Legal
Judgment call
How to find good employees
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Detroit | November 2008
Page 1 of 2
Ralph Castelli Jr.
president and CEO, Kemp Klein Law Firm
When Ralph Castelli Jr.
is negotiating with
people, he wants them to think the outcome
was their idea, when actually
it was what he had in mind all
along.
To achieve this, the chairman, president and CEO of the
100-employee Kemp Klein Law
Firm tries to keep his ego in
check and then simply listens.
“Oftentimes, you get resistance on a given point, but if
you come at it at a slightly different direction, you can let
them declare victory,” he says.
“Yet, you have achieved the
result you want, either internally or for your client.”
Smart Business spoke with
Castelli Jr. about how to deal
with people and how to find
the right people for the job.
Q. What are the keys to
being a good leader?
Leading by example is
important. Staying on message
is important. I have two leadership roles I’ve been in for
quite some time. I’m the CEO
of this law firm, and I am the
mayor of a small city [Pleasant
Ridge]. In each case, what I try
to do is get the right people in
the right places and give them
the tools to perform and then
let them do their jobs.
At the same time, especially
within the law firm environment, I try to set a good example as far as what we expect
from our attorneys at all levels
and don’t typically ask people
to do things that I wouldn’t do
or haven’t done.
In the same vein, the city life,
we have a charter that says
the city manager runs the city
and the mayor is defined as being the CEO of the city with
absolutely no administrative
power whatsoever. The key is
respecting that dichotomy and
getting good people in as city
managers.
Q. How do you find the right
person for the job?
In a lot of the cases, where
we’ve recruited people laterally has typically been in a situation where we already know
or someone in the firm
already knows the person,
already worked in some professional relationship with the
individual. So, we are not
interviewing strangers,
per se.
Quite frankly, you
don’t always get it right.
Nobody does. But a lot
of times, people we are
talking to are people
who had their own firms
or who we know of
from either working
with them or because
we know CPAs who
have worked with them
or other professionals
who can vouch for that.
But, for instance, in
my case in coming
here, my longtime partner and I had our own
firm for six or seven
years before joining
Kemp Klein. A number
of the people here who
have come laterally have
either been partners at other
firms or had their own other
firms.
There’s nothing, per se,
wrong with an attorney who
doesn’t have that mindset;
they can be a very fine attorney. We just feel, in our environment, it works better if
they think like owners and
not employees.
