Cultivating Connections, Care, and a Thriving Virtual Workspace | Michael Stevens and Mary Grecz - E3

When it comes to your team, you've probably been told to just look for competency and hope for the best, but that approach often leaves you feeling like something is missing. It's time to stop aimlessly searching and start building a team you can rely on. Get ready to discover a game-changing interview technique that will transform your hiring process and help you find the perfect fit every time. 

Michael Stevens and Mary Gretz are partners at the law firm Derrevere Stevens Black & Cozad. They share insights on finding the right people for their team. Michael emphasizes the importance of competency and being a good human being, while Mary focuses on the evolving interview process, emphasizing culture and the value of asking the right questions.

The conversation delves into the challenges of virtual work, maintaining trust, and building strong connections within the team. Michael and Mary talk about the firm's unique approach to hiring, including a group chat interview on the candidates' cell phones to assess their communication skills. The episode highlights the significance of personal connections and the balance between professionalism and personal engagement in a work environment.

Reflecting on what makes an amazing team, Michael values the rhythm, trust, and support within the firm. Mary emphasizes a symbiotic relationship, where the company cares about its people, and individuals genuinely care about the company and their team members. The discussion concludes with insights into how Michael and Mary demonstrate care, transparency, and accountability in their roles as leaders.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how to foster trust and collaboration in a remote work environment, leading to stronger team dynamics and higher productivity.

• Discover the importance of effective communication during the hiring process, leading to better employee fit and improved team cohesion.

• Explore strategies for cultivating a supportive and inclusive work environment, resulting in increased employee satisfaction and retention.

• Explore the benefits of integrating personal life with work, leading to a more balanced and fulfilling professional life.

• Uncover creative and effective methods for interviewing candidates, leading to better hiring decisions and a more diverse team.

Key Timestamps:

(00:02:51) - Finding the Right People

(00:08:25) - Building Trust and Connections

(00:13:53) - Establishing Credibility and Trust

(00:15:42) - Building a Great Team

(00:16:44) - Symbiotic Relationship

(00:18:58) - Leading by Example

(00:23:04) - Personal Connection in the Workplace

(00:25:28) - Innovative Hiring Process

(00:30:27) - Importance of Engagement in Interviews

(00:31:41) - The Evolution of Text Messaging

(00:34:25) - Communication Skills in the Digital Age

(00:35:07) - The Rise of AI in Interviews

(00:37:52) - Sharing the Tacos

Key Topics Discussed:

Amazing Teams, Hey Taco, HeyTaco, Doug Dosberg, Una Japundza, peer recognition, interview practices, hiring, human resources, artificial intelligence

Mentions:

Website: https://derreverelaw.com/

Build Stronger, Connected, More Engaged Teams:

https://heytaco.com/

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About the Amazing Teams Podcast:

We started this podcast because we love teams, especially amazing ones. Michael Jordan said it best, "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships." This is what we're all about!

Our mission is to help others build amazing teams by having authentic conversations with remarkable people who are building amazing teams. We will explore the tactic

Transcript

Michael Stevens
Sharing parts of yourself that make you you change the way that others in any walk of life will view you.

Doug Dosberg
I'm Doug.

Una Japundza
I'm Una.

Doug Dosberg
That was Michael Stevens, and this is our podcast Amazing Teams. Join us as we have conversations with remarkable people who are building amazing teams.

Doug Dosberg
Michael, Mary, welcome to the Amazing Teams podcast.

Mary Grecz
Thank you for having us.

Michael Stevens
Yeah, happy to be here.

Doug Dosberg
Of course. Today we're gonna do something different. And instead of me introducing you both, we're gonna let each one of you introduce the other. So Michael, why don't you introduce Mary to Una and I and our listeners.

Michael Stevens
Wow, okay. So Mary Grecz, I have known Mary Gretz now close to 10 years, I think we're going on right now.

Mary Grecz is a partner at a law firm that I work at, Derivere, Stevens, Black & Cozette. She is one of my partners. We both work in the subrogation practice area group. Her and I both are leaders in that group. Mary is basically the brains behind the Florida operation at this point, but she came to me as a law clerk in school, that we started working together while she was at Nova Southeastern University. Mary is a brilliant attorney, an amazing mother, a great colleague, and friend. Um, and she is an absolute pleasure to work with. I tell her this all the time. If we could somehow clone her, uh, we could all retire in five years, easy with no sweat.

Doug Dosberg
Love it. Mary.

Mary Grecz
Let's see if I can follow that one. Michael is the managing partner of Derivere Stevens Black and Cozad. As he mentioned, he was the one who hired me. Although, at first, he was a little hesitant to hire me, but I think I've won him over since then. Michael is a graduate of Florida State University and went to law school at Nova Southeastern down in South Florida. He is now hanging out in Vermont and has expanded our firm's practice up the East Coast. Michael has a great wife and two awesome little kids. And he has been the best mentor that anyone could ever ask for. I almost feel a tiny bit guilty that not everyone behind me gets the mentoring that I got from Michael and some of the other partners early on. But I'll do my best to pass that along to them.

Doug Dosberg
Wonderful. As you both know, our podcast is about building amazing teams. And today, we're going to focus on finding the right people. Where should we start with finding the right people?

Michael Stevens
Before you can start any type of search, you need to have parameters to understand what you're looking for, right? Otherwise, you're just aimlessly looking about, time is the luxury, time is the limitation we all have. We don't have as much time as we wish we did, whether it's professional or personal time. And so to kind of get there and to find the right person to build your team, first thing you need to know, kind of know what to do, I think, is know what you're looking for. And so parameter-wise, if we boil it down to the most basic, we have very, very basic concept. You have competency. So you wanna find somebody that is extraordinarily competent, and you wanna find somebody that's just a good human being. So if you have those two things, I think then you can start looking and find somebody that starts to hopefully fit both of those because having just one or the other is not going to result in, I think, finding you with the person that you're looking for. I don't know, Mary, what have we gotten right a little bit along the way here?

Mary Grecz
Well, I think that the interview process has evolved a lot over time. Focusing on listening to the kinds of questions that people ask is a really big thing. It really identifies what their priorities are and whether they value the same things that we do. Culture is one of those topics that the word is just used and used and used, but it's one of our favorite words because it's something that we feel we really have right and something that is so very special to us. So we look for that in people. Obviously, the competency is really important and that's one thing. Also focusing on what's important to the candidate. Is it all just about money? Is it? Hey, how much time do I get for lunch every day? Or is it something more than that?

Una Japundza
What are some of the cultural parameters that are important to you all when you're hiring people?

Michael Stevens
On the most basic level, we're looking for people you want to be in a foxhole with, right? We are fighting for our clients with what we do for a living. We litigate here. This is a litigation law firm, and we duke it out with the other side. We typically have multiple people in it with us. We do have the top-level no a-hole policy here. We want to all be rowing the boat in the same direction. We don't want to be sitting here blaming each other for something. If we hit a wall on a case, the first question is, shouldn't be whose fault is this? It should be, we've hit the wall, we need to get over the wall, what do we need to do to get over the wall? How do we address it with the client? How do we fix this? How do we mitigate? What just happened? And then we can deconstruct, I have a post-mortem later.

Mary Grecz
Well, and I think, too, the tone and the energy gets set by leadership. And that's one thing from my start at this practice as a law clerk, I noticed, and that has continued over the last 10 years is that, you know, I've never seen a partner yell at somebody, uh, or like throw a stapler, or do anything like that, you know? And everybody treats everyone else with a lot of respect.

Doug Dosberg
Mary, I'm so curious now, have you worked somewhere where staplers were thrown?

Mary Grecz
Possibly.

Doug Dosberg
Possibly, good answer.

Mary Grecz
And you know, one other thing I'll say is that I've always felt, you know, litigation is hard. Being an attorney has its moments when, like Michael said, you're facing this world of adversity, and people may not like you, and people may not be nice, but I've always felt that within our firm walls and now our virtual walls, it was a safe space. It's like you're, you're going to be in there with people who support you and, and who are going to be helpful when you need help.

Doug Dosberg
Was the practice virtual when you started, Mary?

Mary Grecz
No.

Doug Dosberg
Got it. So you guys have become virtual due to the pandemic. I'm kind of curious how has your relationship changed between one another, going from in-person work environment to a virtual work environment.

Mary Grecz
I would say, in ways it's different, of course. There is less of the, you know, just bumping into people in the lunchroom. I think I do have the ability to see Michael more now than I did when we were in the office, because when we were in the office, Michael had to travel to every deposition, or I had to travel, or people are just away for hearings and mediations and things. But now we're doing a lot of that from our home offices. And so there is more opportunity to interact on Zoom or Teams. So while some of the personal connection is lost in the way of lunchroom, chatter, and water cooler things. I do think it's easier, we're more easily accessible.

Una Japundza
I'm curious about this part of closeness, Michael, during the prep call. We talked about the emotional bank account and building trust and connections. How is the two of you do that between each other and with the rest of your team as you've grown it over the last 10 years? That trust doesn't get built by itself.

Michael Stevens
What do you do every day that helps build that trust and connections amongst your team? So I think between Mary and I, we are lucky to have had established that before we left the office, before I moved to Vermont. And so my level of confidence and trust in her was there with that question before we suddenly were just on screens with each other. And that's a great luxury, I would almost call it at this point because you don't always get that. Especially if you're starting a business, people are coming out of school, there are gonna be law firms that start tomorrow that are virtual that just are day one, virtual and I'll just Zoom or Team,  Skype or whatever it is that you're using these days. So, you know, for her and I, it's the maintenance and the growth of it has just been, at least from my side of it, has just been a continuation of what we started that, where I think both of us know there is a safe space and a place to come with any issue, no matter what, big or small, and that the goal will be objectively to just let's bite our way through this, that there's never going to be a conversation of blame. We have to kind of worry about that stuff. And look, at this point with our respective careers, like her and I have been through a good bit together, whether it's personnel stuff or opposing counsel stuff or just family. The world, it's like we're just constantly in this bubble together because that's how jobs work. But it's different when you start from scratch on a screen. I think it's different. I'm curious to hear how Mary, once I finish this point, weighs in on this. Because it's like back in the day when you were in the office to show drive, to show extra effort, to show things that you're looking to get ahead that you want to advance. You'd have to do things, you'd have to spend more energy being observable to people that were making decisions. Are you there before the partner gets in in the morning? Are you still there when the partner leaves at the end of the day? Are you working later in the evening? Are you working on weekends because you are trying to get ahead even though no one's telling you to do it? What level of energy are you putting in to advance your career? Well, now we're on a screen, right? How do you cause, without being obnoxious, without brown-nosing, without rubbing in someone's face, how do you cause that same that also does lead to credibility and trust and the growth of that relationship too, aside from competency during the regular work hours? How do you show people that you are dedicated, loyal, a member of the team, driven, all objectively based in the same direction? Fun, a good teammate all the way through. All of that through a screen and IMing and maybe group chats, whatever it is, what do you think, Mary? How does that fly from your end?

Mary Grecz
So it's interesting, you were kind of thinking about how people, newer people, establish trust with us. And I was kind of thinking about how we can get new people to trust us. But I think I think for your side of the coin, you know, it is the extra effort that people put in. And there are opportunities, although they're different from like nobody's going to really see you if you're working in the office on a weekend like they would have in the physical world. But there are opportunities. We have teams channels where people drop, we talk about accomplishments on one of our teams channels, and people support each other, and they drop funny gifs and things like that. It sounds like small things, but you can really tell through all of those small things like our group WhatsApp chat and just that kind of engagement, who is really interested in being a long-term part of the team and who really thinks of this as their family rather than just a nine-to-five workspace. And then I think for the other side, of getting people to trust us and really getting buy-in from new employees. I was thinking about this earlier, and one of the things Michael really did early on that always surprised me in the beginning years was he kept promises. You know, my first year of practice, he was like, I'm going to take you to see clients. And my first thought was, no, he's not. I'm a first-year associate. I have nothing to offer these clients, you know, why would he take me? But it's very nice of him to say, well, he took me to see the clients and he involved me in so many things early on and gave me those opportunities. And so I think the same goes with the new people that come onto our team is making promises and keeping them and involving them in things that maybe other newer staff or newer attorneys wouldn't have the opportunity to do it other places.

Michael Stevens
I would, so one thing you just made me think of where it maybe it crosses the divide of how you build trust both ways when you were in person versus now that I think it remains completely unchanged. I think generationally, it has changed quite a bit, but I think accountability, accountability, and being transparent with the accountability from both sides. Because right now, there seems to be more of a disconnect, and generationally or otherwise, with a willingness to be at fault for something, for example. If you make a mistake, we all make a mistake. We're all human. And that's something that is just a known quantity with anything in life. And yet, so many people struggle with being comfortable finding in their voice with expressing something that perhaps did not go as planned and talking through it, and the reaction being instead to either defend or excuse or come up with some alternative concept as to explain it away. I think that goes both ways. Just like Mary said, if I made a promise to somebody, say that I'm going to take you to you know, my accountability to my promise hasn't hit right where it should. So that's a missed opportunity right there for me to have established credibility with somebody. Likewise, if somebody new comes to the firm and say they don't understand how to do something or they mess something up, and they want help with it, you know, having that ability and that gear to come to whoever your direct report is and talk through it from an account, like I cannot tell you how quickly that establishes credibility and trust with me.

Doug Dosberg
When you hear the words amazing team, what comes to your mind? How does that make you feel?

Michael Stevens
I mean, if they're describing our team, it makes me feel great, you know? It's, it's, you know, I don't want to call it a machine, but it kind of, it kind of can be on some level. We just have a, there's a, there's a beauty to the rhythm, and there's a beauty to the trust, and there's a beauty to the people that you work with where the machine is oiled and operating smoothly, and you don't have anxiety and stress. That would be completely unnecessary if you had a machine that was constantly getting jammed up, or the oil was running out, or a gear fell off because someone screwed something up. So, you know, we've, we have been so lucky over here to have an amazing team at this firm. From what we've been growing for a very long time now. And we have a bunch of amazing teams at our firm. It's not just Subrogation, but Subrogation has been the one that I've grown from a seed to what it is right now. So that one's the one that I can vouch for the most.
Mary, when you hear amazing teams, how does that make you think of? What does it make you think of?

Mary Grecz
It makes me think of a really symbiotic relationship of a company who cares about the people who is making regular decisions in the best interest, not only of the company but of the people you know, looking at policies that affect their personnel, ensuring that the people have the technology and the tools and the training that they need to do their jobs efficiently and to not be struggling every single day. And then on the other side of that, you have people that genuinely care about the wellbeing of the company who aren't just there to collect a paycheck, although paychecks are important and we all like to eat and all that good stuff. Having people who really care about the wellbeing of the company, about the wellbeing of the team and the people that they're working with, having people that are like looking out, hey, I saw that this is coming up, and you might need to do X, Y, and Z to prepare, can I help? Or just going above and beyond, things like that. Looking at details that may affect whatever is going on in the workday. And so, yeah, I really just think of that give-and-take relationship from both sides. And I think that having a company and management that shows that they care so much about the people causes people to want to work really hard. And I've heard so many people on our team say that nobody ever tells me I need to work hard, but I really want to work hard because I love it here, and I genuinely like the people who are in the management portion of our team. So, you know, it's like, I want to make them proud, that kind of thing.

Una Japundza
What do the two of you do to show people that you care and to display that care? Because you are in the management portion of your team, right, you're running the team. So what are some little things that you do to show people you care?

Michael Stevens
Well, I mean, early on, when I started to become a manager, I felt it was important to never ask anybody to do something that I wouldn't do myself, or I wasn't already doing. You know, with my change in rule right now, I'm not doing everything I'm asking everybody to do anymore, but that's not to say that I wouldn't, or I haven't done it. I think I've done everything at this point, at least in what we're doing at some point in this whole thing. So, you know, not always making it so that way you are leading by example with things is a cliche, but also true. People, people look to the top to see what they should be doing and to, to kind of understand what the expectation is for that.

Mary Grecz
And, probably, one of the big things is making time for people. I don't know where Michael finds the time. He makes time for everyone, and he remembers everything. You know, he'll check on you, like, how's grandma doing? That kind of thing. Yeah, so making time for people. And then, when people do come to us with problems, we address them. You know, if somebody has gotten to the point where they feel they need to come to one of us, then it's important to them. And it can't be swept under the rug. And so I think we work really hard to make people feel like their opinions matter and whatever issues they're having really matter. And that all goes along with our open door policy that we have as well.

Michael Stevens
So something I would add to that and I still don't know the right answer. Maybe in 20 years, I'll figure it out because it worked really well, or maybe it won't. But when I first
working, this boundary line of how much you want to share with your colleagues about your personal life. And I did that, but I was very closely guarded when I first started working because I didn't know what to expect. For better or for worse, Mary and I have only had one job as practicing attorneys, and it's with this firm. We've never worked anywhere else. We've both done stuff at other law firms before this, but never have we ever worked anywhere else but this firm. And so our perspective on the world is unique, and that we don't know better than what we're seeing on a regular basis. We get windows into the world of others. When we interview people when we bring them on and we get to hear about horror stories like staplers and stuff like that. But it's, but the reality is like we're over here doing what we just think is right and the best way that we think we can do it along the way. But it's a... So the boundary. The boundary has moved for me quite a bit since I first started working. And I don't know how it happened or when it happened. But there came a point where I found that within reason, you know, people don't need to know everything about anything that's going on in my world. But sharing parts of yourself that make you you, change the way that others in any walk of life will view you and work with you. And there are times where being relatable and being able to share a pain, for example, with somebody else that you too have experienced that they are now going through or on the other extreme, happiness, something really positive that happened to you. There is no better way to connect with somebody than having that moment. There was a, I forget who it was, I think it was Anderson Cooper and the Tonight Show host, I'm blanking on his name right now, but they both, Colbert, Stephen Colbert, they had like a one-hour session a couple of years ago. Both of them have had some very tragic losses in their life. Siblings, parents, like very just heart-wrenching things. And Stephen Colbert had a whole talk about how it was like a blessing to have that loss because what it allowed him to do was to be in walks of life with people and talk to them. And in those moments where somebody is truly going something so deep and profound and just where there's a loss that can't be understood unless you've gone through it yourself. And so, because you have gone through that, it allows you to bring that person back up from where they are, and you do form those bonds and that process. That's a very extreme example of it. But now, with how we work, I think that most of us at the firm have found a gear, a comfort level with sharing what their world looks like when they're not online a little bit. I don't know how you bridge the gap. I don't know how you do it otherwise because if you just stay within your lane of this is my job, I'm here from whatever time to whatever time, I'll do a great job at it, but I'm never going to share anything about my world. I don't know that you fit in in the world that we're kind of creating here culturally, and I don't want to pry, and I don't want to make anybody feel uncomfortable because really that's not what we're trying to do here, but you talk about a culture, and I guess we're kind of defining it as we talk about it a little bit here but bringing more of yourself to the table when you're a teammate here, it almost feels like a requirement to really get the biggest benefit of what you have here in the support system that is your firm family. Don't get me wrong, we're all playing the... We do a firm lotto pool, and when we get to a billion dollars, we're trying to all retire quicker here. But in the meantime, until that happens, I've got people that I can lean into and lean on, and I feel like they know they have the same thing with us too.

Doug Dosberg
So I love tactics and exploring what people are doing. And you shared a story with us about having a group chat during the interview process. And I just thought that was super rare or unique. Can you tell that story?

Michael Stevens
Yeah, so this is not, so Mary and I, I take no full responsibility for this idea. Her and I have been kind of again trying to figure out what our culture is and then, you know, packaging it up so the other practice groups can benefit from it too. But one of the things we've been struggling with is, how do we know if someone's a really good communicator after interviewing them? And when we would do this in person, you still were left a little bit with, how well does this person communicate? Because just because you can form sentences, just because you can type sentences, just because you know grammar is the spelling, and you can organize paragraphs, legal communication is a skill that today doesn't look like what it looked like 20 years ago. But it's equally as important as it was then, whether it's a romantic or plutonic or professional relationship, you have a breakdown of communication. Nothing good's gonna come from it. And you have the potential for misunderstandings all the way through that come from that too. So people that are skilled communicators, there seems to be a true correlation between skilled communicators and successful people in business all the way through, not just lawyers or software developers, it's all the way through. So today, since we live in a virtual world, the texting and the ability to communicate in writing is so important in real-time, not email writing, you know, drafting of motions. But so much I think of what we do these days is not just on video and this, and it's in very quick order that can quickly cause anxiety, confidence, or somewhere in between those things. We came up with the idea of having a second phase of our interview process for employees, where the first one would go much like all of us look right now on a 4x4 on a Zoom screen. But once that was done, if the interview was going well, the interviewee would be invited to the next phase of the interview, which would take place on their respective cell phone. And the cell phone would be a group chat between a variety of the people that were just on the interview process. And it would kick off with the same question every time. I won't say what that question is right here, just in case someone decides to interview with us. And I still want to have a true and honest response from it. But I will say that that first question taps into their understanding of technological features on their phone as well as asks them to personify themselves with it.

Una Japundza
How long is that part of the process? The group chat interview?

Michael Stevens
I've been doing it, Mary. Six months?

Mary Grecz
Maybe six months.

Michael Stevens
Yep. Okay. Yeah, about six months.

Una Japundza
And how many questions are there in this conversation? Or is it like, you know, half a day and then we just click people not always able to chat, right? How does that work logistically?

Michael Stevens
It's not a half a day, but I think if you were to try and like tie it into what a normal interview would be like, it's the same thing. Like interviews can sometimes be shorter or longer depending on the person, how engaging they are, how's all that's going. I mean, Mary feels like, from my perspective, the ones that we've had that have gone on for much longer than the others, have typically been people that have gotten offers and that have been very enjoyable. Right, exactly. They're giving entertaining answers, they're engaging, like you said.

Doug Dosberg
So help me understand this. So after so many interviews, virtually through a screen. You then get their phone number, and you send them a text message? No, okay.

Michael Stevens
Yeah, it's kind of like, look, we've got this, we should have their cell phone number beforehand. So it's just part of the intake process for the interview. And so the way it'll work is interview with, you know, round one, round two online, if we've got different groups of people we want to meet this person, because, you know, as Mary said, getting, we've also found feedback from a variety of people, not just the decision-makers is vital because you want people to feel like they are building something together. They're not just being told who to work with. So having that buy-in on somebody early on, regardless of where they might rank on a totem poll, is really important. And so once you get through that, we'll tell them, all right, so there's going to be a third phase, we'll tell them, to this interview. In about two minutes, you're going to see a group chat pop up on your phone. That's going to have a few of us on here, and we're going to basically wind up and continue this interview on your phone. And we'll see you over there. And then the next thing you know, there's an introductory text message that pops up on a bunch of our phones. Mary and I are typically on all of them since we're kind of developing this protocol on this procedure at the moment. And then I don't know, I don't think it's gotten more than like 30 minutes or so on there, but it depends on how quickly they're responding. Sometimes they ask us questions. We always give everybody an opportunity to ask us more questions along the way. Not everybody actually takes us up on that. Some people do. And I think those ones where it's again, engagement, we're going back and forth, which is another indicator to us of how well they would fit culturally because engagement and how you engage with people is deep breath so important to every big thing and every little thing that happens top to bottom.

Doug Dosberg
Yeah, that's super interesting to me because it really opens up an opportunity for somebody to kind of shine in a way that, you know, you wouldn't necessarily see through Zoom.

Mary Grecz
It's so true. And I remember one candidate in particular, who I think Michael and I commented afterwards, was maybe a little nervous on Zoom. But then that person did shine so bright in the text portion. And it was like, OK, now the personality is coming out. And that's really cool to see. And it's important, too, to know that people are open to using technology.

Michael Stevens
I'm just curious, can anybody remember the first text message you ever sent? Is that you? You can remember Mary. Okay. What was the first text message you ever sent? Well, or received?

Mary Grecz
No, sorry, because I forgot about the phones before the iPhone. I remember the first one I sent on my first-ever iPhone. But I just remembered there were phones before that that text. Yes. That's in text. It's hard to remember. So now I retract my answer.

Michael Stevens
Yeah. So I remember my first text message. I vividly remember it. And it was in ninth grade. And I think it was in math class. And I was one of those fortunate kids that had a cell phone before that was the thing.

Doug Dosberg
A PalmPilot?

Michael Stevens
It was not a PalmPilot. It was a Nokia. OK. And it was like the fancy ones that were like very small and you could replace the face coverings with different colors. And SMS had just come out. And I remember that I had another fancy friend who also, she had one too. And we were sitting right next to each other, and I was like, I wanna try this. Just bear with me. I think we can message with each other on here. And God knows what I actually said, but I remember doing it. I remember her phone beeping and me thinking, wow, this is so cool, right? Like this is an interesting thing. Okay, now let's see, that would have been like 99, 98. So we're well past that at this point. How many active group texts do any one of you have going on your phone at any given time right now? Right? Y'all do, don't you?

Doug Dosberg
Many.

Mary Grecz
Quite a few.

Michael Stevens
Always family, colleagues, college roommates. You know, you're at, I mean, you name it. Like that's the way it is. That's what everybody's communicating right now. And if, you know, everybody on the screen, I mean, I don't know everybody's ages, but we didn't all grow up with this as part of our DNA, but kids today are. And we're actually, if we haven't already crossed the apex of it, like we're there right now, where the people that are about to be joining the ranks of the professional world have had this stuff in their face from day one all the way through. And so there is a level of not only sophistication but expectation from them in seeing this ability to communicate. And there's a familiarness of it with them, too where suddenly they have the ability to go ahead and communicate better than people who didn't have this, hopefully. But I think there's still training that needs to go on there because I think there is a lack of awareness sometimes in how you communicate in writing like that, which I think is part of why the text interview is so helpful. To kind of weed that out a little bit since we all can text now, right? We can all get on a group chat and correspond, but to be able to express yourself in a way where it transcends just words on the screen or an emoji or whatever it is where you can actually feel a little bit of what they are, that's like lightning in the bottle stuff where you see that and you're like come hither, you know, we've, we've, we can, we can have some fun together and we can make, we can make some magic together.

Doug Dosberg
You think we'll see a day when we only interview through messaging? And do you think we'll see a day where we are interviewing with someone's personal AI?

Michael Stevens
A sadness to that question.

Mary Grecz
Don't love that idea.

Doug Dosberg
This sounds awful, doesn't it?

Michael Stevens
Makes me feel things that aren't. Because we lose so much right now. I mean, and again, we gain back in other places too. But I don't want that. This is our humanity and what makes us is like, once you start delegating that. Right to machines, to AI and other to kind of like take away in just for what? To increase efficiency, to avoid, you know, stepping in something that you may have otherwise missed from the human experience. Just, I think at everything, you just have to think about what cost. And if it is always going to be about the bottom line, which you know for some people and some companies, it absolutely will be, then Doug, there's no doubt that there are going to be plenty of companies that are going to take advantage of that and create that workflow to help them not lose money and to not waste people's time meeting people because that's how they will look at it. They will look at it as wasting time. I don't know. I think Mary and I both like interviewing people. It's a good part of the process.

Mary Grecz
Definitely. Well, and part of one of the really special things about our team is that we do genuinely all get along. We all really, really love each other. And when there are those opportunities to be together in person, we are like, like I remember one Thanksgiving luncheon, nobody wanted to leave. It was like, we miss each other so much. And it is, you can just feel this huge, happy energy when we're together. And it's genuine. It's, and it's a really rare thing because you know, we all have friends and, and know people who work in other places who don't get excited to go to a company dinner or a company function. And so the personality aspect of that is one of the things that makes our team so special. So I think that would be a huge loss. We didn't have that.

Doug Dosberg
Yeah, I totally agree. Una and I are getting ready to do some interviewing here soon. And I love the idea of the text messaging portion of the interview process.

Una Japundza
I knew you would. I was just waiting for that.

Michael Stevens
Do it. It's fun. I mean, we're through the looking glass over here. So we're not the one on the hot seat. Still funny.

Una Japundza
Well, I know we're almost at time. So Doug, do you want us to wrap up the usual way?

Una Japundza
Yeah, so you have five tacos, right? Who you're giving your tacos to? Mary, you can go first if you want.

Mary Grecz
That is different every day, but I can tell you it's never hard to find five people. In fact, that's usually the hard part is that there are more than five people whom I owe gratitude to each day. Today it's going to be Stacey, Chantel, Kristen, Hayley. They have all made my life much easier this morning. Oh, and Dan. For me, five tacos.

Michael Stevens
I, my first thought was to go outside the firm for my, for my, my tacos. My, we, we celebrated our three-year-old's birthday this weekend, and I literally showed up for it. And so I, I, we, we spent a lot of time here doing what we're doing here, putting these, putting the work stuff together and making it as awesome as it is. And so I don't, I don't know that I could do, let me take that back. I absolutely know that I could not do what I'm doing at work if my wife wasn't carrying the load with like creating a system for us to basically allow me to like walk into a three-year-old's birthday party and absolutely just be able to enjoy that on my end. So she's getting all my tacos today because yesterday was a really great birthday party, and just, you know, those are the moments that I'm trying to have more of and all that stuff too.

Doug Dosberg
Well, Mary, Michael, thank you for being on the podcast. Really appreciate it.

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