Harnessing Cultural Engagement for Team & Client Success, with Marcus Collins

Announcer: 

Welcome to The Lawyerist Podcast, a series of discussions with entrepreneurs and innovators about building a successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. Lawyerist supports attorneys, building client-centered, and future-oriented small law firms through community, content, and coaching both online and through the Lawyerist Lab. And now from the team that brought you The Small Firm Roadmap and your podcast hosts 

Stephanie Everett (00:35): 

Hi, I’m Stephanie Everett. 

Sara Muender (00:36): 

And I’m Sara Muender. And this is episode 498 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, Stephanie talks with Marcus Collins about his book for the Culture, the Power behind what we Buy, what we Do, and who we want to be. Stephanie, we have some really exciting things going on this time of year. We recently ran our best law firm websites, contests that we do every year, and we always have a ton of awesome people apply to that contest and share their website, and we craft that with a series of qualifiers, if you will, of what we’re looking for, what a good, healthy law firm website should have. So tell me a little bit about this from your perspective. What is exciting about this, what anyone can learn from this? I know I have personally used the winners of this contest in the past and shared that with our Labster, the Labster that I coach to help them think through their website. But tell me a little bit about your perspective. 

Stephanie Everett (01:42): 

Yeah, it’s always fun to see these winners. So I tell people, go there for inspiration, but also when you look at our judging criteria, you’ll really see what we are looking for in a great website because there are some technical aspects that we talk about in terms of page speed, where your call to action links are, is it obvious when I land on your homepage, who you help and how you help ’em? And is it clear to me what I should do next? What kind of journey are we taking people on the website? Is it a calling card or is it really built for an ideal client to get to learn about you and your firm? And so on the announcement where we go through all the winners, you can read about what we thought made them really great, why their websites stood out, you can also then look at all those technical requirements that we’re looking for. 

Sara Muender (02:34): 

And what would be really cool I think, is if our listeners could go and look through those now for inspiration, set some goals around what they would like to improve on their website this year, and then maybe next year they can apply and actually be one of those winners. 

Stephanie Everett (02:50): 

Absolutely. We’re going to run it again, and you can even self-nominate. So usually around January we open up that nomination process. So make sure you go check it out, check out all the winners. And we also have on the website our complete guide to law firm website designs. So this is an ebook that you can download and it really goes into all those technical requirements I was talking about and the content requirements. It’s going to break everything down and make it super easy for you to follow. 

Sara Muender (03:18): 

Yeah, I love that. We have so many great resources on the Lawyerist website, and if you want to see who the winners were for this year’s website contest, then you can also find a link to that at the bottom of the homepage at Lawyerist dot com. And now here is your conversation with Marcus. 

Marcus Collins (03:39): 

Hi, I am Marcus Collins. I’m a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and the author of the bestselling book For the Culture. I Study Culture and it’s Impact and Influence on Behavioral Adoption. 

Stephanie Everett (03:50): 

Hey Marcus, welcome to the show. I am excited to dive in today because your book starts with a discussion about culture and it’s one of those things, and you say this in the book, we talk about culture all the time, especially around here in the Lawyerist world, we’re always talking about how do you build a healthy culture on your team? But I love that you started with, Hey, this is a really hard thing to even just define and dig into. And so I’d love your help and to kick us off and around, how did you even approach that conversation? 

Marcus Collins (04:20): 

It was not by my own design. I spent the majority of my career in media communications. I had a very short tenure as a songwriter, wasn’t very successful, but did nonetheless, about five and a half years, much to my parents chagrin by the way, I went back to school to study marketing, particularly interested in digital marketing within the context of music. And that’s really where I started to cut my teeth. I did partner marketing, iTunes and moved to New York and did a strategy for Beyonce before going into the world of advertising. And it was around this time that I started hearing the word culture used as a vehicle for marketing efforts. And the agency I worked for was called Translation. And it was ran by a gentleman named Steve Stout, who is the most famous person that you probably don’t know. He used to be a music record label executive. 

(05:17): 

And he then started an agency, an advertising agency with his good friend Jimmy Ivy his mentor and one of his closest friends, Jay-Z Sean Carter, and the agency positioned itself as helping ambitious brands thrive in contemporary culture. And that just sounded good to me. Ooh, ambitious brands thrive in contemporary culture. That sounds so good. And I say it all the time in meetings with clients from pitching the agency and go, we help brands thrive in culture. And I would talk about culture in this very, not even an esoteric way, it was sort of just abstract. And I would talk about culture as this thing that we knew, but you didn’t know thing that we were close to and you were void of. And what I realized is that I was saying the word culture but didn’t really know what it was. And I started looking around and said, Hey, everybody’s saying culture. 

(06:09): 

No one knows what we’re talking about here. And this is right around the time that I began investing myself in behavioral sciences, studying what makes us tick, the underlying physics of human behavior. And I found myself in a field of study called consumer culture theory, which essentially studies the activities of consumption among a group of people who find themselves connected through some cultural affiliation, be it sneakerhead or hogs, Holly Davison, owner groups or Trekkies or burners or cos players, whatever the case may be, swifties even. So we study what are the characteristics and the conventions that govern what these people do and how does it manifest in consumption? And that’s what led me to the idea of culture as a system of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and govern what people like us do. As articulated by one of the founding positive sociology, a gentleman by the name of Mil Durkan. 

(07:12): 

And once that articulation appeared to me, it already existed. Once it appeared to me, the world just got really clear and I go, oh, this is what we meant. This is why we said it. This is why ambitious brands who thrive in temporary culture are more successful than those who follow culture. This is why organizations who have strong cultures outperform those who do not. This is why we vote the way we vote, why we marry who we marry, why we vacation, where we vacation, why we bury the dead if we bury the dead. All these things that are a part of daily living, all these things that are a part of what it means to be a social actor in society are governed by our cultural subscription. And that I think is just a really powerful thing to explore and a very interesting thing to better understand. 

Stephanie Everett (08:08): 

Yeah, for sure. It was like when I was reading this part of the book, I was like, oh, he’s saying all the things I know, but in a way that made it make sense and made it approachable. So maybe for the rest of the audience, I’d love, what do we mean by culture? How do we start talking about this? 

Marcus Collins (08:25): 

About this? Yeah, that’s the tricky thing about behavioral sciences is that it’s very obvious once you read it, you go, oh yeah, totally that thing. Yeah, right. But when you find out the obvious isn’t obvious until someone pointed out to you and most of academic vernacular, it’s so dense and cumbersome that they take a simple idea and actually complicate it. You go, this isn’t helpful at all. But I try to focus on taking a theme that is intuitive and provide language that makes it feel tangible. The thing that I’ve always felt but never had the words to articulate. I just believe that when people have a Rosetta Stone to describe the things that are intangible, that just seem to be sort of all around us, amorphous, but not, I can’t handle it, it’s like vapor. I can’t grab it. That when we have language, it not only helps make the world clearer, but also operationalize is how we do these things. 

(09:21): 

So what is culture? So Mill Durkan talks about culture as a system of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and govern what people like us do. It’s a system. It’s a system of these characteristics that carve out the place that we occupy in the world and then identify what’s acceptable for people like us. It’s anchoring in our identity who we are and our identity is complicated. It is complex. It is oftentimes conflicting. Our intersectionality. We have individual reference like I’m a professor, one of my identifiers, we have group references. I’m in a fraternity, it’s a group reference. I’m a father of two little girls, is an abstract reference. And these different references together, the alchemy of them make up my identity. And because of who I am, I see the world a certain way. That’s why for some, a cow is leather, for others is a deity. 

(10:14): 

And for some it’s dinner. Which one is it? It’s all those things, depending on who you are and how you see the world. For some, a rug is decor, for others is a place of worship. And for some it’s a souvenir. Which one is it? It’s all those things depending on who you are. So because of who we are, we see the road a certain way. And because we see the road a certain way, we navigate life a certain way, right? The artifacts that we don, the behaviors that are normative, the language that we use, these things constitute a shared way of living, a shared way of life because of who we are. We see the world a certain way, navigate life a certain way, and then we express ourselves through shared work. We call that cultural production. This is the literature, music, film, television, podcasts, podcasts, comic books and brands and branded products that we use not only express who we are in the world, but also reflect what people like us do and the aggregate in the alchemy of these systems or systems and systems make up our culture. 

(11:16): 

And that definition for me, that framing makes culture both tangible. And also I know what to look for when I’m observing other people’s cultures and I see people behaving from traveling or even if it’s a subculture here in the states and I go, oh, they’re wearing that thing. I wonder what that means. Oh, they must be a runner. They’re not wearing let’s say arbitrarily, they’re not wearing Nikes, they’re wearing Brooks. Oh, they must be a runner. And because they are a runner, they probably see the world this way and navigate the world a certain way. That’s beautiful part of culture. A gentleman by the name of Raymond Williams, literally 70 years later from Durkheim, he called culture a realized meaning making system. It’s a way by which we make meaning because the world is objective, it’s subjective, totally subjective, and it’s messy and it is random. 

(12:14): 

Doesn’t make any sense. So we use the meaning frames, that is our culture, to see the world and translate it so that the world is full of meaning, that it’s meaningful. That’s why for some Kyle’s leather, for others of some it’s dinner. And once that came to the knowledge of that understanding of culture, the world just got really vivid for me. And I started to see people not as othered, but I started to see people as members of a cultural community and that cultural community, the navigating life based on the truths that they have. What dawned on me, and I write about this in the book, is that when we look at other people who are not ourselves, if they operate by a different meaning making system or they operate by different conventions and expectations, we go, they crazy. They crazy. They eat like that, they crazy, they talk like that. They crazy, they dress like that. They’re crazy. But that’s the same thing that can be said of us, that people see you operating by your cultural subscription. They go you crazy. And the thing is that we all are kind of crazy, right? Isn’t that what nor Barkley told us? We’re a little crazy. And I think that that’s actually kind of a beautiful thing that we see the world in these super subjective ways, but they feel very real to us and therefore we show up in real ways. That’s why cultures a realized, meaning-making system. 

Stephanie Everett (13:39): 

In the book you explore then what companies can do with this. And I know you talk a lot about because of your marketing background and we go to what you do to attract those clients, potential clients who align with your culture. But before we go there for a second, I’m just wondering, as a business owner, we talk a lot about the culture of our teams and we as a team have a culture. And I often get asked, how do you create one? And I always say, well, it probably already exists asking. What you’re really asking is how do you be intentional about maybe moving it more aligned with where you’re trying to go because it already is happening. And I’m just kind of curious how you respond to that. What’s your take? 

Marcus Collins (14:22): 

That is well said. If people are working together, there is a culture, right? There is a way of doing things, a way we do things around here. There are a set of conventions and expectations of people like y’all. So a culture exists, the challenges that what has become your culture probably has not been shaped or informed with any intentionality, and therefore you leave yourself open or vulnerable to whatever manifests. But when we are very explicit and intentional about the culture that we want to establish here, now you have a baseline by which you can communicate what are the conventions expectations of people like us? What do we believe? So if we are fill in the blank company, what do we believe? How do we see the world? If we see the world a certain way, then what are the ways by which we exercise that through our social facts, our shared way of life, the artifacts that we’ve done, the behaviors that are normative, the language that we use. 

(15:28): 

I often when I give talks, if I’m with bankers and lawyers are pretty similar in this case, if you are working in a law firm, you dress a certain way, there’s a certain expectation of how you ought to dress. And it can range anywhere from being three piece suit, two business casual, but you definitely ain’t wearing no athleisure in a law firm because it’s not considered professional based on the conventions and expectations of the industry. Now, I spent the majority of my career working in advertising. If someone came to the firm I was working at or any firm I ever worked at wearing a three piece suit, we go, we ain’t hiring them because you’re not one of us. Because advertisers would hold the belief that you don’t want to be a suit and therefore we don’t wear suits. And that’s the thing that the artifacts, the behaviors, the language, they become outward expressions of inward beliefs. 

(16:34): 

And that’s really kind of that’s what we want to get to. What do we believe and how do we express it through our shared way of living? So for a business owner who is running a company and you’re asking yourself, what is the culture here? We start with what do we believe and how do we demonstrate it in our actions? And if those things are out of sync, you got work to do now, that’s when you go, okay, the behaviors are not reflective of what we believe or what we believe is not what I hope that this thing would be. So now your job is to course correct the beliefs and then ensure that the outward expressions are manifestations of said beliefs. 

Stephanie Everett (17:21): 

Yes, I love it. And it seems like that same principle just carries right over into our marketing, and it kind of starts there too. We want to attract, we want to work with the people who align with us, who believe what we believe. And there’s some real examples you give in the book of companies that we all know that have successfully done this so much. So they create this following. I was thinking about this as I was reading. I was like, what law firms out there even come close to having a following? Like you mentioned the Swifties or the Beyonce, I forgot their nickname. Now be 

Marcus Collins (17:58): 

The 

Stephanie Everett (17:58): 

Beehive. Beehive, yes, thank you. Sorry, I need to learn that. Could a law firm actually do something similar where you had people like that who followed what you did and were so aligned with what you’re trying to create in the world? 

Marcus Collins (18:11): 

Yeah, I think yes, because these things that we’re talking about, they’re not industry specific, but they’re not contextualized by the industry, rather they are context agnostic. We’re talking about humanity. This is the underlying physics of who we are as a species. And when we feel connected to something, because we see the world similarly, we therefore attached our behaviors, our identity, our consumption to it as a way of making our subscriptions material. Unfortunately, I think that in a B2B world, and many times law firms are B2B in nature. You may have a client but you are engaging with another entity. But let’s look at it as a b, B function or companies like that or industries in that realm. They often think of themselves as, I’m here to do a service and you’re paying me for my service, and so long as my service is better than the other person, then you should keep coming to me. 

(19:16): 

And I go, sure, okay, yeah, if you have a sharper razor than someone else, then someone else will be likely to buy your razor if they want a close shave. However, what happens when they have a sharper razor than you and now people leave you and go there and then you have a sharper razor than them, then they’ll leave you. And it’s this back and forth. And these things are all facilitating a transactional based relationship. They are facilitating transactions only, and it’s hard to be loyal when it’s everything is transactional. Could I imagine waking up in the morning and ask myself, do I really want to stay married to this woman every morning? It’s pretty transactional. Like no, the idea is that you’re in it, you’re committed to it. Because we see the world similarly, we are connected because we share a similar worldview and we see this when it comes to employees and their relationship with the firm. 

(20:13): 

Because if the firm is acting in ways that are antithetical to their beliefs and morality, they go, I can’t work here. And you go, well wait a minute. Hold up, hold up. If this was all about business only then people would say, Hey, they pay me well, so I still show up. But when people feel like their beliefs are not aligned with the organization, they go, I can’t work here anymore. So why wouldn’t those same drivers impact how we spend our money? Of course they do because they are underpinned by what makes us human. So for a firm to say, Hey, this is what we believe, we see the world this way, and these are the cases that we take on. This is the way in which we practice and these are the clients in which we work. But when someone says, I’m having this issue, I’m going to go with those folks because not only is this where specialize in, but they believe in this. And we think about high publicized attorneys out in the world like the Benjamin Crumps of the world or the Johnny Cochrans at one time, we hear those names and those people, they took certain cases because of what they believe of what they practice. The same thing goes here, what do you believe? How do you see the world? And when your worldview is clear, people who see the world similarly go, yes, 

Stephanie Everett (21:35): 

Give me some of that. Totally resonates. I mean our company, we’re B2B, we help law firms build a healthier business. And we’re really clear on our goal is to build a healthier law firm. Well, what do you mean by healthy? Well, we have a whole thing. We’ll tell you exactly what we mean. And I’ve got competitors out there who are really just focused on helping you drive revenue, not even profits. I say that’s wrong, but whatever. But people who align with, okay, I want to have a healthy firm. And I’m like, listen, I only need 300. I’m looking for 300 law firms that want to do this thing. And if that’s you, you’re in the right place and you’re tech enabled and driven and innovate all these things. And we see that. I mean, it really resonated reading it too because I mean, we do have a Labster, we call ’em Labster. 

(22:21): 

We have a culture, we have visuals, we have rituals that we do, and they love wearing our brand and supporting our stuff. And it’s really cool and it’s kind of cool to see. And if I’m being honest, I created it by accident. Now that I have the book, I could, I was like, oh, these are the things I could have been doing or now I’ll do better right now I know the keys. That’s what you laid out for us. But I guess I just tell all the listeners like, Hey, it can be done. Exactly. And I think it is done. If you’re an immigration firm, and I know one I’m thinking of that’s like we believe in an open world where founders from other countries can come here and thrive. Hey, if that’s me, then I want to go support that business. 

Marcus Collins (23:05): 

Exactly. I tell students this, whether MBA students or undergrad students when are applying for jobs, they’re interviewing for jobs, they have interviews, and I tell them, Hey, don’t go in talk about your resume. What do you mean? Someone goes, Stephanie, tell me about yourself. You go, oh, I went to your university Michigan. I studied this, did this, blah, blah, blah. I worked here. I’m great. And I tell them, there’s about 500 people graduating from an undergraduate program MBA program too. And say, there are in the top 10 MBA schools in the country. That’s 5,000 people who are walking out saying the exact same thing You’re saying, I went to fill in the blank top business school, studied these things, had these kind of experiences, hire me. I go, you don’t stand out at all. There’s nothing distinctive about you. There’s some differentiators for sure, but I distinctive. 

(24:00): 

But imagine you start your interview saying, my name is Marcus, and I believe that the core function of marketing is to influence behavior. Therefore, I’ve spent my entire career understanding what gets people to move. Started off as an engineer, they started writing love songs, but I found myself just really engrossed and understanding the underlying physics of humanity. And the better I got at that, the better my practice became. So much so that I started to invest myself in the behavioral sciences in academia. And for the last 12 years, I’ve sat with one foot in practice and one foot in academia. That’s been the biggest cheat code of my career. And when I look at the work you do, fill in the blank company. I feel like you believe that too. I think that we could really work well together. So I thought that interview for this job, 

Stephanie Everett (24:48): 

Yeah, you’re hired. I’m ready. 

Marcus Collins (24:50): 

Exactly. And if they believe what you believe, they go. Yes. Finally, someone said, I’ve been talking to 9,999 people. You’re the first one. I heard that from goodnight. You start to find these congruencies between yourself and the client, yourself and the employee, yourself and the partner. This is what it’s about. We are wired to connect based on shared outlooks of life. The psychology refers to this as homophily or homophily, homophily that we tend to gravitate to people who are like us. And if that’s just who we are, and if that be the case, why not leverage what makes us us? 

Stephanie Everett (25:39): 

And for my law firms, this is why we preach to you guys. Even in your job ads, you got to write an ad that says what you believe. One of our job ads now all say this line, we’re trying to encourage diverse candidates to apply, and we say, we see imposter syndrome as a sign of conscientiousness, and that sentence has gotten more people, everybody now who applies is like, whoa, you got me on that sentence? And by the way, I’m looking for who’s telling me they’re paying attention and listening to the nuggets I’m giving them in the ad. If they’re not, that’s how I screen people out because I only want to talk to the people that read that and something hit them that they thought, I have found my people. 

Marcus Collins (26:22): 

I love that so much. I mean, that’s right between the eyes. There’s an interview with Andy Titz, he’s one of the early software designers at Apple. There’s interview with him and a few other key engineers at Apple, and they’re interviewing them and they’re saying, when we interview people, they meet all these people at Apple in the early years meet all these people at Apple. He’s like, but it’s not until the last interview that they have with us that we’ll actually show them the Macintosh, and then we look at their faces and we see how they respond. If they light up, then we know they’re one of us and they don’t hire until you know that you’re one of us. I mean, this is what we’re talking about here. The ability to communicate in such a way that someone goes, oh, you’re talking to me, or, oh man, that hit me right in the heart because I believe that too. When we have that visceral reaction, when we emote, we’re able to evoke emotions in such a meaningful way. People don’t just see you as a firm. They don’t see you as a company. They see you as an extension of themselves, and consumption clearly becomes a byproduct of that. Yeah, I’m going to buy from you than this other firm. Yeah, I’m going to hire you over that other firm because I feel like you get me and who doesn’t want to get got 

Stephanie Everett (27:47): 

Totally am getting vibing with all of this, and yet I think I need to ask this. Let’s hope I ask it in the right way. I don’t want to confuse that idea of you get me, you’re one of us with what has happened in the past of you look like us. That’s, and so how do we thread that? 

Marcus Collins (28:08): 

So if we are not our hardware, we are our software and the way we 

Stephanie Everett (28:15): 

Historically, I like that 

Marcus Collins (28:17): 

The way we have historically defined ourselves have been based upon these exterior representations, age, race, gender, household income, geography, education level. These are all these outward things that we can identify very easily, but our behavior is not informed by the hardware. Our behavior is formed by the software and what is the software? Identity, beliefs, ideology. So we talk about one of us, we talk about people who see the world the way we do, but come from different walks of life because if you see the world the way we do, but come from different walks of life, now you provide perspective. You come to a place and you feel like, oh, these are my people and because these are my people, I feel like I belong here. And then when we have discourse about a particular thing, we all agree that the earth is round. We can all agree that yes, yes. 

(29:16): 

Awesome. Okay, now let’s talk about the properties of how we might be able to preserve the earth, but if we can’t even agree that the Earth is round, we don’t even get to any of the optimization opportunities of how to preserve the Earth, so it’s much more sustainable in how we live here. Ideology. Belief is the foundation to community. It’s the foundation to collectiveness because that becomes the anchor to which our affiliation is established. My wife hates acapella music. She loads it, right? I grew up listening to Take Six, I love Take Six. We can’t even have a conversation about how awesome Take six is because she can’t get past the acapella music, and that’s how it goes with organizations. If I believe a thing and you don’t believe that at all, we can’t even get to the actual work because we are philosophically diametrically opposed, 

Stephanie Everett (30:17): 

Okay, we are running out of time. You’ve given us so much. I mean, we didn’t even get to half of what’s even in the, we didn’t even get past chapter two, you guys, I mean to fair. I mean, I think the intro in one, but I’ve learned so much. I’m so excited about this conversation and sharing it with the world. Before I let you go, one of our values here at Lawyerist is stay curious. Sometimes I like to ask people, what are you learning right now? What are you curious about? 

Marcus Collins (30:45): 

I believe in curiosity so deeply because a thing I cannot teach, so I look for that in people. I can’t teach to be curious, but if you’re curious, I know you can learn anything. And what I’m learning about right now, what I’m really studying quite aggressively is organizational culture. Its relationship to consumption, societal culture, and ultimately what it means to foster a culture in different contexts. For instance, the culture in the military is different than that on a team and is different than that at a nonprofit, different contexts, different cultures. The question becomes then how do we as leaders facilitate the cultural connections that bind the people while also augmenting it without losing its identity? Maybe it’s just a fascinating, fascinating space. 

Stephanie Everett (31:44): 

Yes, I love it. We’re going to have you back. We’ll talk more on that. We’ll put the book link for everybody in the show notes. It’s for the culture, the power behind what we buy, what we do, and who we want to be, and as you can tell, there’s a lot more in this that I think applies to all the things that we’re doing as business owners to our team and how we build teams, but also to our clients and the work we do and even our family. I mean, it applies everywhere. So I’m just so excited. I got to have this chat with you today, Marcus. Thank you. 

Marcus Collins (32:14): 

Thank you for having me. 

Announcer: 

The Lawyerist Podcast is edited by Britany Felix. Are you ready to implement the ideas we discuss here into your practice? Wondering what to do next? Here are your first two steps. First. If you haven’t read The Small Firm Roadmap yet, grab the first chapter for free at Lawyerist.com/book. Looking for help beyond the book? Let’s chat about whether our coaching communities, are right for you. Head to Lawyerist.com/community/lab to schedule a 10-minute call with our team to learn more. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by Legal Talk Network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you.