Adding on

And. Or. Those are two very different words, and Randy Myeroff wants his employees to understand the distinction.
 
When Myeroff presented growth at Cohen & Co. Ltd. a decade ago, the initial reaction of the employees was that growth would take precedent over the accounting firm’s principles.
 
"Human nature is that if you’re asking me to focus on one thing it probably means that’s more important than something else," says Myeroff, president and CEO of the accounting firm. "That’s the most significant challenge of any company, realizing in a different environment you have to focus on different things and getting people to understand it’s and, and, and."
 
Every business faces cycles. You need to not only adapt your focus but your employees need to buy in to the change to help make it successful.
 
Myeroff, who has 225 employees, says it’s all in your approach. Instead of commanding change, walk employees through the reasons why. And make sure you have top down buy-in.
 
Smart Business spoke with Myeroff on how to present changes, like growth, to employees.
 
Present the situation. It’s more simple than people give it credit for. Instead of taking an approach that appears to be an edict that says, ‘This is what we’re going to do, and this is why we’re going to do it.’ Sometimes if you step back a little with your employees and talk about where the firm is heading, I think you can take an approach that says, ‘Will status quo work for us? Based on what we have today and based on where we want to be and based on the things that are part of our foundation that we’re good at, if we keep moving forward, will this sustain our organization? Will this provide the opportunities that you want? Will this allow you to live the life you want to live?’
 
What happens is it becomes very obvious because the reason you want to add something like growth is because you’ve figured out if we don’t grow then we can’t continue to invest in the community to the extent we want to, we can’t continue to stay on the front end of technology the way we want to, we can’t continue to have a very large proactive tax group that can put money back in client’s pockets. We can’t do that if we don’t move forward because growth creates opportunity.
 
So you talk about, ‘Let’s presume we continue to grow at the level we’re at. Here’s what I see.’ If I go back and say, ‘At this level, this is where we’ll be in five years. Does that work?’
 
What happens is people look and say, ‘Oh my goodness, no, that won’t work.’
 
It’s real easy to say, ‘OK, what we’re doing isn’t going to work so we need to do something different. As uncomfortable as it may be, as much as I want you to get out of your comfort zone, you’ve been willing to go through an exercise where you’ve really convinced yourself that this is important. Even if I don’t like it, I’m going to have to accept it because we need it.’
 
If you’re surrounded with a lot of smart people and they go through that process, it’s pretty easy for them to rally around things like growing. It’s not a case of follow me and I promise you something good at the end. It’s a case of this is what we’re trying to build and if we don’t do better in this area, then frankly you won’t want to work here someday. There will be a point where you’ll say, ‘Boy, I don’t want to be here because you guys didn’t plan for the succession of technical quality because you guys didn’t plan for growth so there’s more room for more owners.’
 
Then you get down to the detail. It’s not easy to execute, but it’s easy to get people to commit to.