Leadership In Law Podcast

28 "Unblock" Your Firm and Thrive with Jurriaan Kamer

• Marilyn Jenkins • Season 1 • Episode 28

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Unlock the secrets of innovative management with Jurriaan Kamer, co-founder of Unblock, as he joins me, Marilyn Jenkins, in an enlightening episode of Leadership in Law. What if your law firm could function without the constraints of a traditional hierarchy? Jurriaan draws inspiration from the visionary Brazilian entrepreneur Ricardo Semler to share how organizations can thrive by flipping management structures upside down. Discover how empowering your team with transparency and shared decision-making can lead to more efficient processes and a healthier workplace environment. As we discuss the practicalities of a 25-member team making decisions collectively, you'll learn how this approach not only resonates with legal professionals but can also transform industries at large.

Explore the transformative power of flattening organizational hierarchies to foster employee engagement and responsibility. We delve into the pitfalls of positional authority and how an open-book system can demystify profit distribution while enhancing cost-consciousness among employees. Learn about the innovative concept of electing leaders to ensure roles are filled by the most suitable individuals, promoting inclusivity and accountability in decision-making. Whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting in the world of law, this episode is packed with actionable insights and strategies to help you build successful teams and thrive in the ever-evolving legal landscape.

Jurriaan is a future-oriented organizational change expert, 
cofounder of Unblock (a modern management consultancy), and a keynote speaker. He's the author of 'Formula X' - a business novel inspired by the world of Formula 1. He has just released his second leadership book "Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization," which is about unblocking organizations by rethinking strategy, decision-making, teamwork, and ownership.

Reach Jurriaan here:
https://www.unblock.works/book
http://www.unblock.works/
http://www.jurriaankamer.com/

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Leadership in Law podcast with host Marilyn Jenkins. Cut through the noise, get actionable insights and inspiring stories delivered straight to your ears your ultimate podcast for navigating the ever-changing world of law firm ownership. In each episode, we dive deep into the critical topics that matter most to you, from unlocking explosive growth to building a thriving team. We connect you with successful firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard-won wisdom. So, whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership in Law podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.

Speaker 2:

Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. I'm your host, marilyn Jenkins. Please join me in welcoming my guest, jurian Comer, to the show today. Jurian is a future-oriented organizational change expert, co-founder of Unblock, a modern management consultancy, and a keynote speaker. He's the author of Formula X, a business model inspired by the world of Formula One, and he's just released his second leadership book, unblock Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization, which is about unblocking organizations by rethinking strategy, decision-making, teamwork and ownership. I'm excited to have you here, jerry, and welcome.

Speaker 3:

Thank you for having me Looking forward to it too.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. I love the whole idea of what you're talking about. It's so different, but reading the article that you sent me about the 25-person team that's using your program, tell me a bit about how you got started and let's just dive into this different process that you have. That's working really well in a lot of industries.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so the work I do flips the whole traditional mindset about what management is upside down. We are taught in well, some people are taught in business school, but actually most people are not taught how to be a manager, how to be a leader, and we just copy everyone else because we think that is the way to do it. But there are very alternative ways to organize and we don't have to rely on management hierarchies to get stuff done. The work I do is with leaders all across the world, all across industries. So I'm definitely not a law firm expert, but I've been in and around organizations and teams that have been trying to build and scale and grow and yeah, so let's talk about it, let's dive in.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely so. The article that you sent me, we were talking about this company that has 25 team members yeah, um, they break down to everyone is involved in every decision, which my first thought when I read that was like oh my god, how long are meetings?

Speaker 3:

yeah, right yeah, yeah, so so, yeah, indeed, so they're governing through.

Speaker 3:

They're inspired by by ricardo Semler.

Speaker 3:

So, for those of you who want to dive even deeper, there's a Brazilian entrepreneur who has a few books out there about how to govern together, how to lead without managers, and, yeah, they're using that. And indeed, the challenge can be, if you're deciding everything together, that things can get really long, but you can be smart about it and you can divide and conquer, so to say. But in general, the principle is that there's full transparency. Everybody knows everything that's going on, or at least has access to it if they want to, and all the decisions are made through consent, using their meetings, and that means that we're looking for the state where we don't have to all agree on everything, because that, indeed, would be very time consuming and slow, but instead it's enough if people consent to a proposal, meaning there's no objection and there's no reason why this would, when we adopt this proposal, it would hurt our business. That means you can go quickly, because we're not looking to align everyone 100% perfectly, but we're looking for things that we can live with and can move forward on.

Speaker 2:

And I did like that and it kind of a little bit kind of clarified that as they grew they also broke into teams, if you will, and it's still so. So the main meetings, you know, everybody's still involved, but it's a better organizational timeframe of meetings. But it was totally interesting that everybody is involved in everything from purchases as simple as desk lamps to the salaries coming up in shareholders.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's pretty broad and the way it works is somebody brings a proposal to the meeting and they just clarify you know what? I think we propose to do this or that, which is already pretty different from how most decisions start. Right, we often have the tendency to just put a topic on the table and let's discuss it and hopefully, hopefully, we can somehow make a decision. The thing that's often very the thing that's often missing is the proposal. So you ask people to bring a clear proposal of what it is that you propose to do and why, and then that proposal gets inspected by the group and say can we live with it or are there any reactions to this, or should we change it?

Speaker 2:

Excellent and that's a little bit like I did an interview about the Bezos letters and for them to bring something new out to R&D they have to have a completed proposal.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I think, especially in the law world, it shouldn't be too hard to write things down, which is, in different industries, much harder. A lot of people don't like writing things down and I would say, in general, lawyers are probably better suited to do that, and yeah, so writing down the proposal is really helpful because instead of debating and talking in circles, you can just read thing. The second step is to ask clarifying questions. So to ask like hey, you know, does anybody have any clarifying questions about this proposal? Which means like questions to really understand what is written rather than to give your opinion, and then we wait with giving our opinion until everybody understands the proposal and then we do a round of reactions. So that's a way to kind of unpack a proposal and make a decision with a group pretty quickly, very good.

Speaker 2:

And talking about customer service, obviously this you know we want to make sure that we give outstanding customer service. And how do you, how does your system help, make sure that we do that? Because I know what we're trying to do is get better results without getting burnout. But ideally, you know, we want to grow, we want to have better customer service. And how does that work whenever everybody's involved in everything, or is it just the knowledge base?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so in this system you don't make all the decisions together every day. These are like the decisions that affect a larger group of people. In the end, in this specific law practice, people like the lawyers are autonomous. They have their own clients, they have their own way of dealing with customers and giving them the service they request, and they don't have to go to this centralized meeting for everything they do. Luckily, that is decentralized, but it's really about all the things that are centralized, and that includes salaries and costs. And that is also pretty progressive about this group is that they have transparent salaries, so everybody knows exactly what everybody else is making. And, to go one step further, every year, people propose the salaries that they want to make to each other based on knowledge Right.

Speaker 2:

I didn't see that. Yeah, that does seem very interesting.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so it's not the managing partner that is deciding this for everyone else, or HR Like it's a lean structure, or HR like it's a lean structure. What also helps there is that the basic principle is that every hour that you bill, half of that you can keep above a break-even point. So they first have to kind of make enough money to get out of the costs the basic fixed costs. Everything above that, 50% of your billings will be yours and to keep it balanced in terms of preventing burnout they also have a maximum amount of hours. So I know in law firms and in other service firms that's typical that some people they just work like 80 hour weeks or a hundred hour weeks and that is ultimately bad for customer service. But there's this incentive like if I work more then I earn more, and they collectively decided to cap that to make sure that people create a healthy work-life balance.

Speaker 2:

Right, that's interesting, and they're recruiting younger and more dedicated team members as well.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think this model really is attractive to younger talent.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, I think this model really is attractive to younger talent, a lot of the newer generations have been growing up in a less hierarchical way, like with a mindset of high levels of autonomy, and I think that's what you can get if you work here, so they don't have any problems finding the best talent, because people line to want to work there. Nice and I. I did find it interesting the, the shareholders. So you know, like in American law firms you had you have equity partners and that sort of thing and and they capped at the number of years to be a shareholder and I'm I'm wondering what, what, what is the reasoning behind that? What's the? Can you give us some insight in that?

Speaker 3:

That is also because they want to get more talent into the door. So if you're joining a relatively small law firm and you know that the shareholders are there and that the shareholder pool is not growing, then you don't have the perspective to eventually become a shareholder. So that's why after, I believe, after 13 years, the shareholder have to give back their shares. They can still work there, but somebody else can take that position. So it's not something that you don't buy yourself into the company, but the shares are given to you and if you are a shareholder and you meet the criteria of having enough customer base to sustain a group of people, then you can do that. But yeah, it's kept. It's creating a rotation that I think is healthy because it gives people opportunity that that may not have the opportunity otherwise.

Speaker 3:

And it might and it might then leave the firm because they want to become a shareholder Right. So that's, that's right. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Right, I mean, I like the. I like the idea that it helps you consistently bring in new talent, so you're also keeping a business more dynamic and bringing in. You know you could be servicing a lot more and more diverse clients and you know, instead of it all being the and the old boys club at the top of the ladder, you know you're constantly getting new blood in. I love that. How are you seeing it in in other industries? I know you're you're doing this in in other industries in addition to loan firms.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly yeah. So these kinds of principles they work across every industry. It's often we hear like, yeah, but we are, for example, a highly regulated company, maybe a financial company, with lots of laws and regulations, and this won't work for us. Well, we've seen it work everywhere and I think it works everywhere because they are connected to some of the basic human needs and human principles that we have. It basically says more about the absurdity of most of the traditional management models that we've been dealing with, rather than people are. So some people are surprised about these management methods, but in the end, it's how people have worked together in groups thousands of years ago, Like there was no.

Speaker 3:

For a long time there was no formal hierarchy. Sure, there were leaders, absolutely, but those leaders would lose their position if they were not doing the right thing right. So, like the literal meaning of leader means that somebody is. You know, you're only a leader if somebody follows you. So if nobody follows you, you're not a leader. And that has been skewed by this idea of positional managerial authority that we have in most corporations these days, where you are appointed to a certain spot and you're given a lot of authority by default. Nobody has authority until it's given to them, which is an interesting perspective as well, or a principle that I think should be turned upside down. And, yeah, that creates lots of unhealthy dynamics where some leaders are not doing the right thing or are not really good for their people, or they're only to satisfy their own personal needs and do not care that much about either employees or customers. So, yeah, I think we've seen adoption of these ideas across industries, and I think that's one of the reasons for it.

Speaker 2:

Excellent. Now thinking about, say, you're a mid-sized company with three or four partners or shareholders. As you look at it, what would be the beginning process to get this started if you wanted to say, say, flatten the organizational chart and get everybody involved?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think. I think the really good thing to start with is transparency, and a lot of people preach transparency but but to actually do it is is sometimes scary and and and it's really about creating an open book system where everybody can see the P&L of the whole organization. That may require some education, where you teach people how to read a P&L to understand what are all these costs. I think that's the first step into creating a sense of ownership across the organization, because then people know, oh, this is where all the overhead costs are going to.

Speaker 2:

And so now they don't think it's all going in the owner's pocket, exactly.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, it helps. It really helps, because then people can become more cost conscious and I think if you look at the law firm case that we talked about, that is the main thing that they've been focusing on. They've not been focusing too much on revenue, but they're focusing a lot about costs and tracking costs so that they can.

Speaker 2:

Right, yeah, I did notice. They mentioned that quite a bit about keeping their costs down, and they're all cost conscious but giving good service as well, and you're seeing that. So, in the long run, what we're seeing here is the lack of without having burnout, so you're avoiding burnout. Is that because of this particular firm capping out the hours, or is it this process, this flattening the org chart, that helps to eliminate burnout?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's a mix of things. So people can work for really long hours if they're super engaged and happy at the place they work at. So it's not only about limiting the amount of hours that somebody can bill. It's definitely a helpful part of it, but so it's both the hours and the level of engagement. So if you work at a workplace where you have a sense of autonomy but so you're not all every day being told what to do and what not to do, you don't have to ask for permission for everything. That's helpful. The other thing which is helpful is having a sense of ownership, which is like this company is partially mine, because every decision we make here has an impact on my bottom line, my personal revenue.

Speaker 3:

So I care about this thing and if everybody in the organization has the same sense of that they care about this thing, then you can create a community where people are supportive and supportive of each other, and that really helps. So it's a mix of those things. The other thing is that they have decided not to create any management layers, so that you also don't get some of the bad management behaviors that you sometimes have. So that also really helps. So the mix of those things makes a company thrive, it makes the people in there be interested in their job and it reduces burnout and increases retention.

Speaker 2:

It is very interesting because we did talk about people being put in management roles and assigned that and some just are not leaders, and that is the big difference there and the transparency. I think a lot of people would be afraid of transparency and I think you can see both sides of that. You know they don't want you to see the bottom line of what the profit is, but at the same time it does give other members of the team more perspective to know what expenses are going on, Because I think if you have never been an entrepreneur, you have no concept of what risks are involved and what the costs are.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, people will probably appreciate the risks a bit more. If it's more transparent, it makes conversations easier. It might create some hard conversations, but also, you know like people will gossip about each other's salary anyway, so why not just open it up? And it might uncover some inequalities in how in your in, in how you decided about who gets what salary. And I think it's it's, it's only healthy to have that conversation and to to get rid of those inequalities and, um, you know, increases the ability for everyone to make those salaries, independent of your, your background or your gender, for example, which which has been a thing in in some workplaces.

Speaker 3:

And the other thing you said about management roles, I think I just want to say I'm definitely not against appointing leaders or having certain leadership roles with a certain responsibility. I think in some cases that can be super healthy. But the way to make it even more healthy is to have those roles be elected by the group. So perhaps if you want to have a I don't know head of HR or, depending on what it is that you need, imagine it's the head of HR of a law firm why not hold an election and say, hey, who can actually fulfill that role best? Just assuming it's not a full-time job that you hire somebody into, but maybe it's a role that somebody can hold for a while. Let's talk about what we expect from that role, let's talk about who could hold it, and you can set a term six months, 12 months and after 12, six or 12 months you reevaluate and maybe then it then it's so. That means you can lose your role if you're not doing well, and people can elect someone else. Wow.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's great, that. That is very interesting and.

Speaker 3:

I guess when you think about that, if you decide to move into the unblocked way and you go into the transparency, you'll find out very quickly there's people that their I want to say morals, but that's not the word levels of transparency is not for everyone. It also creates a burden. You know, honestly, if you show up at a workplace and you suddenly have to think about all the costs and all the potential decisions and you have to create a proposal to change something, you know some people just enjoy outsourcing that problem to their manager, basically, and say you know what? I just complained to you and you fixed that problem for me. Right, okay, let's, and I can just focus on my work. That is okay.

Speaker 3:

It's a. It's a different flavor and there's probably something in between that could be healthy. Where it's like you don't have to not, you don't have to involve everyone for everything. You can kind of elect a committee of people If you especially if you're growing, like this law firm is only 25 people, but if it's 50 or 100, it becomes harder to sustain an organization where everybody's involved in everything. So you definitely want to create groups we like to call them circles or sub-teams that are appointed with a certain domain of problem space that they have the authority to make decisions about, and then it becomes a little bit more like a traditional structure. However, everything is still transparent and things can be changed really quickly if needed. So, yeah, it's not for everyone.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but this is incredibly interesting. It's almost like having your entire culture of entrepreneurs working together. Yeah, that's what it is.

Speaker 3:

And I think law firms are especially a good fit for that. Lawyers are used to having their own clientele, basically running their own little mini business inside the bigger framework. So why not treat everyone as an entrepreneur? If you want everybody to be entrepreneurial, well, you should actually give them the opportunity to do so.

Speaker 2:

Exactly.

Speaker 3:

So your book Unblock. It goes through this whole process explaining it. Does it also give you stepping stones if you wanted to transition to that where it's like okay, so imagine you're having a hard time making decisions more quickly. The book offers lots of advice and so you basically skip to the chapter about decision-making and you start reading there. Some people might want to work on psychological safety and improving the ability for people to give and receive feedback. Well, there's. Then you skip to that chapter and you work on that. So it's a modular book and it focuses on six different areas where you can improve your organization, but a lot of the underlying principles that we talked about are in there. Also, if you don't want to go all the way because 99% of companies are not really ready and willing to fully give authority to everyone like the law firm case that we talked about but are definitely willing to make some steps in that direction, and the book is really for them, you know it offers lots of ideas of where to start.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I did notice in that that it was broken down into those different parts so you can go straight to what you're interested in working on. Yeah, exactly, I like that, and you can get the book at unlockbooknet.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly, it's on Amazon as well, if you want to go there directly. So, yeah, it should be easy to find in your well at Amazon. It's nowhere else Like everything is on Amazon these days, so it is on Amazon, correct.

Speaker 2:

Excellent. Well, it's quite interesting and I hope people go out and get your book and just see what you can do to make your business more transparent and make it get people more engaged. You're going to grow if your team is more engaged. I know that I'm especially willing to catch up with you and connect with you. Where would be the best place for them to do that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can punch in my first and last name and I also offer a newsletter and the link is on my personal website, juriankamercom.

Speaker 2:

Okay, great, and I'll make sure we have those links in the show notes. So this has been a very interesting conversation. I love the idea of unblock, clearing the way for results and develop a thriving organization. That's great. Thank you so much for your time today. This has been interesting.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, marilyn, I loved the conversation.

Speaker 4:

Thanks for joining me today for this episode. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you find value here, I'd love it if you would rate it and review it. That really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast. Second, you can connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about. And if you're ready to take the next step with a digital strategist to help you grow your law firm, I'd be honored to help you. Just go to lawmarketingzonecom to book a call with me. Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, thanks for listening to Leadership in Law podcast and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Leadership in Law podcast with host Marilyn Jenkins. Cut through the noise, get actionable insights and inspiring stories delivered straight to your ears your ultimate podcast for navigating the ever-changing world of law firm ownership. In each episode, we dive deep into the critical topics that matter most to you, from unlocking explosive growth to building a thriving team. We connect you with successful firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard-won wisdom. So, whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership in Law podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice. You

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