Employment law attorney, author, and Founder/CEO of the Crone Law Firm, Alan Crone explains how what you do defines who you are, reveals the 3 biggest constants over 30 years of law, as well as the list of things a new or small business absolutely MUST do to stay on the right side of the law, and shares why diversity is death (but not how you think).

So you're in Memphis.

Correct.

I don't know if you are familiar with this

place, but there's a house there that's kind of well known. It

was a singer back in the 60s, I think...

Oh yeah. Aretha Franklin's birthplace.

There you go, yeah, that's the one. Yeah, neat

town you got there.

Thank you. Next time you come, let me know. I'm a

little plugged into this town. I'd be glad to make sure you

have a good time.

I will definitely do that. So your

background in employment law is super fascinating. What got you

on that path? And then talk to me about how, through the years,

this has worked your way into inspiration for the book.

Be glad to. Well, you know, I wish I could say

that I had this burning desire to practice employment law even

before I went to law school. That's not true, you know, I

went to law school, got out my first job. I was exposed to

employment law, went to work at another firm, and then that's

really all I did and really enjoyed it. Your employment

relationship is probably one of the top two most important

relationships you have in your life. You've got your

significant other, your spouse, and then the way you make your

living. And in America, what you do is a big part of who you are.

Very early on, I realized that how incredibly important it is

to folks lives, that they have a fair work place and they have a

clear path to be able to provide for their families and provide

for their own personal self actualization. So it wasn't hard

to kind of fall in love with employment law from that

standpoint, at that time, early in my career, I was a politician

with a law license. I'm now a recovering politician in not in

the mid 90s, I went to work for the governor in Tennessee and

was the chief counsel for the Department of Employment

Security, and among other things that we did workforce training

and unemployment compensation. I did some work for the governor's

office in employment law, and so when I left government service,

employment law was kind of hard, baked into my professional DNA,

and over the years, I've become more and more of an employment

law specialist. The book the law at work, people ask me, How long

did it take you to write the book, if I'm truthful, 30 years

and I wanted to write the book to give non lawyers a playbook

on how to deal with some of these employment law issues out

there. Because, you know, there's a lot of misinformation.

People think they know what the law is, but, you know, they

really don't. A lot of people just don't think about it until

it's on top of them. Whether you're a decision maker at a

company or a employee or executive trying to figure out

what your rights are. Hopefully it's a good first place to go to

begin to formulate a plan on on what you should do next.

Very neat. I'd be curious with that 30 years

plus of experience, how have you seen the environment between

employee and employer change?

Well, I think, I don't know exactly when it

happened, but I think that there's much more of a even

playing field between labor and management now than there used

to be, although that's not saying a whole lot. But you

know, with the gig economy and the great resignation and all of

those things really has changed the way people approach making a

living. I'm not even going to say work, because I think people

now make a living and pursue careers, as opposed to, you

know, just going to a job. Management can no longer stand

at the top of the mountain and just dictate the terms and

conditions of employment, you're seeing a lot more strikes now. I

don't think that that's a coincidence. Everyone from the

writers and actors to the UAW and airline employees are

realizing that they've got a lot more bargaining position than

they used to have, and they're flexing those muscles because

people who are willing to be an employee is a shrinking amount

of people. I think it means that companies have to become much

more mission driven. They have to hire people that align with

that mission. That is really what's going to get you a good

worker is someone who isn't coming to work just for the

paycheck, but is coming to help you achieve a mission that they

believe in.

I'm going to go on the flip side of this coin.

What have you seen stay the same? What issues are you still

dealing with today that you got introduced to 30 years ago?

People. People are the constant when you're talking

about any organization, but particularly a business, the

people and how they relate to one another, is the constant.

You know, no matter how much you you train people, no matter how

much you have policies and procedures, the human condition

is always going to raise its head. But. Positively and

negative. I mean, you're always going to have people that don't

know how to act appropriately. You're always going to have

people that are greedy or that want power or want to

manipulate, and you've got to deal with that in your

organization. You're always going to have people that don't

know, whether it's intentionally or unintentionally, don't know

how to navigate the psychosexual relationships between co

workers, and you're going to have harassers and all of those

things, people is the constant. And I think that in the early

part of my career, management dealt with that by edict my way

or the highway, or you're going to do this or else, and that

sort of thing. And that still works to a certain you know, you

got to have standards. But I think that dealing with that

human element now is dealing with the psychology of

leadership and the psychology of followers. Dealing with that is

is so much more of a priority now. Whereas, you know, 1020,

years ago, managers thought they could just ignore, ignore that

and be off their authoritarian about it. So people would be the

first constant. And then I think the other, you know, constant is

a lack of communication and positive confrontation in the

American business place Management students, when they

come out, they don't understand. They they're not taught how to

properly confront and enforce standards, and I think that

causes a lot of people to be not very confident in their

management style. They don't know how to to get people on the

same page, so they just lay down the law. The other thing that

hasn't changed is how devastating turnover is to an

organization. If you're in an organization and you're

constantly turning over. That's probably more of an indication

about your management than it is about the people that you're

hiring. If someone comes to work for you, I would say, you know,

there's that moment that, that honeymoon moment when you when

you offer the job, and the person accepts everybody in that

transaction, has hope, and then when that relationship

deteriorates, and you have turnover, now you're back to

square one, huge, huge cost to to the organization, both

financially and psychically, right? I mean, nobody enjoys

getting fired. Nobody enjoys firing people. If you do, then

you're probably psychotic and should be doing something else.

And when that happens, that's a failure of the recruitment

process. It's a failure of management, it's a failure of

the employee. Now, more and more as we as we get into all kinds

of different, you know, management tracking and KPIs and

all of that, we're having to figure out how to avoid that

from happening, because we can see in real time how much that

turnover is costing us.

That is definitely one of my favorite

topics. What else would you say are some of the common workplace

challenges, especially if you're a small business owner, or if

you're in a leadership role where you have responsibility

and authority? What are some of the other common challenges,

workplace issues that we're facing today?

The number one is the inability to answer this

question? What do I have to do to be successful here? Again, I

don't think we communicate our expectations very well to

employees. Every case I've ever been involved in, even if

there's intentional discrimination, intentional

harassment, there's always this element of bad communication up

and down the chain again, it goes back to Mission. How does

this position fit into the mission of my company? What

qualifications do I really need this person to have? How do they

need to manifest those qualifications on a day to day

basis to be successful? I tell people all the time, ask that

question in an interview, and if you get a good answer, that's

where you need to work again. I think lack of good

confrontation, people don't want to correct other people. They

don't know how to go about it, and so if you haven't expressed

those those expectations correctly, that's one reason why

people are hesitant to confront because they kind of realize,

either consciously or subconsciously, they really have

never told this person that whatever the part of this job is

is important. I represented a man who was 65 year old, black

guy, we'll call him Jesse. Jesse had worked for this company for

30 years. It was not an upper level position. He was kind of a

supervisor, but very important for the company. He was supposed

to be at his at the job at eight o'clock, but for 30 years, he

got to his job between 815 and 830 mainly because of the public

transportation system in Memphis. Well, for years and

years and years, nobody said anything to Jesse. He had had a

African American supervisor. They all got along. Well, one

point he got a new supervisor who happened to be white. This

fellow noticed, well, Jesse's coming into work 15 to 30

minutes late every day. So basically, went up to Jessie's,

look, you're late. One more time. You're fired. Sure enough,

the next day, he was 15 minutes late and he was fired. And Jesse

came to my office and I said. Why did they tell you that you

were fired? And he said, Well, it's because I was late. I said,

What was the real What do you think was the real reason you

were fired? And he said, Well, the only thing I can think of it

is because I'm black. I've been late for 30 years, and nobody

ever said a thing. Now I get a white supervisor and I'm fired.

The facts of that you can argue with, and ultimately, we settled

the case. But it was a good illustration of this, this

thing, I have a confrontation. I'm not saying that being on

time isn't important, but nobody ever communicated that with

Jesse. And rather than sit down and talk to him about it and

find out what was going on and maybe how they could, they could

change it, the guy just, just fired him. The supervisor

thought that he was enforcing a standard, but what ended up

happening is they lost an employee with 30 years of

institutional knowledge and a lawsuit and a big settlement.

Again, going back to expectations, let's say that

you're going to hire a an accountant, or let's say you're

going to hire a banker. You say, Okay, I need, I need a

commercial banker. You find someone who's been in the

commercial banking industry for 20 years. They got great reviews

and you put them in just because they've been a successful

commercial banker somewhere else doesn't necessarily mean they're

going to fit into your culture. Doesn't mean they're going to

have your values, doesn't mean that they have your priorities,

and doesn't mean that they're going to do the job exactly the

way you want it to be done. The hiring person hasn't has a

vision of what it is to be a commercial banker. The

commercial banker has 20 year, maybe experience of what he has

been as a commercial banker. And for whatever reason, those

don't, those don't align. Maybe the decision maker just says,

You've been a commercial banker for 20 years. Don't, you know?

As opposed to, here's what, what we really need.

I hear you talk about communication, and one of

my favorite sayings is good communication is as much about

the communicating as it is the comprehension. You know, you've

talked about the quality of recruiting, you've talked about

retention. How does the laws, the employment laws that we have

and that we're working towards, how does that weave in to help

with communication and comprehension and retention and

recruitment? Pull those together for me.

What a great question. What a great question.

Employment law compliance is not just good legally. It's good

business for precisely the reason that you're talking

talking about. And I think again, it requires some some

thought and attention. Well, first of all, the employment

laws are not written to make you a better business, to make you

more profitable or anything else. The employment laws are

written to give protect minimal amount of protection. And when I

say minimal, I mean minimal amount of protection to certain

workers in certain circumstances. But there's a way

to take those requirements and supercharge them for business.

One of the things that overall, that Title Seven of the Civil

Rights Act of 1964 brings is this idea that you have to treat

everyone the same, that you can't have discrimination, that

you can't have harassment. You know not harassing your

employees is good business again, if you take that, and you

take it to heart, and you say, Okay, how can we take this legal

requirement and supercharge it and into making our business

better? And so one way you can do that is to, you know, take

that, those trainings that that right now are kind of pro forma,

you know, watching a video of some guy come over and say

something inappropriate to some woman. And okay, what should

they do now? That sort of thing to go on beyond and talk about

awareness of body language and sexual cues and all of these

things, what is appropriate and what isn't appropriate in the

workforce, and turn that into a communication opportunity

progressive discipline, essentially this notion of

they're getting written up, and then you have a warning, and

then you know that, that you get an opportunity to change your or

correct your behavior before you know something bad happens to

you, what the law calls an adverse employment action,

right? You should have that be not progressive discipline, but

progressive training. So you know the law doesn't say that

you have to have progressive discipline. You know that you

have to have three strikes and you're out that sort of that's

just something that's kind of evolved. If it's clear on the

face of your communication, your lexicon, what you do from the

moment that you begin to discipline or coach or train or

whatever you want to call it, that the real goal is not to set

you up to be fired, but is to give you every opportunity to

succeed. At the end, you can either show demonstratively that

either you just didn't have the capacity to do what was right,

or you didn't have the willingness, then that becomes a

pretty clear signal to everybody, the employee

management, and, you know, a judge or jury later on, if it

comes to that, that the company did everything it could to

salvage the relationship, make the person successful, and they

just weren't able to do it. You know, I tell people, Look, I can

tell you how to never get sued for an employment violence.

Conversation very easy. Never fire anybody. It starts with

designing the position, understanding, you know, that

unicorn that you need in that position, recruiting to that and

then train, train, train. It takes some time. It takes weeks

and weeks and weeks of training, of mentoring to get that person

up to where you want them to be, but it's worth it?

You know, I think there's an opportunity for

a mental shift as well. Is, hey, what if you never get to fire

anyone ever? How would that change your behavior in terms of

how you dealt with folks? But if we could take a step back and

say, Hey, let's take a different vision. It sounds like we could

solve a lot of these problems, but that's really hard to do. So

what do you recommend to business owners, leaders, etc,

when they're in this pressure cooker, how do you get them to

start thinking differently? It is exhausting. It takes a lot

more energy. How do you get them to start thinking differently?

I think the first thing is, if I'm a mid level

manager and I've got six to 10 people in my organization and I

don't know how to manage them, I get into a growth mindset and

take some classes, get some training, even if have to pay

for it myself. I see managers that have absolutely no idea how

to lead someone and coach someone to success, other than

just saying, here's the KPI. If you don't meet it, you're gone.

I think that's a deficit in their training and their

understanding of what of what their other options are, all

right. Well, that's a certain way of managing, but that's

probably not going to get you. That's not sustainable. That's

one thing that can be done is really try to get some training

and understanding how to do that. The other is, and I'm a

broken record on this mission, you get somebody to buy into

what it means, and what that means, not just to the business,

but, you know, you just created 10 jobs, which is 10 families,

maybe three kids that weren't going to go to college now or

going to college. That is the kind of motivation that gets

people up in the morning. Those are the people that you want

working for you. It's not just me making a quota, but it's me

making somebody's life better. They've got a higher motive than

just working for the company. So, you know, those are just two

ways I think that that we can solve that problem. It's going

to take a mind shift. You know, it may take a little bit of

stepping back and saying, Look, you know, one, one issue that I

deal with in my law firm all the time, and I think people across

the board don't, there's not many metrics for it, and that is

capacity. Because at some point, you know, if you've got a team

and that team is trying to do the work of three teams, again,

that's not sustainable, but most people have no idea what their

capacity really, really is. And you find out when someone's

capacity when they come to you and say, I gotta quit. I just

can't I don't care what the money is. I can't do this

anymore, particularly for small business people, is okay in the

short term, but it is not sustainable long term.

Yeah, people are just burning out. They're

stepping out instead of working through that. So we have talked

kind of high level on some things. I want to get into a

little bit more boots on the ground. Let's say I am a small

business owner. Five things that I should have to protect my

business, my assets. I come to you, hey, I'm starting this

business where I've got it up and running, where a couple

million in revenue, couple million in revenue, what do I

absolutely got to do?

Well, the first thing is, matter how big your

organization is, you need an employee handbook, and you need

written job descriptions for every position, for all the

reasons we've been talking about. It's one of those things

that you say that to operations people in a business, and they

are job descriptions. And it's one of those check off kinds of

things. No, no. This is a great business tool, because you

really need to make sure that what you say people are doing or

what they actually are doing, and that is so important,

whether it's compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act,

the Fair Labor Standards Act, Title Seven, all those things,

the first thing that a plaintiff lawyer is going to ask for and

discover it, yes, give me the job description. If the job

description is wrong, good trial lawyer can just make you look

silly because your job description is wrong. I could do

a whole show on job descriptions. So that's the

number one job descriptions, employee handbooks, which is

another way of saying, communicate your expectations,

communicate your standards. The second thing is, once you've

communicated your standards, once you've communicated your

expectations, they're non negotiable. If they're

negotiable, then they're not a standard, or they're not an

expectation. And you should make sure everybody knows. You know

if five widgets a month is a non negotiable, and the person can't

do five widgets a month, ask them to seek their salvation

elsewhere. As they used to say at my high school, it's non

negotiable. That's going to do two things. One, your guys that

are doing eight widgets a month are going to appreciate you,

because they see that that you value their effort. The people

that are doing four realize I got this really they're serious

about. That, and you're going to get better production out of it.

The next thing everyone should have is you should protect your

intellectual property. My product or my service is not the

value of my company. The value of my company is and how I do

those things, there are agreements that you can have

that really tie that stuff down. Non competes, non solicitation.

Those agreements are, can be enforceable. Most of them are

not as enforceable as people think, because, again, they're

kind of off the rack. Somebody says, Well, we need to those

salesmen. We need to get a non compete with them. And so they

go to the internets, they pull down an agreement, and they

everybody signs it, and then when you have to go and enforce

it, there's problems because it's not customized to your

situation. And I'm not in the the person who ordered it isn't

going to get what they thought they were getting, and they're

going to have some lawyer like me say, Well, you know is give

you that kind of experience which which you don't want. So

understanding what your intellectual property is and

what it isn't is crucial. Part of it may be the cocktail of

vendors that you have assembled. The identity of those those

vendors is proprietary. And that doesn't necessarily mean that

it's secret that you know somebody couldn't figure out who

you use for SEO or who you use for supplying that vanilla that

that makes your cupcakes taste so so good, but somebody doesn't

have to do a commercial about it or publicize it. So you want to

make sure that if that vendor relationship is important, that

you protect it, either through exclusive contracts with the

vendor or non disclosure agreements, or what, whatever it

is, of course, part of that means you've got to understand

what it is, and then, you know, communicate that to everybody

else. So the third, the third thing I would say, from a legal

standpoint, is have a relationship with a lawyer, have

a relationship with an accountant, with a banker. You

know, you should be going to lunch with, with those folks

once a quarter, at least, to keep them apprised of your

situation and ask them for advice and so forth, keeping

good tabs on on those professional relationships and

advice and then, and then, finally, I would say, Be fair.

Be fair. Be Real, Be human. When you start a business, you're not

starting a family. We're not family, but you're a good team.

You're a collaborative team. Have values, have a mission,

have a reason other than just making money, that you come to

work every morning. I find that when I put my focus on that

vision, and I you know, my professional mission is to

transform the American workplace, one client, one case

at a time. That's not something that's going to happen

overnight. That's why we have that disclaimer at the back of

it. But you know, when I keep my focus on that mission, great

things happen when I'm concentrating on me, how much

money I'm going to make, how much growth My firm has, and

that sort of thing. That's when it all kind of falls apart.

Because true success is is elevating other people. And so

if you do those things every day, then every day you're going

to be a little bit better. And you're going to look up after a

year, after five years, after 10 years, and say, Man, we really

have come a long way, although I don't remember getting here.

Those are the things I would do.

Super helpful. So that opened up a whole nother

can of worms for me. I have like 10 more questions again. I think

the book itself is going to be critical, both, quite frankly,

for employers and employees. I'm a big believer that, you know,

knowledge is power.

You know, I think everybody, every reasonable

person, would agree that you shouldn't make business

decisions based on accidental factors like race and gender and

sexual preference and all those things. And I really think that

if I was a decision maker, I would be thinking every day,

okay, how can I eliminate the implication that that might even

be a factor? And I think one of those things is in order to

create, first of all, I say diversity in a in a business is

death. And by that I mean true diversity. And true diversity is

when you have a diverse opinion on what the mission of the

organization is, now, color, gender, all those things are

accident. Are accidental in the true scholastic definition of of

accidents, right? I mean, as long as you have people that are

mission focused, then it doesn't matter. All those other things

don't matter. But if you're a white guy like me, I gotta go

outside of my my sphere of influence to make sure that

those accidents are purely accidental. In other words, I've

got to go out and go where other people are, more diverse areas,

and make sure that I'm recruiting at hcbus. I'm

recruiting in the Latino community. I'm I'm going to the

women's lawyers organizations, and meeting people and making

relationships so that when I'm recruiting. So I'm recruiting

across the the vast spectrum, because, again, the the number

of people who meet my mission is a limited number amongst the

universe of everyone in the on the planet. I've got to really

expand my my scope of recruitment just beyond my

little circle of friends. And that's the that's the way that

you really do increase diversity in terms of those accidental

characteristics that people have, is to really expand your

your view.

Well, I love that. Super, super fascinating.

Like I said, I've got so many other questions I'd love to ask,

but I want to be respectful. And if I've learned anything about

attorneys over the years, it is how important time is to them.

So I sincerely appreciate your time. You obviously have a

passion for what you do, and thank you very much for giving

your valuable time with us today.

Stephanie, I appreciate it. Really enjoyed

talking with you.