Culture Matters: Building the Wise Firm

Creating The Wise Firm Way video was a group effort.  Literally, our entire firm had the opportunity to speak into its creation—and one of the greatest nuggets of information came from Tracy Cunningham, a director on our Firm FIRST team who has been with the firm since she was 18 years old, more than 30 years.

Author Patrick Lencioni’s book The Advantage has a great section about creating clarity in an organization. His premise is all about achieving alignment, which is a key discipline in creating a healthy firm, because, as he puts it, “…alignment is about creating so much clarity that there is as little room as possible for confusion, disorder, and infighting to set in.” 

I remember the day I saw the very first draft of The Wise Firm Way. I was sitting in a board of directors meeting in 2015, and we had been talking about the Wise Firm outside of the walls of HORNE for less than 12 months. That initial script was rough and there was still a lot of work to do, but I remember feeling so excited about seeing our vision for our future so clearly formed. There were still some lingering questions throughout the firm about why we were choosing to make such a big push on culture externally. And I am sure some were asking why we were so vividly describing the firm we were building together to those who don’t even work at HORNE. 

Improving corporate culture is a huge investment in both time and money. But at HORNE, we believe these investments are necessary to win the war for talent in the changing business environment. In Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog series, we focused on improving career/life integration, personal flexibility and workplace diversity. Today, lets discuss the impact of continuous feedback. 

Last week, I started the conversation about HORNE’s commitment to improve our culture, which focused on defining my own career/life integration while maintaining my client service expectations. I want to continue that theme today, but let’s talk about diversity and its impact on the war for talent and business development.  

We spend a lot of time and money at HORNE on improving our culture. It’s an investment that focuses on improving career/life integration, personal flexibility, workplace diversity, and continuous feedback. We believe these investments are necessary to win the war for talent in the changing business environment. But making big changes internally can lead to a lot of questions, like will these changes affect client service and business development? And if yes, is that a good thing or bad thing? In this three-part series, my goal is answer those questions and add insight into how building a culture of continuous improvement benefits both team members and clients.

What does the concept of WE and SERVICE mean to you? For me, this concept is foundational, it is fundamental to my purpose. At HORNE, it has become our “North Star” for the way we make decisions, always pointing us to true north. When we think about a WE and SERVICE approach, I think it can be evaluated as two main components: attitude and ownership. For me, and for our team, the importance of a positive attitude and an ownership mentality make all the difference in our journey to build the Wise Firm.

Do you ever find yourself sitting at your desk, trying to remember why you’re here? Why do we continue to come in every day to THIS job at THIS firm?

“The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice.”  - Proverbs 12:15

Here at HORNE, we are building the Wise Firm. That is our culture. We want to be like the wise man from the biblical parable who built his house on a strong foundation. When the great storms came, he was able to overcome because he had built his house on a solid foundation.