These days, we’re expected to bring our “whole selves” to work, right? Well, not always. Leaders often find themselves in an “authenticity paradox” where they are expected to share just the “right” amount with their teams, peers and leadership. Executive Coach Dina Denham Smith says that this emotional labor is taxing on leaders, especially lawyers. This often unacknowledged labor takes its toll and often appears as frustration, short temperedness or lashing out–not leveling-up behaviors! In this episode of The Legal Department, Dina shares how leaders can offload some of this labor and stay true to core values (and get the work done). If you’re feeling overwhelmed by keeping a smile on your face during a shitstorm, this episode will give you some tools to steady the ship.

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Listen to the podcast here

The Goldilocks Of Authentic Communication In The Legal Department: Dina Denham Smith, Cognitas Consulting

My name is Dina Denham Smith. I am an executive coach and the owner of Cognitas, a boutique leadership advisory firm. We focus on helping leaders and teams improve their effectiveness, long-term well-being, and fulfillment simultaneously. Fun fact about me, I grew up on the campus of an all-boys boarding school in rural Connecticut. 

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On today’s episode, I’m excited to welcome Dina Denham Smith, who is an executive coach and owner of Cognitas Consulting. Dina has worked for many years as a coach. She’s the author of more than 50 articles in publications like the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Forbes. She’s working on a book that we’re going to talk about later. She’s also been an executive at some companies, so she’s been there and done that. Dina, I’m excited to welcome you to the show. 

Thank you, I’m excited to be here.

We were connected through the very lovely and generous Michael Melcher. I reached out to him looking for some recommendations of people I could talk to about communication, authenticity, and influence in the leadership role, and you were top of his list. That’s the topic I’d like to dig into with you today. 

I’m very pleased to know that I’m at the top of Michael’s list. I think a lot about Michael, so that’s quite a nice way to start my day.

I mentioned your coaching practice. You work with some lawyers. Can you maybe give us a little background about your knowledge of the species?

Dina’s Background

Most of the lawyers that I’ve worked with have come from larger firms and are now in-house. I’ve worked with them across a variety of different leadership issues. One of the themes I’ve noticed is that transition from working at what I like I call a Davis Polk into a company, whether it’s professional services, private equity, or a multinational tech firm. There’s a transition from how you succeed at a law firm to how you succeed at any other company. 

Oftentimes, executive coaching engagements have had this as part of the subtext, which is how you succeed in a fundamentally new culture where some of the performance metrics are also very different. What is celebrated and what is less appreciated are different things. Oftentimes, when I’m working with someone fresh into the new company, I’m helping them try to accelerate their learning around how to be effective in business versus within the purely law firm context. 

It’s super different. I’m thrilled that you’re a resource for folks making that transition because I’ve thought a lot about the differences through doing this show and my own in-house career. We are trained in law school and then at firms to compete and to be individual contributors. The communication style is very curt, direct, and bottom-line. We don’t worry about how people feel. We’re just getting it done. I don’t know if any of that resonates with you from your work with lawyers. 

Absolutely. One of the other things is there’s a different level of risk profile or perfection in business. The old 80/20 rule. Sometimes you will let things slip. I’m not a trained lawyer myself, but my understanding is that when you’re working at one of these larger law firms, you are giving the client the very best advice.

You are locking down risk everywhere you can. You’re on the clock. This is very different from operating successfully in a business context, where sometimes it’s okay to be a little sloppy. That’s tolerated. When you’re working with people on your team, you need to completely let go of that on-the-clock mentality. There are a lot of very subtle differences that amount to a big change. 

Those are success metrics. That is a core thing. I hope that folks who are listening and are law firm lawyers can hone in on that. It’s not about the hours on the timesheet. It’s not about the perfect work product. It’s more than that. How you communicate is a big part of that. 

I do have an appreciation somewhat for the other side, having started my career as a management consultant. I’m very used to sitting on the other side of being in a professional services firm where it’s about billables, utilization, client service, and all of that. I think both contexts are great. It’s about being able to read the tea leaves and operate accordingly to create the impact that most people want to create, what they produce, and how they’re experienced by other people.

Authentic Communication Styles

Let’s talk about how you’re experienced by others. I’ve shared this example a few times where one of my early coaching conversations in my career, my coach said, “How do you think people feel when they leave a meeting with you?” It had never occurred to me before to worry about the other side of the table. I’m trying to push us forward, get that work product done, work on the clock, and not necessarily be so worried about that relationship as you should be. 

It’s such an important question, especially for leaders where your success is fundamentally tied to how effective you are with other people.

For leaders, your success is fundamentally tied to how effective you are with other people. Share on X

Let’s dive into this idea of authenticity and communication styles. First of all, I think there is a trend, as we talked about before, of showing up as your full self at work. Maybe because of COVID, our walls are broken down a little bit more and we are interested in people’s feelings and not just getting the work done. I also have a personal core value of authenticity, and I feel like it has served me, but sometimes I get hung up on it. I don’t know if you coined this phrase, but you wrote about something called the authenticity paradox that leaders experience. Can we talk about that? 

There are many unwritten rules about how you’re expected to show up, how you’re expected to express your feelings, and which feelings you express. These are called feeling rules.

Are they in the employee handbook?

They are not written down anywhere. They are woven into the social fabric of an organization. Some of these feeling rules relate to this notion of being professional. What is professional? Leaders have this tightrope that they need to walk at work. It’s in part because of these notions of professionalism and feeling rules and how you’re expected to show up. Leaders are expected to be authentic and transparent. If you cross the line and you are too authentic or too transparent, there are penalties for that. 

This is especially the case for women and people of color. I think of the Goldilocks principle. We think of Goldilocks like tasting the porridge, too hot, too cold, too whatever. You have to get it just right. I know we’re going to continue down this road of unpacking authenticity and what it means, but it’s complicated. The authenticity paradox is just enough, but not too much.

You mentioned penalties for oversharing or pulling back the curtain too much. What do those penalties look like? 

There can be several. You can be thought unfit for leadership. Let’s just say something very upsetting happens and you cry in a meeting. 

I can’t imagine doing that. 

It doesn’t happen to most of us, but it does happen. Think about in your own mind some of the quick judgments you might make about that person. “They can’t control their emotions. What will happen if?” 

You just heard my reaction to it. I think as a lawyer, people are looking at us to be calm and steady, the adults in the room. That’s why when you said cry in a meeting, that would be hard for me to experience. 

For most of us, it’s a horrifying thought. It’s somewhat of an extreme example. By that one alone, you can see there’s this narrower band of emotions that we can express at work. Penalties can be perceptions. They can be judgments about your fitness for the next level or a more senior leadership position. We could go on and on. 

What about the impacts of penalties on the team? There’s certainly the upward, “She lost herself in that meeting. I don’t know that she can handle the next level,” but what about impacts with respect from your team or those relationships?

There was an individual I worked with, lovely and a former lawyer. He’s now at a large tech firm here in the Bay Area, but multinational. Interestingly, a very core value for him was authenticity and transparency. Those are hugely important to him. This individual disagreed with the direction that the general counsel was taking this very large legal department. He sat over a specific area of it and didn’t like the guy as a person. With his core values of authenticity and transparency, he let his team know in full colorful language what he thought about the general counsel and how he thought the direction the department was going was misguided.

That’s a nuke, I have to say. That’s a big deal to do that. 

This individual has a relatively high EQ. He’s very sensitive. He fights for his people. He loves his team. He’s done many good things, but you asked about the impact on the team. What we found out when I did 360 stakeholder interviews for him was his authenticity and transparency were too much for his team. It was damaging morale. 

Because of that one interaction or because it was just a crescendo of a larger problem?

He was consistently messaging his team that he didn’t like the GC, didn’t agree with the way the department was going, and thought things were just a mess. He was meanwhile trying to protect his team from some of the fallout. He’s giving them context. This was all done with the best of intentions. The impact on the team was reduced morale and feelings of conflict like, “Who do we align behind?” It’s very different from his intent in sharing information with his team. I think there are many important things about this story. One goes back to the notion that there is this right amount. It is situation-specific. You don’t have one silver bullet.

I was just going to ask, how does somebody know what’s the Goldilocks? How do you figure that out? That’s the paradox.

How To Be Goldilocks

It’s difficult. It’s one of the reasons why when I’m coaching leaders, one of the things I’m trying to set up with them is a very active feedback mechanism that is direct between them and their key stakeholders because, at some point, I will be gone. They won’t have me to solicit feedback on their behalf. It’s very important. This is the only way that we can truly measure our impact on others. It’s by getting a very good sense of what that is. Sometimes there can be this gap between our intent and our impact. What I’d love to talk about, and maybe this is the time, or maybe we get into it a little bit later, is this emotional labor that leaders need to do.

I’m feeling labor thinking about how to be Goldilocks. I could see that as a major. I felt it myself to the point that I don’t think it’s an uncommon situation where the lawyers, either outside or in-house, disagree with a company position. In-house, you need to be the soldier. You need to be very careful about how you express yourself if you disagree or do that in the right places to the right people. A group meeting to say you disagree with the direction the department is taking and you don’t like your boss isn’t a constructive way to do that. 

In leadership and client service, there is an enormous amount of what’s technically called emotional labor. It is a very unacknowledged area in leadership, but it is very real and it can be very taxing. First, we need to talk about what is emotional labor exactly. It is managing your feelings and your expressions to fulfill the expectations of your job. The research on this started 40 or 50 years ago and it started in the service sector.

I still think that that provides the quintessential example, like something where it’s very easy for us to all wrap our heads around like emotional labor. Think about every time you board an airplane. The airline stewardess with that smile is like, “Welcome aboard, welcome aboard, welcome aboard.” As you deplane another 300 times, “Thanks for flying the friendly skies,” or whatever the case may be. 

Also dealing with people who are very difficult or stressed, etc. You’ve got to be the adult in the room. 

Of course, they’re not happy to see all of us and greet all of us and serve us another Diet Coke in a plastic cup, but they are fulfilling their role, and some of them are better than others. This is an example of emotional labor and you see it across many of these service professions. Leaders do this same emotional labor. It’s just a little bit more subtle, but research suggests that leaders do as much emotional labor as service sector people. This notion of putting on a smile, grinning and bearing it, or putting your game face on, or all of these different expressions that suggest there is something there.

We have all these different ways of describing it. You can ask, “How is it that leaders and people in positions of power, call it a partner, how might that be?” There are a few different reasons why this is the case. One, if you even think about this question that you posed earlier like, “How do I want to be experienced?” You’re asking yourself, “How should I show up?” You’re not freewheeling it. You’re thinking about the context. You’re thinking about the people in the room and how you want to be experienced.

There’s this element. Leaders, we are working across multiple stakeholder groups. How you show up with the executive team is going to be very different than how you show up with your team or how you show up at an all-hands. You’re constantly doing this context-switching. Sometimes leadership demands that you adopt one style. Call it a more authoritative style when you just need to drive something across the line. 

Sometimes you need to adopt a much softer coaching developmental style. You’re switching between styles with people, and then more recently, with the pandemic, it created such an inflection point. I believe, and the research is bearing out, that the emotional labor required of leaders is now greater than ever because employee expectations have fundamentally shifted. What people will tolerate and what they expect in the workplace is different. 

Emotional labor required of leaders is now greater than ever. Share on X

I think the pandemic did that. It burst everything open. As you’re talking, I’m reflecting on the first part of the conversation where we talked about people transitioning from a law firm to an in-house or company role. In my experience, I don’t know if this bears out for you as a coach to lawyers, the expectations of how you manage your feelings and behavior are different in those different environments.

When I was in a law firm, my experience was that there wasn’t as much of an expectation that you Goldilocks it, feelings-wise. It was tolerated to have people yell. It was tolerated for people to swear. It was tolerated to be curt and uncourteous. As you’re talking, I’m thinking about if somebody doesn’t know, and there’s not a handbook that says how we handle our feelings at work, that changing environments and managing yourself and the learning curve to get on board with emotional labor that’s expected would be very steep.

Yes.

I also want to give an opportunity for folks who may be tuning in to the show to send me a comment through the website if you had a different experience if today’s law firm is different because I have not been there for a very long time, although I do talk with a lot of lawyers and I know that in certain places, it is still tolerated. My guest, Scott Becker, several months ago shared an example where he was the bad guy in the room and was pulled aside by a colleague to rein him in. Anyway, I just wanted to highlight that to go back to our level setting the corporate environment is different, and being aware that this emotional labor is an expectation, especially if you’re somebody who is aspiring to a leadership position in a legal department.

Workplaces across the board have evolved. I would anticipate the law firm of today looks different than the law firm of 30 years ago.

Not that long for me and I’m young, but with this taxing, I’ve had this experience of being in a leadership role during tough times, having to put on the game face and struggling with this need to be transparent. What do you recommend for leaders? This labor has a tax, I’m sure. What do you recommend to people to cope with this?

Coping With Emotional Demands

One of the things that happen is when these emotional demands are so high and we’re under the gun, what most people do is like all those expressions, grin and bear it, put in a smile. The problem is that over time, what we know is that suppressing and ignoring emotions impacts us in so many ways. It can be summed up by people either burning out or lashing out. There are a number of health consequences from continually pushing your emotions down from insomnia to increased body aches and pain, to more drinking after work, to larger cardiovascular situations over time. 

With the lashing out, what we know is that when people are consistently pushing their emotions down and ignoring them, it can also translate into misbehavior or belittling a colleague later in the afternoon. There are lots of ways that emotions if we don’t address them properly in time, pop back out in ways that hurt us and can hurt others. That’s called surface acting.

The grin and bear is called surface acting.

Exactly. If we go back to this Chris example, my client that I was talking about earlier, one of the things that we ended up talking about was how you can reconcile your values around authenticity and transparency with a need to show up in a slightly different way for your team. What he found was that knowing his impact on the team meant it was this huge reckoning moment for him because he cared about these people. Understanding that gave him a good reason to somewhat rein it in to rebalance. Otherwise, he would have felt like, “I’m acting out of character. This isn’t me, I’m faking it.”

This goes back to the earlier part of our conversation, which is about being aware of how you impact others. He was blind to that because he was clinging to this core value of “I’m transparent and I’m going to tell you.” He was blind to the fact that it wasn’t serving him or his team.

It gave him a fundamental purpose for showing up in a different way that also felt value-aligned. When we do that, when we find ways that feel true to us to express a different set of emotions than our knee-jerk reaction, that’s called deep acting. It’s being more fundamentally true to ourselves. One way we can get there is by finding a good reason. Another way can be reframing the situation and looking at it through a different lens.

It gets back, in general, to this calculus that people need to do and how they can sustain this over time. There are these kinds of methods around deep acting, which is finding good reasons to express the emotions that are expected of you. There is no tax on doing that because you are being authentic in a different way.

We also talk about having what the Press Ganey people talk about as a best friend at work to have an outlet or a safe space where you can express your real or authentic feelings about what’s happening.

It’s not just about the deep acting. I fundamentally believe leaders need a variety of different supports in their lives. Hopefully, it’s a multitude of people who don’t feel like they need to self-edit. One of the warmest and the most wonderful experiences that I have as a coach is when I get multiple leaders in a room, whether it’s for peer coaching, a coaching circle, or part of a leadership development program that I’m running, and they finally understand, “I’m not alone with these challenges. I can be super real with these other people because they get it.”

I adore the experience of seeing leaders not feel alone because oftentimes, it can be this very lonely role. You’re not going to tell your boss. You can’t share everything with your team. You may or may not trust your HR partners or your leaders. Perhaps your partner at home is super sick of hearing about it. There aren’t that many people. As a coach, I get to be that person for my clients, which I love, but then seeing them surrounded by their peers and being like, “It’s not just me,” is one of the very best things.

I’m glad we got to the loneliness because there’s that adage of it’s lonely at the top. I’ve talked to several lawyers who feel that way, especially the GC role in particular. I hope people don’t come away thinking that I’m a sad sack and feeling lonely all the time, but there are parts of the job. A couple of parts of this is the fact that we have this ethical duty to maintain confidentiality. We’re in a lot of rooms with different people, sometimes with peers, and sometimes we’re meeting peers with the CEOs or the board. You can feel very isolated in those situations. 

We also talked before that I have what I call my coffee klatch of other peers at other healthcare organizations where we’ve all been there and done that. We get together virtually or in person and relax a little bit and share stories because you can’t sometimes. Sometimes, if we’re working out the CHRO, we’re settling them out. I can’t talk to them, or we’ve got a big piece of strategic litigation. I can’t talk to my team about that, but my peers may know what I’m going through.

I think it’s so important for people to have something, whether it’s a coffee klatch. I’ve heard another person describe it as their kitchen cabinet, but it’s your network of peers that you can rely on and have these conversations that are very open and vulnerable. “I’m going through this. Does anybody get it? What did you do?” 

We don’t have to be alone.

Absolutely not. One of the things that I do on this side is facilitate a group for an organization called CHIEF. It’s a group of executive women. We get together every 4 to 6 weeks, and this is their group of peers. It works out so wonderfully. Some of these women have now been with me for multiple years. What gets shared in that room is so reaffirming for all of them and fundamentally helpful. “What would you do about that? What are the things I should be thinking about? Any unintended consequences?” It’s having a sounding board.

We all need that, especially in a leadership situation. I want to also mention that you write about self-compassion. I have to say that is something for lawyers and other high achievers. You hold yourself to this high standard. If the memo isn’t perfect or if you had a conversation with a colleague recently and they felt they hadn’t been their best selves in front of a team meeting and were beating themselves up. When you don’t hit it perfectly every time, it’s very easy to turn on yourself. You have some ideas for practicing what you call self-compassion. 

Practicing Self-Compassion

It is largely the high achievers who shun this practice very mistakenly. Many people have the notion that they’ll somehow lose their edge if they let themselves off the hook. They think they’ve got to where they are because they’ve held themselves to such high standards. 

That isn’t necessarily wrong.

It’s true in part. Many of our assumptions are true in part. They’re not fully true. Self-compassion, the easiest way to sum it up is treating yourself like you would treat a friend. When you make a mistake or have a setback or things don’t go the way you planned, it’s choosing to treat yourself as you would a friend in an identical situation, versus letting that overactive inner critic that we all have zoom into high gear. Maybe what’s an example of something that didn’t quite break your way or a mistake you’ve had recently and the self-talk?

Self-compassion is treating yourself like you would treat a friend when you make a mistake or have a setback. Share on X

I talked about this in an earlier episode and I probably blew it bigger than it was. I had an interaction with some outside counsel and I was harsher than I wanted to be. I was being authentic about an observation I had, and I didn’t read the room. I went home that night and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was like, “What a jerk? Who wants to work with me?” 

All this business and I thought, “How am I going to make it right?” The next day I reached out to them. We had a conversation, and this made me feel even worse. They said, “Don’t worry. We get much worse.” I did use it as an opportunity to work on repairing the relationship. I still think about it like, “I don’t want to be a jerk.”

Most people don’t. If we’re to flip the tables, imagine a colleague comes to you and describes this situation like, “I think I was too much in that meeting.” What might you say to them instead?

I think back to this other colleague that I spoke with recently, and they were berating themselves. I said, “What did you do at the moment?” “I apologized and owned it.” I said, “That sounds like people would have appreciated that. Are you going to do better?” It helped them process a little bit about how they had shown up. 

It’s no different than that. It’s thinking, “What would I say to a friend in an identical situation?” You might say, “Did you try to be a jerk?” Of course, you didn’t. Does everybody sometimes come across as a little too impassioned or a little tougher than they think? Of course. We all are humans. That’s a core piece of self-compassion. It is that common humanity. We’re humans. We make mistakes. There are a couple of things that unite us all. One is fear. The second is we all mess up. 

If you can have a plan on how to correct it, that made me feel better that I wasn’t going to leave that out there as this thing that was going to haunt me. To acknowledge that you do make mistakes but want to do better helped me anyway.

Making those amends and making them as quickly as possible is such a key piece of quickly recovering from little mistakes in the workplace. There are a couple of things we know about self-compassion. One is more self-compassionate people have higher emotional intelligence, are more resilient, and are better leaders. Hard stop. It’s proven. Case closed. Truly. It is not some soft practice. It’s not like woo, woo, California. Let’s be kind to ourselves. It delivers some hard results.

The other key piece, and I’ve seen this play out with clients who have this hugely overactive inner critic. They have so little compassion for themselves. They also don’t show it to other people. When you start to direct the self-compassion inwards, it opens up this incredible reciprocal loop. You start to very naturally become more compassionate towards others. This unlocks a ton of benefits. It’s this domino effect. It starts with a very simple act, which is treating yourself like a friend when you mess something up. It doesn’t mean don’t do better. It doesn’t mean don’t apologize. It means don’t beat yourself up. It gets you nowhere.

I always have this tagline, I didn’t get hot and skinny by telling myself I was fat and ugly. It doesn’t work. Negative self-talk does not work. 

That’s hysterical. I haven’t heard that before. 

It’s a bratcher. You can quote me. You have so many different tools and expertise in these leadership areas. You’ve written a book that’s coming out in early ’25. Is that right? 

That is correct.

What is it called and what is it about?

Emotionally Charged

It is called Emotionally Charged: How to Lead in the New World of Work. It explores how the workplace has changed and how these changes have fundamentally increased the emotional demands on leaders everywhere. It has also increased the amount of emotional labor that they do. It explores what is an emotion. What is its value in the workplace? How can people fundamentally work with this piece of information? That’s what an emotion is. It’s a fundamental piece of information that we should not ignore. Ignoring them is to our peril and detriment. 

Emotion is a fundamental piece of information that we should not ignore. Ignoring them is really to our peril and detriment. Share on X

How can we work with them effectively in the workplace, both our own, as well as the emotions of others? 

Where can people find out more about you and your coaching practice?

The best place would be my website. It’s DinaDSmith.com. I would love it if you connect with me on LinkedIn. I try to publish something once a day that is super relevant and valuable to leaders and professionals.

I wrap every show with the same final question. I’m hoping that there’s a nugget in here, given all we’ve talked about. Dina, what is your pump-up song?

My pump-up song shifts over time. I’ll give you what’s been a mainstay and then a new top one. The mainstay, I’m a big fan of Twenty One Pilots. That might sound trite, but I love their song The Hype. My new favorite pump-up song is by a band called Rainbow Kitten Surprise, which I happened to see live a couple of years ago at a music fest. They now have a song that’s out and getting played, and it’s called Superstar. 

Dina, thanks for coming to The Legal Department. It’s been great picking your brain on how to be a better authentic communicator and manage those emotions. Thank you so much.

Thank you. It’s been a fun conversation.

Important Links:

• Cognitas Consulting
• DinaDSmith.com
• LinkedIn – Dina Denham Smith