Click here for Part I, Part II & Part III

Helping entrepreneurs, executives, and organizations grow their businesses by transforming their workplaces from within

Joe Mechlinski is the CEO and co-founder of entreQuest, a business consulting firm based in Baltimore. Since 2001, eQ has driven growth for entrepreneurs and organizations of all sizes, industries, and economic environments. Joe is also the Founder of SHIFT – a localized membership group for entrepreneurs and executives – and the author of Grow Regardless, a New York Times, USA Today, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com best selling book about organizational change. He has served on the boards of Betamore, Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Greater Chesapeake, Conscious Venture Labs, and others. Joe and eQ have won numerous recognitions and honors, including Baltimore Business Journal’s “Best Places to Work” (for five consecutive years) and The Daily Record’s “Successful by 40” and “Most Admired CEOs” lists.

Q. Your industry has changed drastically over the past decade-plus. Could you tell us how recruitment and workplace culture has evolved?

JOE MECHLINSKI: Civilization, philosophy, and history, can teach us a lot. I mean, there was a day when the family you were born into really dictated your future and your life expectancy, your prosperity. If you fast-forward those thousands of years to the last 200 years, America blazed the trail of meritocracy. There’s a glass ceiling, which you can bust through with hard work, and perseverance, and sweat, and blood and tears, and all those things that, you know, make the Rocky movies fun to watch. What you start seeing, though, after the Industrial Revolution is certainly we had big labor, and that was a great move for industry—to not treat its line workers in a way that wasn’t helpful or certainly healthy—and all of a sudden you turn to the 60s and the 70s and the 80s, and sort of the expansion of professional settings, and people going to college, and companies probably led from a place of command and control. And if you think about the 80s and 90s, where basically if you work for a company, again it was about command and control and compliance, it was about when you clocked in and clocked out. They make funny movies about it—Office Space—and the show The Office is really a parody on that period of time. But in the 90s, things got shaken up a bit. You saw this dot-com culture that developed out of Silicon Valley where it was about “I can get my job done, and I can put a foosball in the middle of the table, and we can still get work done.” I think it was sort of breaking ground that we’re going to leave this meritocracy place to “yes, performance matters, but so does fun, so does engagement, so does making an impact.”

I think it’s interesting to see companies being flexible in their environment, allowing telecommuting, thinking about having remote employees, thinking about not looking at time as the only currency with their employees. There’s been some interesting companies like Zappos, who’s gotten rid of their management recently, and I think not everything that’s happening should be for your company—if you’re watching this happen—but I think if the golden mine is to attract top talent, the question that we should all be asking is no different than you would ask about your customers, which is if you want great customers the question is “What do they want?” Well, right now, top talent wants more than just money. They want more than just a great vacation plan. What are the things they need? In our estimation, based on our experience and our research and what we’re seeing, is they want more meaning in the workplace. They want to see that your company is having an impact. Two: they want to see that they can make progress in their development, in their career. They want to learn, they want to grow—regardless. And three: they want a great relationship with the person leading them. It is funny—if you pull a bunch of managers to see “who here got management training or got their degree in management?” There are a lot of managers that have no idea what they’re doing. They were great players, but not necessarily great coaches. I mean, if Michael Jordan couldn’t pull it off, why is everybody else so laissez-faire about taking the responsibility of people’s professional careers? I find that interesting, and you can see a lot of companies struggling with emerging leadership programs or leadership development programs, and, you know, not that there’s a silver bullet for this but really taking developing that mid-layer of management and leadership in your company seriously is a really important factor in growth.

Q. What can older, established companies do to attract millennials?

A. How do you make an inflexible environment or company attract this new generation that wants flexibility? I would say that one of the number one ways to do that is to focus on what’s most important, which is define what good looks like: what is good performance? It’s hard sometimes to correlate performance and results, meaning just because my area does great doesn’t mean I had anything to do with it. So, if I run a Starbucks and that Starbucks is the most profitable Starbucks in the world, is it really attributable to the branch manager? Maybe, maybe not. Defining what good looks like in that role is not just the lagging indicators in a professional services company like hours, utilization, and billability; it could also be measuring how often does that associate at a law firm get referrals? How often, if I’m an accounting firm, do I attract other people to the firm? How often do I find myself at events for my clients? How often do I write thought leadership blogs and posts? Once you define what “good” is, you then as a company need to ask yourself, “Do I really care, or how much do I care that they show up at a certain time and leave at a certain time?” But without those key accountabilities, you can’t ever flex the time because you’re basically trading time for output.

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ABOUT OFFIT KURMAN

Offit Kurman is one of the fastest-growing, full-service law firms in the Mid-Atlantic region. With over 120 attorneys offering a comprehensive range of services in virtually every legal category, the firm is well positioned to meet the needs of dynamic businesses and the people who own and operate them. Our eight offices serve individual and corporate clients in the Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and Northern Virginia markets, as well as the Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City metropolitan areas. At Offit Kurman, we are our clients’ most trusted legal advisors, professionals who help maximize and protect business value and personal wealth. In every interaction, we consistently maintain our clients’ confidence by remaining focused on furthering their objectives and achieving their goals in an efficient manner. Trust, knowledge, confidence—in a partner, that’s perfect.

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