The #FollowFriday Conference is quickly approaching and that has the LISI team thinking of the Key Pillars of #FollowFriday. Taryn Elliott, Director of Client Success + Marketing, Ann Caskey, Legal Content Writer + Editor, and Rae Ritter, Director of Client Service + Marketing, discuss three of the pillars — collaboration, innovation, and support — and their importance in our professional and personal lives.

Taryn:

Hey everybody, welcome to our livestream. This week, we are doing a Three Things and we are talking about collaboration, innovation, and support. If you don’t know the #FollowFriday Conference, which is being led by Robyn Addis, we’ll be coming up here on International Women’s Day. I think that is March 8th. And as part of that, we are here talking today about collaboration, innovation, and support which are three of the pillars of the #FollowFriday Conference. In the coming week, you will be seeing blog posts come out from each of us on each of those topics, but we thought we would dig into each of those and the importance they play, not just in our professional lives, but our personal lives.

So I’m Taryn Elliot, the Director of Client Success and Marketing here at LISI and I am joined today on this livestream by Ann Caskey, the Legal Content Editor and Writer at LISI, and Rae Ritter, the Director of Client Service and Marketing. So welcome ladies, thank you so much for joining me today.

Rae:

Hi there.

Taryn:

We all wear green for good luck or for the Philly’s fan of which Rae is the only one of us who resides in Philly at the moment.

Rae:

Eagles!

Taryn:

Green for the Eagles, so very exciting couple of weeks. Very animated chats in the LISI team chats as there are a lot of Eagles fans in our team chats. So, I think maybe we should change our LISI logo to green for the next two weeks. I’ll get that approved by Robyn and get Leslie right on that. Well, rather than talking about the weather or our green, let’s jump right in.

These are three topics that I’m really excited about. I know the three of us, were all excited to be able to write about them and I think that we’ll have a lot to talk about, a lot to share. These are three things that are important to us at any point in our life, we were talking just before we got on about, you know, some of us with kids, like sometimes these are things we’re having as conversations with teens or tweens or you know, how we handled things in college. So it’s not something that you just deal with in your professional life, that you just deal with at a certain age, but the importance of collaboration, innovation, and support at all parts of your life.

So our first topic is collaboration, that’s our first thing today. And Rae is going to jump into the topic of collaboration for us. So Rae, whenever you’re ready.

Rae:

Thanks. So I thought it was interesting where you were talking about the Eagles and you know, we’re headed to the Super Bowl, so we’re stoked about that. But I mean, it’s a clear example of collaboration, like all of the people on the offense, the defense, special teams, like all having to work together when they’re out on the field, off the field, like all the coaches, all the, I mean, the fans, right, like it’s has to be all these things going on at the same time, all working and striving for this common goal. And if you didn’t have collaboration, I mean, I think I saw some stuff in the news about another team where players were upset at each other for one thing or another. I mean, in the end, it’s all about collaboration and working together to really get to that common goal.

And when we first talked about this topic, actually the first thing that came to my mind was not the Eagles, but it was, you know, in high school and getting assigned those group projects and you have to be on a group and you get assigned your classmates. And I hated that because I always thought like, oh, like there’s gonna be a weak link on our group and they’re gonna bring our grade down and I’m gonna have to work extra hard like to maintain it. And it just was not, I think, not my strong suit at that time to work in a team for school, even though I was an athlete and on the field, it was like right in my wheelhouse.

But, so that kind of led me to this, with this subject matter to think about, well, you know why, you know, we at LISI talk a lot about like, let’s not have a meeting for the sake of a meeting. You know, let’s not collaborate for the sake of collaboration, but what are the true reasons that you would want to collaborate? And you know, just as I thought about that, it kind of brought up some things that maybe are not so top of mind. You know, one that I thought was pretty important is building and strengthening relationships. That’s certainly important within your organization or perhaps you have an opportunity to collaborate with someone outside your organization. Maybe it’s a service provider or maybe it’s a peer at another firm on a speak engagement or a panel or something like that. And in collaborating on a common goal, on a project, on a program, you will naturally strengthen your relationship with them and then be able to tap that relationship and build on it for future things. So that’s one reason I thought that collaboration is so important.

Another with respect to projects, like within your organization is earning buy-in. So something that came to mind for that was if you are trying to get something, let’s say like a budget approved, getting the other folks who would benefit from that involved from the start so that they collaborate early on and then they’re already in, they’re already supporters of the project from the very beginning because you’ve included them from the beginning. Another, it’s probably one of the most obvious reasons, like why would you collaborate is to get more diverse experience perspectives, and skills. Because there’s probably people in your team who you think, well, we, you know, we had a similar path, we had similar education in our background and then we worked in maybe similar types of firms.

So we’re really coming at this from the same angle, whatever your challenge is or your project or whatever. But the truth is you do have different perspectives and by collaborating on something, you are kind of broadening the scope for what you’ll do on that project. And I was thinking of like a Venn diagram, it’s not the part in the middle that’s the important part of collaboration, it’s like the circles take up more space so you have more access to more points of view and perspective than, and skills, candidly, I think of the, within our team at LISI, we have this broad group of really smart people, but folks have different skill sets.

So when we work together, I think that really results in a better end product. And then a couple other things that I thought were kind of interesting is, especially in context of the #FollowFriday Conference, you know, when you collaborate with other folks, you have the opportunity to grow yourself and to learn from other people’s styles or techniques or there could be, I mean, it could be like really rote skills, like learning how to do something very technical by collaborating with someone or just what is someone’s project style and then you’re growing through collaboration.

And kind of the flip side of that, if you collaborate with folks on your team who are perhaps not as tenured as you, you have an opportunity to really raise up other people when you collaborate with them and teach them something, you know, your experience and share your experience. So I think, it seems kind of intuitive, we should collaborate, but if your knee-jerk reaction is like, oh, Jesus, it’s going to take longer or it’s going to be harder, it’s still, probably there’s probably a lot more benefit than not. So think back to that high school project. I think in the end probably the teacher who assigned the groups was thinking, some variety of these things. Maybe that weak link is brought up and is learning from their peers or maybe I was gaining some perspective from other folks as well. I hope so. So.

Taryn:

I am a firm believer that they do group projects because as I say to my, as an adult now having done them and having kids, I’m always like, you need to learn how to work with people. Not a day goes by that we don’t somehow need to work as a team. Whether that is day-to-day and on the work we do for LISI, whether that is in the evenings with your spouse or your partner about raising your kids, whether that’s at a board meeting for a charity that you are volunteering for, like whatever it is. I mean, it can be planning a vacation with your best friend, like you still need to work and from a professional perspective. But really any of those things, and you kind of talked about this, I think one of the best things about collaboration is that you bring your different styles and your different perspectives and not just to learn from it, but to make sure that everything is covered.

So I know we talked on the LISI team, Rae and I have a pretty similar approach to new projects, to new things that we’re taking on, whereas a couple other members of our team have the opposite approach and it’s really important for all of us together to bring that balance to have all those pieces together so that way if it was just Rae and I, we would probably spend a lot of time talking through things. And what might be for some people a one-month launch would probably be a three-month launch for us as we covered every single thing. Whereas some other members of our team would have it launched two weeks later and then be like, “Ooh, crap, didn’t think of a couple of those things and now we need to adjust on the fly.” And it’s finding that middle ground because I feel like 2020 was the year that I was like, we’re better together, we’re better together.

Rae:

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep, the outcome is definitely better together.

Ann:

More and more with our team as well, that even on projects that there may be a core group of people that are collaborating together in the team, they’ll reach out to our wider LSI team. You know, we’ll have a chat where like, what’s your opinion on this image for this marketing campaign? And there’ve been quite a few instances there where someone else has come in with, no, that’s really no good because that’s really associated with this other thing which is not PC or from my personal experience, that’s really triggering and I don’t think you should use that for that personal injury campaign. And there have been a lot of kinda life experiences and just life knowledge because we do all have different backgrounds that we really draw on as a broader team.

Rae:

Yeah, and I think the other thing is you have to be careful to avoid groupthink. You think, well, I’m being agreeable or I’m going along with everything, we’re all rowing in the same direction. But in the end, the benefit is bringing another perspective and flagging something that might seem, like you said, triggering or problematic for some reason that someone else just didn’t even know about or it didn’t kind of raise a flag for them.

Taryn:

Yeah. And I think that says a lot about building the team and learning how to have those conversations that it’s a safe environment for somebody to say, “I don’t agree with that for this reason or have you considered this? I know it might not be popular, but I wanna make sure that we talk it through” because if I’m thinking it, someone else might be thinking it as well, whether that is someone on our team or a client and I just had this conversation with a friend the other day like learning how to have those conversations and the language to use so that way we can get to the best outcome versus like what you said group think, ’cause everybody is like, “Oh, well, if I say that, I’m just gonna get yelled at or I’m probably the only one so I don’t wanna speak up. Like that has its own set of problems.

But part of those problems is, I don’t wanna say dysfunction of the team, but a slight mismatch of the team if you don’t feel like you can say that and that actually speaks a lot to leadership as well, which also we’ll get a lot of at #FollowFriday. But even when you’re younger, just kind of starting to learn how to have that language around, I wanna share this perspective and let’s talk about it so that way we have a path forward that is the right path forward for our group.

Well, thank you Rae for talking about collaboration. Our second thing this week is going to be innovation, and innovation is the topic that I tackled. And I’m not gonna lie, I signed up for it and then I was like, ooh, you know, like you think team, you think a lot of things, you think collaboration, you think support, all those kind of things. And my first thought when I thought innovation was like these big ideas and things that changed the world and that was really scary for me. And I kind of sat with that for a while.

I looked up the definition of innovation, innovation is a new idea method, or device, it’s a novelty or it’s the introduction of something new. And when I really kind of started thinking about how innovation impacts our lives on a day-to-day basis and its importance, I really got comfortable with the idea that innovation is the big and the little things, it can be something that you develop in your professional life, it can be something you develop in your personal life. It doesn’t have to be like, “Ooh, I invented the automobile and changed the world.” It can be something as simple as I approached billing for our projects differently and now I offer another alternative and that’s a differentiator. And that’s a real-world example from someone I know where they made a different approach to how they were billing clients and it opened up a whole new realm of reasons why people might hire that firm. It was meeting a need in the marketplace that no one else was seeing at the time.

And I think that’s really important to wrap your head around that innovation can be anything as long as it’s a new idea, a new method, or a new device. And you know, it’s really woven into, like I said, everything we do, it’s the products you develop at work, it’s the careers you carve out, it’s the way you show up for your friends and your family, it’s how you contribute to your communities. It can be how you parent a child, how you lead a meeting like we were just talking about. But what innovation isn’t is falling back into the familiar patterns that we all know or it’s taking the easiest path forward and doing what’s always done. And I know for a lot of my peers, the kiss of death is when you’re sitting in a meeting and someone says, “But we’ve always done it this way. That’s just what we do.” And that’s an instance where innovation isn’t happening and that’s actually the perfect time to take a step back and ask what I think is the primary tenet of innovation is, what is another way we can achieve our desired outcome.

And what I really ask myself a lot and I’ll say this to my team or to my husband or to some of the committees I serve on is, and this is a hard conversation to sometimes have, but like some version of this isn’t working or we might think this is working, but the perception is that something is broken about this and instead of piling on all the negativity about why that is, like let’s leave that there and let’s take a step back and like really, like the only goal here is to think of another way to approach this. So like we know that that’s what we need, we know we need a solution that gets us to the same outcome or possibly even a better outcome. But that’s all we’re thinking about right now is how can we do this?

And honestly, like that doesn’t generally happen in that meeting and it doesn’t happen because you did a whiteboard or mind mapping like usually, it’s on the drive home or in the shower the next morning, you’re like, oh, this is a new approach. And then it’s having that conversation and that collaboration and as we’ll get two in a minute that support among a team to say, “Oh there is a different way that we can do this” and we’re better for it, because that innovation, it sets us up for success, which is important, you know, the world is constantly evolving, it’s constantly changing and if we don’t change, we risk becoming stagnant. But it’s what differentiates us. I

t’s the thing that somebody can say, “Ooh, she’s doing it different or he’s doing it different, or that company is doing it different.” I wanna learn more about that, I wanna be a part of that. And you know, I think sometimes, like in my own world, I learned that there was a different way to tie your shoes when I had small children. Like it was an innovation. I had no idea there were other ways to tie your shoe. And I was able to teach my very young child to tie his shoes and I was like, oh, this is great. And now it allows me to have my own kid tie his shoes every day. And that saved, part of the stress of getting out of the house in the morning with a four-year-old and a two-year-old. And then it was something that like people are like, “Oh, your kid ties his shoes in a different way, tell me more about that.” And then it made somebody else’s life easier and we didn’t create the automobile, we didn’t create A.I., we didn’t create all of the uses that people have come up with A.I., we just learned how to tie our shoes in a different way and it still serves him 10 years later even though I tried teaching him the normal way. But innovation can be really hard.

And so I think part of figuring out how to incorporate innovation in your life is thinking through like what you can do for that. So part of incorporating innovation is setting and managing goals in order to manage your future. It can be short-term goals, long-term goals, like reach for the stars, or even like very small things, like I’m going to do my laundry on Monday every week. So it’s done for the week. Another thing that I think is really important about innovation is to just open yourself up to other ideas. Read, have discussions with people, listen to podcasts, watch TED Talks, like whatever it might be. And not just in you know, your narrow field or in your narrow community but everywhere because that’s the best place to find ideas that you can then say, “Ooh, if I just make these few tweaks or combine these couple things, I can do something revolutionary in my life.”

Learn something new. I think it’s kind of like being open but like just practicing the skill of learning something because really that’s what innovation is, it’s learning something and applying it somewhere else. But be open to failure. Like I think that is one of the things that can kind of turn people off from trying something new to trying to innovate is that there is the risk of failure. And using Rae’s sports analogy earlier and we’ll go with football teams, there’s a couple other really good examples, football teams don’t run the same plays every year. They don’t throw the ball the same way. They’re working to come up with different ways, ways that’ll get them to the end zone faster, or ways that will make them kick further, whatever it is, like that’s their innovation, that’s their differentiator. They might fail, but if they succeed, the payoff can be great, so.

And finally strive to be the best version of yourself, whether it’s at work or at home, your personal life, whatever you’re doing. Like life’s too short to not constantly be saying like, “How can I make this better so that way the time I have is enjoyable no matter what I’m doing.” So innovation, it’s imperative for success, but honestly like it just makes things better, and it’s really easy to implement on a small scale if you’re just open to the thoughts on it.

Rae:

And one thing you said that kind of struck me, innovation doesn’t have to be a net new thing, it can be a new way of doing something, like you said with the shoelace example. You didn’t invent shoelaces or tying your shoes, you just started applying a different technique to something in a new way. So I think that’s something interesting ’cause like when, we talk about like, oh, our website is innovative or something, like, well, we didn’t invent the website, we didn’t invent the concept of animation, we didn’t invent the concept of branding, but doing things in a new way. And one other thing I wanted to add that struck me about what you’re saying, if something is failing, then you need to innovate to fix it. I think even more difficult than that is if something is succeeding but you could innovate to make it better, or like that it’s satisfying the need, but is there an opportunity to succeed, to innovate and make it even better? I think that’s, it can be harder to find buy-in when you’re trying to kind of take it up a notch if it’s always worked, if we’ve always done it that way. So there’s definitely challenges like to innovate.

Taryn:

And I think that’s something I struggled with when I was sitting down to work on this concept is it doesn’t have to be, you know, to your point big, it doesn’t have to be fixing something that’s irretrievably broken and it’s still finding that motivation though to make those changes and kind of what’s the root of that. So I’m not saying you have to sit down and be like, “I’m gonna go from coordinator to C.E.O. and here’s my big plan.” It’s as simple as, I wanna move to the next level or I want to learn a new skill so what I’m doing today is even better and really sitting and getting comfortable with that because that, yes, to your point, success is probably the biggest barrier to innovation. And as I was working on this in my notes, and I’ll talk about this a little bit, like one of the worst things is like we didn’t see it coming, but you don’t necessarily have to see it coming, but you have to be innovating so that way you can adjust, and have that culture of innovation, so that way when you are in those situations where you’re like, “Ooh, there’s a threat here”, however big or small, you’re comfortable with working through how to get past that.

Ann:

This is gonna sound like a total plug, but in looking at the #FollowFriday Conference and listening to everything you’re saying, there are so many features of the conference that I really think Robins thought innovatively about. From the idea that it’s not limited to one industry, We’re all used to industry conferences, but it has people from across all industries, women and allies from across all industries and look features like, I know they’re organized in a room for nursing mothers, a separate private room for that. I love the feature of having like mock interviews, they have interview panels for people at all levels. And that was another thing is the fact that it’s for people at every level of an industry, whether you’re just starting out, doing an M.B.A., reentering the workforce as I did, or people at the highest levels of leadership in an organization, Like they’ve really thought about how to cater to all these people while also giving them the opportunity to network with each other and collaborate, and kind of support each other through the day. So.

Taryn:

Yeah, just simple changes, innovative ways to do things, things you learn somewhere else that you can apply in a way to what you’re doing. So I really love that about the #FollowFriday Conference and really seeing kind of how we’ve all been weaving this. I think we’ve probably had a greater awareness about this, as we’ve been building our team, and holding each other accountable to asking those questions as well. So that brings us to our third thing for this week and that is support. And so I’ll let Ann share where she is thinking about support right now.

Ann:

Yes, well, I am, I took on the task of thinking about supportiveness and for me, I immediately thought about kind of my personal support network though there really is a very personal and a professional side to this. And what I thought about as well was through the Covid pandemic, that separation completely exploded. Everybody suddenly needed this huge overlap in their personal and their professional support networks. B

ut for me, again, my personal support network was the first one I thought of and such is the friend who kinda swooped in to take my kids for the day on a, when I had an unexpected snow day a few days before I had to set the bar exam and swooped them off, like what would I have done otherwise? Or the friend who just listened to me as I suffered through studying for the bar exam while she was going through kind of reentering the workforce as well, who incidentally is speaking at the #FollowFriday Conference, Megan Davis Hill.

So a great friend and a great speaker, former lawyer, and now a writer. So she was part of my personal network without whom I may not have been able to regain that professional side of my life and come back to the work for it. And the other thing that randomly kind of came to my mind when I was thinking about supportiveness was a story I heard a while back of staffers at the White House back in the Obama administration, female staffers who took on this policy amongst themselves in meetings that when one of them said something, the other one would then repeat it and credit the original speaker with what they said. It was this amplification policy. And so by doing that, they were amplifying each other’s voices because the men very much had a stronger presence and a stronger voice in the room. And it really worked over the months and the years to give women a greater role in that administration and in those meetings.

And I thought it was really, it was such a simple thing to do and I love to see that those women were supporting each other to raise up women as a whole. And in kind of looking that story back up, I came across the fact that female senators have actually had quarterly bipartisan dinners for years. They’ve all gotten together, it has broken down in the more polarized political atmosphere we’ve had in recent elections. But they for years got together every quarter to meet and discuss and support each other despite the fact they were from opposite sides of the aisle.

When I just think that’s huge and it’s something we should be doing in every sphere, but my kind of thoughts and my personal stories weren’t the only ones I wanted to think about for this. So I did collaborate and reach out to other people to find out their experiences and their examples of support or lack of support. And then it was interesting the things that people came back with, like one was really kinda the boss perspective. You said it can be as simple as saying, “you did a good job,” which is when your supervisor, when you’re superior tells you, “you’ve done a good job, like keep doing it.” It really lifts you up and keeps you going or what can I do to help you?

And that is really where the overlap of professional and personal I think can come in because what can I do to help you from your boss or from your peer can mean like for my own personal experience, I need to just stop, like I had the experience in LISI where I have to jump on a plane ’cause I have a sick parent. I just need everybody to take everything. And LISI, my team jumped in and did that. That support allows me to still work and allowed me to spend family time, you know, it’s huge and I think women, especially of the sandwich generation looking after kids and parents really need to lean on support like that and need to have that available to them in their working and their personal lives.

One story I loved from a woman who has been working for many years, this story goes back over 20 years and which is relevant, because she was really starting out in her career and she was working with a small team who really supported her, trained her and they’re all a little older and more experienced and were really helping her along. But the day came when she had to go into her boss to tell ’em she was pregnant with her first child. And for a lot of people that can be nerve-wracking ’cause they don’t know what their reaction is gonna be. And she had two meal bosses and their reaction was to say, “Take as much time as you need, we will be here, we will support you.” She took a year of extended maternity leave, they supported her all through it. She wasn’t ready to come back. They’re in remote work, part-time work, and this was over 20 years ago when remote work was certainly not a thing and the technology wasn’t there for it either. And she said that that really determined her career path and really made a difference for her and how she would treat other people going forward as well. And what you would expect out of jobs going forward when you’ve had that kind of supportive atmosphere. It really made her feel comfortable in her own self and her own career and her own personal life.

The last thing I want to mention was not about being made feel comfortable and supported, is being made uncomfortable and supported. And I’ll call you out on this Taryn, because you did say it to me about how support can sometimes mean pushing you out of your comfort zone and encouraging you to do something that maybe you’re not really feeling too comfortable doing, for example, speaking on a live podcast or a livestream. But when you have the team or the boss there behind you to say, “Look, you can do this, you’ve got this and we’re here. If things can start to fall apart, it’s okay, we’re here, you’ve got this.” That support can be just as important pushing you outta your comfort zone to keep succeeding and kinda raise you up.

Rae:

I think that’s interesting. One thing that you said that made me just think of this like that we be looking for ways to support each other, that like to seek out those opportunities to raise up other people. And I think it’s something we probably do sometimes, but we should probably pull up to the top of the list to put that, to look for, I mean, think about like little things in your day-to-day, like opening the door for someone pushing a stroller or something or like helping, whatever, helping a person that you see. But in the workplace, not only in your own organization but in peer firms, peer organizations looking for ways to help other people. Like, hey, this might be a good person on this speaking panel that might be the like not so comfort zone or I have this potential lead, I have like a referral for you. If I give it to you, it’ll like really make you look great at work. Like I think that’s a great thing to keep top of mind.

Taryn:

And I like what you said about the Obama administration and the point of amplifying people’s voices. I mean, #FollowFriday is of course discusses women, but it is for anyone and there is a lot of talk about women amplifying women’s voices, but it’s really important no matter who you are, sometimes you just need somebody to say, “Yes, I hear you and I’m going to spread this far and wide.” And kind of related to that as well and to what you were saying about how we support people, one of the things that I’ve always heard is praise publicly and like reprimand privately and we don’t need to talk about the reprimanding part, although there are a lot of really good way, there’s a lot to talk to unpack there too, and a lot of ways that you can do that right, and a lot of ways you can do that wrong, but praising people publicly is something I always tried to do. Like, oh, I’m really glad that you liked that blog, you know, that was so-and-so’s idea, or something as simple as, we did a small video for our holiday card and it was our intern. And I said, you know, like, I want to raise her up. And like, so it very deliberately to the entire team said, “We’re launching this and great work to our intern” and by name. And I think those are kind of small ways that we can support people.

And then of course there are bigger ways too to get people to be the best versions of themselves, whether professionally or even personally like having dinner with some girlfriends and be like, “Hey, did you know so-and-so did this really cool thing at work” because she’s not gonna talk about it. I randomly knew about it for whatever reason. And I just think to Rae’s point, if we incorporate these things in big and small ways in our life and it doesn’t take time or effort to do that, like that’s how we get to a place where people feel seen, where people feel supported, where people feel their hard work has paid off, and it acknowledged that they have contributed something.

So. Well, I want to thank both of you for your support and collaboration on this livestream. Even a little a bit of innovation, we kind of went in a slightly different direction from how we normally do this, but I love how it turned out. I love how we accomplished the goals we set up to accomplish, we did it in a little bit different way. So the #FollowFriday Conference, you can register for it online now, It is March 8th, 2023 in Philadelphia. And we would love to see all of you there. We hope you enjoyed this podcast. Thanks again to Ann and Rae for joining me this week. I know I’ve kind of been slowly pushing them out of their comfort zones to get them here, but.

I’m really excited, and I do that because someone lovingly did that to me too. But I’m really excited with you know, what we’ve done and I hope to see all of you next week on our “Ask Me Anything” livestream. Dan Martin and I will be answering all your questions about podcasts. So I hope that everyone has a great weekend and we’ll see you here next week. Bye everybody.