Cliff Roe isn’t afraid to admit that he likes getting up and going to work every day. And Roe, the managing partner for Dinsmore
& Shohl LLP, tries to make sure that the more than 600 employees at the firm’s eight offices feel the same way. With that in mind,
Roe strives to create a different kind of environment at the $108 million firm, one in which people can balance work and life and
where their voices can be heard. Smart Business spoke with Roe about retaining talent and about getting his people involved in
the decision-making process.
Let employees balance life and work. You want people to get up in the
morning and want to come to work. In the changing society’s view
of life, we stress the environment of how we work; we stress the
personal side of what people deal with.
You have to find ways to keep your people motivated. That has
resulted in us doing things like allowing part-time lawyers — we
have many highly achieved lawyers that have children and don’t
necessarily want to give up their profession, and we make arrangements to keep their talents.
We don’t enforce strict rules on altering the workday for that.
We’ve got some that work one day a week and some that work
four days a week. And that’s one example of achieving a work
environment that is healthy and enjoyable. We get to keep their
skills with us, and they’re happy to have that flexibility.
We also hire a lot of lateral associates — people with a few years’
experience that are coming from other firms and cities — and it is
not unusual to hire very experienced, very good talent from other
firms who, after awhile, realize they’re not going to make partner
or they’re tired of working until 10 o’clock every night.
We welcome those people and tell them that we understand
there is life outside of this place. Work takes commitment, but we
want people to see that we aren’t just looking for a person to bill
us for hours; we want them to have a life and have work fit with
that, and we work with them to figure out what we can do to help
them achieve that.
Assign leaders who can reach everyone. We have management structures that break the firm into management pods. We’ve got a management council that includes the managing partner of each of our
regional offices and the three heads of our major departments.
The point of that management council is that when we convene
one of those meetings, every one of our 300-plus lawyers is managed by somebody in that room. You can literally get the message
to all of them through these leaders.
So it’s an organization where you can really address specific
problems and empower somebody in that room to solve the problem and hold that person accountable. When you structure it like
that, you can make the management council the organ where
things get done because someone is given the job before you walk
out of that room. And at the next meeting, the first question is, ‘Did
you get it done?’ or ‘How are you coming?’
Get a consensus. Our entire management team is a total democracy
— we have them elected by the partners. I’m not sitting atop of a
pyramid having fought my way up the ladder; I’m elected to a
three-year term.
So when we set our strategic goals, there are very few mandates
that ever come out of my mouth; we look at issues together and let
the group of elected managers vote. A democratic platform is very
appealing to those that have been involved in other types of management styles because you give people a voice when you take a
vote on things.
We had a partner join us a few years ago who told us after his
first meeting, ‘I was just asked to consider and vote on more things
in one meeting than I was ever asked to vote upon in the 10 years
I was at the other firm.’ Well, that’s how you make sure people feel
as though they’ve been heard; you give them a chance to have an
equal opinion on decisions so they can see that even if they’re
choice isn’t what’s used, it was still factored in.
Listen to your peers. We are in a peer group of large, regional firms
around the country similar to us that aren’t our competitors, and
we meet every six months and share our best practices and we
share our failures.
The biggest, most popular part of our agenda is when we go over
the last six months and talk about what we’ve done and what programs we’ve started. It’s not just each firm bragging about how
successful we are; we share our failures. And that’s where you really learn.
We share our best practices, too, but when you can sit in a non-competitive environment with fellow professionals and share
ideas, and say, ‘Let me tell you how we screwed this one up,’ it’s a
great process to see what works and what doesn’t. You get to share
documents and files and anything else anybody needs to see how
you roll out new programs and how certain things work.
Use technology, save time. When I became managing partner, I told
all the other partners, ‘You better check your e-mail constantly or
you will not know what’s going on because that’s how I’m going to
keep in constant communication with everybody.’
You have to keep communications fast and constant when you’re
spread around. That’s why we also built a video studio here and we
have state-of-the-art communication technology so if we have a
meeting, we can have everyone see it and keep things live and
interactive.
It’s helpful to keep communication moving, and you prevent
yourself from traveling the full circuit of offices every month. You
can’t get anything done if you’re traveling all the time. It’s important to get out periodically, but it’s also expensive and time-consuming when, instead, you can use technology to push out information in an instant to your whole team.
HOW TO REACH: Dinsmore & Shohl LLP, (800) 934-3477 or www.dinslaw.com