How to Unlock Your Team’s Hidden Ideas
Which way do ideas flow in your organization? Top down? Bottom up?
What about decisions: are all the decisions made at the executive level?
I spend a lot of time thinking about this for Vineskills. I knew in the early days I didn’t want Vineskills to be a top-down organization where all the ideas and decisions were made at the executive level. Instead, I wanted our ideas and decisions to resemble how we’ve built our company: as an employee-owned, distributed-power organization.
One of our organizational superpowers is how we distribute power and invite our team to come up with and act on their ideas. It’s truly an unfair advantage:
It reduces bottlenecks (I don’t need to be in every decision).
It drives internal alignment (our internal teams debate ideas before aligning on a path forward).
It helps our team feel like their ideas matter and contribute to progress: “The progress principle” is a major factor in employee engagement and satisfaction.
It delivers better outcomes for our clients. Everyone is empowered to make incremental improvements on a daily basis.
Here is how it works:
Everyone in the organization is empowered to act in the moment to solve a problem or delight a customer. Years ago, I read about how Tim Ferriss empowered his team to make decisions that would drive customer satisfaction. “From this point forward,” he wrote, “please don’t contact me with questions about A, B, or C. I trust you. If it involves less than $100, please make the decision yourself and take a note (the situation, how you handled it, what it cost) in one document, so we can review and adjust each week. Just focus on making our customers happy.” We do that at Vineskills, too. Not only does it allow for some genuine human connection, but it saves so much internal time. You would be surprised how much Vineskills baby swag we send to clients!
Vineskills employees are encouraged to bring their ideas to their internal teams for discussion and debate. Each internal team meets twice a month, and anyone can add topics to the meeting agenda. We use principles of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni (required reading for anyone on the team) to have healthy discussions and debate about ideas before committing. This practice ensures we don't get stuck perpetuating the status quo. New ideas are vulnerable, and we strive to be thoughtful about how we nurture and implement them.
There is an openness to considering ideas that have organization-wide effects. If someone on our team has an idea or suggestion outside of their specific domain (i.e., it affects other teams or has implications for company-wide goals or norms), we ensure it gets addressed by our leadership team for serious discussion and feedback. As an employee-owned company, we encourage everyone to think and act like owners (with an eye on the long-term health of our business).
I’d love to hear from you. How do ideas flow in your organization? How do decisions get made?
Helpful Resources
This month, I’m sharing three articles with lists of practical takeaways and one LinkedIn post that really has me thinking.
Nine Steps for Crafting a Good Decision-Making Process. In their book Decisive, authors Chip and Dan Heath make an important point: the best decisions are more a function of good process than good analysis. How the decision-making process is designed directly influences the outcome. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about as we’ve built Vineskills, which is why I loved this article on the nine steps to create a good decision-making process. First Round Review (13 minutes).
Three Hacks to Maximize Law Firm Efficiency & Growth. Law firms today need to do more than just survive. They need to grow sustainably and adapt to a rapidly changing landscape. It’s something we see often with our clients. This blog from Filevine outlines three hacks to maximize efficiency and growth: 1) Drive predictable growth and client acquisition with targeted paid advertising, 2) Centralize operations with a legal work platform, and 3) Maximize productivity through intelligent automation and strategic delegation. Filevine (10 minutes).
Four Styles of Coaching for Managers—and When to Use Them. Google analyzed data from thousands of employees to identify the qualities of highly effective managers. Over the years, strong coaching skills consistently ranked at the top. I really liked the Coaching Styles framework in this HBR article. It maps out four distinct styles of coaching in a 2×2 matrix. Harvard Business Review (9 minutes).
Will We Pretend That $750/Hour Law Firms Will Be Business-As-Usual in The AI age? This LinkedIn post predicts the change in the legal profession due to AI. It received a ton of engagement, and it has me thinking. My take is that AI will reinvent the law profession, but it won’t happen overnight. The firms that are the bold first movers will be able to ride this wave far better than those who resist it. It reminds me of that quote: “The future is here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” Pair this LinkedIn post with this article from Harvard Law on the impact of AI on law firm business models.
One Principle of Leadership
“A pattern I’ve noticed in the people who are successful—speed.
They don’t overthink, overplan, or wait for the perfect moment. They move. While others are debating, researching, they’re already learning, adjusting, and making progress.”
From Harsh Goenka (on X)
Let’s Connect
We built Vineskills to help law firms more fully leverage the power of Filevine. Being helpful is in our DNA. If I can be helpful personally as you navigate the leadership journey or if our company can help you grow, just shoot me an email at troy@vineskills.com, or book a free help call here. I’d love to hear from you.
