Latest / Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love / 189: 7 Mistakes Law Firm Owners Make When Training Employees

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189: 7 Mistakes Law Firm Owners Make When Training Employees · Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love

• 0:00
  Davina: Experienced attorneys often forget how deep our knowledge is and how long it has taken us to develop that knowledge and those good work habits and the skills that we have. We often don't understand why it is so clear to us, but it is not easy for others to understand. So remember, everyone is unique with different learning styles and experiences. So be sure to ask your employees how they like to learn and provide material in a way that they could learn it and absorb it best.
• 0:34
  Intro: Welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. What if you could hang out with successful women lawyers? Ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more? Then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Devina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve, and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love.
• 1:04
  Devina is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and her goal is to give you the information you need scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams. Now here's Davina.
• 1:22
  Davina: Today, I wanna introduce our sponsor, Noble Marketing. Over the last four years, No Bull Marketing has tracked more than two fifty law firms and discovered 60 to 80% of new client calls were generated through Google My Business and Google Ads. Basically, you need to be on Google and No Bull Marketing can help. I recommend them because they have an incredible guarantee. Your campaign will be profitable in three months or less, or they will work for free for an additional three months.
• 1:52
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• 2:20
  Davina: Hi everyone and welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Devina Frederick, and I'm so glad you're here with me today as I'm gonna be talking about a topic that is really coming up a lot for me lately, and that is training mistakes. Mistakes that law firm owners make when they are thinking about training their new employees. One of the most challenging aspects of expanding and scaling a law firm business is training new team members. A lot of people are focused on setting up their hiring system, but then once they get the new employees on board, they don't have a plan for how they're going to train them.
• 2:59
  So the most common refrain I hear from law firm owners is I don't have time to train. It's just faster. It's just easier to do it myself. If that's your thought, may be right in the moment. So in that moment, may feel faster and easier because you have more knowledge.
• 3:15
  But ultimately, if that's your belief, it's a very shortsighted one. The value of training employees is realized over time when you no longer have to do those repetitive tasks that must be done to keep the gears of your wealth generating law firm humming. And instead you can rely on other people to handle those tasks for you, or you can rely on automation to handle those tasks for you. You have to put the work in upfront knowing that the long term benefit is going to be worth it ten, twenty, 30, a 100 times over. Right?
• 3:48
  So today I'm gonna go through seven mistakes that I see a lot with law firm owners when they are thinking about training, when they're hiring, they have employees on board, and then, you know, they're complaining because those employees aren't working out because they don't have time to train them or they train them and they don't work out right. So hopefully, once I go through these mistakes, you can make a note of which ones you think you may be making and take some corrective action. So number one is not having a training plan before you hire. If you wait until day one when your new employee shows up and then you remember that you're going to need to train them, you and your new hire are gonna feel really stressed out if that's your approach. Prepare ahead of time by making a list of all the duties, responsibilities, and tasks you're gonna expect this employee to complete and then begin thinking about how you're gonna train them on these various tasks.
• 4:47
  This is gonna be a much smoother approach than just throwing things out them their first week and trying to train on the fly. But the first piece of advice for you is if you're making this mistake is to take time and really think about writing down a training plan. What is going to be my plan for training them on these things? Number two is not setting clear expectations for yourself, your new employee, and any other team members about the training plan and the length of time required for training. So often law firm owners have unreasonable expectations about how long it will take for employees to be fully trained.
• 5:25
  We think we explain something to them once they should get it. Right? But training may require having them watch videos, read procedure manuals, shadow other people, be shadowed as they complete tasks and much more. This can take time and patience. So by the end of ninety days, which is the typical probationary period, when you hire a new employee, you should be able to tell if an employee is going to work out or not, but you must allow enough time for them to learn.
• 5:57
  And remember when you started law school, you didn't get it right away. A semester, it may have taken you a whole year to start getting the hang of things. You have to remember it's going to be the same for your employees. Employees need time to learn and you will need an abundance of patience. But in the end, if they are good employee, it could pay off for years to come.
• 6:18
  Number three is assuming your management duties are over once an employee is trained. Now this is a big one because I think most law firm owners who haven't had employees don't think of themselves managers, and they haven't been trained themselves in how to manage. So this is perhaps one of the most common mistakes that I see law firm owners make because it never occurs to them that once an employee's trained, that they're still gonna need to oversee their employees' work product. New policies and procedures may evolve as your team grows. And until you reach a point in your business where you have layers of management besides just you, you're gonna need to be involved in oversight and providing instruction and management of your team and quality assurance.
• 7:04
  Right? So as you're teaching and training, you're eventually going to want them to take over certain tasks without needing that detailed level of involvement of you doing it yourself, but you still need to manage and you need to understand what it means to manage and maybe get some training yourself on how to manage. All right. Mistake number four is assuming that you personally must do all the training. I recently have been working with a client who has been tremendously successful herself working by herself so far, but now she's needing to staff back up.
• 7:39
  And unfortunately, she's in a position where it is just her. So she is going to need to do some training herself. But over time, there she will get other employees involved in helping to train. But even if you're a true solo, I want you to know that there are a lot of training resources that are already available for you for a small investment. So I remember when I started out as a true solo, I had no clue how to do paralegal work because I'd never been a paralegal and I never employed a paralegal at that point.
• 8:13
  So I bought training materials for paralegals in my practice area so that I could use them and learn what I needed to do if I were a paralegal for me as a lawyer. Right? So this helped me tremendously. And perhaps you've hired someone with experience, but not in your specific practice area before you try to teach them everything yourself. Consider if there are CLEs or training materials or programs you can purchase to help lay some groundwork if you don't yet have a well developed training system.
• 8:46
  That way you only need to focus on training them in your systems and preferences, things that are unique to you in your law firm. All right. Mistake number five is not creating a training library and requiring employees to use it. In The Wealthy Woman Lawyer, we teach you a simple training method that you can use to start building a training library for your law firm. This is not a one woman project for you alone.
• 9:11
  And that goes for you even if you are solo. We teach you who should be on your systems creation and training team and the easiest way to set up a training library that you can build upon as your law firm grows. So it's really critically important that you start putting together a training library, even if you're a true solo. Start making that effort to create those materials and collecting them in one place that is maybe a Dropbox folder that says training and start putting materials there, which will make it much easier for you because you won't have to start from scratch as you start hiring. Mistake number six is assuming that everyone thinks and learns the way that you do.
• 9:53
  So this is a biggie, folks. Experienced attorneys often forget how deep our knowledge is and how long it has taken us to develop that knowledge and those good work habits and the skills that we have. We often don't understand why it is so clear to us, but it is not easy for others to understand. So remember, everyone is unique with different learning styles and experiences. So be sure to ask your employees how they like to learn and provide material in a way that they can learn it and absorb it best.
• 10:28
  Ask for feedback on your training to ensure understanding as they have them repeat instructions back to you. Encourage questions. Let them know how best to communicate with you because you have a particular preference and communication style. And you're just gonna assume that everybody thinks the same way you do, and they likely don't. So you also wanna include the best time to communicate with you.
• 10:55
  If you have a running, a really busy law office and you're used to working uninterrupted and not having employees ask you questions, you're gonna need to think that through and say, okay, how can I still get what I need, which is uninterrupted time to do some deep thinking and also be there to manage and support my employees who may need information from me so that they can do the things that I've asked them to do? New employees, may not realize that you like to work in these uninterrupted sprints, or, you just may always seem on the go. And so it doesn't feel like you have time for them. They may feel embarrassed and they may feel worried about interrupting you just to ask you questions that they wonder if there are dumb questions. So it is your job to assure them that they can ask for help and to let them know when the best time is to ask for help and the best way to ask for help.
• 11:51
  So it's a relationship that you're working on developing. All right. Mistake number seven is having the wrong mindset around training. I hear this all the time. And if this is your mindset, I really want to encourage you to start trying to shift this mindset.
• 12:09
  And that's thinking that you've lost valuable time and money just because you trained someone and then they left. So I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of hate mail for this one, but I want you to hear me out. If someone leaves after only a short time, no matter how much you've invested in training them, they did you a favor. Why? Because they obviously were not a good fit for your law firm and it's better to find that out sooner rather than later.
• 12:35
  So would you rather have found out before you train them? Of course you would. But that's not going to happen because you're going to hire them. You're to train them. You're to see if they work and if they fit.
• 12:44
  So it's just not a realistic expectation to have. Think of it this way. It's like you're dating someone for a few weeks or months and you've invested time in the relationship and then they tell you it's not a good fit. They break up with you. They say this isn't working for me, or you tell them it's not a good fit.
• 13:00
  You break up. It's not working for you. It's better to be grateful that you found out early on in the relationship than to invest years in the wrong person. If someone stays with you for a year or two or more, and they provide good work in exchange for a fair wage, then you have not wasted your time on training them. They did the job for at least a year or two, and now everyone is gonna stay with you for decades.
• 13:25
  It's just not the world of work is these days. People's lives change and they're going to move on. If this is your mindset that anytime you've invested in training is wasted, if people leave at whatever point, then you will always feel cheated. You will always feel like you were cheated. Instead, learn to appreciate the help that they provided for the period of time that they were there.
• 13:48
  And also recognize that with every employee that doesn't work out, you have learned a whole new set of skills in managing and working with people. And that's gonna prepare you for attracting even better employees because you're gonna have more knowledge about what you don't want. Right? You're gonna be a more experienced boss. And those mistakes, what you perceive to be a mistake will actually work out as part of your own training in being a manager, right?
• 14:18
  And a leader. So I hope you've enjoyed today's podcast episode. This was really important topic for me to cover because I've been discussing this a lot lately with women law firm owners, and I know it's an issue for so many. So I wanted to make sure that we talked about this. I hope you found this helpful.
• 14:35
  If you have, please leave us a review on Apple. We so appreciate it. It helps to promote our podcast. The more favorable reviews we have, the more eyes and ears we can get on these podcast episodes, and the more women law firm owners we can help. So I so appreciate that very much.
• 14:53
  Thanks so much for being here, and I'll talk with you soon.
• 14:56
  Intro: If you're ready to create more of what you truly desire in your business and your life, then you'll want to visit us at wealthywomanlawyer.com to learn more about how we help our clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.