How Kailee now shows up in her professional pursuits is anything but status quo — wildly curly hair, coke bottle glasses, as Kailee herself would describe. But it wasn’t always that way.
As Kailee shared, she quickly realized that her conformist approach to how she showed up as a lawyer early in her career was getting in the way of her best talents.
By embracing her authenticity, Kailee has learned how to leverage her best lawyering superpowers to add value to her business and team.
As Kailee explained to me, in the legal profession, we are so focused on billing time and keeping our heads down to get the work done, we sometimes forget how broad the definition of “the work” truly is.
“Beyond the documents and guidance we produce, our job is also to assemble and develop teams to get the most out of individuals and foster the workplace cultures that empower everyone within them.”
I think Kailee is spot on that there is a lot more work that needs to be done to disrupt current patterns of thought and behavior to advance diversity in legal.
Here are some of the practical ways that Kailee is doing that, and which any legal leader can start doing tomorrow to drive more impact for diversity in the legal profession.
1. Push back on activities that are irrelevant and immaterial to outcomes
Kailee is on a mission to demonstrate how a focus on the irrelevant and immaterial can be a hindrance to performance.
She provided me with an illustrative example in preparing for this very interview.
“I emailed you to ask if this would be audio or video only, because I already had to start thinking about if I was going to wash and do my hair. The decision to wash my hair affects my exercise and eating routine; it may require me asking my husband to pitch in extra so I am freed up from childcare responsibilities; it could change the time I wake up, and require altering when I’m getting my kid to school; it could mean deciding between an extra hour of sleep or having ‘done’ hair.
“All of that energy and thought — in advance — to determine if I was going to meet the societal/industry expectation to show up today with ‘acceptable’ hair. How would that time be better spent, I wonder?”
Do we want our teams focused on living up to traditional standards of “acceptable,” or exceeding expectations, delivering excellence, and applying their individual superpowers in the service of our clients, our mentees and each other?
Rather than focusing on things that have no impact on outcomes, Kailee strives to model acceptance, and reward and celebrate everyone’s unique identity, ability and contributions. She’s found this to have a tremendous impact on her team’s productivity and quality of work.
2. Many small gestures over time create big impact
“There are lots of big organizational efforts out there moving the needle: DEI hiring and retention goals and firm-wide mentoring events, and so on. I fear individuals then often hide behind these larger efforts to do the work for them.”
Kailee tries to focus more on her own sphere of influence and potential for impact.
“What can I and each of my team members do from behind our desks every day to cultivate an environment that fosters courage and contribution rather than perfection? I think the idea of perfection is a waste of time and energy. It's really about establishing a culture. You build this bravery muscle every day, brick by brick, conversation by conversation.”
3. Approach firms as a partner in DEIB initiatives
As Kailee explained, if you lean into everyone’s natural inclinations, interests and abilities, there will be less friction in getting people motivated to help.
Top-down feels forced. Bottom-up feels like a grassroots movement.
“We really try to partner with firms, as opposed to issuing mandates that may or may not be relevant to the firms. We've learned we make more progress if we work together. So we offer sit-down meetings with firms to discuss their unique challenges.”
4. Embrace new ideas
In work cultures that are broken, team members can feel reticent to share innovative ideas because they fear acceptance.
Kailee rails against environments that result in any team member — up and down the organization — pre-filtering their best ideas because they fear what the reaction might be. The world’s biggest innovations start with some of the oddest-seeming notions — at first.
“On my teams, we want to hear your ‘craziest’ ideas — the things you’ve been thinking about but haven’t raised because you feared the response or didn’t think it mattered. We have so many current examples of positive change that resulted from someone feeling safe enough to raise an idea. And the pride and engagement the person feels when their idea is put into action is one of the best parts of leadership!”
5. Mentor early and often
Kailee shared that if a partner wants to grab coffee or have a quick meeting, she encourages them to bring a younger associate. She then shared a great example of why.
“True story: I was grabbing a casual and impromptu dinner with a partner at a law firm. And I said, ‘Let's bring along an associate.’ At dinner, we asked the associate about her experience and what we could do better. It just so happened that we were evaluating a new model to handle a portfolio of low-risk claims.”
“Because of this young associate’s input at dinner, we later worked out a system where these lower risk claims would be — and are to this day — still handled by associates of this firm…something the partner and I would’ve never thought of!
"I was so impressed how simple this was; we simply needed to take a few minutes to pick up our heads from the day-to-day and come together to come up with a win-win solution!”
And as Kailee shared, that’s the most important point.
It’s not that the solutions aren’t accessible. It’s just that we too seldomly take time out of the busyness of the daily grind to pause, ask for input from all interested parties, and consider if the old way of doing things is getting too old to be optimal…or even relevant.
Of course at PERSUIT, we couldn’t agree more. 😉
We hope you enjoyed learning from Kailee as much as we did. You can listen to the podcast episode in its entirety here:
Podcast Interview: Kailee Goold: Cardinal Health — Contribution Over Perfection in Building a Better Legal Department Culture
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