The best business advice Michael E. Zatezalo ever received didn’t come from a lawyer colleague or a mentor in his field. It came from his father, a steel industry manager, who taught him no matter how many degrees you have or how smart you are, 75 percent of everything you do is the ability to get along with people.
Zatezalo references that message when trying to hone his listening skills or understand his 130 employees’ points of view.
To build employee consensus you have to be a good listener, says the managing director of law firm Kegler, Brown, Hill & Ritter Co. LPA. He uses consensus building while setting a company vision and, more specifically, communicating that vision to employees.
“That’s a challenge in law firms because law firms are basically horizontal organizations and people in law firms have a fair amount of autonomy,” Zatezalo says.
Smart Business spoke with Zatezalo about how to set a vision and push it through the organization.
Involve key people in developing a plan. In a law firm, you have to talk to your partners and lawyers, you have to study what’s going on in the marketplace, you have to analyze your strengths, weaknesses and your challenges, and out of that, [you] develop your vision and your plan.
We involve usually the executive committee — the executive committee really is the leadership group in our law firm — and we also from time to time have consultants that we use to help us facilitate our development of strategic direction.
What you normally do is you develop your vision over time. For example, every year, we have a firm retreat where all the attorneys participate. We usually have a facilitator or a consultant come in who speaks on various topics. But if you’re talking about developing a plan, normally what you do is you talk to the heads of all the practice areas, gather information (on market trends), and you sit down with the heads and say, ‘What are you going to need this year, where do you envision your practice going, are you adequately staffed, do you have enough support, do you need any new technology, those types of things?’
You basically talk to all of your different practice areas, and then based on information that you’re gathering on legal trends, say, ‘Are there areas we need to get into or industries that we should be focusing on?’ and you develop your plan from that.
Also I think one of the important things, try to match what you’re doing with what people love to do. So, for example, if you’re trying to develop an international practice, you have to have a lawyer who is really passionate about international practice or international law. You have to have someone that is really passionate about that area to really make it a success.
For example, we have an expanding India practice. The head of our international area basically said this is a good opportunity, and we started gathering information several years ago about what was going on there, and we also have an attorney here who is dual licensed in India and the U.S. We said this is a good opportunity to develop because we have the expertise, we have a person who is dual licensed in it, it’s an expanding market.
