Key Characteristics of Our Team

Every family, church, business or other community has its own group personality. This reflects the community character, and affects the experience of its members and its interaction with outsiders. At Telios, we did an exercise recently that helped us reflect on “who we are.”

The idea came from Donald Miller’s book, How to Grow Your Small Business. The book is one of the best explanations I’ve seen about how all the elements of a small business work and how they interact with each other. And of course, most small law firms are a small business. In fact, most large law firms are a small business! The Small Business Administration uses obscure links to confusing tables to define “small business,” but the upshot is that “small” businesses may have hundreds of employees and many millions a year in revenue.

This exercise was to define three Key Characteristics of our team. Miller proposes that each company should have distinctive Key Characteristics of team members, depending on the mission of the company. We went through the exercise in our weekly team meeting. We talked about what we believe we actually are, the ways that we think we’ve fallen short, how we can improve, and what we aspire to be. Here are the characteristics we chose, and our reflections in the process.

Our first Key Characteristic: “We provide solutions that honor God and invite healing.” Law firms exist to solve problems. Sometimes preemptively, for example by creating good policies, or sometimes by responding in a variety of ways to problems that arise. Our business model as a service provider is to “provide solutions” to problems for (mostly) ministries and businesses. We thought about saying “legal solutions,” but our Telios Teaches affiliate offers HR training rather than legal services, so we left it at the single word.

We want our solutions to honor God. What would that mean? Probably too much to unpack here, but a couple of things are obvious. First, we wouldn’t take on a representation where we couldn’t do a good job, or where we didn’t know what we were doing. Excellent work honors God and sloppy work doesn’t. (Someone who is a Christian should be known for stellar work, and sadly, that is not always the case.) We also wouldn’t promote something we thought was actively wrong, like covering up an abuse situation or helping a business owner cheat a partner.

What about inviting healing? One of the meanings of “Telios” is “wholeness,” and we don’t want to do work that leaves a situation more broken. Even in confrontational work like litigation, we want to move towards the possibility of healing. In other work, like investigations, we want to get to a place where healing endeavors like Christian mediation or restorative justice could be the next step for the people involved. We try to actively discourage—or even refuse to represent—clients in matters that are revenge-driven or pointless.

Our second Key Characteristic: “We communicate with stakeholders promptly and with compassion.” Why promptly? One of the most common complaints about attorneys (and the cause of a vast number of Bar complaints) is that they don’t always communicate promptly—or sometimes at all. Part of good client service is prompt communication. But clients aren’t our only stakeholders. We also want to communicate promptly internally with our people, with our vendors, and others. This shows respect. All of us have fallen short at times on this one, but it’s something we want to work on.

We argued a little bit about the word “compassion.” One of the alternatives proposed was “courtesy,” but some on the team felt that could mean cold politeness with no heart. Another alternative was “empathy,” but let’s face it, not all legal communications are going to sound empathetic (though some of them should if you are interested in healing). “Compassion” seemed like a good compromise. If we try it for awhile and don’t like it, we can change it later.

Our third Key Characteristic: “We take joy in serving as a team in an orderly way.” There is a lot to unpack here. First, the concept of “team” is often a tough sell in law firms. A brilliant lawyer once said to me, “We don’t do ‘team’ here [at their firm]. We are more about the superstar and the supporting cast.” Well, okay. I can see that would be tempting when you have those superstars. But whenever you see a business that’s run like that, you don’t have to look far to see unhappy people (most often the non-superstars). At Telios, we want to be a team. And not a baseball team where everybody does their own thing. More like a football team, where people cover for each other. (Or so I am informed, not being a fan of watching large people jump on each other. Sorry, Broncos.)

We also wanted to stress the concept of order. Some people are inherently allergic to processes and systems. Processes can certainly get carried too far, to the point where everything is slowed down and inflexible. But without processes and systems, it’s hard for people to know their jobs or be supported in their jobs. Even the creative free spirits among us acknowledge that when someone doesn’t comply with processes or systems, it’s almost always someone else who is inconvenienced and has to do extra work and pick up the pieces.

We had our biggest argument about “taking joy.” A younger team member didn’t like it. He said that Millennials and Gen Z don’t find “joy” to be a big part of their life experience, and we didn’t want to pressure people to be “joyful.” It’s true that living authentically doesn’t equate to being “happy, happy” all the time. We discussed it for awhile, and couldn’t come up with a better word, at least not for now. We were going for the idea that not only are we planning to serve as a team in an orderly way, but we want team members who see that as a positive thing. Maybe they won’t be turning cartwheels in the meadow, but they see the model as good and affirm it. Also, joy is a fruit of the Spirit, and maybe it will grow better in a supportive and orderly environment.

So that was us. What would your Key Characteristics be?