This week, we sit down with Rachael Bosch, the founder and managing director of Fringe Professional Development, to discuss the importance of communication and leadership development within the legal industry. Rachael, with her extensive background in law firm talent management and certifications from prestigious institutions like the NeuroLeadership Institute, Harvard Law School, and Cornell University, offers valuable insights into the role of brain-based coaching in fostering effective workplace environments. Her passion for helping professionals grow and succeed shines through as she discusses her journey from a decade-long career in law firm talent management to founding Fringe Professional Development.
Rachael explains her decision to leave a stable career at Paul Hastings to start her own company, citing her love for professional development and her growing interest in communication challenges within law firms. She describes how these challenges often stem from poor communication practices, such as being too direct, too passive, or using the wrong platform, which can lead to misunderstandings and inefficiencies. Rachael’s background in theatrical performance also contributes to her fascination with human behavior and motivation, which she has channeled into developing innovative training programs that focus on improving workplace communication and leadership.
The conversation delves into the concept of brain-based coaching, a method that combines neuroscience and leadership development to help professionals understand and improve their communication and leadership skills. Rachael emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and emotional intelligence in effective communication, noting that many professionals struggle with these aspects. She explains how brain-based coaching helps individuals recognize cognitive distortions and other psychological barriers that can hinder their ability to communicate effectively. By grounding coaching in neuroscience, Rachael is able to offer a more fact-based approach that resonates with her often-skeptical audience of lawyers.
Rachael also shares some of the challenges she has faced in promoting coaching within law firms, particularly the resistance from attorneys who believe that only other attorneys can truly understand their issues. She argues that the “clarity of distance”—the idea that a coach who is not deeply entrenched in the legal industry can offer a more objective perspective—is actually a strength in coaching. Additionally, Rachael highlights the importance of upward feedback in professional development, describing how Fringe Professional Development’s tools help law firms gather and utilize feedback to improve leadership and team dynamics.
Rachael predicts that the legal industry will face a conflict between a new generation of partners who deeply care about creating supportive work environments and a new generation of associates who maintain a more detached, boundary-driven approach to work. She emphasizes the need for bridging this gap to create cohesive, caring teams. Rachael’s insights provide valuable takeaways for legal professionals looking to improve their communication and leadership skills, as well as for firms aiming to create more human-centered workplace cultures.
Fringe Professional Development Toolkit
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Twitter: @gebauerm, or @glambert
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Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript
Marlene (00:02)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gabauer.
Greg Lambert (00:09)
And I’m Greg Lambert. And today we have joining us Rachel Bosch. Rachel is the founder and managing director of Fringe Professional Development, where she leverages her extensive experience in law firm talent management to enhance workplace communication and leadership through innovation, brain -based coaching, which we’re gonna get back to, and training programs.
Marlene (00:34)
And with certifications from the Neuro Leadership Institute, Harvard Law School, and Cornell University, Rachel is dedicated to helping high achieving professionals excel by fostering more human and effective workplace environments. Rachel, welcome to the Geek in Review.
Rachael Bosch (00:48)
Thank you so much for having me.
Greg Lambert (00:51)
So Rachel, you had at least a decade long career in firm talent management and you left that to start Fringe Professional Development. So got a couple of questions. One, why?
Rachael Bosch (01:08)
I ask myself all the time.
Marlene (01:08)
Why did you keep doing it?
Greg Lambert (01:12)
So what were your inspirations and some of the challenges that you faced when you moved from one and started your own company?
Rachael Bosch (01:21)
Well first, rude, you didn’t need to out my age like that.
Marlene (01:25)
Nice going, Greg.
Rachael Bosch (01:28)
just right in there. No, it’s totally fine. I think there were a couple of reasons why I wanted to start the company and then certainly plenty of challenges. So I’ll start with the first. I was inside firms doing both recruiting and professional development. And a lot of firms have that as a joint function. I loved the development side. I just really, really loved it. I loved helping people grow their careers and figure out their challenges working in teams and recruiting in law firms.
Greg Lambert (01:29)
My bad.
Rachael Bosch (01:58)
There are some things that are cyclical and then some things that will just pull you off track. Lateral partner recruiting, things like that. You could have the best mentorship program you’re about to roll out, but some key partner comes along and the firm’s going to hire them. Everything stops. So I first of all just really wanted to focus my work on professional development. The other thing is I kind of became the person in my, you know, at least in the local office in DC for my firm where I sat where people would come to me and they’d be like, you
I have this problem or I have that problem and they always thought it was some legal issue or they thought it was something about some complexity in the research and when we would talk it always turned out to be a communication challenge. It was too much, it was too little, it was too direct, it was too passive, it was on the wrong platform, whatever it was and so this was just naturally fascinating to me. My undergrad is actually a conservatory degree in theatrical performance and so I’ve always been interested in humans and
why they do things and what motivates them. And so I really just wanted to not only focus on professional development, but how we communicate and how much time, energy, emotion is just wasted over not communicating well in our workplaces. So that’s sort of the why. And luckily I was at Paul Hastings and you know, they really fostered my development of these skills and they were so fabulous about me transitioning into this role.
they’re big cheerleaders of me still. And so I had a great environment for it also, which really, really matters. And then what challenges? Well, you know, I started the company in 2017. So within the first three years, we had this just very small global pandemic. And that was a challenge for sure. But I think the bigger challenge was almost an identity crisis of what the company was going to be. Was it going to be a solo shingle?
Was I going to be doing things myself or was I going to grow a more functional company like a broadly applicable service company and I decided to go for the latter option and that just has so many challenge personnel challenges infrastructure systems things like that but it’s been a lot of fun to build all that and One of the things I’ve realized is I love building the company I still love doing the services, but I love building the company and now I get to bring in people who are
experts and let them shine on a platform, which is not at all what I intended when I started out when I first left Paul Hastings.
Marlene (04:36)
What was your favorite part?
Greg Lambert (04:36)
Yeah.
Rachael Bosch (04:38)
of building the company.
Marlene (04:40)
Mm
Rachael Bosch (04:41)
You know, it’s probably a tie between finding talent and building systems. know, building systems, as it turns out, is just something that I love. I don’t know if it’s my ADHD brain, but I love a system. I love having all the back -end pieces. I kind of am a nerd about these things, so I wanted to go in and build all these automations and build functionality, and that has been manifested into building an entire platform that delivers one of our services. you know, I just
enjoy that piece, but I also have to say like there’s nothing better than finding an amazing coach or an amazing trainer and just giving them everything they need so they don’t have to worry about anything except shining in what they do and then hearing back from clients like, we worked with Kate and she was so fabulous and it was just the best program ever like that makes me so happy and so proud.
Greg Lambert (05:35)
I wanted to ask you about the communication, because if anyone’s listened to more than one of these podcasts, they’ve heard me say that all problems are communication problems. And so I’m just wondering, what were some of the challenges in communication, either getting the, I will say partners to communicate what their true issues were?
Marlene (05:42)
You
Rachael Bosch (05:45)
Amen.
Greg Lambert (06:03)
What were some of the things that I guess you probably still do to kind of ease that transition for them to actually say, here’s what I’m really thinking.
Rachael Bosch (06:14)
I was going to say, Greg, that’s so generous. You put that in past tense. We could put that in present tense. The challenges, you know, eight years ago are the exact same challenges. Now they’ll be the same challenges 10 years from now. One of the big things is when you and this kind of gets to, I you already teed up the brain based coaching thing, but one, when you create habit around things, when you do things for a long period of time, they become really hard to explain to other folks. Like I always,
to tell people think about if you’ve ever taught a kid to swim or ride a bike and then think about how hard it was to unpack each thing that you were doing when you are doing most of that yeah non -consciously now like you just naturally turn your head and breathe and to actually try to explain that so I think one of the challenges is actually being able to unpack what skills and what specific steps people need to do to actually be good at their job because we we live in an apprenticeship
Marlene (06:55)
each step.
Rachael Bosch (07:14)
model. People are learning by being around people who do this and know it really well, but they need to also know how to kind of unpack it and describe it backwards. I think the other thing is for an industry that kind of has in the zeitgeist a bit of a cultural conversation around being aggressive and confrontational and like, you like to argue as a kid, go be a lawyer. Like, it’s the worst advice ever. But I think the real challenge
is also that there’s a real resistance, a hesitancy to just have open, honest dialogue. And I think that that’s actually the true nature. And most of the lawyers we work with is a risk aversion. That piece comes out in the communication. So it’s like everyone kind of culturally expects, they’re just going to go in and like say the thing. And it’s like, sure, when you’re in a deposition, you’re across from opposing counsel, you’re negotiating something.
Yeah, that’s when that comes out. But when you got to give feedback to that associate down the hall, I see partners who would make me cry in a deposition, shrink away because they just don’t want to tell that mid -level associate that they should be using, you know, this font instead of that font. And so I think like that’s that challenge is really there. So those two things really play into it like unpacking what you’re trying to teach somebody and also just being willing to have a direct conversation.
Marlene (08:45)
Rachel, can you explain the concept of brain -based coaching and how that applies to improving communication and leadership within legal and professional environments?
Rachael Bosch (08:55)
Yeah. So brain -based coaching is interesting just in general. think the world of coaching, where did that come from?
Marlene (09:01)
Yeah, like where did that come from? Like where does that terminology come from?
Rachael Bosch (09:05)
That comes from the Neuro Leadership. I wish it did. I wish it did. I’d be on a beach somewhere. Now, that comes from the Neuro Leadership Institute. Neuro Leadership Institute is a great organization. bring together top OD specialists and top neuroscientists, and they try to just figure out how to solve organizational problems in a human -centered way. And when I decided I wanted to get coaching certified, looked at all, there’s, you know, my thousands of options out there to get.
Greg Lambert (09:05)
It came from her brain.
Marlene (09:07)
from your brain.
Rachael Bosch (09:35)
certified as an executive coach and I sort of started from a place of who’s my audience. My audience is lawyers. I have a skeptical audience. So I wanted to be in a position to really speak from a place of fact where a lot of coaching can be squishier, a little bit more soft in terms like the language that you’ll sometimes hear lawyers use. I wanted something really rooted in fact and so
that’s where brain -based coaching comes in and the Neural Leadership Institute comes in. So what’s great about brain -based coaching is it’s not necessarily different tactics than anything that you would do in those squishy, soft coaching engagements. It’s just that I can tell you what’s actually happening in your brain to ground what I’m talking about with somebody. So when I’m talking to that partner who’s scared to give that mid -level down the hall the feedback that they’re using the wrong font, we can talk about catastrophizing and then we can talk about
about the fact that that’s a cognitive distortion. What’s a cognitive distortion? That’s where you actually are thinking something is true, but your brain is telling you a story that isn’t factually true. How do we get out of that? We’ve root ourselves in truth. Ask yourself, what do you know to be true? Have you ever given feedback to that mid -level associate before? Yes. Have they ever gotten really upset, stormed out, said they’re never working with you again? No. Okay, so what do we now know to be true? So that’s what it really is. It takes the tactics of coaching and actually explains it. It’s not.
Marlene (11:02)
It’s like psychology. It’s like you’re a therapist. That’s funny.
Rachael Bosch (11:04)
not far off. It’s not far off. I know. Well, I always tell people, I’m like, coaching is not workplace therapy, but it gets dangerously close from time to time.
Greg Lambert (11:17)
I’m just wondering, before we get off the coaching, I’ve got a couple of questions that I’m just gonna hit you with here is, do you feel there was any kind of resistance to bringing in a coach to teach lawyers how, yeah, it was too squishy. And the other thing that I wondered, because I see this a lot in other aspects,
Marlene (11:39)
think it was too squishy.
Rachael Bosch (11:41)
Yeah.
Greg Lambert (11:47)
is does the, do the attorneys think that the coach also needs to be an attorney in order to really understand them?
Rachael Bosch (11:54)
you
Great questions, Greg. Let me answer them. in terms of resistance, yes. So, you know, I’m not going to be the first person to say this on this podcast, I’m sure. You know, the legal industry lags behind corporate culture. And we just know that big corporations are doing things that we will do in five or 10 years. If you look at the of coaching inside like big consulting firms, it’s so much more
Greg Lambert (12:00)
Please do.
Rachael Bosch (12:26)
accepted than it is in law firms even still. Although there’s been a lot of really good work and in firms you you see certain firms have like a really strong culture of coaching where when somebody’s like we want you to work with a coach they’re like awesome they don’t see it as you know that sort of sign that things are about to be coming to a close for you. I think one of the challenges is that a lot of law firms still only use coaching for outplacement.
So when you only use coaching for outplacement, it means that people see you coming down the hall to tell them about coaching and they think, all right, time to get packing, right? Time to start answering all those headhunter calls because they’re scared. So when we think about coaching, it’s a much more like broad application. We certainly do coach. I mean, all the way to the extreme of post investigation. So we’ve done our internal investigation. You haven’t done anything illegal, but just in case, why don’t you do some
coaching so we can just say that we did that you know all the way down to super high potential person there may be a senior associate we really want them to be up for a partner but they seem to be struggling managing people could you work with them and then seeing those people through to the partnership process so when you start using coaching for a lot of different things people get more comfortable with it and they’re more accepting I will also say even when it is mandated like that first example
People are happy just to have an hour where they can kind of step outside of their working reality and really focus on how to do things better. One of the big challenges in our industry, as you all know, is like just time. When we’re billing by the hour, everything comes down to time, which means that we do not see a lot of leaders in law firms taking the time to self -reflect. And self -reflection is one of the best things that you can do to build your leadership skills, your practice.
your business development skills, all of that. That was part one. Do they need to be a lawyer? No. And a lot of times it’s better. Do folks think that, which I think was actually your question? Yes. So they’ll be like, I am an IP attorney. I have a background in chemical engineering. I’d like to work with a coach who has a background in chemical engineering and is an IP attorney. It’s like, well.
Marlene (14:52)
still understand me better.
Rachael Bosch (14:53)
They’ll understand me better. Yes. So in coaching, we actually talk about something called the clarity of distance. It’s better if they don’t know a damn thing about what you do. We want the coach to sit outside of your reality because then they can see things clearly. If somebody is like deep in the weeds of what you do, you tend to kind of stay in the weeds instead of bringing yourself up and being able to see that big picture. And so you want somebody who
doesn’t know or quite frankly, I mean, I say this in a cold way, but care about the ins and outs. It’s a whisper, right? But like, the thing about coaching, a lot of people kind of get this wrong about coaching is the coach should not be invested in the outcome.
Marlene (15:29)
She’s like dropping her voice like it’s a whisper.
Rachael Bosch (15:44)
The coach should be invested in supporting the person in coaching. Right? And so the person in coaching sets the outcome. They set the goals. If somebody said, unless I’m worried you’re going to hurt yourself or hurt somebody else, if you say, this is the thing that I think is going to get me there, great. What are the first two things you can do? Right? I’m there to be there for accountability and to help you see things. I don’t, I, and people will always say this in coaching. They’ll say like, like, you know, thank you so much. Like,
I could never have done this without you.” And I was like, no, you could. You could have done it. It’s just helpful to have that outside voice, that outside perspective. And people will also say, like, what do want me to say here? Like, what’s the right answer? No, the right answer is whatever you’re like. And they think I have some magical answer in my mind. It’s like, no.
Marlene (16:34)
Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do.
Rachael Bosch (16:35)
Yes, exactly, exactly. So sitting outside of the problem and sitting outside of the practice and the nitty -gritty of it is actually super helpful, but we hear it all the time, all the time. Like, they gotta know what I do, they gotta do what I do. It’s like, no, it’s actually better if they don’t.
Greg Lambert (16:36)
Mm
Yeah, we hear it all the time too, don’t we?
Rachael Bosch (16:54)
Mm -hmm.
Greg Lambert (16:55)
No comment from Marlene.
So Rachel, you had emphasized earlier about the importance of communication and creating more human workspaces. And so what are some of the practical strategies that legal professionals can implement to improve their interpersonal communication skills?
Rachael Bosch (17:20)
Practical strategies, number one, and now it is gonna sound like I’m talking about therapy, so everyone just stay with me, is like, you gotta know yourself.
Marlene (17:26)
you
No one’s even paying for this, it’s great.
Rachael Bosch (17:31)
There you go, you have to know yourself you have to know how other people see you you have to know what is important to you I mean we I did just a talk I’d like a trade group a year or so ago on values based leadership almost two years ago now and firms started asking for it I was shocked I was like, are you kidding me? They want to know this but I’m thrilled because knowing like what’s important to you who you are how other people perceive you is probably the most important thing and something that very much gets
overlooked. So I’d say like invest in some self -awareness. Do a self -awareness activity. can, if you want to drop it in the show notes, we have like a free tool that you can use. It’s not terribly in -depth because it’s free, but it’ll at least get the conversation started where you can like ask folks how they perceive you and then you put in how you perceive yourself and you get a Venn diagram. Even something as simple as that is so helpful. But I think we sort of move through the world thinking that people are experiencing us and know us in the way
that we want to be known and we have no freaking clue. And so just building that self -awareness muscle is the first thing. And the second thing is emotional intelligence. Like if we’re getting like two really key practical things, learn who you are and how other people see you and engage in emotional intelligence and emotional regulation. It drives me up the wall that law firm or law schools still teach. We have to remove emotions from the law.
At this point, we’ve got inside out one and inside out two. So everyone should know emotions are always with us and they inform our behavior and we ignore them at our own peril, right? Like they’re there, you’re feeling them and you’re going to behave in certain ways based on those emotions. So if you just pretend they don’t exist, you’re setting yourself up for a load of hurt. So really like cluing in. No, you can’t. That’s when you become that person who’s throwing stapler.
Greg Lambert (19:25)
You can’t just shove them down and keep them down inside and then.
Rachael Bosch (19:31)
out their office, you know?
Marlene (19:39)
So, Rachel, prep – I know.
Excuse me, we have to take a break so we stop the giggles. So we stop the giggles. All right, we’re back. So in preparing for this call, Rachel, you’d mentioned in your development of an upward feedback tool. And that’s been praised for its confidentiality and also for its ease of use. So can you share some specific examples of how the tool has helped law firms improve their leadership?
Rachael Bosch (19:48)
We have to take a giggle break.
Marlene (20:15)
and overall team dynamics.
Rachael Bosch (20:17)
Yeah, naturally, naturally. Well, and it’s a great transition from talking about emotions to talking about upward feedback and knowing yourself and upward feedback, right? Because I think like this is one of those things. Yeah, we sort of stop. People become partner and they’re like, I’m done.
Greg Lambert (20:17)
without breaking any confidentiality.
Marlene (20:19)
without breaking any confidence.
and how you do that, yes.
Rachael Bosch (20:36)
I’ve gotten all the feedback I need to get. love when firms are like, no, no, no, we have a partner evaluation process. And I’m like, yeah, do the partners just tell you how they’re doing and that’s it? And they’re like, yeah, that’s it. I’m like, okay, that doesn’t count. So upward feedback, basically what was happening was we use upward feedback and coaching already. So we were using it one -on -one with folks as a way to sort of say, like, let’s ground the coaching in reality. You you can think that you’re doing a great job and then you show up to coaching. You’re like, I’m doing a great job. And then the coach is like,
Marlene (20:39)
I’ve made it.
Rachael Bosch (21:06)
All right, well, what are
on. So if you get a bunch of feedback from people who work with that person, it’s really helpful. What ended up happening was that a lot of the firms that we work with and do a lot with were saying to us that they were running that internally for large groups. So outside of just one -on -one coaching engagements like the entire partnership or everyone manager and up on the business side, they were running it internally and they were surprised that nobody wanted to give feedback. And I said, right.
And they said, well, could you do your process that you do for coaching for 250 people? And I said, yes. And then I figured out how. And so we took that same process and sort of magnified it. Now it’s an entire platform because the other piece of this is besides the confidentiality issue, what was coming up a lot of inside firms is there’s just not enough staffing power to actually manage this process. So taking like the coaching brain and then that process brain that I was talking about earlier, putting those
two things together got us to the platform and getting to roll that out. How it’s helped firms with leadership is like, I mean, could give you a ton of stories that don’t break confidentiality, but I think the biggest thing is getting folks really practical information about how they are perceived. And one of the things that like we are really big on, you know, most firms when they do downstream feedback, we call it chicken nugget feedback, what they give people.
So they get feedback from five different partners on how associate X is doing and then somebody, maybe it’s a partner, maybe it’s somebody on the talent team, takes those five different feedback forms and like mushes them up into one little chicken nugget and gives that to the associate and it is not recognizable from its original parts. It’s not terribly healthy and helpful. So we want to do the opposite. So one thing that we do that’s really helpful to those leaders who get
their reports. We don’t edit any comments. Everything is in their verbatim and everyone who’s giving feedback knows that they’re getting it verbatim. So the person getting a report is getting a real snapshot of how folks feel about them. We also triangulate their feedback. So they do a self -assessment. They get their perception of themselves. Then they get other people’s perceptions of themselves. And then we give them a third data point, which is from their group of peers. How do they compare? So there’s just
a lot of grounding in that individual self -awareness, like opening one’s eyes to how you’re actually perceived. And then organizationally, there’s massive benefits because we can take all, you know, however many, maybe it’s 50, maybe it’s 500 feedback reports and look at it on a firm -wide basis. So across the whole firm, what’s happening in this group or that group or that office? What’s happening for your female partners versus your male partners? What’s happening in different demographics?
What’s the feedback looking like? What are the trends? And also we can spot the issues before they become big issues. So if we’re seeing comments and there’s a little bit of like coded language, something seems a little bit off, we can flag that and say, know, just go work with this person. Something might be going on. And I think in some ways, like people get anxious about upward feedback because they’re worried about risk. And one of the things like many of the
the chief talent people that we work with have said this to me, it’s a risk for us to not know this stuff. So there’s like so many, think that’s like that individual, then the organizational, and then all the way to like sort of a big like risk piece of ways that it helps firms.
Greg Lambert (24:57)
I’m wondering if there are, because I think this industry, especially larger law firms and those who make it to partnership level or on the partnership track, I think there’s a perception that they kind of all have a similar personality in order to get to this. So are you seeing some things, and I’m thinking like with Dr. Larry Richards and a lot of times when.
Rachael Bosch (25:24)
Mm -hmm.
Greg Lambert (25:25)
when he looks at, and he’s pointing out, there’s certain things that really, you’re one or two points above the standard deviation in this area. Are there things that you kind of see consistently in this industry that you may not see in others?
Rachael Bosch (25:36)
Mm -hmm.
Yeah.
So yes.
And we see it both in our upward feedback and in our, we deliver the disc behavioral assessment to a lot of firms and we should, we’re aggregating about 3 ,000 disc assessments right now into a behavioral white paper, which is gonna, I’ve not been in the data set yet, but I’m anticipating I would have a lot more to talk about once we see that. Because there are some things that we kind of anecdotally know through that and through the upward feedback piece.
One is that the emotional regulation is really a challenge. Like I know the bottom three questions across all of the upward feedback assessments that we do and the questions around emotional regulation usually creep in there in spot number three in terms of the weakest areas. So there’s a challenge with emotional regulation that I think does lead all the way back to those law schools saying like, check it at the door. We don’t want that here. So no one’s learning it. So that’s a big piece.
And there’s not necessarily, I would say personality wise, I kind of push back on like the idea that there are standard personality pieces that we see in law firms, because I think that that can be viewed or heard as like a sign, like this is the one type of person who can be a lawyer. And I always like to push and say like, no, like anyone can do this. What we are seeing in terms of like trends behaviorally and trends in the upward feedback is that
there are just some really different learning styles that are being presented of late. If I have to have one more conversation with a partner, I mean, I will, I love y ‘all, I’ll do it over and over again, where we have to say like,
Associates have just learned differently and they’re going to continue learning differently. So we can’t do the sort of like learn by just being here model. I we literally have swag that says a red line is not feedback because you cannot just assume that when you send that red line people are going to learn because they’re doing things so differently than they used to like, you know, I’m literally just talking to a colleague about this used to get a now I’m really going to show my age you
you’d get that red line, you’d go, you’d put that red, you’d have a paper, somebody redlined it with red pen, you’d go sit, you’d have to enter in each of the things. As you did that, you were learning, you were growing. The learning style, I think, is the thing that is really changing and being different. I wouldn’t call that personality though. I call that behavior. know, like personality is so core to who you are. The behavior patterns we see, I also see them very much
in different areas both geographically and practice areas, you know, so you you see And it’s not always the way that you would think right like somebody would be like, like you’d think that the litigators are like the real like Hard -charging say what they mean like what I was saying earlier about those feedback. Those are folks who sometimes get like real pullback and it’s this idea like they in the thing that they do They can really give it everything but they can’t then take that hat off and then
sit down and do the same thing with somebody else. So there’s there’s like that kind of thing. But then you do see like, you know, for the disk assessment, for example, you see if you’re looking at a bunch of, again, I’ll use IP attorneys, you tend to see them be more sort of task detail oriented. A lot of them came from either medical or engineering backgrounds. There’s just like some of those behavioral patterns. Those are learned, though. And that’s why I kind of like like to differentiate behavior versus personal
personality and then in the upward feedback, it’s just this is not going to be shocking but feedback is the thing that lawyers don’t do well. Those are consistently the bottom two questions.
Marlene (29:43)
I want to pull on that thread a little bit, like the difference between personality and behavior patterns. Like how would you explain that to people? Like how would you explain it to your clients?
Rachael Bosch (29:50)
Yeah, so our behavior is always changing, constantly. Our personality is static. Right? So who I am is who I am.
When I’m hanging out with my girlfriends, I show up in one way. When I’m hanging out with my family, I show up in a different way. When I’m managing my team, I show up in a third way, right? Like that’s all behavior, but underneath all of that is who I am. And that stays the same. So when we talk personality, it’s more grounded in core values, things that are really important to me. Those are the things that always stay there. They’re always a piece of how I show up, but I will modulate my behavior in
different environments that’s not being inauthentic. And I think that’s a challenge in the cultural conversation right now is like, I’m just being my authentic self. It’s like, no, I don’t know why that’s that’s my Gen Z voice. I don’t know. I’m gonna get canceled. I’m just being my authentic self. And it’s like, no, you can you’re still going to modulate, right? Like, I’m not going to show up to work. I would say I’m not going to show up to work in curse, but that is a thing that I do regularly. So but it’s a good example, right? Like if I’m in
Greg Lambert (31:02)
Yeah, so does Marlene.
Marlene (31:03)
was going to say, we knew we liked you.
Rachael Bosch (31:05)
Yeah, little f -bomb every now and then just keeps people on their toes.
So, but like if I’m going to a very conservative firm, I won’t curse. I will modulate my behavior. I’m still a little spicy as a human being, right? Like that’s still gonna come through, but I will modulate my behavior. And that’s, think the difference really is that the one is a constant shifting, evolving based on the environment that you’re in and what’s appropriate. And the other is like a steady stream that kind of runs underneath.
Greg Lambert (31:40)
Arlene, have you ever taken the disk assessment?
Marlene (31:44)
don’t think I’ve taken that one.
Rachael Bosch (31:46)
Ooh, I’ma hook y ‘all up.
Greg Lambert (31:46)
I’m a very, I’m an ID. Rachel, what are you? Same? All right. So we would probably not work good together then.
Rachael Bosch (31:49)
Yeah, same. Yeah, same. Yeah, it’s been a journey.
Marlene (31:54)
Twinsies
Rachael Bosch (31:58)
I don’t know. Remember, yeah, I’ll get you in there. I’ll get you in.
Marlene (31:59)
Now I’m eager to do this.
Greg Lambert (32:03)
Yeah.
All right, well, we’ve kind of talked about this, but I know one of the two things that you said that you really enjoyed when you started Fringe PD is being able to use that creativity and customize some of the training programs. Do you mind sharing some examples of a particularly innovative program that you’ve developed and some of the impact that it may have had on the participants?
Rachael Bosch (32:32)
Yeah, I think there’s, you know, individual programs and then there’s just the theory of how we approach training that is fairly unique. You know, I’m in the very fun position of I used to hire outside consultants to do the job that I now do as an outside consultant. So that’s, I’ve got some interesting perspective there, but, you know, taking that brain -based coaching and that the ideas that we learned there and, you know, two of our other trainers besides me, so three of us all told have that same background in training.
That’s baked into our group learning as well as the one -on -one work that we do. So there’s certain things that we just know about the brain. Like you can watch an fMRI scan and see that when you are having fun, you retain ideas and concepts better. It’s just fact.
So we have fun in our programs. Like just flat out, there’s kind of like a pop culture reference no matter where you sit, wherever you sit in the pop culture world, we got you covered. If you sit in the Bravo verse, we extra have you covered. So we have lots of little like Bravo little Easter eggs throughout our programs. If you don’t follow Bravo, you’ll never notice it. But if you do follow Bravo, it’ll make your day. So like we want people to have fun. You just learn better.
when you’re having fun. And honestly, a lot of the stuff that we teach can be very preachy, finger waggy, if you don’t do it in a fun and lighthearted way. So that’s the first thing is just like how we approach training. The other thing about how we approach it is we give people space to play. So we always think of it as learn, play, do. That’s like the, always go through that process. In that play is actually having some of these conversations.
giving people fact patterns. That’s something we, you we used to see it kind of that case study model inside firms, but they were never actually then turning around and doing, having the conversation. And I say to folks all the time, it’s like, we do not send firefighters into burning buildings for the first time in a real fire. And yet somehow we think that you’re gonna give really hard, constructive feedback to somebody who’s very emotional about their job for the first time in real time.
that makes no sense. We should be practicing these conversations. So that’s the other like sort of structural thing. So having fun, really making sure people can practice and get in. think in terms of the programming, one of the things I’m really proud of is that we cover the entire life cycle of being a lawyer. So we work with a lot of law schools to deliver programming all the way up to like executive leadership retreats for law firms. And so we’re sort of hitting on every
kind of key moment of communication and how that manifests. The thing that I’m proud of recently is our incoming associate trainings and we have a couple of them that are really good but mostly because we started getting complaints a couple years ago not about our training let me be very clear but about new associates and like that Gen Z conversation of like the hell you know like I’m not I
Marlene (35:45)
hahahaha
Rachael Bosch (35:48)
I won’t say what firm. Yeah. It is fun and we are in it now. But I, you know, I had a firm come to me. I will not name the firm, but they were like, could you have a program on just like how to be an adult? And I said, yeah, we do.
Greg Lambert (35:49)
I’ve been telling people for years, it’s gonna be fun.
Rachael Bosch (36:07)
And so what was fun there is you know what I was talking about earlier where it’s really hard to kind of unpack What you’re doing once it becomes non -conscious to you We actually brought our trainers together and like did a retreat in the middle of nowhere in Virginia and just sat with that question What does it mean to add value probably? What are the things that you are doing when you add value? What are the things that you are doing when you take ownership and how can we teach that to new associates who are mostly Gen Z?
in a way that is not going to get them to tune us out, cancel us, or, you know, I don’t know, throw tomatoes at me. I don’t know what would happen next. But I love those programs because they’re hyper practical and we put it in a way that people are like able to digest it. The other one that I just, I mentioned earlier that just still warms, makes my little Grinch heart grow is the fact that we’re doing so much of the values based leadership.
I did not see that coming at all. Like I said, I did it for that trade group and then people in the room started being like, would you come teach this to our partners? And now we’ve done it again, partners, and we’ve also done it for law students. So it’s like teaching people all the way through the life cycle to really anchor to their values and to make decisions based on those values. And that is really fun because most of the time we get in these rooms and I say, does anyone know their core values? People will be like, no.
Mine? I don’t even know the firm’s values. You want me to know mine? Yeah, you talking to me? And like, it’s really wild. And so we get people to be really practical about how they figure it out. They go through a whole activity there and watching people come up and talk to us afterwards and actually say like, my God, I understand why I’m making decisions now. I understand how to root this. It’s really, really powerful. I’m super proud of those two. Those are big ones.
Marlene (37:39)
Are you talking to me?
Greg Lambert (38:05)
We had Doug Wood on last week and he talked about kind of he has a book from Dawn to Dusk so he covers the whole lifespan of an attorney that we really kind of focused in on the end of an attorney’s career and making that transition out. Are you being asked to kind of help with coaching on the tail end of someone else’s career as well?
Rachael Bosch (38:07)
Mm
We, individual, yeah, we have been doing some of that. It’s very much individual as it should be. I’m sorry. Are you asking Marlene, do individuals come to us or does the firm come to us?
Marlene (38:35)
And is it individual or is it more on a firm basis? Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it more like individuals are coming or you have a organization that’s coming? Because Doug had some thoughts on that.
Rachael Bosch (38:57)
Yeah, yeah, it is more the organization is coming to us. And it’s, I think what’s really, really interesting about it, from my perspective, is at those earlier stages, when we’re working with folks who aren’t at the tail end of their career, but who are just wanting to be partner or just became partner.
Marlene (39:01)
That’s interesting.
Rachael Bosch (39:18)
I will ask a lot of times, like, why do you want to be partner? To what end? And no one’s thinking about after, which I think, you know, we’ll need another three hours to unpack that.
But one of the things that somebody said to me really early on when I started Fringe was, think about what this business is going to serve for you in your life. What’s it gonna give you in your life? Outside of work, screw work. How is this gonna help you live the life that you want? We’re not having that conversations with attorneys in practice. What is your practice doing for you? What is it doing to serve you? And now that partnership, especially in the big firms, looks so different, like…
I keep having partners ask me this, like, do the associates even want to be partner anymore? I’m like, no, look at you. You sound miserable. Like, why would they want? It used to be, you know, like Friday afternoon on a summer week, partners would be out hanging out on the boat, going golf and hanging with their family. I coached a partner last year who built 2 ,500 hours.
like why would anyone who’s 20 something look up the chain and say they want to do that? So I want there to be more conversation about this in firms. I’m hearing more of it from my colleagues and other companies who do more of the outplacement work. I think that’s where it’s actually stemming from is like end of career outplacement almost. But I want to know Greg’s opinion.
Greg Lambert (40:51)
Ha
Rachael Bosch (40:52)
Well, Marlene said you had a hot take.
Marlene (40:52)
Well, it does seem to sink.
Greg Lambert (40:56)
no, think Doug had a hot take on that one. Doug had it, yeah.
Marlene (40:58)
Doug, Doug, no, Doug, Doug did. And this seems to sink. At first, I didn’t think it did sink, but when you added that last bit that it’s basically for the outboarding, I guess, that that does sink. He’s saying that organizations firms are not really looking at this until that point. And they offer some support that way, but not kind of what you’re talking about.
Rachael Bosch (40:58)
Doug had a hot take.
Yeah, it’s a lot easier.
Greg Lambert (41:26)
Yeah, and the thing that stuck in my head with Doug is one of the comments I made was typically the attorney only retires once. The law firm, however, goes through multiple attorneys retiring from their firm. And it seemed like there was still not any kind of structure on how to guide these partners into winding down a career.
Rachael Bosch (41:45)
Mm
Greg Lambert (41:56)
in a way that really kind of helped the firm, but also helped the partner as well. And so it seemed like the onus really should fall on the firm to make that effort to at least offer this type of coaching.
Marlene (42:00)
and help them.
Rachael Bosch (42:01)
Yeah, there’s not.
I don’t disagree and I actually think that we should be having these conversations way earlier because people don’t know what life is like if the entire world, if your entire universe is work. It makes it really hard to step away. That becomes your identity. It’s such a huge part of who you are instead of seeing work as a way to then create a time in your life where you’re doing other things. What are your interests? What do you want to do? What you want to sit on a board? You want to volunteer like
There’s so much to be done. I had somebody say to me once, who was much older than I, I’d rather burn out than rust out. And I just, said to them, we had a good relationship. said, we have two very different ideas of retirement. I’m not rustin’ out anywhere. I will see you in the south of France, sir.
Marlene (43:04)
Right.
Okay, so Rachel, we’ve come to the time in the podcast where we have our crystal ball question. And we ask all our guests this question at the very end of the discussion. So looking into your crystal ball, what challenges or changes do you see or foresee in the industry in terms of professional development or workplace training over the next two to five years?
Rachael Bosch (43:35)
Yeah, I do travel with a set of tarot cards, but I will not I will not use that in my answer to this question. I think we are about to encounter a real conflict around caring and.
Marlene (43:44)
You
Rachael Bosch (43:57)
I see a new generation of partners, mostly mid to elder millennials, who deeply care and are hungry and humble in a way that I haven’t really seen in a long time. Sort of a generation of new partners that say, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Could you please help me? Like no one ever told me how to be a boss. And now I need to boss these people. Please help. And just like a real care and wanting to really just like foster
foster caring in their groups and in their teams in a way that, you know, no shade to my Baby Boomer partners, but that we just didn’t see as much of. It just wasn’t the world that they came up in. At the same time, we have an entering class of new associates in early on Gen Z that are
seeing work in a different way and very much at arm’s length and almost to care about work is a sign that you’ve given in to capitalism and you’re just a slave to the patriarchy and we can’t and we have to have these boundaries. And I think boundaries and guardrails are very helpful and they have a place.
But I think we’re gonna have a group of new junior partners who really wanna build cultures of caring and a group of new associates who just wanna give them the old Heisman, keep them at arm’s length. And I think that is gonna be the challenge that we all in the organizational development talent leadership space need to figure out how to create a bridge between those two communities.
Greg Lambert (45:36)
Interesting. You notice that not one mention of us in the Gen X slacker generation, right? We’re keeping a low profile.
Marlene (45:42)
Nope.
Rachael Bosch (45:45)
I know how to cater. Come on. Yeah, very Gen X.
Marlene (45:50)
We don’t care.
Greg Lambert (45:53)
All right, well, Rachel Bosch, founder and managing director of Fringe Professional Development, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us here on the Geek in Review.
Rachael Bosch (46:03)
Thank you, it’s been a fun time.
Marlene (46:07)
And of course, thanks to all of you, our listeners, for taking the time to listen to the Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you, so reach out to us on LinkedIn.
Greg Lambert (46:18)
So Rachel, we’ll put it in the show notes, but what’s the best way for people to find out more about fringe professional development or to reach out to you if they have more questions?
Rachael Bosch (46:27)
website, LinkedIn. That’s it. And I can send, I’ll send those little, the tool thing that I mentioned, I can send links and pictures and things like that. Yeah.
Greg Lambert (46:30)
All right.
Okay, awesome. We’ll make sure we put those on the show notes.
Marlene (46:38)
Okay. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. So thank you very much, Jerry.
Greg Lambert (46:44)
All right, thanks Jerry. Talk to you later, Marlene
Marlene (46:46)
Alright, I’m gonna check out my behaviors.
Rachael Bosch (46:49)
Yeah
Greg Lambert (46:49)
Good luck.