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Tyler Finn

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How important is the culture of an organization to its success? How can legal leaders cultivate high-performing cultures for their teams and their companies? And why is this something that a lot of legal teams seem to struggle with? Today, here in London, that's fun for me, I haven't said that before. We are joined on the abstract by Manu Kanwar, co-founder and CEO of Lex Solutions, a legal consultancy that builds solutions that fit your legal team around resourcing, innovation, and culture. Manu previously served as GC for multiple tech companies in the UK, including a long tenure at Yahoo. He started his legal career at Osborne Clark here in London.

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Manu Kanwar

Yeah. Thanks so much for joining me today for this episode of The Abstract.

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Manu Kanwar

Thanks for the invitation. Good to be here and welcome to London.

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Tyler Finn

Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here. Okay, let's start actually with Lex Solutions. Where did the idea come from? Why did you decide to launch a consultancy? And I give a very brief overview, but what is LexSolutions focus on?

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Manu Kanwar

So the idea for LexSolutions came about when I was at Yahoo. And I was at Yahoo for quite a long time, heading up corporate and then, well, commercial and then corporate as well. I've always been really entrepreneurial and trying to find ways in which we as lawyers could drive real value to the business. You know, when you're in-house, that's, you know, primarily what the focus is and should be. I even thought at some stages about moving across into the business, but then I found that there was so much more that we could do from the legal department. And Yahoo, in my second five, I mean, I was there for like 10 years, but in the second five years, so the second half of my tenure, uh, we'd gone through, I think, seven CEOs in the space of that time, like including two interims. And the business was pivoting so much that we were, well, obviously started out as an internet company and then we were a tech company and then we were a data business. And so it was just, it was moving in the whole direction and the business model was moving. And we, as the commercial team, really needed to be ahead of that business strategy in order to be able to deliver that value. Finally, we settled on being a digital ad network when digital ad networks didn't exist. So we really needed to understand what that meant for us. And then not just for my team but also for all the other lawyers, like the product lawyers and you know in HR, right? Because we need to understand our business to know how we drive value. And I started out with a couple of small initiatives in my team in London and EMEA that then got expanded and sponsored across all of the lawyers in EMEA, and then all the lawyers globally. So we had a conference in Napa where all 350 lawyers were working on these initiatives that we'd started, which were largely related to wholly adopting the business objectives of Yahoo, rather than legal objectives that we might have come up with in relation to templates or like know-how and stuff. It was just looking at the commercial objectives of the business, the commercial challenges of the business, and how as lawyers could we just align fully with that. And the markets across the world were all different, so people had different ways of being able to do it. So when I had all of these lawyers working on these small initiatives that we'd started, I think that was the moment that I felt, wow, I want to help other legal teams to do that. And that was essentially legal ops, legal innovation at a time when those weren't phrases.

So the idea was seeded then, and then it just grew over the next few years. And yeah, and then finally launched almost 10 years ago, about nine and a half years ago. 

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Tyler Finn

I want to ask you a follow up to that, which is, how do you think about innovation? Because I think that when folks who I have on this podcast or people who I talk to at conferences, our customers even, when they think about legal innovation, often what they're thinking about is procuring some sort of technology. These days, they're thinking a lot about AI. They might be thinking about process and workflows around that, some sort of change management. But what do you think about when you think about legal innovation? What does that term mean to you? What you're describing at Yahoo sounds like a slightly more wholesale way of thinking about what sort of value is the legal team supposed to be delivering to the business.

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Manu Kanwar 

Yeah, 100%. So it starts with that. It starts with the value that we're delivering because we're all working within a business and our primary focus has to be the success of that business. Obviously included within that is also risk and compliance. So I'm not saying that that's not part of the puzzle. It absolutely is. But how do we drive greater value and success for the organizations within which we work? And then innovation or legal innovation has to be how we find better ways to be able to deliver that kind of value. And that could be speed, it could be better deals, it could be, you know, a way in which that actually we deliver well-being and productivity, not just for the legal team, but for the business guys as well. So it's really just trying to find new and better ways to deliver that kind of value. And some of that is obviously educating the business guys as to what a good deal might look like. Because sometimes from the perspective that we have, we can deliver value in a much more holistic way because we are seeing everything. We're seeing the deal, the challenges, and the perspectives from lots of different perspectives. We deal within legal with all the departments of the C-suite.

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Tyler Finn

It strikes me that for a sort of shift in thinking like that to be successful, you have to bring a lot of people along with you. I'm curious, as you look across the different clients that you've worked with at Lex Solutions, what distinguishes those who do this really, really well from maybe those who struggle a bit with the sort of like change?

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Manu Kanwar 

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, ultimately, the ones that would do it well would be those that take a much more purpose-led approach. So to the point that you made earlier, that a lot of people think about tech and about improving processes being innovation. Absolutely they are. We see tech as being the last piece of the puzzle. Well, not even last, but a piece of the puzzle that we would put it out.

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Tyler Finn

I kind of agree with you actually, but yeah.

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Manu Kanwar

Because there's a lot more that you need to be doing or thinking about before then, right? So, you know, there's a lot of us that have been saying for many years that, you know, focus on the problems you're trying to solve. So where's the value gonna come from? What are the inhibitors to driving that kind of value? So what are the challenges you're facing. So what problems do you need to solve in order to be able to deliver that value? So understanding what your purpose is, what the problems are that you're facing, and then finding ways to improve processes, relationships, alignment, so driving a better culture and alignment across different departments. All of that work are going to lead to lots and lots of quick wins and pave your path towards the more glitzy innovation that you might do, whether it's in relation to a tech product or AI more generally, whatever it could be. So back to answer your question, those ones that do it well and better, I take that they take that measured approach because Because, you know, rather than just rushing ahead and firefighting and trying to find a solution, it's just stepping back a little bit, thinking about why we're here, thinking about our purpose, thinking about where we are having challenges in the ways that we're working. How do we fix that?  And then how do we move towards delivering on the value and the purpose that we talked about? And you build then a roadmap towards and including tech and AI and everything else. But you do it in a way that you find the low-hanging fruit, deliver immediate value, optimize relationships, and then move towards the harder stuff.

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Manu Kanwar

What do you find most rewarding about this work? And I'm also curious what you find most challenging about it.

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Manu Kanwar 

Okay, good question. So most... 

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Tyler Finn

You're allowed to think. 

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Manu Kanwar 

What I find most rewarding is, I guess, is solving problems. It's finding answers to those challenges. And what I find most rewarding in relation to that is that the solutions are, and the value is sometimes, if not often, to be found in places that you're not looking. So it's by taking that step back, taking that measured approach, aligning all your stakeholders, being able to create safe space for all those conversations, looking at the problems from different perspectives, and then coming up with solutions that at the beginning people were thinking are not viable, were never going to happen, or just like weren't really issues. So what I find most rewarding is taking an approach that both surprises and truly satisfies people. And your second question was what's most challenging?

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Tyler Finn

What's most challenging about this sort of work?

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Manu Kanwar

I guess it's just that I think everyone in any in-house team are largely frustrated by two things. One, that they've got just too much on. You're firefighting constantly. Not just in terms of volume of work, obviously that's a big one, but also relationships and being able to demonstrate value. And there are lots of different perspectives that we are under fire for and budget. And so what I find challenging is is that there's so much value to be had and to be delivered if people were able and were empowered to be able to create that space, that time, and also to apply a bit more budget to it. Because ultimately, we would throw money at problems, thinking that we're going to be able to solve them. But that's not necessarily going to work, unless you're taking a much more measured approach.

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Tyler Finn

I want to ask you a question about budget actually. And we are going to talk about culture too because that's something that's I think unique to the approach that you take. You keep hearing a lot, do more with less, do more with less. We're being told to do more with less. I don't know. I mean, I guess I don't think like the sort of like AI solutions are quite there yet for that to be a like truly palatable reality. I think even when that is the case, a lot of the times, what you really want to do is do some things much faster and more efficiently, but then go and fight a lot of other fires that are burning. What comes to mind for you when you hear from clients, we've been told to do more with less by our CFO or GC or CEO or whoever it is?

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Manu Kanwar

So I've got, I think I've got two two flip side of a coin answers to that. I think, I don't know, I haven't quite worked it out in my head just yet. And I'll explain why I'm pondering over this. One, I totally get that's a reality, right? All GCs are faced with that, that that's what we've been told for a long time. It's not a new phrase, but it's just an evergreen challenge. And circumstances change and there is more to be done and there is less budget available. So it just becomes an impossible problem to solve. So I understand that we do need to navigate it and that we do need to find ways to be able to deliver value with the limited budgets and the limited resource and the limited time that we've got. And there are lots of ways that we can do that, you know, along the lines that I was describing earlier to be able to, you know, just take a step out and find different perspectives to have stakeholder alignment. So we're not working, you know, in silos, we're working with those other teams that we're supporting, like literally with them, to be able to come up with solutions that in the moment everyone agrees are going to deliver value for everyone. You know, I mean, we can talk maybe more about that as well. But the other side of the coin is that it's a massive frustration that legal should be burdened with a challenge like that. It's often, if not always, the legal team that seems to be burdened with that more than any other department. Okay, yeah, marketing a little bit, but then marketing also is related to revenue so they can get budget because they can demonstrate value in a different way. It's always been the case that legal are tasked with having to do more with less whereas other departments may not be so much and I think it's because we find it difficult to demonstrate value. But I've just come from lunch with a mentor and a really good friend of mine, like Paul Gilbert, and he'll absolutely hate me mentioning his name. He's so modest.

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Tyler Finn

Who is he, just for those of us who...

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Manu Kanwar

So Paul was a long time GC, very well known in the legal community, 15 years, has become a very renowned mentor, coach, and sounding board within the legal sector. 

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Tyler Finn

And a future podcast guest. 

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Manu Kanwar

I'd love for you to have him on. He's so incredibly modest. And that and you know, he may not he actually said to me, he's never done a podcast He's never had a video recorded because he just won't he just won't do it He's always in the moment and he is again again, like, you know, he's not a meditator. We know you talk about meditation, but you know, he is always always in the moment Which makes him such a special person and such a great mentor He he ran a program called LBC called and it's a leadership program. He's now passed the baton on to the faculty. And so we're going to be running LBC going forwards. But when I was there as a delegate last year, and this is a speech that he gives, you know, or talk that he gives to all members every year was about this phrase, was about this, how dangerous it is to succumb, to capitulate to this obsession with the business that the lawyers need to do more with less. And his position is no, like the maths doesn't work. How can we do more with less? You want us to deliver more value. You want us to be able to help this business be successful, but like we're human beings and we're tasked with the same kind. So at what point, if we'd keep doing more with less, more with less, more with less, you give us more, you, you, you, you, yeah, so yeah, you, you, um, give us more to do with less resources. Something's going to break, right? The system's going to break. Risks are going to be taken that shouldn't be taken. People are going to become unwell. And we see all of those things happening all of the time. So no, we're not going to do more with less. Actually, we can do more with more or we can do less with less. So you as a business decide what you want us to do. And I think, you know, it's very difficult, you know, when we're in the moment, you know, with the CFO or the business, just to say no, but there is a lot to be said for us to just take a step back and go, okay, it's right. You know, we need to be making sure that compliance is strong, integrity remains high, that people remain well, and the business is being adequately served. Those are really, really important things. And uniquely, the legal team are placed to be able to deliver them. So we should be elevating the position and the perception of legal so that we can deliver true value, but are adequately resourced, remunerated, and respected for it.

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Tyler Finn

One reaction to that would be saying that we're going to continue to get better at what we do or operate more efficiently year in, year out, just as every other team does within a business or adapt to changing trends, right? Maybe now we have product councils that we didn't have before, right? That's not the same as saying we have to do more with less year in, year out, right?

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Manu Kanwar

No one's saying that we're not gonna improve. Yeah, exactly. We're not still like writing, literally writing our contracts. Like we've moved way, way, way ahead of that, right? So yeah, and we always like challenges. We always like self-improvement. You know, it's a great thing about lawyers are always trying to strive for perfection and do things better. So that's natural, we're gonna do that, right? So that's fine. But to continue to expect us to deliver more value with less resources and less time, it's just the maths doesn't work.

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Tyler Finn

Maybe this is a good lead in to culture. It's one of the things I guess that Lex Solutions does sort of uniquely is focus not just on the sort of resourcing side or like the innovation and tech side of consulting, but also does consulting around culture for legal teams. I guess maybe a first question would be why do you think culture is so hard to get right?

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Manu Kanwar

Two reasons One it's not considered enough It's like an afterthought or it's something that we talk about but don't really do So it's not really really Invested in really do. So it's not really, really, um, invested in. Um, and the other thing is because culture is not easy necessarily, right? It's about human beings and human beings are complex. We're all complex. So it takes a bit of time, a bit of investment, a bit of thinking about how to do it right. And, and it goes down to, you know, understanding us as human beings and as individuals to get it right. It's not just going to be a one solution, fitting everyone, making everything work. You're not going to be able to want may wave a wand at this. You need to be thinking about different needs. You need to be thinking about diversity and inclusion. You think about wellbeing, you need to be thinking about remote working or hybrid working and all of these things, all of these factors, they're all important and they're all important because people have different needs. So, so that's why it's, I would say that's why it's more challenging. I still don't, I mean, it's not difficult difficult. It's not an impossible challenge to solve, but given appropriate ways to think about it and using lots of different tools to understand people and align teams and build better relationships is important.

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Tyler Finn

How has your experience led you to conclude that this is something that's really important to focus on, so much so that you would make it a big part of your practice? 

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Manu Kanwar 

Because I've personally been involved in businesses where the culture is great. And even within those businesses where the culture has been great, being involved in toxic relationships. So the subculture within a team or a relationship could be incredibly damaging even when the overall culture is great. And then I've been in situations where the overall culture is incredibly toxic, but individual relationships are strong and supportive. So I've just seen different sides of all of that and I've seen how it plays out for the business. I've seen it, how it see how it plays out for the team and I've seen it, how it plays out for an individual, like my own experience in all of those situations. And I've seen my own physical and mental health suffer in toxic relationships and cultures. And I've seen businesses fail, like literally fail, be pulled apart and not exist anymore because of the toxicity of the culture and not wanting or being able to address it. And it's a shame. It's a shame when you look at that and you think, wow, you know, there's, there's no reason why that business should have failed. In fact, it should have been a dead cert. But you know, the only one common denominator or the most important common denominator was that. So I guess, you know, having been gone on my own journey, having had, you know, you know, uh, time to reflect and think about and having to work on myself. Um, and, um, that was empowering for me, helpful for me, but also then it was something that I wanted to bring back and give back. Um, So then I started thinking about, you know, if you know, if I were to deliver or help teams to deliver better cultures, stronger relationships, how would I do that? I trained as a coach in a methodology called organizational relationship systems coaching. Okay. A mouthful. But it's basically about, you know, understanding any relationship, even between two people, as a simple system. And then obviously the more people you have in a team or an organization, the more complex that system becomes. But each relationship creates a third entity. So you have in a relationship of two people, you have three entities. There's a relationship and the two people in it. The more complex, the more people you have in a team or organization, the more complex that system is. But the system is always intelligent, generative, and creative. So the system's always going to move towards achieving the objectives of the people in it. But the people in it don't know what impact they're having or what impact they're taking away. The system as a whole is unaware. So we need to find ways to inject awareness, intentionality and purpose and things like that. So that's one way. I've gone on a bit of a tangent, but so I, I, I trained as that, and then I found ways to sort of bring some of the exercises, some of the learnings from that into my day-to-day work. And then as I've gone on my own wellbeing journey, you know, I've, I've started to introduce other things that, that, that I never thought I'd be able to talk about in, you know, in, in legal circles because I teach meditation. I've got my own coaching model called purposeful alignment which, which goes to us as human beings. And there's more appetite to have those conversations now. And then threading that back to the things that we were talking about, threading that with innovation and stuff like that, it's just delivered profound results for us and for the teams that we work with. That's just encouraged me just to keep just to keep going because everyone wants to deliver change. Everyone wants to deliver value but change shouldn't be an afterthought. It shouldn't be something that we do at the end. It should be thought about right at the beginning of the planning stages when we originally get our stakeholders together to think about what are we doing and why are we doing it. And so I don't, I can't see how innovation strategy and culture could be dealt with separately. They're inextricably linked and they need to be dealt with as that. So that's a long winded way to say why, why it's an important part of Alexa.

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Tyler Finn

I have so many questions for you now…

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Manu Kanwar

So I'll go all day 

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Tyler Finn

Do you want to start with the company perspective or do you want to start with I've got a couple questions for you Personally, where do you want to begin? 

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Manu Kanwar

I don’t mind.

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Tyler Finn

Okay, I mean, let's talk about where responsibility lies for this maybe. I think that's an interesting area to explore. Does it lie with the general counsel? Does it lie with the executive team broadly? I mean, I think of course probably it does, right? But does it lie with anybody who's in management? What sort of autonomy do individuals have within an organization? Like, how do you think about that? Is that enough of a question to get us started?

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Manu Kanwar

Yeah, yeah. I think I'll keep us going for a little while. So, I mean, ultimately, yeah, the responsibility is with the exec team and the business, you know know the leaders of the business. But that you know as I was alluding to earlier doesn't mean then if they don't take responsibility that the general counsel or any leader is abdicated from not doing that within their own team. So ultimately we're all responsible for the culture that we deliver within the teams that we lead or that we work in. And of course, got lost as to how we're going to navigate all of this. But yeah, I mean, how much autonomy there should be. I mean, ultimately what you would expect and what you would ideally want is for you know the overall leadership of the business to have a clear purpose and vision and values and all of that. But as you know has become a cliche in its own right you know those vision and values and purpose isn't something to be laminated and put in a drawer it needs to be lived needs to be well understood. So how can we a make sure that we understand them within the exec team and how can we make sure that you know people understand what it means to them, you know, in their responsibilities, in their roles and responsibilities and their teams and how they can, how can they live that. So we need to find a way to align and thread all the way through. But we are responsible for the teams within which we work. So even if we can't influence necessarily what's happening at the top, we can certainly influence what's happening within our own teams. So we need to find ways of understanding where people are at, right? Where, well, yeah, where people are at married to the purpose of our own particular team. So how do we fit in? How do we work better with each other? We need to understand where and how there could be challenges to delivering the kind of atmosphere, the kind of relationships, the kind of culture that we want. And we need to in order to be able to do that, we need to be able to create safe space. So psychological safety so people can have the conversations that this is what you consider to be the purpose of our team or organization. This is what you consider to be the values and everything else that we should be lived by. But actually they're not. For me, I don't feel that. I don't feel that because of X, Y, Z. Now no one's going to own up and say that unless they're in a safe space. So there's lots of ways in which we need to be able to create that safe space to optimize those relationships for that information to flow. And as that information flows, then we can understand each other's needs and how we can deliver on each other's needs towards that overall purpose. You asked about autonomy and people definitely need autonomy, right? But it's not just, you know, it's not to say you're responsible for culture, off you go. They need autonomy for their work. They need autonomy for the way they bring themselves to work and so on. There's this theory of self-determination which talks about how to lead motivated teams and for you to have high motivation in a team, there are three basic human rights that are needed. One is connectedness. You need to feel that you're part of a team, that you're part of a tribe, that you've got each other's back. Another is competence. Now, competence is the balance between being challenged, so you need to be challenged, you want to be challenged, but also you don't want to be so challenged that your task is impossible. So you need to feel that you've got an opportunity to succeed. So it's getting that balance. That's where the competence comes in. And the third is autonomy. You don't want to be in a position where you're just told what you need to be doing. You need to have some freedom to, you know, understanding where we're going, understanding what our purpose is, understanding what we need to deliver, and then have highly motivated, well-performing people. So all of those things are different facets and the responsibility of different people within the team. But ultimately, I've probably spent five minutes to answer your question, that the responsibility lies with the leaders of those teams. Yeah, definitely the organizing, but definitely within the teams.

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Tyler Finn

You've brought up this sort of concept of like psychological safety, which I personally agree with. But I know there's a lot of execs out there who would say, okay, I sort of see that, but I also really pride us on having an organization that has a lot of candor or a lot of transparency. How do you respond to that? Do you view those concepts as a conflict?

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Manu Kanwar

No, not at all. I don't see how they're mutually exclusive at all. Would you say, and I'm not saying you would say, but would they say, for instance, that, you know, they want to have a lot of candor and transparency, you know, to the point that they are free to bully, hurt, exclude other people? Well, no, right? You don't have the freedom to be able to do that. So you'd want to have the transparency. So everyone feels safe to explain what their needs are and how they feel in an organization and what do they need to be able to deliver on the success, you know, towards the success of that organization. And if I feel that I'm being bullied or I'm being excluded or you haven't really got my back and I won't own up, then I'm not going to be transparent. There is no candor. So we need to be able to create the environment where we can have transparency and candor, but in a civilized and respectful way.

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Tyler Finn

Sure. 

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Manu Kanwar

Yeah. 

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Tyler Finn

When organizations have culture that goes south, let's say. How in your experience, like what does an organization need to do to recover or how have you gone maybe in with clients and helped them try to right-size what's happening, fix what's happening?

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Manu Kanwar

I mean, the first step is to recognize that things are not right. 

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Tyler Finn

Yeah. 

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Manu Kanwar

And not be so headstrong that we just got to continue down this path and the way that we are doing it. So you need to, A, understand there's an issue and recognize that we probably need to pivot, change. What do we need to do? And finding ways to be, you know, for the organization to be self-reflective and humble, to be able to think about, right, what do we, how do we do it? And if you, if you have that as an approach from the beginning, then solutions come because the solutions are not going to come from, from me coming in to say, this is what you need to do. Right? We, the solutions are already there. 

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Tyler Finn

Sure. 

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Manu Kanwar 

Within the organization, within the relationships, within the people. And that's where it's gonna have the greatest impact. Because I'm not gonna be there forever, no one is. So we're gonna help facilitate for teams to be able to optimize their relationships, deliver on their purpose, deliver value, and then for that to be a self-perpetuating, like Dynamo, essentially, right? So's going to be serving them on an ongoing basis and I've lost my train of thought 

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Tyler Finn

That's all right. I mean a question for you then on this too. I mean I think Well one of the things I'm interested in hearing a little more about is you know is you've been on your own journey And you've you know, is you've been on your own journey and you've, you know, left businesses where individual relationships might have been tough or where culture might have been tough more broadly, you know, sort of what advice do you have for other people who might be as individuals in that situation or how have you responded to that after stepping away and leaving, like the sort of time that you take and the work that you do to then say, okay, now I'm really excited about going back and tackling some new challenge? Like how have you worked through this sort of thing?

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Manu Kanwar 

I think the most important thing is to understand our own needs as individuals, but even beyond that, it's to understand what is causing me the feelings of dysfunction or the challenging feelings that I'm having, right? I mean, obviously, you know, working in a relationship within an organization or a team that's dysfunctional or toxic or with a leader that may be so and so on has an impact, right? Definitely, absolutely. But some of that I have to just understand is some of the stuff that I'm internalizing. Like how do I view myself or how am I perpetuating a negative view of myself that's allowing me to be affected by that? I'm not saying that I'm excusing, you know, the environments within which they're working and putting all responsibility on the individual, right? I'm definitely, definitely not saying that. But we owe it to ourselves to at least understand how am I programmed and how am I perpetuating that programming from an external circumstance. So and again, this is probably another tangent, but you know, in purposeful alignment, right? The coaching that I teach, we talk about four misalignments that we have as human beings. And those misalignments we all have because our biology doesn't really care about our happiness. Our biology cares about getting our genes into the next generation. So that's what it's all about. So those misalignments, they are misalignments because essentially they are features for evolution that have made the human race incredibly successful. But they're bugs for individual happiness. And so we then are, on an ongoing basis, always just slightly, if not very, misaligned within ourselves. When we understand what these misalignments are, then there's a way to be able to counter them. But one of the big ones is that this is a primal fear that we are programmed with right from an early age that I'm not good enough, that I'm not whole, that I'm not worthy. And it's almost a universal feeling, even people who think that they don't have that, they have that. Because right from an early age, right, maybe at the beginning when we're born, the amygdala is fully formed, right? So the lizard part of our brain, which is millions of years old, is sending us signals of risk to keep us safe. But the human part of our brain actually isn't fully formed until we're 25. So how does a human part of our brain compute with these signals of life or death at that early stage? And the only way that we can do that is if we have protection from our tribe. And our tribe is essentially our parents and then our siblings and then our school friends and then our colleagues. So I need to feel part of that tribe to be able to get the protection and the acceptance that is going to keep me safe. So whatever values, behaviors they approve of, I'm going to do more of. But that means the flip side of that is that I feel that I'm not good enough unless I do those things, unless I have more of those things. So everyone's narrative is then different, right? Somebody then has to be super, super good at sports. Somebody else needs to be super, super academic. Somebody else needs to make sure that, um, they are always, you know, looking good, aesthetically, you know, pleased with themselves, whatever it might be. So we build our narrative over time because we, we need the external validation to make us feel that we are whole. Our biology will not allow us to see that we are already whole despite of that. Um, so again, like very long answer to what you were saying is, how do I, an individual come back? It's by, you know, working on things like this, understanding like, why am I, how am I triggered by different events? You know, if somebody says something about me, then why do I take that so personally? Do I, why do I believe it? If I have this understanding about myself, if I have an understanding of what my triggers are and my misalignments are and how to counter them, then I've building this like shield around me that I'm self-protecting and becoming on an ongoing basis more and more self-aware. So whatever's happening on the outside, I'm less affected by. And if it is a truly toxic relationship and an environment that I can't influence, then I know I need to walk away and I'm safe in doing so. And I'm much happier doing so. I won't regret that I've made that decision. Because the other thing is, if you walk away, you can regret the decision and then you're beating yourself up about something else. So, so you feel happier to make that decision, but also you feel more empowered within that situation to be able to stand your ground and explain what it is that you need. So all the way around, we are in a much better position. So, so the stuff that I've learned, like for myself and that I want people to understand is just like that we need to be more self-aware, self-compassionate and self-sufficient. And again, that's not saying that you're wholly responsible for the well-being in your team or organization, but we are certainly wholly responsible for our own well-being, our own mental well-being in that sense.

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Tyler Finn

A reaction to that I guess would be like some of that made me think of is I think people often also struggle with Taking a long view It doesn't mean like you're like a nihilist and you're like, oh none of my relationships at work matter at all And like I won't even remember this person in 30 years, and who cares? That's not the point, right? But when you're in a really difficult situation at work, or in life as well, sometimes it can be tough to take that much sort of longer term, or longer run view, and say, no, no, no, I really need to look after myself here or even if Standing up to this person at work who I feel like is in treating me. Well is going to be hard in the moment I'm going to be okay because over the long run right like this is just gonna be a blip Just a reaction to what you were saying and I guess I'm gonna add a reaction to what you were saying. I guess if I'm going to add a question to that, it would be, you know, I can think of a variety of reasons, but why do you think sort of like lawyers and legal teams, I wouldn't say uniquely struggle with this, but the stats aren't great, right? If you look at things, whether it's substance abuse or et cetera, right? It does seem like this is something that lawyers struggle with more than the general population, maybe.

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Manu Kanwar

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's right. I think that's right. So I gave, actually, a purposeful alignment session talk to a group of leaders just a couple of weeks ago and one of the questions that came back saying as you came up with you know these models and as you were researching all of these different things, did you have lawyers in mind? Because it seems to me that you know that all of the things that you're doing is so relevant to or even more relevant to lawyers. And I mean I didn't have lawyers in mind, but you're right, we are uniquely challenged in, you know, and so maybe even though I wasn't only thinking about lawyers, it makes sense because it's the environment that I've grown up in. But also, if you think about the tendencies that we as lawyers have in order to make us good lawyers and that are then trained into us even more so over a period of time, then those tendencies would be things like perfectionism.

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Tyler Finn

Sure.

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Manu Kanwar

So you are always, you know, trying to make sure, spot the mistakes, you know, make sure we don't make any mistakes, you know, that there's no risk and so on. And we're always striving to make sure that we get to the, you know, to the best solution. And we're always upset if there is a mistake or whatever else. So that perfectionism is a problem. Second is rumination. The rumination is again, understanding like, okay, what's the worst thing that can happen? What's the worst thing can happen if we agree to this clause? What's the worst thing can happen if we agree to that clause? And on all the different permutations of all of that. So we're constantly thinking about the worst case scenario. And then the third is that where people please us. So especially what we learn in private practice, you know, clients, number one, you got to keep the client happy and so on. So we're always trying to make people happy. We're trying to keep the business happy, we're trying to keep our trainees happy and everyone's alright. So we're always thinking about that. I think those tendencies are pretty much universal within the legal sector. Like all good lawyers will have all three of those, but then it's really trained into us at law school and then you know, a private practice and beyond that. So we do struggle with all of these things. But awareness is the first step in them being able to understand how does it affect me and how do I break away from that or how do I find a healthier way to be able to still deliver value but not have it so negatively affecting me. Because all of these things, if we don't address them, then they will lead to, you know, maladaptive behaviours or chronic illness. And I've, you know, I would say I've done both of those. And, well, I've done the maladaptive behaviours and then in order to be able to cope or in order to be able to avoid tricky situations and I've been subject to chronic conditions. I've had Crohn's disease since I was 16. So you know, at stressful, most stressful periods of my life, I've had massive flare ups. And interestingly, the flare-ups happen not even necessarily at the time of the stressful event, because you're so full of adrenaline and cortisol to deal with the event that it's usually about six months afterwards that you have a flare-up when you've calmed down. And that's Crohn's, but you know, people have lots of other conditions. So, you know, it's that chronic thinking and rumination and everything else and dealing with stress and not being kind to ourselves, not being protective or loving of ourselves. That starts to, that really turns that toxicity into a true poison.

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Tyler Finn

One other concept that I wanna explore with you around culture. I don't know, I've been thinking a lot about authenticity in leadership and communication, and to what extent do you work with, whether it's GCs or others around this? And I think authenticity can be hard for people in the workplace. People who say, bring your whole self to work. I mean, you probably shouldn't bring your whole self to work, right? All the time. That being said, if you try to be the GC who never has any problems and is always very serious and never tells a joke, right? I mean, unless that's actually maybe your authentic personality, right? Like, people also won't trust you or respect you really because the wonder. So, I mean, how do you think about this? How have you worked with clients on this, coach them around this concept?

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Manu Kanwar

Yeah, I mean, again, it comes back to, I guess, the first point, you know, an earlier point that I made about really understanding ourselves and being comfortable and true to ourselves and why we need to do that. And then and then how that builds on a better relationship. It also helps to understand how you're perceived, because we don't necessarily know how how we are perceived within within teams or organizations. And it helps to have conversations within a team so that people can be open and honest to be able to demonstrate, well, A, how they're affected by each other, but also to demonstrate how delivering our authentic selves and being more open, being more vulnerable, being more empathic with each other actually just delivers a completely different culture and a completely different context. And when you start to see that, then it starts to become easier to do. But I think most of the, you know, with a lot of leaders, the number one issue that prevents us being truly authentic is because we're afraid of what other people might think. Yeah. And actually, you know, to your point, it's actually, it's a much more positive response that you get than you expect. But it comes from what I was talking about earlier that we don't necessarily have, you know, a high regard for ourselves or we were so worried about what other people are going to think about us that we can't see clearly towards ourselves. And so if we find, you know, if we can find ways to be able to do that. But again, it starts, you know, with a bit of self-awareness first. And then authenticity, you know, translates out from the individual right to an organization. So you know, how authentic is an organization? And that's something else that we work with. You know, for instance, we've got a collaboration with the Maturity Institute to deliver a benchmark called a law firm maturity index. And that's authenticity at an organizational level. So the law firm may, you know, say that its purpose values are X, Y, Z. And it may think that that's the case, but actually the reality could be different. So is there a gap in authenticity there? And how is that affecting the people in it? And how is that affecting the relationships with clients? So how can we use things like that and the data that comes from diagnostics like that to be able to deliver authenticity right from the top, right down to the individual? 

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Tyler Finn

All of what we've been talking about today, whether it's sort of like focusing on innovation in your organization or realigning with the purpose of the business or Trying to shift the culture you have at work or even this sort of like personal approach or work on yourself How do folks think about this in a manageable way. I guess would be the way I would put the question right which is sort of like whole scale shift in the way that your team runs or the culture of the business or how you bring yourself to work or, right, wholesale change can be really hard to contemplate. How do you how do you counsel clients around making this you know intentional but intentional but also manageable.

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Manu Kanwar

So I mean it's only going to happen within the environments which we in which they work. So like I said there's not one size that fits all. Sure. And so so the answers are going to come from within that team within that organization. And actually, so the answers are going to come from within that team, within that organization. And actually the answer is going to come from within that individual. So it's not something that, you know, I, you or anyone can tell them what to do. They have to find it from within themselves because they have to understand what their challenges are to be able to be better aligned, to be more, to be more able to be more creative or authentic or whatever it might be. And so the answer to that is actually, I think to find more presence. It's certainly true of an individual. So like I would always recommend if people don't have a practice of, a practice of meditating or taking time out, but just spend five minutes, even two minutes a day, just to stop and think, like, what is it? Where am I now? What am I thinking? What do I need? What am I feeling? Just check in with yourself, right? And then there's a practice beyond that. But even if you're just doing that. Two minutes a day, five minutes a day, within that presence, as you start to slow down, the answers start to come. And it sounds a bit trite, but they definitely do. And it's then true of a team or organization. So how do we find time just to slow down and think and just become more present? Because we're all rushing towards, you know, answering all of these problems and delivering greater success. 100% we need to be doing that. But sometimes you need to slow down to speed up and we just need to have to create that space. And presence creates the space within which you can start to recognize your thoughts, within which you can get in touch with your feelings, within which a team can become more open. And in that openness, you know, you've created a crack that the light starts to come in. And whether that's for an individual or a team, that light has a big impact, even just a cracker light, and slowly it gets bigger.

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Tyler Finn

If folks want to get connected with you or find out more about what you're doing, how can they, how can they find you? Where can they find you?

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Manu Kanwar

So LinkedIn is probably the best one. So, you know, reach out to me on, on LinkedIn. Lex Solutions has a website. Otherwise, you can find my profile there, but I'm active on LinkedIn, so feel free to send me a request or a message.

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Tyler Finn

Okay, I've got some closing questions for you that I like to ask all my guests. I think are kind of fun and a little less serious. The first one is your favorite part of your day to day.

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Manu Kanwar 

The faith it's working with people whether there it's you know whether it's my team or whether it's clients and it's just engaging with them in a really authentic way just a normal way. So yeah just finding ways to be able to create and build those relationships.

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Tyler Finn

Do you have a professional pet peeve?

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Manu Kanwar

I guess in some ways it's counter to the first one, right? We get so wrapped up in our roles and our challenges and our needs and our organizations that it's sometimes just a little bit difficult to be authentic or for people to be authentic. And so we end up with just a lot of unnecessary bullshit. Yeah. Am I allowed to say that? Yes. So, you know, and so my pet peeve is like, why do we, why do we have that? Why do we have that? Can we just like move that aside and get real?

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Tyler Finn

Do you have a book that you would recommend to our listeners? It doesn't have to be a business book. It could be a meditation book. I don't know. Is there a book you'd recommend?

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Manu Kanwar

So can I give you more than one?

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Tyler Finn

Absolutely.

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Manu Kanwar

Yeah. So I want to give you three now actually. 

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Tyler Finn

Great. 

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Manu Kanwar

I thought I was going to give you two, but I'm going to give you three. So the first one would be by Gabor Maté and his latest book is The Myth of Normal. 

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Tyler Finn

Okay.

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Manu Kanwar

So Gabor Maté is like world renowned authority on first he was a world renowned authority on addiction. And in ways of treating addiction he found that we shouldn't be treating addiction we should be treating the pain. So that led him to become the world authority on trauma. And the way he redefines trauma is that it's not necessarily a terrible event that happens to some people. It's just any event or circumstances in which a child's needs went unmet. That creates a traumatic event that creates a traumatic circumstance that then leads, you know, that that that person to have like vulnerabilities that can persist over time and negative self-worth and whatever it might be, or, you know, have negative toxicity that I need to do this in order to feel successful. I need to be that to be happy. I need to have this to feel content. You know, none of these things are true. And so those are myths. But also the fact that there is a normal that we all should subscribe to is a myth. And so he talks about that at length with lots of other, you know, perspectives and stuff. It's a brilliant book and a really important perspective. The second one, just because I've only just finished it, is ADHD 2.0. So it's about ADHD by two authors who really made the ADHD, you know, more wellknown in the world. And they're just now coming back to say, obviously there's a lot more being written and talked about ADHD, but this is what we see from our perspective. And it's just a brilliant book for people who think that they may be suffering and the people who think that they may have a partner or a child or others that may be. And actually I think for any good leader to read and just understand what it means. Because we talk about ADHD superpowers, but no one really gets what it actually means. And there are lots of negative traits and challenges that people with ADHD suffer from that are not well understood, that people just write off, that you need to man up and change and get better organized or whatever, which is just not helpful. And I mean, I'm not diagnosed yet. I'm waiting for a diagnosis, but it's something that I'm starting to learn about. Not just for myself, but for other people. So you know, I may or may not be, but this certainly resonates really, really strongly. And then the third one, just because like I mentioned him earlier, Paul Gilbert, he's brought out a few books which are all just beautiful. The one he brought out last year was called The Mentor. And it's beautifully presented. It's just like beautiful writings. And he talks about his journey and his journey as a sort of coach and a mentor. But while he takes you through an art gallery, essentially. And it's just like, it's his life story written through that, and it's just beautiful.

And I think really, really poignant, especially at a time like now.

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Tyler Finn

Great recommendations. My last question for you, my traditional closing question for my guests, it's if you could look back on your days being a young lawyer, maybe just getting started, something that you know now that you wish that you'd known back then.

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Manu Kanwar

I think it goes I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier, right? It's just understanding my own worth. And understanding that not just me, but we are all already worthy. And we're caught up in an environment where we feel we need to do X, B, Y in order to be successful, to be happy. And actually none of that is true. So just to understand that I need, is understanding how to be more self-aware and self-compassionate in order that I am less influenced by what other people define success and happiness as, but I can find it for myself.

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Tyler Finn

What a great way to end this episode, Manu. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of The Abstract here in London. 

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Manu Kanwar

Brilliant. Thanks. Thanks very much for the invite. 

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Tyler Finn

And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for tuning in and we hope to see you next time.

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