Legal
A personal touch
How to infuse your vision throughout your company
By Brooke Bates
Smart Business Pittsburgh | February 2009
Page 1 of 2
Chip Babst
managing shareholder, Babst, Calland, Clements and Zomnir PC
Chip Babst realizes that
being on a first-name
basis with all of your
employees probably becomes
impossible once a company
reaches a certain size.
But Babst, Calland, Clements
and Zomnir PC isn’t too big yet
for him to know all 119
employees.
“It’s important to maintain
that personal tie, recognizing
that in larger businesses, that
has to be done in a different
way and is not going to be
accomplished by one person
at the top,” says Babst, the law
firm’s managing shareholder.
He uses both formal and
casual interactions to customize his approach to each
employee to generate buy-in,
set goals and check on
progress.
Smart Business spoke with
Babst about how to drive your
vision with communication.
Q. How do you communicate
your vision throughout the
company?
The communication can be
either direct or indirect. There
are two ways to do that. One is
through opportunities that you
have to talk to significant numbers of people, whether it be at
a meeting or a retreat.
The other way is making sure
that you get around and talk to
people on a one-on-one basis.
During the course of a year,
you should be in touch with
many, if not all, of the people in
the organization.
But in addition to that, if the
people who are involved in
management with you are
coordinated in what you’re trying to do, then the message
gets directed to everybody indirectly, which is, in many
cases, more effective.
Q. How do you get others on
the same page with your
vision?
It’s a very personal approach,
and I don’t know if there’s a formula that you would apply
that’s one size fits all. You deal
with individuals as they are.
There are certain types of arguments that would be persuasive
with some people and would
not be persuasive with others.
I try to take the time to
talk to people to find out
not just what they think
about the business but
what they’re like as people. Just by getting to
know people, you have
a better feel for the best
way to approach them.
