Stay accessible
Employees won’t be able to help your business grow if you don’t give them a platform to communicate with your company’s decision-makers. You can have formal methods of interaction, such as monthly or quarterly meetings. But communication in any form is a step toward building and maintaining a culture in which employees feel involved and valued.
At Duane Morris, Soroko likes to walk the halls whenever possible — but when walking the halls doesn’t cover enough distance, he relies on technology to bridge the distance. Many CEOs dislike the absence of personal engagement when communicating by e-mail. Soroko says that while e-mail can’t sustain a communication strategy alone, its ability to reach many people in a short period of time and its ability to allow people to reach you just as fast shouldn’t be overlooked. E-mail can’t substitute for in-person communication, but it can fill the space until you are available to meet in person.
“I am a walk-the-halls kind of person, but in a law firm that has almost 700 lawyers, 200 of which are in Philadelphia, you have to walk the halls in a cyber method,” Soroko says. “I send a lot of notes to people. I use e-mail a lot. When I read about a partner in our San Diego office having published a very timely client alert, I’ll stick it in my briefcase, read it, give the person an attaboy or attagirl and add some comments.
“In the aggregate, it has had a very positive effect in two ways: I get a good sense of what our partners are doing, and they get a good sense that I’m following it all.”
But electronic communication only works as a supplement to communicating in person. Soroko visits all of the Duane Morris offices on a rolling basis. As with the in-person client interviews, it’s a time commitment, but if you want to make yourself into a good communicator, it’s time you have to mark on your calendar.
“It’s simply about prioritizing,” he says. “Communicating is at the top of my list. It might mean that you sacrifice some time or attention for other functions, but you have to make up your mind that your people are important enough that you are willing to do that.
“When I first addressed our partners as the newly installed chairman last year, I stressed that if there was one thing I understood very clearly, it’s that I did not then and would not over time have all the answers. I was relying on them to give me input, suggestions, complaints and feedback about what steps we could take to make Duane Morris the strongest firm possible.
“If you have that openness to the ideas of others while at the same time having a good vision in your own mind about how you are going to lead, that will prove to be a winning combination. But if you think you have all the answers, and it’s a matter of you leading and people scrambling to follow you, that is a far less successful approach.”
