Sitting Down with Danny Goldberg

NS: If a manager is feeling they’re really struggling to connect with their employees, what steps can they take so that employees feel cared for or that managers feel like they actually are demonstrating the care that they don’t know how to show?

DG: At this point, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people and leaders as well as the people that they serve. I’d say pretty consistently what I found in my own research is that more often than not, people really do care. And we think as an organization, we’re doing the right things by giving people competitive salaries [and] good benefits. But then when you ask the employees or the key contributors, what you find consistently is that people don’t necessarily always feel it. They know that the intention might be there, but they don’t feel it. And that’s where there’s a misalignment and where people end up saying I’m going to leave here because I’m not really cared for.

If you wanted to focus on the three most foundational and core elements, they are safety, understanding and connection. The way that you create safety is you invite the voices in the room. The understanding piece is about creating that environment where people can feel understood as the whole self. And then the connection piece is really the one that just requires the most effort and intentionality. We need to know that people are changing all the time, and the only way that we can meet people where they are is by taking the time to understand how those changes are impacting them.

NS: What can managers do so that employees can be honest in their feedback?

DG: Something that I’ve seen is to do an anonymous ask and keep it fully anonymous. If it’s a really small firm, sometimes people still don’t feel safe because the organization is going to know that’s me because of how I’m acting or how I show up to meetings. Sometimes firms will hire someone outside who will conduct surveys to feed it back to their organization so it remains totally anonymous.

I spoke to a law firm that had an anonymous box, and they said the head of HR knew everyone and would know who put in what. The suggestions box is good to have, but if the organization is too small, sometimes people worry about that, so it becomes another friction point. In an organization where people really feel safe, they should feel like they can speak up and don’t need the anonymous box.

NS: During midyear reviews, how can employees feel safe to evaluate the company without fear of retaliation?

DG: I think it’s necessary to know what your people are actually thinking [and] how they actually feel. The safety piece needs to come from the top, but it’s not a small piece — everything stems from that. Without that, you’re probably looking at a review that doesn’t hold that much weight because you’ve gotten some feedback, but you know it’s skewed positive because they’re telling you what you want to hear versus the things they really want you to know.

NS: There’s sometimes complacency in the legal industry of allowing lawyers to treat employees however they want due to the power and legacy dynamic. How does that impact those in the organization, and how can legal administrators change that culture?

DG: I think that ship has sailed. And if that’s how you treat people today, it might work short term, but you’re going to lose people. The levels of burnout, the levels of extreme fatigue, the levels of people who are on the path to becoming a partner who choose not to, they are insanely high. It might have been the way that it was, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s so much pre-work that has to take place to get into the industry, years of sacrifice. We should really be evaluating how we think about that culture because they will lose great people, but they don’t have to.

NS: How much does industry expertise matter when it comes to performance? When people go from industry to industry but keep the same title, does switching their niche matter?

DG: I don’t think so at all. I think people can always make a move within a company or to a new organization where they have no idea what that company does, but they’re bringing their gifts, their talents and their ideas. Sometimes when you have the same people from the same industry talking about the same thing over and over again, it’s really hard to get new and unique ideas.