Check employees’ integration progress
After employees exit the leadership academy, you still have to keep following up with them to make sure they stay aligned with the vision. That’s partially done by continuing to repeat your core beliefs.
“You can never communicate enough,” Vincent says. “The communicator always thinks he’s communicating plenty. The people hearing it always want more. You never know [when you’ve communicated enough] because some people tell you straight up, ‘Hey, I still don’t get it.’ Other folks will say nothing.”
Besides keeping your outward communication flowing, you also have to make sure employees are receiving your message and acting on it.
Vincent spends nearly two months pooling partners’ evaluations of each associate whom they’ve worked with throughout the year. Trying to distinguish common themes from case-by-case rarities, he compiles the data into a written message for each associate. But the annual basis of those kinds of evaluations can leave a lot of gaps, so he also relies on informal evaluations throughout the year to check employees’ behavior.
“The informal process, which we encourage, is talking to the associate about each project: ‘Here’s what you did well. Here’s what you didn’t do well. Here’s what you should be thinking about the next time,’” he says. “That daily teachable moment thing is more beneficial than the formal process.”
So don’t wait for the annual evaluation. You should always be gathering information about how employees are integrating into the firm. Ideally, that information should come from a combination of metrics and personal interaction.
“You can look at statistics. You can look at billable hours. You can look at fees collected,” Vincent says. “You can look at things like that, but those are kind of sterile. They really don’t tell you. You’ve got to be out and about and answering questions.”
He says that the hardest part of his job is making time to go around and talk to employees about their transition into the firm.
“How’s it going? Is it what you expected?” he asks them. “Are there things you’d like us to be doing or things that you’re thinking about that we’re not thinking about? How do your clients feel?”
Vincent also looks at how often his associates are cross-selling and directing clients to other people within the organization, which shows their comprehension of the entire firm’s offerings and how to use them.
As you evaluate employees, keep in mind that you empowered them to personalize the firm’s priorities to make them work for their particular practice. That means you need to expand your idea of what successful employees look like. You have to consider what their strengths are and evaluate them based on those rather than expecting them to excel at every single thing they do.
“Some folks, it’s easy to see [success] because you can see it in everything they do,” Vincent says. “Other folks, it’s in their written work; they bring passion, style and flair to what they write. Other people, it’s interacting and mentoring folks in the office and managing projects internally.”
“One size doesn’t fit all,” he says. “The goal is to understand people’s strengths [and] put them in positions where they can maximize those strengths.”
How to reach: Dinsmore & Shohl LLP, (513) 977-8200 or www.dinslaw.com
