Be approachable
Yund spends a lot of time in his car. And if Frost Brown Todd’s eight locations were more than 250 miles from the home office, his sky miles, not his odometer, would be the true testament of his efforts to reach out to all of his employees and partners.
You’re never going to have as much time as you’d like to interact and communicate with employees, so you have to spend your time wisely when it comes to spreading your message. One thing Yund wants his employees to know is that he is approachable.
“You have to be approachable,” he says. “I don’t mean that in I wish I had more time to spend in walking-around management, but when I do walk around, I want to let people know I’m having fun at work, so they can feel that they can have fun at work and they should have fun at work. I think the better companies are ones where people really like their jobs as opposed to just dread Monday morning and can’t wait for Friday evening.”
When Yund talks about fun and approachability, he doesn’t mean performing juggling acts or playing practical jokes in the hallway; he means simply letting employees know that you enjoy doing your job. It’s like with any lead-by-example scenario: If you are able to demonstrate to your employees that you like your job, that sentiment rubs off.
“When I hear peopl
e complain about their jobs, and this goes back long before I was the managing member, my general response was, ‘Man, I really like what I do. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing. It’s a fun place to practice law with great partners and great clients,’” he says. “If you give off the aura that that’s the way you feel about your job, I think you’re more likely to have other people feel that way, too.”
Building that approachability starts with taking advantage of whatever opportunities you have, no matter how short or how limited, to demonstrate that you enjoy talking to your people and you enjoy getting to know them. Yund tries to reach out to his 925 employees, a little more than half of whom are lawyers, by not only traveling to all of the Frost Brown Todd offices but by inviting employees to visit the larger Cincinnati and Louisville offices in order to spend time with them and introduce them to other firm employees.
It’s a circular answer, but in order to build relationships with employees and show them they can reach out to you, you must be accessible.
“That doesn’t mean sitting in my office with the door open because there are, of course, times when I can’t do that,” Yund says. “It means getting out of my office and making sure that when people come to talk to me about a problem, which is most of what I do, I don’t look at it as a chore.”
Naturally, when employees have a problem or they did something wrong, they might be worried about the reaction they’re going to receive from you. Yund takes a tip from former President Ronald Reagan by using a bit of tough-minded optimism. You have to make sure the problem gets fixed, but you also have to reassure your employee that everything is going to work out.
If you want your employees to feel that they can approach you with a problem, you have to be willing to help walk them through their dilemmas.
“I think there’s a lot to be said for helping people solve problems. That’s mostly what lawyers do anyway, so maybe it’s easier for me,” Yund says. “But I look at when people bring problems to me as an opportunity to do my job. I’ve already said I like doing my job, so I don’t want to make them think it’s difficult to bring a problem to George because my reaction is something other than optimistic.”
