TRP 249: Delegating for Rainmakers with Sarah Tetlow

[00:00:10] You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast, hosted by high stakes headhunter, author, and professional speaker, Scott Love. You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast, and my name is Scott Love. Thank you for joining me on the show. If you're new to this podcast, take time to scroll through some of our past guests and experts as they share insights and other ideas to help you become more effective at client development.

[00:00:39] That's what this show is all about, rainmaking and related topics. Our guest today is a productivity expert talking about how you can become more effective at delegating. Our guest is Sarah Tetlow. She's a seasoned productivity strategist, consultant, and renowned international speaker. I've seen her speak before. She's fantastic. She's been a guest on this show, and she always gives great advice for professionals.

[00:01:04] Even if you're not in the legal industry, listen to these ideas that she shares with you because I know they're going to help you. As always, this show is sponsored by Leopard Solutions, Legal Intelligence, suite of products, Firmscape, and Leopard BI. Push ahead of the pack with the power of Leopard. And now here's my conversation with our guest, Sarah Tetlow. Thanks for listening. Hey, this is Scott Love with the Rainmaking Podcast. Our special guest today is a repeat guest, Sarah Tetlow.

[00:01:34] And our topic today is delegating for rainmakers. Sarah, thanks for joining us on the show today. Always happy to be here, Scott. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Thank you. And it's good to follow you on social media and stay connected with you. I learn something every time I see anything that you, anytime you post something. So let's get right into it. Delegating for rainmakers. Let's say somebody is listening to this, and he or she is a partner in a firm and has a team of associates and a council, maybe a junior partner,

[00:02:01] and there's a project coming up. How do you think that partner should really get their arms around this issue and getting the team on board with the project? Yeah. First, I want to acknowledge for a moment that they already are delegators. They're already doing it. They've gotten this far because they're doing some things right when it comes to delegation, but they might have some areas of delegation that they could take a look at and

[00:02:26] see if they could do it more effectively. And I have a whole acronym. I do a program on effective delegation techniques, and I have an acronym called TORQ, T-O-R-Q-U-E. So we can certainly dive into it because it kind of answers the question in a broader term, but to... Yeah, let's do it. Sure. Okay, great. Because I'm already saying in response to your question, I think it's all of TORQ,

[00:02:52] but it's really that R, the O and the R in TORQ is like laser focused on answering this question. Okay, good, good. Well, can you walk us through that? Yeah. Okay, great. Let's do it. Okay. So the T in TORQ stands for trust and respect. And this is a mutual trust and respect. So I think the old school way of thinking about the partner to associate relationship is the partner,

[00:03:21] and we're just going to use this terminology because I think everyone can understand, even though delegation can run up, down, sideways, it runs in all directions, but let's just keep with the traditional partner to associate or assistant. And often they think like, oh, I have to trust and respect the associate that I'm going to be delegating to. I have to trust and respect that their work product is good. I got to trust and respect that they're going to be timely with their deliverables. I've got to trust and respect that they're going to have open

[00:03:51] communication. And where I want to challenge your audience listening right now, who might be a partner who might be in this situation, the trust and respect actually runs both directions. And while one could argue, I've worked in law, so I've been inside the firm and seen it, one would argue, well, no, I'm sorry, the associate doesn't have to trust or respect me. I need something done. I'm going to delegate to them. They need to get it done. They need to be timely. They need to have a

[00:04:19] good work product, et cetera. But we want to have effective delegation. We really need to look at this holistically. And what happens when it comes from a time management perspective is if an associate does not also trust and respect this partner, that's where you start to see the mistakes happen. Procrastination, where maybe our person listening will remember when they were a younger associate

[00:04:44] and they can remember that one partner that was just never happy with their work. Their work product was never good enough. They never seemed to get it in on time. They would be micromanaged. I bet you they often would start to procrastinate on that work because why bother? I would rather blame it on I didn't have enough time than I spent hours all night trying to get it perfect for that

[00:05:10] partner and it was never good enough. And so the trust and respect really needs to run both directions. So that's the T. Yeah. Let me ask you this, though. I mean, we could probably spend a whole topic just on the T here. But let me ask you, what do you think causes an associate to lose trust in that partner? What have you seen? Well, I think one, it could be the cyclical behavior of the partner, maybe initially the first time that the end and also obviously get into the R and everything,

[00:05:38] which plays a role. But the first time that they delegate to this particular associate, maybe the work product was not great, or maybe they weren't timely. And then they're already starting off on the wrong foot with the partner and the trust is already broken. So that certainly can happen. But I think through TORC, which is a teaser into what we'll get into in a moment, through TORC, over time, they actually can, on both sides, they can improve and repair that relationship. That's

[00:06:07] one piece of it. Another piece of it, I think, is the reputation. That is not the R in TORC, so I'm not dropping a hint here. I think also the reputation sometimes where maybe the relationship was soured between that associate and a different partner. And let's be real, they talk, the partners are going to talk. And then they say, oh, yeah, don't bother working with John over there. His work product is not that great. But that could also be because of what we're talking about here,

[00:06:34] that trust and respect. Maybe the partner in that scenario didn't trust and respect. It didn't flow both directions. And so that's where we're starting to see that procrastination and that blaming it on John being the associate saying, I didn't have enough time. I can never meet your expectations. And so when John goes to work for this new partner who then hears from his colleague, oh, John's not a very good associate. Don't expect much out of him. That relationship is starting

[00:07:02] off on the wrong foot without really giving John a chance to show himself to this other partner. Those are some of the things I'm sure there's a lot more. Also, just because what I do with the coaching, often when I am coaching, say an associate or a junior partner in a firm where some of the feedback I get is the associate or the junior partner is not timely or the work product is suffering, the attention to detail, the proactive communication, all of those things.

[00:07:32] Sometimes it's really, really hard because it's pretty clear, the writing's on the wall, that this person's going to be in the associate that I'm working with. And in this scenario that we're talking about, they're going to have to work a lot harder to dig themselves out. They've dug themselves into that hole of not being trusted and respected. And sometimes it really is the ownership of that person. And if they want to repair that, if they want to improve,

[00:07:59] if they want to see the delegation relationship improve, they've got to work a little bit harder to show to the partner that they are worth the investment of time, energy, client work. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for elaborating on that. Sure. Yeah. And then what's the O? What does that stand for? Organized. Being organized. So what I really mean here is project management. This is perfect for the question that you teed up. So you ask like a partner has a project, they've got a team underneath

[00:08:27] them. What do they do to get the ball rolling on the project? So under the O of being organized, what I really mean here is anticipating where you can get help. And this is by looking ahead, what's coming up in the work pipeline and the workflows where you can anticipate that this project, this transaction, this report, whatever it is that's due next week or in two weeks. If you can invest,

[00:08:57] you as the partner can invest even 15 to 30 minutes into it today, you will be in a better position to see where and how your team can help you with the pieces that by the time you're ready to put your full attention on that project late next week, a lot of the work is already done. Now you can start to see how even this part of it plays a role in that trust and respect. Because if I'm delegating as a partner,

[00:09:24] if I'm delegating to an associate and I say, I need this done today, this afternoon, right now, by tomorrow morning, that emergent request is not actually setting that person up for success. And I recognize that sometimes there's the perspective, well, I'm the partner and I need it and too bad. And this is how I was groomed. And they got to learn that hard way. What I'm suggesting

[00:09:48] is it doesn't have to be that way. And it actually creates a better environment for everyone. Not just, I'm not just saying, oh, make it easy on the associate. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm actually saying, making it easy on you by anticipating project managing a little bit better so that there is room for improvement. There's room for mentorship and feedback, which helps with that trust and respect and the effective delegation relationship.

[00:10:16] So let me ask this, you mentioned, which I thought was a great idea, invest 15 to 30 minutes a day where you're anticipating the workflow that's coming up just over the horizon and not, well, maybe what's going on today. But when this partner is doing that, what exactly is he or she actually doing when they spend time that 15 to 30 minutes? A failure to plan is a plan to fail. So some of it is just planning, but I don't want to say that

[00:10:45] and make it sound as though that's a waste of time. The planning itself is incredibly effective. I see it in the work I do. I see in the work when I'm coaching with someone. And sometimes that is what we do in a session is just what's coming up. As an example, if I have an agreement that is going to be due two weeks from now and we're busy, we're all very busy. So right now it's like, what's in front of my plate today? I've got meetings, I've got phone calls, I've got an onset, I've got to go over

[00:11:15] to the building and meet with the client. All this stuff is happening. I cannot think about this thing that's due two weeks from now until it's in front of my face. But if you carve out 15 to 30 minutes to just sit, this is white space. If you can carve that out and say, this big agreement is due in two weeks. Let me just wrap my, sit down, look at what I'm going to need, maybe do an outline or a,

[00:11:39] or a to-do list, whatever that looks like for you listening. You know what works best for you when you sit and kind of map out what you need. Sometimes mapping out what you need for that 15, 30 minutes will unlock ideas of, oh, I can, I can get sued to work on this piece of it. Or I can ask Leslie if she will start drafting or researching this section. Even if it's a business development thing, Scott,

[00:12:05] it could be like, I have this article, I cannot think about it right now. Let me invest 15 minutes to think about what the outline is going to be. And then I can ask the marketing team to start looking into the research on that or what publications we might want to offer it to. So that's great. I think investment of time can pay dividends overall, right? And I'd even found just when I put that on my calendar, strategy time, 30 minute block time, I'm actually got it on my calendar. It's an appointment with myself to really think about

[00:12:32] where am I going? What do I need to do? How do I get my team involved? What do you think about that idea, Sarah? I love this idea, but I'm going to have a little footnote or an addition to this idea. People have to know themselves. So some people, the time blocking is very effective. Others, the time blocking is, I could go, I'll keep it shallow here, but the time blocking is in the moment because time blocking is always for your future self. You don't time block yesterday,

[00:13:02] you time block sometime in the future. So I love the idea of it, but often people will time block because they say, I can't do this right now, but I think Monday mean we'll be able to do this. So we time block for Monday and then Monday comes and we're no different. We've got stuff going on. We're busy. We're bouncing from one thing to the next and that block gets lost on the calendar.

[00:13:27] So a couple of things here. One is if you resonate with this, you have to have checks and balances or a way to audit that you did not actually do that thing. Cause that means it now is going to be on yesterday and that doesn't do anyone any good. So we got to carry it forward. Secondly, if you have the time blocked, remember there is a reason you blocked that time because you last week or two weeks

[00:13:54] ago, you were anticipating and acknowledging that this thing is going to take that hour. And you were optimistic enough to say, I can do it on Monday for this one hour. Try to hold true to that space. You already carved out that space. And if you don't utilize it, you're just going to have to move it to some other point in time. And then you're going to have to battle this procrastination again.

[00:14:21] So to get over the procrastination, when you have the time blocked in that moment, you know, you need to spend an hour on that planning or getting started. And yet there's 17 other things to do. Hold true to it by saying, nope, I'm going to do this, this from 10 to 11. I have the time blocked. It is important to me. Five, four, three, two, one, work on it. That's great, Sarah. I love that. I love how you can help us parse that in our minds and get our arms

[00:14:49] around that. Let's go to the letter R. What does that stand? R is repetition. So repetition through people, processes, and projects. What this means is you wouldn't delegate, let's say you have like a one hour or we'll call it a two hour research project. That's really a one-off kind of thing. And it's going to take an hour to explain it to somebody. And it's somebody who will never need to do that work again. That's probably something that you should

[00:15:17] just do yourself. Yes, I am in my effective delegation for Raymakers. I am suggesting you do something yourself, but you have to weigh that because if it's not repetitious for the people you are investing in, the types of projects that you are doing or processes that you can repeat over time, what part of the process can the people do? Then it's probably something to consider. You might

[00:15:42] not be delegating the right thing. Instead, think about things you do that you do on repeat, that process. What part of it can you be delegating? Because it's going to come up over and over again. It doesn't have to be the whole project. It can be a part of it. So that's the R is the repetition. Great, great. And then what about Q? What does that stand for? So Q and you go together. Q is the quality of work. The quality of work being, we're talking about

[00:16:11] delegation here, right? And if you ask people, if you ask your listeners, what's the hardest part about delegating? I've asked audiences this all the time. Often the answers are not enough time. I can do it better myself. I don't trust the work product. It's not as good as what I could produce. So at the end of the day, this is all about control. And what I'm saying through TORC is that mutual trust and respect that you build over time. You can help develop a healthier relationship if

[00:16:40] you're a little bit organized, anticipating what you need, understanding that through repetition, investing in the same people on similar projects or in processes that happen in your day-to-day, that your quality of work with that person will eventually improve over time with an understanding, here's the you, understanding that it will never be 100% of what you can produce.

[00:17:07] But I have something else to say on this, Scott. Two parts. One, I know we're lawyers. I know we're perfectionists. I know we're saying right now, like, well, no, that is not acceptable. The quality of work has to be 100% of what I can produce. If you, as the partner, there's, this is a quote by Pierre Omidar, who was the founder of eBay. He said, five times 80% of me is still a lot

[00:17:33] larger than 100% of me. Meaning, let's just talk math here for a moment, okay? Let's say we have one partner who has only so much time, energy, mental capacity in a day. Let's say this one partner has five associates that he or she can delegate to. Let's say through TORC, they can get their

[00:17:56] quality of work up to 80% of what this partner would deem a perfect work product. 100% minus 80% means there's 20% of investment of time and energy that this partner would need to put into each of these work products from the associate to get it up to 100% of his or her satisfaction to get it sent to the client or opposing counsel or, or the court. So we're just doing math here. If that one

[00:18:25] person has a one hour of time, that one person could produce one of those work products or that person could invest 20% into five work products, the same amount of time and energy to get it to the work, the quality that they deem acceptable. Does that make sense? Great. That does. I love the mathematical way you explain that because you can get your arms around that. That's brilliant, Sarah. Yeah. And so tell us about this. What's the letter E?

[00:18:54] Eliminate control. Oh, wow. No way. This is heresy right here, ladies and gentlemen. Heresy, eliminating control. That's hard, right? It is hard. It's really, really hard. I think it's a battle every day. I'm doing a lot of work just myself of control and realizing how much control comes into play in everything we do. Everything from someone cuts you off on the freeway and you're frustrated. It's also about

[00:19:21] control. You were controlling that lane. You were controlling your speed. And now that person, like if you didn't get into car accident, it wasn't that close. Like what else would be the reason you would be so upset? It's control. And then it's just like everything, everything from how the dishwasher is loaded. That is control. That is perfectionism. I know we battled that with our spouses. So I'm bringing personal stuff into this, but... How do we deal with this? How do we deal with this?

[00:19:47] I think a lot of it is recognizing that this is a characteristic that we all have. It goes back to our ancestors and having control. And there's actually like, I'm letting out a breath of fresh air for a moment because while we want that control, sometimes when we recognize that's what we're doing and we let it go, it's so nice. It feels very like freeing. And I think a lot of

[00:20:15] delegation is control because even going back for a moment to that Q and that E, the quality of work with an understanding that it'll never be 100% of what you could produce. I want to also give one other example here. Most of your listeners can probably think of, or if they... I'll challenge them to think of it right now. Think of something in the last six months where you were really proud

[00:20:40] of that finished product. It could be a presentation you did, maybe an article, maybe a reporter or an agreement or an email to the client summarizing something where you were like, I put a lot of time and energy into that work product. And it was... Can I swear on here? Damn good. Darn. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, market explicit. That's fine. I would challenge them to go look at it today and they're going to find errors. They're going to find

[00:21:06] a rant, the bullet points that were perfect. There's a bullet point at the end with nothing written there or a word was misspelled or they're going to find errors in the work product. And that's because in the moment we think that we are producing the best thing. And then in hindsight, we go back and look at it and it wasn't perfect. So remember this as you are building the torque and working with associates and building that trust and respect with the understanding that their quality

[00:21:33] of work will get there. Also with an understanding that your work product is probably never perfect either. And also even better, go back and look at something you did as an associate that you thought was good or that even the partner thought was great. And you probably would look at it now and say, oh man, that was not as perfect as I thought it was. So just back to the control thing, I would say, just recognize that this is the underlying behavior on a lot of things and letting go a little bit will

[00:22:02] actually give you that peace and freedom and gain time. And you can, you can rain make more, spend more time on rain making. That's right. So let me go over this again. You've got trust and respect organized. What was the letter R? Oh yeah. Trust. Oh, repetition. That's right. Repetition. Yeah. And then quality of work and understanding and eliminate, eliminate control. Yeah. This is a great model. How long have you had this mindset? When did you come up with this,

[00:22:30] Sarah? I came up with TORC about two and a half years ago. I was preparing a program for a large U.S. national mediation company and on delegation. And I already had the program outlined. This is that planning. I planned the outline as I was building the program. And it dawned on me as I

[00:22:57] was thinking, I kind of just stepped back and said, what makes effective delegation? And having experience both as someone being delegated to, and I have a team I delegate to who has repeatedly said to me, you're a very good delegator. You're easy to work with. It's very clear. I rarely, rarely have a rush last minute. Most of my stuff is pretty thought out. I also, I don't personally, I am answering your question in a long way, Scott. I personally don't like to live in that everything is an emergency,

[00:23:27] not just because of the planning I do, but also really in the moment asking myself, even when it feels like an emergency, am I performing surgery here? Is this life or death? Is this rocket science? The answer is no. And so I really try to say, do I want to create this chaos for me and my team? Or can I give them the space and time at which to succeed? And we can, okay. So with all of that in mind, I was

[00:23:54] thinking about what went into effective delegation. And I said, it's planning ahead. It's project management. It's not being a perfectionist or finding where I'm being a perfectionist and stepping back a little bit and taking a look at that. It's trusting them and them trusting me and respecting me and vice versa. And it's not wanting to do it all myself, which is control. And so when I looked at what that was, I saw the acronym TORC and it makes sense because TORC with multiple gears, you can

[00:24:24] produce a lot more. So that's how I created it. And I have a really fun exercise that I do as part of that program and that I'll deliver to firms or organizations. We do a fun exercise to really show like the delegation and the communication and being available. There's even more to it too, that the being available is another piece. I'd love to see that at some point, but these are great ideas you brought to us today. If you could summarize three action steps for a new person to take to get

[00:24:52] started implementing those, what would those be? Yeah. So I want to keep the action steps really small. So it's something they could even do right now when they finish and they hit stop on their podcast. One, find the white space on your calendar. It might take a few weeks out, but that's okay. Look a few weeks out, find where you have white space, block it, call it something like deep work

[00:25:16] or strategizing time. It doesn't have to be defined for what it is. You don't even need to define it until the day before, but the future you will thank you for and put it on reoccurring. So 90 minutes to two hours, if you can afford it on some regular cadence, block the space of time. Number two, related to that, then look and see what are some of the deadlines or deliverables you have coming up in

[00:25:43] the next month and spend some of that time anticipating where you might be able to delegate to some of the people on your team with a little bit of patience of building that mutual trust and respect with those people. But now you're setting yourself up with that success of having enough time to work with them to get it to that 80%. And then number three is just start to be curious

[00:26:11] about your own control or perfectionism and how that might be playing a role in your effective delegation. That's great, Sarah. These are great. Thank you for being here on the show and tell our listeners about your services, your offerings. What do you do? What do you have that you'd like our listeners to know about? Yeah. Firm Focus was created after I spent many years working in law firms with the very niche focus of helping attorneys and legal professionals

[00:26:35] with time management challenges. Perfectionism, procrastination, analysis paralysis, distractions, interruptions, and all of those time management areas. So we do that through one-on-one coaching and speaking and training on teams. That's great. Well, Sarah, we're going to put all of your contact info on the show notes. Everybody listening to Sarah, go ahead and do that. And then Sarah, tell us, did you mention that you have some sort of special offering for people today?

[00:27:04] I do. So on my website, which will be in the show notes from focus.com slash resources, there is a delegation bundle that has some helpful handouts on the torque method, on tracking what you've delegated out to make sure you get it back. So if that's one of your sticky points is if you delegate it out, you might forget about it. There's some helpful handouts in there. And so

[00:27:28] we'll put a code in the show notes for your listeners to be able to access that at no cost. That's great. Thank you for doing that, Sarah. I can't wait to get that for myself. So thank you. And thank you for being here again. And I know we'll have you back on the future. Thanks so much for taking your time and sharing all this with us today, Sarah. Happy to be here. Thanks so much. And get out there and get delegating for Rainmakers.

[00:27:53] Thank you for listening to the Rainmaking Podcast. For more information about our recruiting services for international law firms, visit our website at attorneysearchgroup.com. To inquire about having Scott speak at your next convention, conference, sales meeting, or executive retreat, visit therainmakingpodcast.com. Thank you.