but I just bought

00:00:06 a new house…

00:00:06 I want to start a business…

00:00:06 So I was wondering, I think…

00:00:08 My brother was fired...

00:00:09 My friend got divorced awhile back. I just don't understand how her ex...

00:00:14 You've been there at a social function, meeting friends of friends. Word gets out that you're an attorney, and suddenly your night is filled with partygoers asking you, quote, UN quote, simple legal questions. The questions are seldom in your area. Some of the stuff you haven't thought about since law school, you're being cornered.

00:00:31 Of.

00:00:32 Court in the cornered out of court podcast from IICLE, you'll hear from fellow attorneys about the questions they get and the responses they give to escape being cornered. Every member of your firm's team contributes to the business's success, and they all look to the firm's leaders for direction support.

00:00:54 And an understanding of mission, the same qualities clients expect from their legal advocates.

00:01:00 Amy Gardner, co-founder of Apochromatic, a coaching and consulting firm in Chicago, helps her clients bring team leadership and career challenges into Clear Focus.

00:01:12 My name is Amy Gardner and I'm a partner with Apochromatic, a boutique consulting and coaching firm based in Chicago. I graduated from the University of Chicago Law School and then went to a large firm where?

00:01:24 I was a.

00:01:25 Commercial and IP litigator from there, I moved to a mid size firm in Chicago, about 100 lawyers.

00:01:31 And was a partner there again in in litigation mainly IP as well as internal investigations and then from being a law firm partner, I became the Dean of students at the University of Chicago Law School where I implemented and created a number of programs to help law students improve their.

00:01:51 Leadership and professionalism, skills just about not quite 10 years ago, I co-founded Apple Chromatic, which is a chicago-based boutique consulting and coaching firm.

00:02:02 Where we work with teams, leaders and lawyers every day, we help teams to work together better leaders to lead more effectively and we help lawyers to advance transition and transition in their careers, as well as build their.

00:02:15 Books of business.

00:02:17 Let's start with the basics. How do you define executive presence?

00:02:23 So there's a definition of executive presence that I really like from John Beeson, and he wrote one of the the main articles about executive presence, one of the most known articles. It was back in the.

00:02:32 Harvard Business Review.

00:02:34 About 20/17/2016 or so and he said that executive presence is your ability to project mature self.

00:02:42 Confidence. A sense that you can take control of difficult, unpredictable situations, make decisions in a timely way and hold your own with other talented and strong willed people.

00:02:56 And obviously that definition of executive presence to me sounds like what lawyers do all day, right? Holding your own with talented and strong willed people making tough decisions in a timely way, taking control of difficult, unpredictable situations. I mean, you basically are just describing what what so many lawyers do, and then another key.

00:03:16 Definition of executive presence is from Christy Hedges, who wrote a really key book about executive presence and she says if you want to be seen as trusted and credible, your actions must be in alignment with your intentions, both stated and unstated. It's the only way to be received with Clark.

00:03:35 Activity and I really think about that in terms of executive presence, as if you work on your executive presence, then you can make sure that you show up the way that you want to be, which generally for lawyers is trusted and credible and executive presence is about more than just showing up as polished and put together. It really is about how do you want to show up.

00:03:56 And then taking conscious steps to make sure that you are showing up the way that you want to, right? So it's an alignment with your intentions, both stated and unstated.

00:04:04 It, and if you ignore your executive presence, then you will just show up. You know, as you know, that with all of the chaos and stress that lawyers bring to to any interaction versus being able to be received with clarity because you've thought about how you want to show up what is.

00:04:21 Unique about lawyering that offers exceptional.

00:04:24 Challenges to those in leadership roles.

00:04:28 Well, I think that.

00:04:29 Basically, everything about lawyering is unique, and that creates particular challenges for those in leadership roles. I mean, I think that one of the things that I always think about is when I decided I wanted to be a lawyer when.

00:04:40 I was.

00:04:40 In second grade, there's obviously a story there, but I used my spelling quizzes in elementary school.

00:04:47 As the way then that my dad would allow me to stay up and watch LA Law when I was in elementary school so he would prep me, quiz me for my spelling test.

00:04:55 During the commercials for LA Law, Law is a unique profession, and that so many of us have always wanted to be a lawyer, and I think that means that then it can be harder for lawyers to accept that there are parts of it, like perhaps leading a firm or leading a team that maybe they aren't as good at because.

00:05:15 I think a lot of us grew up thinking being a lawyer is, you know, going to court and it's doing certain tasks that we all were in mock trial for or we we took certain steps to get good at. But often people who become really successful.

00:05:29 Lawyers were not in the sorts of environments of team sports, things like that, where we were learning leadership skills and that can be a really difficult reckoning then to get to a point where you realize I might be great at closing a deal, and yet I I don't really know how to tell my paralegal that what she's wearing to work is completely inappropriate or that my secretary.

00:05:50 Really does need.

00:05:50 To get on top of the mail, right?

00:05:53 And so I think that that's one of the.

00:05:55 Cases. In addition, lawyers are dealing with such a wide variety of people, and often they are going through the most stressful periods of their lives. Whether that's, you know they're in bet the company litigation and they're afraid that everything they've worked so hard to build, this is going to be lost to them or they are, you know, an individual who's fighting with their neighbor.

00:06:16 Or maybe they're an individual who's just been through a really traumatic experience, and they're hoping that their lawyer will will get them some compensation. So you have that additional piece of it that lawyers are dealing with, other people who are in such stressful.

00:06:29 Times. And then you also have the fact that lawyers have really unique ethical obligations that so many other professions just don't, and and maybe some of them should. But whatever the situation is, lawyers just have different obligations. And so you Add all these layers and it it creates really significant challenges to people who are trying to lead.

00:06:50 Those lawyers and and another layer of all this too, is that lawyers are taught lots of things in law school, but leadership and management usually are not on that list.

00:07:00 And I will never forget I was a law school Dean of students, and I was creating leadership and professionalism programming for law students. And I had a professor come to me and he was not being negative or cynical, I don't think. But he literally said to me, you know, I hear about the things that you're doing to help law students.

00:07:20 Be better communicators. All these things are you just.

00:07:23 Trying to make them pop.

00:07:24 Popular and it was a a genuine question, right? He just didn't think about it from the standpoint of preparing these students to be leaders, right. He viewed it in terms of how do we prepare students?

00:07:35 To go off.

00:07:36 And be great commercial litigators, or be great corporate lawyers. And he hadn't looked at it from that perspective. So, and that's a very.

00:07:44 Typical.

00:07:45 Perspective. I have learned both when you're thinking about how you're preparing associates to be great lawyers. Often law firms are overlooking the leadership aspects, but also in terms of the skills and education that law students are getting. So.

00:07:58 These things are 100% necessary, like thinking through how you're going to carry yourself, how will you handle difficult situations or conversations? How do you give feedback?

00:08:09 How do you?

00:08:09 Receive feedback. All of these things that people in other industries are often taught. How do you work well in a team? Right? When I was in law school, we always joked about the NBA.

00:08:19 Students, all they did was sit in conference rooms and have meetings and have team projects, right? Well, partially true. But those MBA students learn how to work in a team in a way that lawyers often simply don't. So you can have things like.

00:08:33 Like mentors or advisors or shadowing things like that. You know, in law school or in your early time as a lawyer. But to truly excel, you have to really figure out where am I starting from, where do I want to go and what leadership development do I need to do to get there. And that is often something that lawyers just don't even realize they need to do.

00:08:55 Aren't given the space or encouragement to do.

00:08:59 What sorts of benefits could a firm's team expect to get from leadership coaching?

00:09:06 The possibilities for benefits that an individual and their team can get from leadership coaching are really endless. We use a model that we call team driven leadership with our model. We develop the leadership of every single team member. So the idea behind traditional leadership development, often what happens is you pull the law firm.

00:09:25 Leader or the practice group leader out of their everyday you send them off to a conference or leadership development program. They come back, they often, they get a certificate. Maybe they get some swag. They've got some new ideas and that's.

00:09:38 Awesome. Then you put them back with the very same people who've been toiling away while the leader has been off learning things in a vacuum and, surprise, surprise, it doesn't necessarily get the great transformational change everyone is hoping for. So our approach is we work with every member of the team and certainly the current leader might need some additional skills or or tweaks.

00:09:58 But what we have found is that when you work.

00:10:01 With everyone together.

00:10:03 You teach them all how to have difficult conversations. You teach them all how to manage conflict, you help everybody improve their emotional intelligence. That means that then, you know, 2 years from now when the practice group leader becomes managing partner and is no longer leading the group, someone else is ready to take that spot. And it also means that in the meantime.

00:10:23 Everyone is rolling in the same direction.

00:10:26 Everyone feels valued, everyone feels more bought into the organization and that the organizations investing in them in terms of pay off, we see it bigger, books of business, we work with a lot of lawyers to help them develop their books and we take the approach that you don't start with the tactics that you really start from the inside out. And so helping people with their leadership.

00:10:47 Ultimately also helps them with their their business.

00:10:50 We also see better results in terms of how they're negotiating in a courtroom, how they're negotiating in a deal table. We see better retention in organizations that use the team driven leadership approach because as I said, everyone feels as though they are invested in that they have a future and that they're.

00:11:09 Valued.

00:11:10 Side note, if you have not stopped and considered how much money you lose whenever someone leaves your your firm or your organization, you really should stop and do it. We actually have a calculator that we use and you know the the numbers that you read online are, you know, anywhere from 150 to $250,000 per associate.

00:11:26 And I actually thought maybe those numbers were high because there's just such large numbers. But when you stop and pull back and look at, let's say, you lose a paralegal while your other paralegal is picking up the slack, which means they're frustrated, you're probably not merely paying your that second paralegal enough to pick up that slack. And so there's the decrease of their loyalty.

00:11:47 And they're feeling valued by the firm.

00:11:50 There's the the the disruption to your cases, the disruption to your lawyers, disruption to.

00:11:54 Clients needing to train someone needing to hire someone, etcetera. So whether it's associates, partners, staff, whoever it is, when you lose somebody, it costs you money, right? So really focusing on the whole team ultimately saves you.

00:12:07 Money.

00:12:08 And just we see it in terms of things that were difficult in terms of, oh gosh, I got to go talk to that person again.

00:12:15 It just becomes easier because you have.

00:12:16 This shared language.

00:12:18 Many of our clients also share really intangible results from working with us, so things like one team that we worked with of of attorneys told us they felt like they got their mojo back because they were really starting to fire on all cylinders again and work well together in larger leadership and business development programs.

00:12:38 We run, we measure carefully to evaluate ROI. We recently worked with a group of Illinois solo and small firm lawyers where they were measured on 34 metrics over the course of a nine month program.

00:12:50 And we saw that they the group improved in 34 out of the 34 metrics, including six figure increases in business for some of the firms. And these again are small law firms and it it was not again it was leadership and business development, right. It was really focusing on the how do you show up, how do you want to be showing up with your clients?

00:13:13 How do you want to be as a leader within the legal community and that sort of intention can make a big difference, and then one more example, we worked with a group of lawyers recently who then after our work concluded, went through her arcane that wiped out much of the town where a solid 4th or so of the teen lived. And what we heard from the leader.

00:13:33 Afterward, he reached out to us and said I just want you to know we would not have gotten through the hurricane and come together the way we did if not for our work with Apple.

00:13:42 Dramatic, obviously. I mean what was just an incredible feeling, right? To understand that, wow, the things we do, yes, it's it's great when they can help the bottom line and all of that and that's really satisfying and can help us justify the investment. But knowing that it helps people feel better working together and get through really difficult times, that that was just.

00:14:02 A tremendous outcome and not something that I would have predicted when we were explaining to them what benefits they could get if they had work.

00:14:10 Thank you, Amy.

00:14:11 If you're interested in learning more about executive presence in legal careers, the online on-demand program "Enhanced Executive Presence for Lawyers" offers 1 credit hour of general professionalism MCLE and is available now at IICLE.com. We welcome your suggestions by e-mail. Our address is info. That's I-N-F-O

00:14:29 At IICLE.com.

00:14:31 IICLE is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit based in Springfield, IL. We produce a wide range of practice guidance for Illinois attorneys and other legal professionals in all areas of the law with the generous contributions of time and expertise from attorneys, judges, and other legal professionals. If you are interested in our many authorship and speaking opportunities, please give us a call.

00:14:51 At 217-787-2080 or visit the Contributor Resource Center at IICLE.com/contributors. Thank you for joining us for another edition of cornered out of court, brought to you by the Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education.