Don’t discriminate
Growing up in southern Virginia in the ’60s and ’70s, Edmunds saw that his father, a successful lawyer, treated people differently than others in town. One evening, his father had a cocktail party, and he invited a black couple to the party. When they arrived, he’ll never forget how three couples left the party and how people treated his father after that.
“He always lived that everyone matters,” Edmunds says. “He really instilled that in me, and I’ll never forget how some of the people in town treated him after that — as if he didn’t matter anymore. My whole life — my professional and my personal life — I try to live by this mantra that everyone matters.”
One way to do that is to not discriminate with whom you engage in conversation. For example, Edmunds will talk to the people who park his car in the garage, to the security people at the desk when he comes in and all the way up to the senior managers in the company. But beyond that, it also extends to the various offices he oversees. For example, he has 1,800 people in his San Francisco office. But if he goes down to Fresno, he only has about 30 people there.
“I try to make sure (the people in the Fresno office) understand that they matter as much to me as leader of this region as the partners here in San Francisco that serve the biggest accounts,” Edmunds says.
Edmunds uses a five-minute rule for his meetings to show people that he respects their time.
“Whether there are supposed to be 4,000 people on a call or four, within five minutes of when it’s supposed to start, I start it,” he says. “That doesn’t matter whether my CEO from New York is supposed to be on it and he’s not on it yet, I start it. Within five minutes of starting time, we run. That’s how you show respect to the people who showed up on time.”
All of his employees are well aware of this rule and respect it, just as they do all of the other rules related to this, such as no do-overs.
“So you start the call, and somebody arrives 15 minutes late, you don’t debrief them in front of several hundred people,” he says. “You talk to them later.”
Doing this shows his people that while some people may have higher titles, they’re not more important than anyone.
“I respect their time, and they trust that I’m going to run things on time and run things properly,” he says. “No do-overs. The message that sends is everybody matters. It doesn’t matter if the senior partner shows up late. Everybody is the same.”
