Kip Reader was excited about celebrating birthday No. 100.
Don’t do a double take looking at his picture; Reader is nowhere near 100 years old. But the law firm where he’s managing partner, Ulmer & Berne LLP, hit the century mark in 2008, and the company spent the year celebrating its successes.
During that celebration, the firm put together a book of some of its best moments and found there was a common thread: Lawyers and employees, both past and present, remarked constantly on the importance of the firm’s collaborative culture.
“A lot of the stories have included in them comments on the firm’s culture and history and the positive characteristics of working here,” Reader says.
That positive atmosphere is created by the firm’s efforts to constantly push teamwork and collaboration, two of Reader’s favorite topics when speaking with his 380 employees.
Smart Business spoke with Reader about how you can set the tone for collaboration and why it’s more important to celebrate teamwork today than to reward it with compensation later.
Use your voice to lead the way. You need to have communications skills, so listen to people on the incoming side and externally be able to move toward that picture. You need to be persistent or dedicated to have the drive to make it all happen.
I’m in regular communication with all levels of our professional and nonprofessional staff on the things that would hopefully move us in that direction. Internally at our firm, we have an administrative staff that I talk to, and I communicate daily with the chief officers of our administrative staff on issues that relate to what the firm is doing, where we want to go, what we want to do and the day-to-day tactics.
No. 1, my job is to make sure that there’s a support system at the firm that facilitates and enhances teamwork and collaboration. That’s part of my role across the board. Part of that is I need to find — and the firm needs to find — ways to reward and recognize people constantly for collaboration, and that is done over the long term by compensation, and in the short term, it is done by recognition.
As an example, yesterday I heard a great story about how a number of our lawyers collaborated on a real estate transaction to a successful result. I didn’t do anything fancy, I just walked upstairs and walked around the offices of the people involved and talked to them about it.
There was a lawyer in another office involved in it, as well, so I called him up and talked to him.
