The Leadership Resources I Wish I Had  

No one taught me how to lead. I just had to figure it out. 

I’m not complaining. It’s just the reality for most law firm owners, and I wasn’t any different. I graduated from law school, joined a firm, and was assigned a legal assistant to manage. Somewhere in there I was supposed to have picked up the skills to actually lead people—to delegate well, give feedback that landed, and develop the people around me instead of just directing them. 

I didn’t. I winged it. And for a long time, I told myself that was fine because the work was getting done. But somewhere along the way, I realized I had a lot to learn.  

My Own Avoidance Tax 

See if this feels familiar.  

I had a team member who wasn’t performing the way I needed them to. Not dramatically, but lots of small things, accumulating over time. Missed details. Work that didn’t quite hit the mark. A pattern I could see but hadn’t quite named out loud. 

And I avoided it. Every time a feedback conversation came up, I found a reason to let it go. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. I told myself it wasn’t a big deal yet, that I’d address it when something more significant happened. I kept the relationship comfortable and let the performance problem quietly grow. 

I’m a High D, High I on the DISC assessment. The High “D” means I have extremely high expectations. I work hard, expect results, and when someone isn’t performing at the level I need, I feel it acutely. But the High “I” means I care deeply about people and relationships, and I hate confrontation. I want people to like me. I want the environment to feel good. So those two things are in constant tension: I can see exactly what isn’t working, and I kept choosing comfort over clarity. 

What I didn’t understand then was that avoiding those conversations wasn’t protecting the relationship. It was slowly ending it. We call this the “avoidance tax” because it’s the price you pay when you avoid the tough conversations. Mine was growing fast.  

By the time I finally addressed the performance problem directly, it was too late to fix it. We were already at the point where the only path forward was letting them go. And when I look back, I can see all the moments where a different kind of feedback, earlier, more direct, might have changed the outcome entirely. Maybe they would have risen to meet a clearer expectation, or maybe we would have discovered sooner that the role wasn’t right for them and parted ways with more goodwill and more time for both of us to adjust. Instead, I waited until the situation had deteriorated past the point of recovery, and then I had to have the hardest conversation at the worst possible time. 

That wasn’t fair to them. And it wasn’t fair to me either. 

I Had the Instinct. I Didn’t Always Have the Language. 

Since then, I’ve started paying attention to the leadership skills I’d never actually developed. I read a lot, worked with coaches, and talked to other leaders about the moments they’d gotten wrong. I am constantly trying to push myself to be a better leader.  

As a result, I’ve read plenty of books on leadership philosophy. I understand the frameworks. I realize what I’m supposed to do when I delegate work, or provide feedback, or coach a team member through a development opportunity.  

And yet, when it comes time to do the work and have the conversation, it can still be difficult in the moment.   

And I realized that what I kept running into was the same gap: there was plenty of material on leadership philosophy, on mindset, on frameworks. But very little on the specific, practical, what-do-you-actually-say version of this work. 

No one gave me the script for the feedback conversation I’d been avoiding, or walked me through how to set expectations clearly enough that a performance problem doesn’t sneak up on you. And nobody handed me a reference guide for the moments when you’ve read the book, learned the framework, and then it’s Monday morning and you still don’t know what to say. 

That’s the book I wanted to write. And that’s what Debbie Foster and I built with Be a Next Level Leader: The Four Cornerstones of Leadership for Law Firms and a companion guide called Be a Next Level Leader: The Work(book). 

I’m Really Proud of the Work(book) 

The book itself is structured around four cornerstones: Leading Self, Leading People, Leading Operations, and Leading Forward. It’s a real framework, grounded in what actually breaks down in law firms and what it takes to fix it. I’m proud of it. 

But the workbook companion is what I genuinely wish I’d had when I was in the middle of figuring all this out. It’s the part I get most excited talking about, because it solves the exact problem I kept running into. 

The workbook has scripts. Actual, word-for-word scripts for the conversations that leaders routinely avoid—not because they lack the judgment to have them, but because they don’t have the language. Feedback conversations, expectation-setting conversations, how to give a strategic “no”—these are the conversations we put off because we’re not sure how to start or how they’ll land. We wrote out the words so you don’t have to construct them from scratch in a stressful moment. 

There are reference guides designed to pull you back on track when you feel like you’ve lost the thread. Because leadership development is not linear. You learn something, you get busy, months pass, you drift back into old patterns. The reference guides are there for the Tuesday when you need a fast recalibration, not a full re-read. 

There are exercises built around what we see inside law firms, not generic hypothetical scenarios. They ask you to look at real things: how you show up under pressure, where you tend to avoid the hard conversation, what you’ve been tolerating instead of addressing. 

The Work(book) is designed to sit on your desk, not your bookshelf. To be the resource you reach for when you have a hard conversation in an hour, or a team dynamic that’s not working, or a leadership moment where you know what needs to happen but you’re not sure how to make it happen. 

This Is the Book I Needed, Written by Someone Who Made the Mistakes 

Lots of leadership books get written from a place of authority. The author proclaims what good leadership looks like. That’s a fine book. It’s not this one. 

This book was written by someone who avoided feedback conversations until they cost real relationships. Who had to let people go who might have stayed if I’d known how to lead them better. Who has high expectations and spent years not understanding how to communicate those expectations in a way that was useful to the people receiving them. 

I wrote this book so that law firm owners don’t have to learn leadership the way I did—through trial and error and a series of situations I handled worse than I should have. The cost of learning it that way isn’t just personal. It’s the people on your team who deserved better leadership than you knew how to give, the relationships that didn’t have to end the way they did, and the version of your firm you could have been building, if someone had handed you the framework and the tools earlier. 

That’s what Be a Next Level Leader is. It’s the resource I wish I’d had. And I genuinely believe it will change how you lead—not by giving you inspiration, but by giving you something you can actually use.