Thoughts on running a business: Don Misheff, Northeast Ohio Managing Partner, Ernst & Young

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

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 tip 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.

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