Field Notes: The Job Description That Was Actually a Fortress

Field Notes are dispatches from real coaching sessions with law firm founders — unscripted moments where the gap between what a leader says they want and what they're actually building becomes impossible to ignore.

Location: A Founder's Home Office

Observation: The job description she'd written wasn't a hiring tool. It was a wall.

A managing partner sat down to build the job description for her next operations hire. On paper, it looked complete — ownership, communication, process improvement, the usual checklist. When I asked whether it made her life better and made the firm better, she paused. "Honestly, I don't know if it makes my life better," she said. "But it avoids problems between myself and the position."

My client hadn't drafted an optimized role. She'd drafted a defense to conflict.

1. The Job Description Built From What She Didn't Want

Every line traced back to a bad experience with the last hire. Don't repeat that mistake. Don't let this happen again. It was airtight, and it was joyless. When I asked if she was excited about hiring someone into it, she didn't hesitate: "No, I'm not." A job description built entirely from avoidance will never attract — or produce — anything you're excited about. It can only prevent damage. It can't create value.

2. Catching the Catabolic Frame

In Energy Leadership terms, "I don't want someone who makes my life worse" is a Level 2 frame — reactive, defensive, running away from pain instead of running toward something. She named it herself the moment I reflected it back: "It just makes me not want to do it." I urged her to build the role from the opposite direction. Not "someone who won't screw up billing" but "a strategic thinker who loves fiddling with a process until it's better." Same responsibilities; completely different energy. I saw the shift happen in real time — her voice picked up, her body language changed, the tension melted away, a smile appeared, and the hesitation dropped out.

3. "I Don't Do Reasonable"

She proposed a 90-day plan for the internal candidate already circling the role — sound, sensible, hedged. Then she asked, "Does that sound reasonable?" My answer: reasonable isn't the bar. The real question is whether it excites you. Founders default to reasonable because reasonable feels safe. But a firm doesn't scale on reasonable. It scales on the founder building toward something she actually wants, not managing around what she's afraid of.

The Bottom Line: If your hiring criteria, your org chart, or your next strategic move are built primarily to prevent a repeat of last time, you're not designing your firm's future — you're still relitigating its past. Excitement is a data point. Pay attention when it's missing.

Field Exercise:

1. Pull up the last job description, role, or initiative you built. Was it written toward something you want, or away from something you fear?

2. Read it back and notice your body's reaction. Excitement or relief?

3. Rewrite one sentence of it from the anabolic frame — what you're building toward, not what you're avoiding.

If you can't find the excitement anywhere in the document, that's not a hiring problem. That's a leadership frame problem.

End of dispatch.

Ready to stop building your firm around what you're afraid of? Schedule a 1:1 conversation with me.