When Wayne Risoli
looked at his law
firm in 2004, he saw an organization that was
drifting, content with being
good enough but no longer
striving for excellence. The
new managing shareholder
at Chamberlain, Hrdlicka,
White, Williams & Martin
knew things needed to change.
“When people believe they
can operate without any structure or any answering to management, then left to their own
devices, people will get in a
feeling of status quo,” Risoli
says. “They will just do enough
to get the organization running
and nothing more.”
Risoli wanted to make the
pursuit of excellence a priority and ingrain it in the culture of the 285-employee
firm, which grew 2007 revenue to $58.2 million, up from
$35.1 million in 2003. But such
goals often require a leader to
make hard decisions.
“In three months’ time, I
terminated seven or eight
people,” Risoli says. “From
that minute on, everyone
knew management was serious about only accepting
excellence.”
Smart Business spoke
with Risoli about how to
communicate change to
employees and how to weed
out those who don’t want to
go along for the ride.
Q. How do you communicate
change to employees?
Be sure that the organization
has a solid foundation. The
first thing we did was meet
with every employee, starting
with the management committee, the practice group leaders, all the associates and all the
staff in our offices and communicate our goals going forward. Ask everyone, ‘Are you
prepared to join us in attempting to achieve these goals?’
Be candid with where the
company is at present. Tell
everyone in the organization
that we are going to improve
this organization with your help.
Identify all those people
who will not or will drag the
company down or somehow
will not buy in to your plan
going forward. The leader
needs to make hard
decisions with those
people. Either you are
going to be with us or
you need to find other
employment.
Sometimes, the best
decisions leaders make
are terminating those
who will not agree to
the plan for growth and
success.
It’s difficult if you just
come into an organization to identify those
people. You may be able
to look at production
runs on those people.
There may be something
in their file that suggests
they will not help you
advance.
Q. How do you get everyone
working in the same direction?
A leader, if they are going to
have any staying power, needs
to have the confidence of his
or her staff. In order to do
that, you need to have confidence in them. What I try to
do is instill in them that I have
complete confidence that they
are good at what they do, and
we are results-driven.
I open the communication
up to dialogue between management and the employees. I
get some very good suggestions and advice from people,
and I continue to encourage it.
It’s funny that CEOs fear that
rules that need to be followed
are going to be looked at negatively. Most people want to
succeed. We saw that with just
about everyone on our staff.
They wanted some rules
applied evenly and to everyone. Once we explained that,
everyone said, ‘Now, I have a
structure, and I can give you
my best effort.’
Have faith that they are
going to accomplish the goals
that they set.
Don’t try to micromanage
those goals. I don’t think it’s in
the best interest of an organization to get too far down in
trying to manage every detail.
Q. How do you convince
employees of your confidence
in them?
Have realistic goals that are
actually achievable in one year
so that you get momentum
going forward in year two and
three.
Communicate with your people and tell them how you’re
going to reach those goals. In
most organizations, it’s not
that difficult to see what is
dragging the company down.
Identify those and make the
hard decision. Tell everyone
you are eliminating those and
that you freeing them up to do
their best work.
Q. How do you deal with
problems along the way?
If, in attempting to reach
your goals, the firm faces
some failures, don’t look at
those failures as stopping or
preventing you from reaching
your goals. Every organization
has failures. The organization
that is healthy is the organization that minimizes those failures and learns from them.
You’re going to make some
failures. Learn from it, tell
everyone we did fail at this,
but we’ve learned from it, and
here is how we’re going to
cure it.
Once you see something is
failing, call it. You get the trust
of your employees when you
admit you made a mistake,
and you cured it.
HOW TO REACH: Chamberlain, Hrdlicka, White, Williams & Martin, (713) 654-9645 or
www.chamberlainlaw.com