Push the vision through to employees. You have to do that by building consensus and convincing your partners that you’re trying to help them succeed by helping them succeed and the firm succeed.
It’s communication. But you also have to be a good listener. And I guess overall it’s basically trying to help someone succeed. If you can demonstrate that you’re trying to help someone succeed, you can get that consensus.
(You demonstrate that) by being a good listener, asking questions, coming up with ideas to improve an individual’s practice or practice area, giving them the resources to succeed, supporting their efforts.
I think it’s every day you have to remind everyone of what we’re trying to do.
I personally think that … you communicate by personal communication, one-on-one or personally talking to people, and also being consistent in your message. When you don’t change your story, you’re communicating with people.
You have to have one message and everybody in the firm understand their role. I believe in the team concept so that everybody is a link in the chain.
One of the things we’ve done is created what we call a Wow Committee, which meets and is made up of secretaries, administrative staff, directors … there’s a mix of us that meet every month. The purpose of the Wow Committee is how can we provide such outstanding client service our clients say ‘wow.’ We go through the client experience with our firm and analyze each step, basically say how can we improve that. I think that committee has helped us all communicate much better in terms of how to treat clients and how to treat one another.
Monitor whether or not employees understand the vision. You measure by: Are we increasing our fees in that area, are we increasing our clients, are we developing a reputation, are we becoming known as the go-to firm for that particular area, how many people have we hired, [and] are we getting a lot of inquiries from people who want to work for us because of that area?
Ultimately, the test of whether the message is getting out is whether they’ve been able to expand the business and generate enough work for their area, that’s the final test.
The question is a hard one in a law firm because we’re not a vertical company, so it’s not like we can do all of these quantitative tests. We’re not an IBM, you don’t have middle managers and then go on down. We’re kind of a horizontal business. For example, if you have a practice area that is growing and they add two more associates and you recruit two more lateral attorneys, then you know it’s working.
How to reach: Kegler, Brown, Hill & Ritter Co. LPA, (614) 462-5400 or www.keglerbrown.com