Sari Swears Podcast: Do You Have the Right People in the Right Seats?

If you’re anything like I was a few years ago…

You're doing everything.

You're hustling.

You’re building.

And you’re running a successful business.

BUT, you STILL feel trapped.

That’s because you’re operating like a solopreneur, not an entrepreneur.

(Spoiler: one burns out, the other builds a team.)

In this week’s podcast, I’m sharing something outside of the trial world, but essential to your success inside the courtroom:

👉🏽 HOW to get the right people in the right seats
👉🏽 WHY the traditional org chart is completely ass-backwards
👉🏽 WHATI’ve learned from implementing the EOS system (and why I wish I’d done it sooner)

I’m pulling back the curtain on my own journey — where I was the bottleneck — and how structure created more creativity, more impact, and yes… MORE freedom.

If you’re tired of building alone, and ready to lead differently…

This one’s for you.

Tune in NOW! 🎧

Love,
Sari 💖

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➡️FREE FB GROUP FOR PLAINTIFF & CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEYS

“You can’t grow if you’re the one doing everything. The more I let go, the more the business grew — and the more I grew. That’s the magic of getting the right people in the right seats.”
sari de la motte

transcription

Well, welcome everyone to another episode of Sari Swears. Sari is with you today swearing up a fucking storm. And today we're talking about, do you have the right people in the right seats? And even if you don't own your own law firm, this is going to be an important episode for you to listen to, because you yourself may not be in the right seat, either in your firm that you work for, or if you're a solo and you don't have anyone working for you, this may change your mind about that. So all those things said, you're still going to learn a lot, but for most of you who do have your own firms, this episode is fucking essential.

Now, before we get going, I did want to tell y'all that we have a brand new freebie for you. It's 8 Strategies to an 8-figure Verdict. If you go to sariswears.com/8 ... Like, just the number. Don't spell it out, just the number 8, strategies, you can sign up there to get the first three for free. And then the next five you can purchase for a very, very reasonable price if I may say so myself, which I can because it's my podcast. So that's the new freebie for you. Go check it out. We want to hear what you think about it. But let's get back to what we're talking about today. And I want to bring our EOS implementer onto the podcast because I think this is so important. But we have recently started on a journey with the EOS system, and if you don't know what that is, it stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System.

I got to tell you that there is a huge difference between a solopreneur and an entrepreneur. Meaning, for years I was a solopreneur, and I liken that to being a hunter. Those of us who start out on our own, maybe we have an assistant eventually, or maybe one other person working with us, we are constantly on the hunt. And we go get the contract and that sets us up for a few months, and then we have to go out and get another contract. And that's the hunter mentality of the solopreneur. But once we, and many companies, started growing, we had to move from ... And when I say we, I mean me, honestly, from the hunter analogy to the farmer analogy and become an entrepreneur. And if you think about the difference between hunters and farmers, it is that farmers are doing the work months and months before they actually ever see that come to fruition. And so there's more systems in place. And that's necessitated by as you grow, you have more employees, you have more complicated things that you're doing.

And so that has been a journey that I've been on, making that transition over the last several years. But I finally came to a point this year, especially with the new H2H headquarters and our new courtroom, and we've got new employees and we're growing, to actually get super serious about doing this, so serious that I actually hired an EOS implementer, which is the person I just mentioned I like to bring on to the podcast. And it is amazing. And you know that when I am doing something that is amazing or is working in my business, I want to share it with all of you, because if you're like, "Aren't you a trial skills person?" Yes, I'm a trial skills person and a mindset person and an all things person, and here's why this matters.

Most of my masterminds, those are the people that I work with in a small group every year, and it's invite only, those people go on to win multiple eight-figure verdicts. Not that that's the measurement of this, for sure. But the way that they do that is not by magically figuring out how to do 1,000 different things more efficiently, because there is no way to do 1,000 different things, they have to let things go, they've done that by actually doing that, letting things go and not having as many cases. And so this is very related, what I'm talking about today, to trial skills, in that you can never be in a position to increase your capacity as a trial lawyer in the skills department if you are spending most of your time running your business, and running it inefficiently at that.

I've been sharing this with my masterminds and I thought it's time to share it with you now. Of course, I don't want to share anything proprietary, and I'm just going to share a few little things because I really want you to go to EOS. That said, eosworldwide.com has a ton of free resources for you to look at. That's eosworldwide.com. So you can start there. But let's start with an analogy and let's see if you recognize this, especially if you are in the position that we've been in, where you are growing so fast that you can't keep up with the growth that is happening in your business. We've used the analogy quite a bit of building the plane while we fly it. And we said that so long that I thought, you know what? We actually need to land the fucking plane and build it the way we want it before we get it up in the air again.

Now, obviously we're still doing work here and all the things, but that's what I mean by we finally got serious about this. Because here's what happens when you don't get serious about really making the switch from solopreneur to entrepreneur, is that you continue to operate as a solopreneur. And I had to have a real heart-to-heart with my staff last year, about a year ago, because they came to me saying, "Listen, you can't do the things that you used to do when it was just you and assistant. You can't just change on a dime. You can't just decide, 'Oh, that's not working? Well, we'll do this instead', because there's this whole machinery now behind you and that interrupts the operations of the entire team." Where before, when you're a hunter, it's like, "Well, I'm not finding the tiger or whatever I'm hunting ..." Please don't hunt tigers. Can I just say that? Please don't do that. "But I'm not finding the food in this jungle, so I'm going to go over to this jungle." You have to pivot. You can't do that, at least not as easily in an entrepreneurial setup.

And so when you don't make that shift over from solopreneur to entrepreneur, then you are at risk of really wearing out your team. Now, I love my team and I don't want to do that, so these are some of the things that we're putting into place. But today what I wanted to talk about is this concept of right people and right seats. Because when I coach with my masterminds, what I hear often ... And not always. And if you're listening to this and you know who my masterminds are and you work for them, don't think I'm talking about you. I hear this with lots of people. Kevin hears about this with his clients. But we hear about how we have the wrong people in the wrong seats or right people in the wrong seats. And we're going to talk about all of that and what that means today.

So let's start with the book where all this came from, which is called Traction. I'm going to start with the book where, at least for me, this is where it started. And the book is called Traction by Gino Wickman. And if you start anywhere, I would start here because this is really fantastic. Again, the website has a lot of information, but you might get a little overwhelmed. The book is a great place to start. And so what Gino says in the book Traction, and let's talk about traction for a minute, he talks about how if you don't have these pieces in place that we're going to talk about today, you can't get traction in your business. You're always behind the eight-ball, so to speak, and you can't ever really get to where you're going.

And so he says there are six components of any organization, and I love the simplicity of that. So the first one is vision. So you have to have a compelling vision and be able to communicate it. Now, that's not just some fun thing that we put on a poster that nobody follows and it sounds good. He walks through in the book how to come up with a compelling vision. But that's one of the six pieces we're going to talk about today. The people component is the second of the six components, and that's what we are talking about today, and that is getting the right people in the right seats. Again, when you have the wrong people in the wrong seats, or even the right people in the wrong seats, it causes all sorts of problems, which we'll talk about.

The third component is the data component. It's a handful of numbers that you look at on a weekly basis that tell you the health of your business. Wouldn't that be amazing that every week there's a handful of numbers that you could ask whoever is in charge of those numbers in your business to give to you, and it could tell you right there, give you a snapshot of how your business is doing? That's one of the components. Fourth component is the issues components, the obstacles that you have to overcome in your business in order to achieve your vision. And EOS has a whole way of dealing with issues. There's a processes component, and you know I'm big on processes. So that's your way of doing business, and is that notated where everybody is following it and it's across the board?

And then that sixth component is the traction component. That is where you live in what they call a 90-day world. And so, everybody in your organization has 90-day rocks. These are the biggest things that we have to do as a team in the next 90 days in order to forward the vision of the company. And along with that, there's accountability, and it's a whole way that they do that. So it's a really great system around those six pieces. So let's talk about the accountability piece when we now start talking about the right people in the right seats.

So they have in EOS what they call an accountability chart. And it's different than an org chart. It is an org chart, so don't get me wrong. It does say who's in charge of what. But the way that it's different is that it really is based around accountability, who is in charge of what, versus just naming titles and people. And the reason I bring this up, I'm not going to go into deep dive into the accountability chart, is that one of the tenets of EOS and the accountability chart, is that no two people can be in one seat. Conversely, especially if you're a small business, one person may sit in various seats, but you cannot have two people in one seat. And the reason for that is again, down to accountability. Meaning, if you have more than one person in charge of a thing, then when something goes wrong, when a ball gets dropped, you don't know who is actually responsible for that. Or if a rock, your 90-day rock doesn't get met, you don't know who's accountable for that.

So it's a really great system that they have to clearly communicate across your organization. And it sounds like I'm talking about organizations that are like 200 people. And it can be for sure, but in my organization there are seven of us. So it's not huge. It doesn't have to be huge. It could be three of you, and maybe you sit in a variety of different seats. But what I also love about the accountability chart is that you set it up and you decide what the seats are without thinking about the people in your business. Meaning, you take everybody out of their current seat and you said, "To operate this business, what seats are needed?" And then you put the people in the right seat. So you take them out first, even if they're currently holding that position or that seat, and you ask yourself these right people, right seat questions, which is what we're going to go into now.

So let's first define, what do we mean by a right person? A right person is someone who shares the company's core values. And I'm going to talk a lot about values in today's episode, because the session that we had with our implementer was so enlightening. It was a way that I'd never thought about values before, that I wanted to share that with you. And then how do you know that the right person is in the right seat? Well, are they operating in what Gino Wickman says is their unique ability? If you've been listening to the podcast or if you're in my H2H crew, the way we talk about that is, are they operating in their zone of genius? And we'll talk about what that means as well and how to understand that in a really easy way.

So let me first talk about what you are risking with the wrong people in the wrong seats or wrong people in the right seats. I'm going to go to the book, actually, because they have such a great way to talk about this. Let's talk about the right person in the wrong seat. So in this case, you have the right person, i.e., the person who shares your core values, but he or she is truly not operating in his or her unique ability. This person has been promoted to a seat that's too big, they've outgrown a seat that's too small, or they've been put in a position that does not utilize his or her unique ability. Again, for us, that's a zone of genius. Generally, this person is where he or she is because he or she's been around a long time, you like him or her, or he or she is a great addition to the team. And until now, you probably believed you were helping this person by promoting them to their existing seat, but in actuality, you were hindering his or her growth and the growth of the company.

So that's an example. And think in your own organizations of someone who's a right person, you want them in your organization, but they're in the wrong seat. For example, my brand new executive assistant that I hired back in May, great executive assistant, I'd say zone of excellence for sure, very, very good at it. But once David had been here for a while, we recognized that David's actual zone of genius is in video editing and podcasts. And so yes, as sad as I am to say that Kevin will not be on the other side of that wall anymore in terms of podcast, he's very excited about that. He likes laughing at my jokes. But that's not his zone of genius. Again, that was in Kevin's zone of excellence. His zone of genius is in coaching. And so we made the move, and David is now doing both video editing and podcast producing, as well as financial stuff, which he also loves. We knew he was the right person, but now he's absolutely in the right seat. And we'll talk a little bit more about some examples like that too.

Here's another example, wrong person, right seat. So in this case, the person excels at what he or she does. Is extremely productive and was clearly in his or her unique ability. What makes this person the wrong person is that he or she doesn't share your core values. While this obstacle may seem like something you can live with in the short-term, that person is killing your organization in the long-term. He or she is chipping away at what you're trying to build in little ways that most of the time, you don't even see. It's that wry comment in the hallway, the dirty look behind your back, and the dissension that this person spreads.

We've also had that here in our company, even this year, where we hired someone who we thought had the right seat, and that also remained to be seen. Once we let them go, we realized probably that wasn't the right seat either. But once they were here for three weeks, we recognized they were not part of our culture and did not have our core values in mind. So you really get into trouble when you're not having the right people in the right seats. Because we tend to think, "Well, it's just the right people. That's just all we need, right?" And for example, in the David example I just gave, he's so much happier, which don't we want happier employees? And he's now in his zone of genius. I mean, the dude has a degree in film. Hello. So that's what we want. Not just good people, right people, but we want them in the right seats.

Okay, so how do we determine whether people fit our culture, so to speak, or have our core values? You've heard me say before, or maybe you haven't if you're brand new ... I'm going to stop saying that. I'm not going to just keep repeating myself. I repeat myself all the time, just so you know. But I have said before, last time I'm going to say that, that you don't create culture, you hire culture. Meaning, your business already has a culture, especially if it's kind of a business like mine is, where there's a person at the head of it and that person has a very distinct personality. I have a very distinct personality. And therefore, there is a culture that is created. And you do not bring people in and then create that culture in them or however you want to think about it. You actually know what your culture is and you hire people who match that culture. Now, here's what was so fascinating about how to determine what our core values are, because what is culture? It's how your core values are being expressed in the workplace. That's really how I define it.

Kevin and I have done tons of value work with our clients, and we thought we knew everything there was to know about values, but came to find out, we did not. And by the way, as we're talking about these core values, these are not the values that we put out to the world. And by "we," I mean all of us business owners. These are internal values for your company. For example, our external values, which we also hold for sure, are play. We want you guys to not take things so seriously. Not that they aren't serious, they are, but when you're practicing and you're learning and you're growing, we want you to play with things. Trust. We want you to trust yourself, the process, the jurors. Love. We want you to love yourself to a better life and freedom. We want you to be free of mindset issues. So we're not talking about those that we put on our swag and we have on our website. We're talking about your internal values.

And so what our implementer had us do with our leadership team is, think of three people you admire either in your company or outside of your company. And we all made a list of the three people. And there couldn't be anybody in the room. And then she asked "Why? What is it about these people that you value?" And we came up with, between the four of us ... We each had three, so what is that? I can do math. 12. We had 12 people to go through. We came up with a ton of values listed on the whiteboard, which is our whiteboard, which is actually pretty cool. Now, here's where it got interesting. She then took us through a filter, and this is where we started narrowing it down. So the first filter was, are any of these values pay-to-play. Now you might be like, "What does that mean, pay-to-play?" And that's what I was like. I was like, "What does that mean, pay-to-play?" And this is what she said, and this is what blew my freaking mind, it was, "Things that you would just assume anybody in your company should hold as a value."

It doesn't differentiate you. It's something that's just basic. A lot of people are like, "We value quality service." Okay, that's not a core value, that's probably something that I can't think of any company that doesn't value the service that they're delivering to their people. They want that to be good. Or, "We value punctuality," or "We value attention to detail." So it was very interesting. We have those on there, of course, but we were like, "Oh, okay, so those aren't our core values," and we had to cross them off. So again, a pay-to-play value is something that, yeah, I mean just to work here, you would have to value that or exhibit that value or show that value.

The second filter that she took us through was, are any of these values aspirational? Are there things on there that we wish we were, but we actually aren't? For example, one of the people that came up on many people's lists ... Wow, David's first podcast that he's producing right now on the other side of this wall, and we're talking about David today, so this makes sense. But he showed up on a lot of people's lists that day. I don't know if he knows that. And one of the things that came up about David that we admired about him is he's so very kind. And so when we were looking through this list, I highlighted that and I said, "I love the fact that David is kind, but I've always had an issue with that word, especially as applied to women." Somehow, to me it just feels like meekness or, "Be kind. Don't say a bad word," and I'm all about calling people out or whatnot.

And so I was like, "You know, it doesn't feel like it's a company ..." I mean, do I love that David is kind? Yes. But do I wish that I myself were kinder, because I have a temper, I get impatient? Yes. So that to me was like, "It feels a little bit more aspirational." So that was the second filter. It's like, are any of these things on this list things that you wish you were but you really aren't? You want to get rid of those because that's not truly what your culture is. Okay. Not to say that kindness isn't important or that we all want to be mean to each other. It's just we're trying to get it down to three to five.

The third filter is, are these conditional values? Are there any conditional values here? I guess I would use the word contextual instead of conditional. Meaning, during COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of people had the value of working from home and being an independent, and all of those kinds of things that you needed during that time, that now that people are coming back to work in-person, that was a value that maybe was held during that time but it doesn't fit now. So once we went through those three filters, what we were left with is what we really thought were our core values. And she takes us through a process where we, are any of them similar? Can others collapse into others? And we really came down to five internal core values for us.

The number one is disruptive. We are disruptive. We are disrupting the industry. I'm a female. I swear. I have weird hair and weird clothes. And I have two music degrees. Nobody saw me coming and now I'm one of the top trial consultants in the United States. We disrupt what people think voir dire should be. We don't do exclusionary voir dire. We disrupt how our CLEs are run, in that we love you and support you, we don't tear you down. But we just disrupt. We do things totally different than anybody else in this industry. So that's a top value for us. It's a core value. We really value authenticity. I want everybody in this company not only to be in their zone of genius, but expressing who they are. David came to work one day in a lime green jumpsuit. It was amazing. Not every company would love that. I loved that. Authenticity is huge for us. I want everybody to feel like they can really express who they are here. And of course, we help our clients express who they are.

Loving. Love. That was the third one for us. So even though I'm impatient and I can stress my team out, I hope I try very hard to let them know that I love them and appreciate them so much. And so that's something in our team. Creative. We are always looking to push boundaries, play outside the box, do things differently. And we're passionate. We're very, very passionate. Even in my interviews I talk about how, "Hey, you don't have to come in here loving trial lawyers, but if you can't get there, if you immediately are already thinking they're the reason that our society is in a downfall, then this is not going to be a great place for you to work." So, passionate. We're passionate about trial lawyers. I tell my people on every call that I have with my crew members that I love them, that they're the loves of my life. So it is there too, also internally.

Now, here's why this is important when you're talking about the right people, because remember, our definition of the right person ... Well, Gino's definition, but I agree, is someone who shares your company values. Now you're going to put them ... If you want to go, there's a free tool. You can go to eosworldwide.com/people and get the people analyzer. But you take on the left-hand side and you put your core values. And we actually did this when we made them the other day. Now we made them, when we found them the other day. Put them on the left, so we had five things on our left-hand side. And then up above, what we did is we put the names of everybody who currently works here. So we had Kevin up there, we had me, we had Abby, we had David, we had Megan, Meg, Julia, we had everybody up there.

And then as a leadership team, we went through each of these five things for each of the people, and we either gave a plus, a minus, or a plus/minus. So disruptive, we're like, "We're grading Kevin. Is he disruptive?" Does he exhibit this value for the most time? That would be a plus. Sometimes. That's a plus/minus. Or he never exhibits this value, negatively. And we scored our whole team. And by the way, our whole team passed. They're all the right people. Yay. So they're the right people. And you as an organization get to decide how many plus/minuses are okay. Are any minuses okay? You get to decide that. And we had our own little, this is how many plus/minuses we would allow. In new hires, can you imagine how helpful this will be in hiring new people? All right, so that's how we decide, or how Gino decides and how we're deciding, who the right people are. We use your core values.

And this is a great thing to do with your leadership team. And if you're like, "I don't even have leadership, I don't even know how to do that," I'm going to tell you in a minute how you can actually hire an implementer to come in and help you do all this. Because I can't say enough good things about our implementer. But once you have this, now you're going to hire, fire, reward based on these values. And yes, I'm going to bring these across to the team and we're really getting this totally underway come January. That's why we're doing all this prep work now. Now, how do you know if a person is in the right seat? So remember, that's the unique ability, and for us, that's the zone of genius. And they really have three questions in EOS to help you answer that.

The first one is, does this person get it? And what that means is, do they understand the role and what it means to be in this role? That's the first thing that you would ask yourself. The second question you would ask yourself about each person is, so for example, we took everybody out of their current seats and then we took one person and we put them in a seat and we were like, "Okay, do they get it? Want it?" And then the last one is capacity for it. So this is how you're looking at the people if you now start thinking about them in your seats. So the second one is wanted, as I just mentioned. So do they genuinely like doing these things? Kevin wants to tear his fucking hair out when he produces the podcast. He loves to sit here and listen to me, but producing it or any of our video work is just like, it's a slog for him.

Where for David, he went to college to do that shit. And I don't know, maybe he'll decide differently after he's been in this for a few months or years. But this is right in his wheelhouse. So for David, when we were looking at this in our leadership meeting, it was, yeah, he understands the role because he's been around it enough, because he'd been helping Kevin. And I believe he wants it, because we asked him and he said yes. And then the capacity for it is the time, yes, what it takes to do the role, but also the physical, mental, emotional piece of it. So let's go to events, for example. Events are stressful for our company. They just are. There's so many moving parts. We have people from all over the United States coming in. We have to deal with lunches, we do snacks, and I want everything at a certain level because I'm a nitpicky Finnish person who wants the right napkins and the plates and the whatever.

And when I think of something, I immediately fire off a, "Hey, why didn't this happen?" It doesn't mean anything. I'm just like, it's in my head and I want it out of my head. But some people would be like, "Okay, holy shit, that is so stressful," where the person who actually is loving that role, which is Meg in our company, is like, "Yeah, that's just Sari, she just gets stressed. Don't stress me out, I just know that's Sari." That's not a negative or positive for people. It's just, that is for that role, for the events role, they would need to have capacity for my stress and not take that on themselves. So when you have that people analyzer and you've got your things down below, you can then up above also add GWC and give your people a plus, plus/minus, or a minus in terms of get, want, capacity for it.

Can you see how this would change, first off, maybe the actual organization you're in now, if you're in leadership and have the ability to do that. In fact, our implementer said she has never, ever had a scenario where she's taken the leadership team through what she took us through and everybody was the right person, first off, and we're in the right seats. She couldn't believe it. That never had happened. Most of the time when she takes leadership through this, they find that seats need to be moved, people need to be fired, this person needs to be hired. And in our scenario, I mean, we got lucky. I mean, we've worked really hard on it. Right, Abby? We've worked really hard on it. But that was kind of a cool thing. So right away it gives you a snapshot to see where you are and what needs to change. But can you see how this would help in terms of reviews, in terms of hiring? It's just an amazing, amazing system.

One of the first things, I'm going to share some free tools with you right now, that our implementer had us do was go to eosworldwide ... No, it's different. Hold on. It is organizationalcheckup.com. And you can take a quiz there about the health of your organization based on these six different factors. One of them is, "We have an accountability chart and everybody's in the right seat." I was like, "No." We got really bad on some of that because I wasn't sure. I didn't even know what an accountability chart was until we got everybody in the right seats. And then now I should go back and take that again because I think we'd do much better on it. But if you want to just kind of see where you're at, you can go there.

But if you're like me who is like, "Yeah, I could read the book and I could try to figure this out on my own," which I did, tried to do this last spring, and then you get frustrated, because you're like, "This is not how I want to be spending my time, and I would rather spend the money to have somebody come in and do this for us," then you definitely want to go to eosworldwide.com. And at the top you'll see, hire an implementer or find an implementer, or something like that. And you can hire somebody to come in and do this for your company. Now, regardless of what you choose, whether you just get the book Traction, which is available at your local bookstore, I'm sure ... It's very popular. It's on Amazon, although I know Amazon is evil. Or you hire an implementer or you just listen to what I say or go look at some of the free tools on EOS's website.

The reason, again, why I wanted to podcast on this today is because if you are spending, trial lawyer, I'm speaking to you now, the majority of your time managing people, hiring the wrong people, having to fire people and waiting to do it because you're not really sure if it is the right person or if it is the wrong person, if you're not sure who's accountable for what, if you don't ... Having all of that, then you will not be able to do the trial lawyer things that I'm teaching you to do in the other places because you're going to be so wrapped up in this. So that's why I'm sharing this with you today. I hope that it is helpful.

Again, go check out our free new free resource, 8 Strategies to 8-Figure Verdict, which is sariswears.com/8strategies, and we will talk next week. Bye everybody.