Accounting and Consulting
Don Misheff
Northeast Ohio Managing Partner, Ernst & Young
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Cleveland | May 2007
If you’re a client of Ernst & Young and you run into its leader, Don Misheff, around town, don’t be surprised if he asks you how his
firm is doing. Sure, Misheff, the professional financial services firm’s managing partner for its Northeast Ohio office, has 1,170
employees working on client issues every day, but he never misses a chance to improve. In fact, he still does regular tax work just
to keep an inside eye on where the business is going.
spoke with Misheff about the importance of a diverse culture
and why you should never put a dead fish under the table.
Be a community figure. I’m a big believer in
being out in front of our clients and
spending time with them. The best test
to see that things are working is to be in
the marketplace, talk to your customers.
It’s never a perfect world, but that helps
us react to issues and problems.
We can use that market information. I
was at a client board meeting, and they
were extremely complimentary, but they
had a few things we could work on, too,
and I left, went right down into the staff
room where all our people were working
on the job, and I complimented them,
told them what a great job they’re doing
and said, ‘Here’s some things to put on
the radar screen for improvement next
year, and let’s keep trying for the perfect
score.’
If our people are doing things right,
then we have trusting engagements and
we have relationships with our clients
and we can both formally discuss things
with them but also informally discuss
things. It doesn’t always have to be formal. For me, it means being very visible
in the market as much as possible.
I am also a firm believer in giving back
to the community, so I participate on
various boards in nonprofit organizations, and that is also full of other community leaders, and that leads to more
interaction. Call that your MasterCard
commercial — it’s priceless because
they’ll pick up the phone and call you.
They know you; you’re not just a name,
they’ll call you and tell you something —
good or bad — which is extremely helpful to us. We cannot lose focus of the
market and its reaction.
Keep that executive office on the front line. Part
of my leadership style is still doing some
accounts as a tax partner. That way, I’m
in the same situation as our people on a
daily basis.
It helps you keep in touch with the
marketplace by putting you in a situation
where you have the problems our line
people are dealing with every day. We
very much want the entire leadership
team to be in touch with clients and our
people.
Delegate duties, not decisions. The hardest
problem is you have to be careful where
you dig in and spend a lot of time versus
where you delegate off and let someone
else handle it. Part of that is in no way do
you ever want to be offending someone
with the idea that their problem wasn’t
big enough for you. So it’s a balancing
act based on time.
When something is of a nature that you
need to deal with it, you can delegate
some of the research responsibilities,
but you can’t delegate that final decision.
Use candor with care. The biggest leadership strength is candor and openness
and not being afraid to communicate
that with people. You have to always
address everything with total honesty.
There is nothing more important than
having trust and honesty in every relationship. In that respect, you still have to
respect people’s feelings and do unto
others as you would have them do unto
you, but you can’t be afraid to deal with
the truth, and that means we have some
tough things to talk about sometimes.
I heard a quote one time: ‘If there’s a
dead fish in the room and you put it
under the table, it gets worse. If you set
it out where everyone can see it, then
there are things you can do to fix it.’ So
I’m kind of a big believer in that philosophy: If we’ve got a problem, let’s put it on
the table, and I’m a big believer in keeping an open door at our firm so you can
come into my office with a problem.
Now the answer I give you may not be
what you want to hear, but it’s the truth
and we can figure out how to deal with
that from your perspective and the firm’s
perspective.
Depend on diversity. The older I get, the
more I see that having a diverse culture
is so important. You just have to step
back and hear how different people
would do it and have that consultation
process.
We strongly support alternative work
arrangements so we can have that. We
support life balance — not only in the
number of hours worked but in respecting your culture, where you come from
and what things are important to you.
We want to be a melting pot of cultures
and beliefs, so we respect them all. In
our recruiting process, we encourage
that. We say it’s a part of our culture that
we will respect each other’s differences
and build a team from those.
We have people work from home.
People may work different hour schedules if they have to pick up kids. We
respect various religious holidays and
cultures. My belief is everybody in the
firm is on a flexible work arrangement;
you just have to tailor it to yourself.
I’m not saying there is never a problem
— it’s our responsibility to educate them
and communicate to them the appropriate timetables and what they need to do
to serve a client. But it all centers on the
communication of what our client needs
and then communicating that to our
employees.
So it all centers on what they can do to
deliver that and then figure out how to
balance that with their personal goals.
We’re such a global firm, and we serve so
many clients that the need to understand
the cultural differences around the
world is something we deal with every
day in our office, and it helps us take it
to our clients.
HOW TO REACH: Ernst & Young, (216) 861-5000 or
www.ey.com
