S is for soft skills—but what do they really mean for in-house counsel? In this episode, Inside Counsel Academy founder Joe Schohl joins Stacy Bratcher in The Legal Department to unpack executive presence—what it is, why it matters, and how to develop it for leadership success.
Plus, in this special Office Hours segment, Joe tackles a tricky listener question: What should you do if your boss gives the board incorrect advice?
Get expert insights and practical strategies from Inside Counsel Academy to strengthen your in-house legal career.
About Joseph Schohl
Joseph Schohl is the Chairman and Founder of General Counsel West, PC, and has nearly 30 years of experience in providing healthcare companies with strategic legal advice to help them grow. He has served as general counsel for many private-equity backed healthcare companies as well as providing outside legal services in the areas of health plan and physician contracting, mergers and acquisitions, corporate and healthcare compliance, and dispute resolution.
Joe recently served as the Chief Legal Officer at Radiology Partners, Inc, the largest physician-owned radiology practice in the U.S. operating in all 50 states. In that role, he oversaw the Practice Protectors team, which he created ab initio and now consists of over 30 professionals efficiently providing world class legal, compliance, and risk management services. He continues to serve as a legal advisor to Radiology Partners.
Joe previously served as Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of DaVita Inc., a leading health care provider focused on dialysis services and education for patients with chronic kidney failure and end stage renal disease. At DaVita, he was responsible for all legal affairs of the company, overseeing a department of approximately 65 teammates, including 20 attorneys, located across the U.S. Under Joe’s leadership, DaVita’s law department won Inside Counsel magazine’s IC-10 award, recognizing it as one of the ten most innovative legal departments in the country.
Prior to joining DaVita in 2004, Joe was corporate counsel at Baxter Healthcare since 1998, where he rotated through several areas of legal responsibility, including securities law, mergers and acquisitions and business unit general counsel.
In private practice, Joe was a senior associate in the corporate and securities group at Sidley Austin LLP, a global law firm with approximately 2000 lawyers in 20 cities worldwide. Based in Chicago, he advised on numerous complex mergers and acquisitions and capital-raising transactions.
Joe began his legal career in the corporate practice at Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy LLP, a preeminent international financial services law firm, representing middle-market companies in initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions and general corporate matters out of the firm’s Los Angeles office.
Joe graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Illinois, with a Bachelor of Arts in Finance. He earned his Juris Doctor from Columbia University School of Law, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. He also earned an MBA Degree with Distinction from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where he received the Jane Robertson Memorial Award for Academic Excellence and graduated at the top of his class.
At the center of his life are his wife and four daughters. He is also active in his local parish and enjoys trail running, swimming and cycling. Joe is admitted to practice in California, Illinois (inactive) and New Hampshire (inactive).
Transcript
My name is Joe Schohl. I’m the Founder of a brand-new training, development, and coaching program called Inside Counsel Academy. I’ve been a General Counsel for healthcare companies for over twenty years. A fun fact about me, I once gave a business presentation to a room full of 2,500 people wearing blue tights and a red cape.
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In this episode of the show, I’m welcoming back a repeat guest, Joe Schohl who was the General Counsel of a couple of public companies and is Principal at General Counsel West in California. We’re going to be talking about executive presence. I’m excited to have that conversation.
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Joe, how are you?
I’m great. How are you?
I’m great.
Thanks for having me back.
Your episode, which was number eight, so you were an early adopter of the show and I appreciate that, was 7 Things I Did to Become a General Counsel. It has been in the top ten of all episodes. You’re a great guest. I’m happy to have you back. The first episode we did was about becoming a GC and how to get ready for that. As I read it again, it was great, focusing on developing business acumen and putting yourself in a position to do stretch projects. We didn’t dig too much into what are called soft skills. In particular, this concept of executive presence and what that means is something that people look for in a senior legal officer. That’s what I wanted our conversation to focus on. In addition to all the things you did to become a GC, how did you develop executive presence?
Developing Executive Presence
If I had to sum up executive presence in one sentence, I would say it’s your ability to inspire confidence both in yourself and others. It’s your ability to get people to follow you because they believe you will help them be successful. What did I do to achieve that? If I did, it was through putting myself in new and changing roles in order to build my ability to solve problems. Over time, that meant both a larger variety of problems and also bigger problems. When you’re a general counsel, the job by its nature is going to give you new and bigger problems to solve, which is one of the things that makes it so great. That’s what people perceive as executive presence.
Putting yourself in different situations is part and parcel of the job. There’s a Harvard Business Review article that I read and it broke executive presence down into three components, gravitas, which is somewhat of a vague term, communication, and appearance. What’s most important to me around those is confidence, which is also correlated with gravitas. When we talked in prep, I forgot what your term was but you had a list of things you had already achieved as a way to build your confidence. Can you share that tactic?
I keep a list of what I call Reasons to Believe. They’re a list of things I’ve accomplished in the past that if I’m facing a new situation that’s challenging and testing my confidence, I can look back at that and recall, “I faced big challenges in the past and overcame them.” This is not my idea. I picked this up somewhere along the way. I found it super helpful because otherwise, we can have a tendency to think what we’re facing is something new or novel that’s going to test us beyond our limits. Confidence comes from the completion of successively more challenging tasks. If you’re doing that, you ought to be tracking them so you can go back and reflect on them and then mentally have that confidence for new things.
Confidence comes from the completion of successively more challenging tasks. If you're doing that, you ought to be tracking them so you can go back and reflect on them so then mentally, you have that confidence for new things. Share on XThat’s great, Reasons to Believe. That’s also a nice way to put it because we all have this nagging doubt as we’re approaching a new task or situation we haven’t been in before. Another concept that comes up, and this is more in the communication space, is authenticity.
What does authenticity mean to you?
I correlate it with transparency. First of all, authentic authenticity is a huge core value for me. I don’t like it when I feel like I’m not getting the straight story. To me, authenticity is being transparent with people.
That’s a great quality to have. Sometimes, in the nature of our roles, we can’t be completely transparent with our team in certain circumstances, but acknowledging that, having that upfront, and stating when that’s the case is a form of authenticity in and of itself. People will understand. People can tell when somebody’s being authentic. It’s probably primal. It’s innate in human nature.
Authenticity In Leadership
We’ve all worked with people who we consider more or less authentic. If you want to be an effective leader, you’ve got to tap into that, which means making yourself vulnerable, too. We sometimes hide our authentic selves because of fear that maybe somebody will think we’re not capable or maybe we have a little bit of imposter syndrome, so acknowledging that and being willing to face it head-on is a key to authenticity.
We sometimes hide our authentic selves out of fear—fear that others may see us as incapable or due to imposter syndrome. Acknowledging and confronting it head-on is key to authenticity. Share on XTo me, a lot of executive presence is focused on how you communicate and how you show up. There’s this concept of commanding the room and being able to read the room and people. It’s that gravitas word that we both recoiled from. I wonder if you could share instances of what commanding the room looks like when you are in that senior leader role.
In particular, as a lawyer in that senior leader role, what I see is that people have a tendency, the more senior the audience they’re speaking to, to not lay the groundwork for the conversation. They think it’s important because these are busy people and smart people to get right to the point. Often, the point is more of an esoteric legal issue that, unless these folks have been briefed on it, they probably aren’t in a position to have that conversation without you laying some groundwork ahead of time.
I find that what’s most effective is laying that groundwork even more than you think you need to. People can acknowledge it and ask you to move ahead if they already understand where you’re coming from. The bigger risk is skipping ahead and not having laid the groundwork. You don’t have a conversation because you’ve got people who aren’t with you when you get to the point that needs to be discussed.
That’s helpful feedback for me because one of my other core values is efficiency. I also am always sensitive about the clock. I find myself when I’m giving a presentation or speaking in front of a group in a meeting I tend to rush through laying the groundwork. I’m fast-forwarding. I’m doing the old-school TiVo, fast forward to get to the meat of the conversation. It sounds like that is a misstep on my part.
It depends. As with everything in life, it’s a balance. I once had a CEO who, when people would lay too much groundwork, would say, “I already know all that,” which was a not-so-subtle cue to move ahead and get to the point. That’s part of reading the room.
Let’s talk about reading the room. I feel like that phrase has gotten to its moment. I’ve heard that a lot in the last couple of months. What does that mean to you?
Reading The Room And Effective Communication
We’re talking a lot about communication. What comes to mind for most people is, “What do I say? How do I say it?” etc. Even before that, the first part of communication is listening, and we, as lawyers, could do a lot more of that. When busy executives or board members have questions, they want you to listen and answer the question.
If you have more to say for good reason beyond that, then you can and should add it but not before first answering the question they asked, or at least letting them know you heard it and you’re going to return to it. When I brought in outside lawyers to speak to the board, when I would see instances where I felt they were not reading the room, was not paying attention to those cues and those questions and instead delivering what they had prepared to say without being flexible and adjusting as things go on.
They’re like, “The folks can’t see me but I’m nodding my head vigorously.” I always felt very helpless when you are in one of those situations and it’s a big case that you brought to the defense lawyer or defense team and they are following their script. They’re not aware of the mood. Are people asking you questions? Are they looking at their phones? Are they trying to move things along? Aside from a CEO who is making it crystal clear to you, what are the things that you look forward to seeing if what you’re saying is you need to hit that fast-forward button or if you’re doing the Goldilocks of just right?
It’s engaging people in making it a conversation. It’s asking, “Do people understand this before I go to the next part? It’s fundamental,” and getting that engagement. That takes confidence. The first time you’re in front of the board, you’re probably not going to feel like doing that. You have to practice and put yourself in situations where you’re going to be asked to do things like that, even when you’re nervous.
There can also be an overemphasis. I feel like I always take a hack at law firm training. There can be an overemphasis on being too technical and too perfect on the legal side of things. You want to make sure you’ve got all buttoned up what the law is and less what you’re saying, which does resonate with me. When you are presenting, it’s very different than talking to another lawyer. Asking those questions about, “This is what we’re going to talk about. Is everyone on the same page? Do you need me to go over and set the table or do you want me to jump right in?” That is a real skill.
We are circling around talking about dealing with the board but there are a number of other constituents that the general counsel has. Let’s talk about communications with the CEO. What suggestions do you have for communicating with CEOs?
Communicating Effectively With The CEO
It’s important to have regular one-on-one sessions with the CEO. They have a calendar that sometimes is hard to break through. Every time you get that slot on the calendar, it’s incumbent upon you to leave them feeling like, “That was a good, efficient use of my time.” Otherwise, you’ll find yourself canceled, rescheduled, less frequent, etc., which is a dangerous position to be in because there are things you can only talk to the CEO about at times. You’ve got to have that opening. It’s incumbent upon you to create the structure for that conversation, bring the information in an efficient way, and make it easy for them to want to spend more time with you. Don’t let them feel like they have to lead that conversation.
That’s great advice. I’ve done various things. Some CEOs I’ve worked with don’t want an agenda. I used to track what I call my big rocks, my big projects, and then news of the day, anything that was hot, and try to follow a structure like that. Other CEOs, especially if they trust you, want to consigliere. They want to talk. What tactics have you used to make the most of those meetings?
I would always come with an agenda, but at the beginning, I’ll be like, “I’m going to preview this, but before we talk about any of them, we’re going to circle back and see if you have any issues you want to talk about, and then we can decide how much time to allocate.” I would categorize them into time-permitting, “I’d love to have a discussion on this topic. I have to get your answer on these three things,” and, “I’ll keep it brief, but I can’t leave here without having that to move things ahead.”
That’s helpful. Giving the CEO a roadmap of what they can expect from the meeting, I’m sure, was offering tremendous value.
We would want that if somebody were the CEO and somebody were meeting with us.
Those one-on-ones that you have with folks on your team would be a good way to train for that, don’t you think?
Totally. Oftentimes, direct reports will ask you, “How should we structure our one-on-ones?” I say, “This is an opportunity for you to decide how you want to structure them with me. If you don’t want to do that, I can give you a formula and we could use it.” I’m always more impressed when they take the initiative and lead the conversation in a way that’s going to allow them to be most effective in their role, which isn’t the same for everybody. It’s not one-size-fits-all.
It’s different based on whether your litigator is going to have much more of a linear list of lawsuits or threatened lawsuits to talk about versus your compliance person, who may have some long-term projects or your IP person.
Different based on where they are in their career journey, how senior they are, how new to the role they are, etc.
Developing Executive Presence In A Legal Team
The reason I ask about the team is because there is a perception that executive presence is something you have or you don’t. As leaders in the legal department, our job is to help our teams develop those skills that all fit into executive presence.
I didn’t have any executive presence when I started.
Putting yourself in different situations, did you have a mentor or somebody who took you aside and helped you learn the ropes?
I always had mentors along the way, self-identified people who I wanted to emulate because I saw how they were practicing and wanted to be successful like they were. Nobody took me aside and said, “Here’s how you should do it,” but I watched people and imitated them, which is how humans learn.
Especially if you have been exposed to some of those different rooms. I interviewed Brandon Neal, who is Deputy General Counsel at Walgreens. He described bringing people on his team to meetings with their CEO so that they could watch how he interacted and learn from his interactions with the CEO and also give them exposure. What can feel like a barrier to folks who want to move up the ladder in the legal department is they don’t necessarily get exposure to the C-suite or to the board.
It’s true. There are ways to do that depending on how open the CEO and the board members are to more people. Oftentimes, they’re not very open to having more lawyers in the room in the big board meeting but you’ve got committee meetings and you can introduce people that way. There are ways to do it. You should do it as a leader both in terms that will make your job easier and you have a responsibility to develop the next generation.
I feel very strongly that we’re here to help move the team forward. In our last conversation, we talked about how when you invest in developing people, they tend to be more loyal, and you tend to retain them more. As you think about executive presence, not necessarily as you’re managing up but as you’re being a service provider, what insights do you have for that audience?
Structuring Meetings For Effective Client Service
I always try to keep their objective in mind at the start of any meeting. I even have a notes template where I’ll record ahead of the meeting what the objective is. Reflecting back on that through the meeting and adjusting it when I’m hearing different things is key. Ultimately, we’re there to serve the business clients. We have to do that in the context of what’s best for the overall organization.
Putting aside situations where there’s a disconnect between their objective and the organization’s objective, which isn’t all that common, most of the time, we’re going to be trying to help them accomplish their goal. If we don’t know what that is, we need to get them to tell us. We don’t know what it is unless we’ve tried to write it out.
I’m reflecting on our prior conversation. You strike me as somebody who has a lot of structure and discipline in how you practice. I’m jealous of it because I feel like I am, a lot of times, flying from the seat of my pants.
That would surprise me about you. I would be surprised.
I asked you about mentoring but I want to talk about how people can build these skills. I know that you’re working on a new coaching community for in-house counsel. To me, and I hear this from people who reach out to me about the show, I feel like there is a need in the market to help lawyers develop that leadership executive presence or “soft skills”. I wonder if you could talk about what you’re trying to achieve in your coaching community.
The Purpose Of The Coaching Community
That’s exactly what we’re trying to achieve in the coaching community. We have 8 modules, which I consider the 8 essentials for inside counsel success. The intent will be to have different cohorts of folks depending on where they are on their career journey. For folks who want to become what I call GC-ready, which means they either want to get a GC job or they at least want to be clearly positioned on the succession chart as the next person at their current company, they’ll be a cohort of sitting GCs who want to continue to level up in these areas and want to do so not only with my advice and guidance but with their peers as well. They’re carefully selected to make sure that people are getting value from their peers in that arrangement.
At some point, I’m thinking we would even have a new-to-in-house more training and less coaching program as well. That’s under the umbrella of the academy. That’s what we’re doing. We’re also doing in-person workshops for teams. For GCs who want to provide professional development in these soft skill areas to their teams, we offer that ready-made where we come in and do it, or we do some tailoring with the GC’s guidance for what their team particularly needs. We come and do that in person on a retreat-style day, offsite, etc. There’s an overlap in the content but a difference in the delivery.
To probe my inquiry here, what are the eight modules of the coaching academy?
The eight modules, I could do them in order. One is all about mindset and showing up as your best self. We call it training like a professional athlete would for their job. You’re showing up with that mentality that you had on day one when you first interviewed for a job and got selected. I got this from David Goggins. You showed up on day one with the mindset you were so excited to be there. What happens over time is that it dissipates, and that’s reflected in performance. Having that day-one professional mindset is so important to preserve if you’re going to continue to deliver your top performance as you go along.
The second one we spent a lot of time talking about is executive presence and communication. Another one is expanding your breadth of knowledge. We call it adding breadth to your depth. These are inwardly focused. The first four are focused on the individual and how the individual can level up their game and reach their full potential. The back four are all about how you relate to others.
Being an all-star team member or team leader, aligning with your business, balancing your partner protector role as an in-house counsel, and then looking out over the horizon to systematize, anticipating risks before they become threats. Those are the eight. I got them all in there. Those are the kinds of things we talk about both in the academy and in the workshops.
Those are great. There’s an opportunity to help serve our cohorts and our colleagues in in-house practice.
I missed one. One is about nurturing your inner Solomon, which is our judgment module, and how you can accelerate your development of judgment. We think that judgment comes over time with experience, and it does, but it can be accelerated. More time doesn’t necessarily make you better at something. Think about driving. When you learned how to drive at 16, you learned a ton and got way better between 16 and 25.
We believe that judgment develops over time with experience—and it does—but the process can be accelerated. Share on XBetween 25 and 40, did you become a better driver? Probably not, unless you were doing some kind of driving course to accelerate your performance as a driver or something else. Doing things more often at a certain point isn’t necessarily going to make you better, but if you’re self-reflecting and trying to improve your performance and have that feedback loop, it will.
Not to get too in the weeds on the academy or how these modules work, but is there a feedback loop for executive presence? Can you talk about some of the tactics you’re going to be training people on through the academy?
Developing Executive Presence Through Self-Reflection
When I think about executive presence, it’s about putting yourself in those positions and reflecting on your performance, what worked, and what didn’t work. I believe self-reflection is the most important part of developing, not just as a lawyer but in any domain, tracking your performance, identifying, being honest with yourself about where you need to level up, and knowing what your strengths are so you can continue to leverage them.
Will you be encouraging people to get 360 feedback or external feedback as well? I’m going to use the board presentation because that’s an example that most of us can relate to. You don’t necessarily know if you did a good job. You might feel good but maybe someone who was in the room says, “I didn’t understand what you were saying.” Will you encourage 360 feedback or external feedback?
Yeah, 100%. It starts with self-assessment, which is available on our website. Anybody can take it. I’d recommend people take it. We’ve gotten good feedback about that. For people to take a step back and understand what their strengths are and where they could use some work has been helpful. We have not incorporated a 360 into it, but we’re also about to launch our first cohort. That could be very well made into it and it’s a good idea.
First of all, we didn’t even talk about what it is called and where people can find it.
Introducing Inside Counsel Academy & Assessment
It’s Inside Counsel Academy, which you can go to InsideCounselAcademy.com. Click on Take the Next Step at the top of the page, and it will direct you to the ICA assessment. For your audience who complete the assessment, I’ll be selecting several of them to do a completely free one-on-one session to help them solve a particular issue or challenge they’re facing in their role as a member of the legal department.
Do they need to indicate anything in the form that they’re a reader?
There will be a space at the bottom for open comments. Put that in there that they knew me on your show and that will move them up to the top of the queue.
Thank you. That’s so nice. I mentioned to you that I wanted to start a new segment of the show that I’m going to do with any GC or GC-adjacent guests on the show. I’m calling it Office Hours. I get a lot of questions either through my website or directly through LinkedIn. I thought this was a good question for us to noodle on together. I’m going to read what I heard from one of my readers.
Office Hours: Correcting Leadership Without Undermining
The reader asks, “I need some advice. I’m a DGC at a large organization and I report directly to the general counsel. I attend many meetings with the executive leadership and sometimes board members where we both attend. Typically, I defer to her, let her answer questions, and try to be “seen but not heard,” or I try to supplement or support comments that she makes.
In one recent meeting, she made a statement that was factually incorrect. It was a key fact that was the basis for the advice that she gave. It was material and I felt that there was a risk to the company if I didn’t correct it but I didn’t want to undermine her in the room. How should I have handled this?” That’s a tough one.
It’s a great real-life question because things are going through my head where I’ve been on both sides of that. Earlier in my career, I had situations where that happened. You don’t know what to do and whether you’re going to get a chance to help them correct it later. I’m sure I’ve made misstatements with one of my team members in the room and they were trying to redirect me.
First of all, I agree with not doing anything that could be perceived as undermining her in the room, the boss. There’s no upside to that. You don’t want to get a reputation for being disloyal. In a situation like this, I would ask in my mind as it’s happening, “Is there an opportunity to slip her a note?” You should always be sitting right next to her, your boss, for a lot of reasons, including this one. If you’re invited to the board meeting, sit right next to them, right next to the GC if you’re not the GC.
Maybe you ask a question about the factual assumption to take the conversation in a direction where, with more information, she slows down, appropriately hedges her statements, asks questions, or leaves some wiggle room for her to get more information to come back and advise the group in another time. If there’s no opportunity in the room to do that, then catching her in the hallway on a break immediately after so she has a chance to revisit it sooner rather than later is going to be your last resort.
I love this real-life example. We’ve all been there. It’s difficult. I once got very chewed out for what my CEO perceived as disagreeing with him in front of the board. It happens. We should avoid it when we can, but there are circumstances in our role where it requires us to state our opinion even if it’s different, and sometimes, that’s more important.
That is an even tougher situation. As the GC, you do have that ethical obligation to the company. If you’re in a boardroom and the CEO is not giving the full facts or there’s an issue that hasn’t been shared with the board, that is a tough one. Sometimes, you have to get chewed out.
It sticks with you.
I’m sure it does. Thank you for that feedback. I struggle with that as well. I had a similar situation, not with the CEO but with my boss. I made the mistake of tactfully trying to add more color to the situation and the CEO at the time told my boss after the fact that she thought I was insubordinate. There you go.
It’s so interesting. It goes back to the beginning of my thoughts on it, which is that everybody’s going to be judging you, not just your boss, on how you handle it.
We’re coming up on the end here. I’m going to ask you for your pump-up song again. Everyone can go back to episode eight and know your first choice but I’m hoping that you gave it a little more thought because your first song, while I agree it’s a pump-up song, was a safe choice. I’m wondering if you have anything a little more edgy.
It was also at the beginning, so it was still available. Eye of the Tiger was still available, which is everybody’s pump-up song. My pump-up is More Than a Feeling by Boston. I listened to a 30-minute podcast dissecting that one song and what makes it so great. It was on a road trip and my kids were squirming in the car but it was so interesting to me and even to my wife. I can’t get it out of my head.
I love that answer. I am especially intrigued that there’s an entire podcast devoted to the song. That’s awesome. Thanks for coming back. We loved having you here in the show. I enjoyed your contribution to Office Hours. Thanks for being here.
Anytime. Thank you.
