Your Personal Evolution Will Beat Any KPI
Law firm leaders love numbers.
Billables, realization, profit per partner, average fee, new files opened, aged receivables – the dashboards get more sophisticated every year. I’m not anti-metrics. In fact, I like them. They give us a snapshot of what has happened.
But they don’t tell us something far more important: Who did you have to be to create those numbers – and who do you need to become to create different ones?
This month, I debriefed a milestone Energy Leadership Index (ELI) assessment with a law firm leader I’ve coached for over a year. When we first started, his energy profile showed what I see so often: high responsibility, high effort, and a heavy mix of frustration, self-pressure, and “it is what it is” thinking.
His numbers were good. His identity, however, was exhausted.
Twelve months later, the metrics of his firm have improved again – but what impressed me most weren’t his financials. It was the way he described himself.
He wasn’t talking about working harder. He was talking about:
choosing how long he stays in stress instead of living there,
setting standards without trying to control people,
mentoring instead of “football coaching” his team,
and being at peace with reality without settling for “fine.”
His milestone ELI showed exactly that shift. Less victim mindset, less conflict energy, less “I’ll carry it all myself.” More win-win thinking, more designing the game so everyone can succeed, more awareness that he is always at choice.
In other words: his personal evolution outpaced his KPIs – and now his KPIs are catching up.
This is the part many founders miss. We’ll happily invest in better systems, better tech, better marketing, better dashboards. But the system that governs all of those decisions is you.
You are the operating system.
That’s why, in my own life, I’m making a significant evolution as well. Michelle and I are moving to Portugal for at least two years. Same work, same mission – but a different way of living it out. We’re trading snow for ocean, routine for adventure, and “someday” for “we’re doing it now.”
Why? Because I left the practice of law to build a geographically independent life. If I never made the leap, all the talk about possibility and leadership would just be theory.
The same is true for you.
You can have the best dashboards in the world and still feel stuck if you haven’t updated the person leading the firm. Personal evolution is not a “nice to have” on the side of your metrics. It’s the source code underneath them.
So as you look at your year-end reports, don’t just ask:
What worked?
What didn’t?
What should we change?
Also ask:
Who was I being when I led this firm in 2025?
And who do I have to become to make what I want in 2026 possible?
The numbers will follow your identity, not the other way around.
