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Today we’re excited to share a presentation by Jay Henderson from MaxLawCon 2021! Tune in to learn all about how to maximize your potential.

Jay is a performance & leadership expert, speaker, and author of The Ultimate Guide to Hiring Super-Stars in Any Small Business. He is also the creator of the 5 Shifts to Greater Profits – a proven method that accelerates any business result you seek. Jay is one of the most sought-after leadership performance consultants and hiring experts in the country, regularly speaking at national conventions for business leaders.

1:56 interference everywhere

5:15 what made the difference

9:03 three core decision making dimensions

13:17 we need high standards

16:43 go in with a new KPI

20:01 problem with my profits

24:18 wrong focus, not enough trust

27:03 you need that gap

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Transcript: 4 Key Steps to Make KPI’s Work for You w/ Jay Henderson

Becca Eberhart
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2021. Keep listening to hear Jay Henderson as we share his talk four key steps to make KPIs work for you. You can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Have you grabbed your ticket to this year’s conference? If not head to max law con 2020 two.com to get yours today. Now to the episode,

Speaker 2
run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum liar podcast, podcast your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson nutrix. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Jay Henderson
I’m gonna talk about KPIs a little bit. Yay. KPI is fun. So you have more potential than you’re currently utilizing. I’ve objectively measured over 18,000 people and how they think and make decisions and their performance capacity. So I have objective data that you have more potential than you’re currently utilizing. Your team has more potential than they are currently utilizing your business. Of course, as a result, your firm has more potential than you’re currently utilizing. Who here knows what KPIs are? Key Performance Indicators? Why do we want to have key performance indicators? We want them because they focus people focus is the absolute OS call it mother virtue, if you will, as it pertains to performance and getting the best out of people. The big problem is that there’s interference everywhere. interference, one word that represents everything that gets in the way and blocks focus blocks performance, and minimizes our access to our potential. Okay, it’s everywhere, right? We all know this. It’s some of the stuff Jim and, you know, they’re just talking about, it’s like, we’ve got to have that focus so we can grow. I want to give you an example of focus. So I studied sports psychology for 30 years, just because I love it. I study it because I learned that they had all the research and information and knowledge about how people learn and how people take their learning and translate that into performance. There’s a whole process that goes on, and can people access their performance. Right. So this is Rory McIlroy, pro golfer. All right. 2011 Masters, he was 22 years old, already made millions of dollars already one of the best golfers in the world. Okay, he’s in the masters. He goes through the first round. They want He leads by five shots. That’s a big deal. The media isn’t really gonna get into that right they to leads by eight shots. Day three, eight shots. Day four loses by 14 shots. Now to go from an eight shot lead to a 14 shot loss is a massive colossal choke. Right? And that choke happened because of interference. What interference? What here’s a 22 year old kid that’s about to become a Masters champion. Yeah, his name will be held in the record books of golf forever. The 2011 Masters champ. He’ll get a five year exemption on the PGA Tour, which means he doesn’t have to qualify for anything. He’ll win $1,200,000 get the trophy name everywhere. Go on to make millions and millions of dollars and endorsements. Well, I’m sure that on that day, judging by what happened. He couldn’t find his shorts with both hands. His mind was so cluttered with thoughts that he should not have been having, but could not help. But half. He’d never been in that position. He’d never been in that experience. And it was just it’s just a big big deal. Fast forward two months. Two months later. Rory tees off at the US masters in June. Lead three shots, day two, five shots, day three, six shots. Everyone’s wondering the media’s like what’s going to happen. Remember Roy’s massive choke is it going to perform or what’s going to happen? Day four wins by eight shots. Unbelievable shift and performance. Would you agree? Right. How did he do that? Okay. He reduced the interference through focus. And I know that because as the media does, they interviewed him, right after the round. They said, Rory, wow, phenomenal, congratulations. What made the difference? Here’s his answer. It’s gonna sound silly, he said. But it was two words, process and spot. He said, on my long shots, I focused entirely on the process. What he means by that is his pre shot routine, every champion, every high level surgeon, high level attorney, trial attorney, every medical doctor, the best have pre meeting, pre de pre event routines that they go through that put them in the proper mental and emotional and physical state of being that they need to be in to access their very best. He said, spot was for my potting, I picked a spot. And my whole goal was to roll the ball over that spot. So his mission all day, in order to reduce interference, so that what did not happen two months earlier would not happen again. Two words, focus on two things all day, process and spy. Did he do more than two things all day? Absolutely. He had a ton of things to handle and take care of and think about. But he picked two specific areas of focus that could create the control of his mind that he needed to access his very best when he needed it. All right. This is a really, really key thing. And you and your team have just a plethora of things to do all day long. Fair. How many of you feel that there’s interference is a real thing? Is interference a real thing? Right? Okay. Law Firm interference. There is extra external interference. And there’s well, external would be too many goals. What do I focus on? If I have 10 KPIs, I’ve got to pay attention to all day or all week, or all month, right? team doesn’t know the boss’s priorities. There’s a lack of clarity, bad hires. That’s a huge interference issue, right? Broken systems, poor management, weak customer service, there’s all kinds of interference that goes on. In our firm. It’s just so many things that are critical to do internal interference, someone’s in the wrong job. They have poor judgment, and they don’t make consistently good decisions for and in behalf of your firm. You want to delegate you don’t want to micromanage as Tyson was saying, you want to move them into performing at a high level, you want to trust them, right? But maybe they have poor judgment, and they’re not going to make good decisions for you. Toxic team members hate to say it happens, right? They don’t fit your culture, your values, who you’re about and what you want to be about. So there’s all kinds obviously, of interference that is getting in the way all day long of your team. So we need to do what Rory, did we need to find a way to focus. That’s what helps us Yeah. So performing on KPIs requires behavior change, how many of you would like to see your team members behavior change during the day, raise of hands, look around, you want your performance to increase? That’s a behavior issue. Rory behaved differently, because he focused differently. His change in focus created what needed to happen in order for him to perform at a high level. Right. So Stephen Covey said, organizations don’t behave people do. So I want to just for a second, tell you that there are three core decision making dimensions science has proven, mathematically proven, there are three core decision making dimensions, every decision you and I make, comes down to these three core dimensions. I think of it like an umbrella that everything falls under. So in your practice, everything falls under these three core decision making dimensions, they are systems. Do you hear about systems much? A lot of laughter all the time, right? Tasks. Have we been talking about tasks a lot? Right? And the third one is people, people, the intrinsic dimension, your systems, everything that falls under that is vision as Jim was talking about and Tyson mission. Strategy starts moving toward tasks, tactics, vision, mission, tactics, vision, mission strategy tactics. Okay, perfection is in the system dimension law is in the system dimension.

Jay Henderson
So you need to make sure that your systems are organized, which we know we talked about all the time, and that the tasks are very, very clear. Because we don’t want a lack of clarity because a lack of clarity creates interference or a PERT lack of performance. Right? organizations don’t behave people do. Why did Covey say that as a PhD in organizational behavior, his baby is organizations, because your organization doesn’t perform. Systems are awesome, and they help us and they are drive certainty, right? And they give us security and efficiency. We know that. And they’re key and you’re doing that I’m sure. But when we get into the people aspect, they’re the ones that have to perform the tasks and follow the systems right, fair. So it’s their decision making, that impacts how they handle these three core decision making dimensions. And you as a leader, it’s key, that you’re clear on how to get your people to behave in the way they need to behave, which includes driving focus to reduce interference. So I’m gonna get into the four steps in a minute. But I wanted to give you this paradigm, this background, because this was talked about yesterday, one gentleman talked about one of his goals for this, this weekend was to make sure that he got the tactics he needed to perform great choice. Right. And Dave Freese and Billy Umansky both said, you really want to back up a little bit, which he probably knew. And he mentioned, he knew that right. But getting back up into that vision mission strategy piece that planning and organizing so that you can be clear on the tactics you want to get where you want to go. But people and performance is leadership, which we’ve been talking about influence, getting the best out of them driving the focus. Yeah. All right. Here’s what’s interesting. Work is logical. So how many of you have been frustrated that you hired someone that didn’t work out before? Raise your hands? Hi, please look around everyone. It’s like 75% of the room and the rest, don’t want to say so. But by the way, that’s normal, totally, completely normal. We saw the resume, we interviewed them. We told them what the job was. They said they could do it. They said they wouldn’t do it. We offered to make an offer. They were excited. They come into the firm, everybody’s happy. All you attorneys or your office manager, your law firm administrators or whoever’s doing your hiring for you is like, Alright, cool, I can get some work done. Now that I got that all the way. It’s how it feels. How many of you love hiring? Look around nobody. So we expect now we’ve done all the work, we expect them to perform at a high level because they said they could we did the research doesn’t happen. So what I call the expectation gap, it’s tremendous amount of frustration there. perfectionistic expectations comes from being highly systemic. And the more perfectionistic you are, the higher your standards are. And the higher your standards are, the harder it is for your people to perform. That’s okay, we need high standards. I’m not saying don’t have high standards. But this is just the cycle that happens that creates these expectations, which are appropriate, we should have those expectations. Because work is logical. It’s easy. I interviewed you, you said you could do it your resume said you could do it, you’re not doing it. What’s the problem? very black and white, straightforward, right? Work is logical, people are psychological. Right? We know that. They can’t even get themselves to do what they know they should do. So performance is psychological. So as leaders to create influence to get the best out of people, it’s critical that we provide what they need, and help them to perform at a high level. So back to KPIs if we want to achieve our KPIs, which are phenomenal, benchmarked numbers that show the gap between what our performance is now and what our performance should be. By the way, psychologically, whenever there’s a gap. It creates dissonance. It’s called cognitive dissonance. Yeah, I’m performing here and I know I can do that. I’m told to perform here. I don’t know that I can do that.

Speaker 4
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Jay Henderson
One manager called me at a law firm, large law firm about 125 people. And I guess that’s a large law firm and said, Jay, I’m having a real struggle with my team. Their intake, and part of their job is to make a lot of outbound calls to do follow up. And so we’ve given them a KPI and the KPI is 30 calls a day. Right? But they’re not doing it. Like one is no one else is. What do I do? So I’ve been studying sports, Psych and performance psychology for 30 years. And I love this question. Love it. So I said how many hours a day? Are they working? Eight hours. So they’re actually on the phone? Eight hours? You know, they’re supposed to be doing their job eight hours a day? Yep. Okay, normal, right? Cool. I said, go in with a new KPI. And the new KPI is four calls an hour. So how would you like you’re all attorneys, you’re all intelligent people. The smarter you are, the more you need to be engaged and challenged. How would you feel about making 30 phone calls a day that are somewhat the same over and over and over and over and over and over? For months? Would you love that raise of hands? Right? So where was the interference? I mean, I could have dug deeper and found the interference in other ways. So like if you could get the message, right, if you can reduce interference, boom, shift in performance, go in four calls an hour. Give me a call them in all calls. She called me back in two weeks. She’s like, it is like a revolutionary J. Everybody’s blown away. 30 calls doing 40 and 50 calls a day. How’d that happen? How come? Well, because what happened is we shifted the focus of their attention. That’s what Rory did. He talked to some sports psychologists probably maybe he already knew this. And he’s like, you know, my mind was all over the place while I was on the course in the Masters. And April, like my brain just was everywhere, you know, which creates complete shift into chemicals of his body. You know, all the blood stops flowing into the small muscles of the body, the hands, the arms and whatnot and go straight to the quads in the back. What’s happening, adrenaline, cortisol fight or flight is going into Rory because of all the interference in his brain because of his self image. Am I am Astros champion, really. The I know I’ve been working at this all day, every day, for years and years and years. See their self image, which is I can see myself succeeding as a big time attorney. I can see myself scaling. But self efficacy is can I cause it to happen? Different paradigm. So you take people that need to make 30 calls a day, and maybe they don’t even want to. They just want a job. But then you give them this KPI and it’s over their head and their self image and their self efficacy and their whole brain they don’t want to do and they freak out and they just don’t perform. This is why Covey said organizations don’t perform people do. So what do we do to shift people’s performance? We’ve said it a few times, right? We focus focus that help them focus. So the team excelled because of shifting it from everyday they go in there and go I gotta make 30 calls, 30 calls, 30 calls, they’re tired, low energy, maybe hungover don’t really love the job. Didn’t really want to do it anyway, but need a living. And I gotta make this 30 calls hated yesterday. Got to do it again today. But when you shift it, there’s still maybe going to not like it, but you can shift it to four and I work there like for an hour. That’s nothing I can do that. No problem. Yeah. So it’s fascinating how all this works. And it’s a big shift. I mean, I’ve seen clients that in this blew my mind, by the way. I had a client that hired me to executive coaching this owner of a firm, about 95 employees. And when they were on the phone shortly after he hired me and he said I’ve got a problem with my profits. Now, I’m not like a business guru. I don’t have an MBA. I’m not all into the numbers in the weeds. I understand it all. But I mean, that’s not what I do. And so I said, Okay, well, what’s going on, and we had a good chat about it. And together, we made a determination with his knowledge of what’s going on in his firm that there was a problem in the medical records department, which was the beginning after the intake happened, they became a client go to medical records, PII firm, and there was four people in this medical records department. And we did these four steps I’m going to show you together. And I was blown away, because they had a 28% efficiency improvement on medical records in the first month, another one 30% in the second month, 32% in the third month, and then Abdun, flowed 29, whatever, you know, up and down, they tracked all of it, Excel spreadsheet, they sent it to me, it was unbelievable what happened. I mean, the numbers got into like a 150 280%. Improvement 360% improvement over the first month that we started at, not month over month, right. But the increase was unbelievable. I was shocked even. And it was by creating focus, because of the four steps which I’d better get to. Here’s the thing, the fastest way to meet your KPIs to reduce interference. Imagine you’re driving down the road, you’re on the freeway, you’ve got plenty of power in the car, your foots on the gas pedal, you’re cruising along, but you feel like you’re dragging. Like walking in mud, you know, something’s weird. And you go to find out that the emergency brake is on. Anybody ever had an experience driving down the normal street and you find out your emergency brakes on the car feels weird, you’re back out of the driveway anyway. What do you do put your foot more on the gas, give it more gas. You know what the number one problem for high performing people is? It’s overtraining. They overdrive because it means too much in their minds. That’s what Rory did. Everything meant so much. It just whacked him mentally. And he was no longer playing the game. Because he was into the future trophy, money rewards fame, no longer in the present into the future. Total mental interference couldn’t access his performance. Right? So we’re going to take the emergency brake off, we’re going to take our foot off the brake. There’s a lot of analogies for that. The fastest way to meet your KPIs and perform at a high level and grow your firm is to reduce interference. The heat thing is you can’t reduce interference by trying to reduce interference. You don’t overcome your weaknesses by focusing on your weaknesses. What do you do you put your attention on other things? By the way, I don’t think you should focus on overcoming your weaknesses. I think you should focus on your brilliance and your talents and your gifts and your abilities and use those to block the weaknesses, development areas, whatever you want to call them. Right? All right. You don’t do it by read reduce interference by Timothy Galloway, who wrote a book in 1972, or three called the inner game of tennis, which by the way, I love it’s phenomenal. It’s like the Bible of sports psychology. He said focus is what distracts us from whatever is distracting us. We know we’re gonna have distraction and interference, don’t we? It’s everywhere. Early the earlier slide I had a big storm, a big like Hurricane looking rainstorm. That’s what everybody’s in all the time. So we got to create focus. Tim Cook at Apple said we are the most focused company that I know of or have read or have any knowledge of we say no to good ideas every day, we say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small. So we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. In fact, the table each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes yet our revenue is $40 Billion. See that? Now that’s a quote to remember. Okay? So the four steps before I tell you the four steps real quick, and we’ve only got a few minutes left, but what I’m going to show you hear you can all go home and do immediately. You can do that. It’s so simple. It’s unbelievable. But we want everything to be complicated because we’re intelligent.

Jay Henderson
And we don’t trust ourselves enough. That’s why Rory choked. Wrong focus. Not enough trust. But you can do this stuff. I mean, it is I mean, if you’ve got the through law school, man, it’s a breeze to do what I’m going to show you. There was a Hungarian psychologist and it was me Hi, Chick sent me highly. The reason I tell you it’s Hungarian is because of his name. But he was at the University of Chicago, PhD, taught psychology for many, many years. He did a big study in the, like, early 80s, I want to say and what he did is he gave all kinds of people I think was like 800 people, a beeper with their cell phones in early 80s. I can’t remember it was like they had a beeper, okay? They had a little pad of paper or like a booklet, whatever pen surgeons, musicians, artists, all kinds of dancers, performers, and what he would do is he would put periodically ping them on their beeper. And the idea was when you get this beep, you need to as soon as you can, from the moment it happens on mountain climbers, as soon as you can, when this happens, you get beep, stop and write down what you’re doing and what you’re experiencing and how you feel there were some questions, something like 800 people. And what he came up with was there were eight components to flow, heard of flow flow, the zone, high performance peak States playing in the tree, every different sport calls it a different thing. And the first three are actually something that you need to act upon. The rest of them are almost like automatically going to come as a result of these first three. So I call it the key three, if you will, components of flow, or high performance or optimal experience optimum enjoyment. Oh, how many KPIs does each team have? Each of your teams, you know, if you focus you can perform faster. So you’ve got to pick the important part. We’ll talk about that. Here are the four key steps and here are CIC sent me Hailes three key elements to flow number one, so simple. Don’t overlook I mean, Tyson was talking about the importance of simplicity. And Jim earlier, right. It’s true. Number one, clear result goals. Number two, clear process goals. Notice there are two different types of goals. Okay, Rory, what was his goal processing spot? That’s now me here doing this. What’s the result? Goal? It’s out there future. Okay. So clear result goals, two kinds of goals, but you need a goal with you want to carve out from everything that is happening. Having KPIs is great, you want metrics, you want to know where we are, really, and where we want to be good, you need that gap. You need to get your team to do those KPIs, as we’ve been talking about. But what you can do is you can carve out a clear result goal for each team. Let’s call it an impact goal to because you don’t want to ask for this team. What’s the most important goal? You don’t want to ask that question? Because everybody will have a different opinion about what’s important. What you want to do is say, What’s the most impactful thing this team can do to shift the organization’s results, to give us what we’re after, and give us what we need? Right? And then what you do is you go around the room and you say to everybody, Jay, what are you going to do this week to impact this goal that we have given you? Great, Brian Mittman, what are you going to do this week? So we go around the room, and we get everyone to choose their goal. Covey said no involvement, no commitment. If you give choice involvement goes up, guess what else goes up accountability. So it’s what Tyson was saying earlier, you know, you don’t want to have to do everything yourself. You want to delegate and you want to trust, but you got to give them clarity. You got to give them that impact goal. That’s not saying they’re only going to do that all day. Sure, they’re going to do all the other things they have to do. But we’re gonna give a disproportionate amount of energy to this impact goal. Right? Then we’re gonna go around the room and get process goals. You know, Chuck, what are you going to do to impact this dino, what are you going to do to impact this outcome? What are you going to do to impact the Scott? So we go through and we get everybody to choose what they can do one or two things focus simple, not 10 things one or two, that you’re going to do to impact this goal this week. Then you need feedback loops. You see these pictures at the bottom right here? These pictures are trying to indicate to you that there’s what what what’s the same thing and all those one target. Michael Jordan has one goal Jordan Spaeth there has one target football goal, one goal, one target. So you’re gonna give them what are one or two things you can do this week to impact this goal for the organization, right? Then you’re gonna meet weekly with the team around this goal, only around the goal. This isn’t a team meeting, it’s two hours, this is 20 minutes of how did it go this week, how to go for you how to go for you how to go for you, then you coach. That’s part of number four. Now, some of you I know, don’t want to coach your people. You may not want to talk even to your people. You may not even want to be around your team. And I know that right. But this structure and process will focus your team to overcome the interference that is blocking their access to their best stuff. And it’s so simple. You can do it. You really really can do it. That’s where your focus, leverage engagement and accountability come from. Okay. It works. Thank you so much for your time. Very grateful to be here. I’ve enjoyed a couple of days here. Have a blast, go home and implement these four steps. It’s super simple and you can do it. It’ll work. I promise. Thank you so much be Well, you say