Our CLA Family

• September 6, 2018
• Denny Schleper

Family is often defined as, “People who support and hopefully love you and the people you confide in and trust.” Denny discusses what makes us a CLA Family and asks us to embrace it, continuing to create a supportive environment where we create opportunities for our clients, our people and the communities we live in.

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Family is often defined as, “People who support and hopefully love you and the people you confide in and trust.” Denny discusses what makes us a CLA Family and asks us to embrace it, continuing to create a supportive environment where we create opportunities for our clients, our people and the communities we live in.

Narrator: Welcome to “Own The Promise,” a CLA podcast created to share what guides every decision we make and every relationship we cultivate.

[00:00:14]

Denny: Hello, CLA family. This is Denny coming to you in September in 2018, obviously at the end of our summer at CLA. I hope all of you enjoyed a wonderful Labor Day weekend, which did officially mark the end of summer. What I plan to do–hopefully, all of you have received an invitation for a live stream that we’re gonna be presenting to the firm on September 11th.

This is the first time we are trying to do this in a live session where I will have the opportunity to come to the entire CLA family and really give all of you an update on what I believe is the success of the summer at CLA as well as where we are at year-to-date and also where I think CLA is headed, not only for the rest of 2018, but into 2019.

I hope all of you can find the time, be it if you’re in an office, at a client, or at home, to join us for that live stream on September 11th. In over the last probably two months or so, I continuously have had this good feeling, and obviously a good feeling about what has happened within CLA. But I’ve tried to narrow it down a little bit more for myself–where is that good feeling coming from?

[00:01:34]

And the more I’ve thought about that, I really have come down to this idea of the CLA family. Just as I’ve addressed you today and I do on all of my podcasts, addressing you as the CLA family, I really wanted to dig into that a little bit further if I could. The reality of the CLA family and all of us–and I do believe it’s almost all of us referring to ourselves as the CLA family–it really started back at the end of 2016.

I very consciously decided to start calling us the CLA family, but I was a bit apprehensive, to be honest with all of you. I didn’t know if that would come off, somehow, disingenuous. I thought maybe some of you would look at that and say, “I have my own family, and CLA is not it.” I was worried about those types of reactions.

[0:02:35]

And I have been so incredibly impressed with how all of you have really embraced the true meaning of that family. I even went back and I looked–I always like doing this when I kinda wanna think through why things affect me the way they do, so I go back to some of the meanings, and I look up definitions. If you really just go to the basic meaning of a family, we all know that it can–and CLA is proving this–that it can go beyond blood relation.

It’s really defined as “family consists of the people who support and hopefully love you and the people you can confide in and trust.” Simple definition of family. And I think that relates so well to what is happening at CLA and how all of us are really treating one another. But with that family obviously comes certain values that a family has.

[00:03:35]

Again, if you were just to look this up, you would see things such as a family being honest and trustworthy with one another, being courageous, never giving up, adding value to the world, being patient, taking personal responsibility. And when I see these types of moral values, what I think about is that’s exactly what CLA’s promise is, although we use different language. We talk about being owners.

We talk about being leaders. We talk about being entrepreneurial people. We talk about being accountable, and we’ve all heard that definition of being accountable, but that is taking that personal responsibility and adding value. We hope and we believe we add value through creating the opportunities for our clients, our people, and the communities that we live in. So very much does fit the CLA family.

[00:04:36]

And then I said why is this so important? Why do I have this good feeling coming to me every day, and I hope many of you do. I believe many of you do. And if you even go back to why is family so important, let’s go to the nuclear family. So most of us, and I hope many of us, have had a strong nuclear family. I know not all have had that privilege, but I hope most of us have. That would be described as, really, family is the single most important influence in a child’s life, in that nuclear family.

And when you think about that being the most important influence, think about all of us at CLA. Many of you are playing different roles within CLA. You might be at an experience level where, in effect, you’re playing more of a parent role or maybe a older sibling type role. And obviously, we have many new young people joining CLA, and that influence. Now, they’re not children. We get that.

[00:05:40]

But they are new in their careers. And I think that some family influence is being given to them and is probably the most important influence in helping them build those careers. And so those roles are just the recurring patterns of behavior by which individuals fulfill family functions and needs. And along with these roles comes certain social and family expectations for how those roles should really be fulfilled.

So all of us play those different roles within CLA. I went beyond that and I said, well, where are the other examples in CLA that are truly showing me that we do work together as a true family? Again, not a nuclear family, but definitely a family of CLA people supporting one another. I think about the Yammer postings, and this is incredible. We have roughly 5,000 of our people, out of 5,500 people, are active users of Yammer.

[00:06:44]

Initially, when Yammer was introduced to me—and this goes back a few years ago–I fell into one of my habits, and that is questioning is this something that’s really gonna be sustainable, or is it just another kind of social media that comes and goes? And, of course, like many times, I was wrong. Jackie Kruger, along with the marketing people, said, “Denny, I think this is something that’ll be great for the CLA culture.” It was even before we were thinking of it as the CLA family.

It was just the CLA culture. And they were absolutely right, and I see that every day…with the postings on Yammer, be it our office functions, our industry functions, some of your personal stories, your challenges, the D&I Counsel postings on helping us all feel like we belong. And the incredible stories, the travels that people have taken, some of the funny stories that people have engaged in.

[00:07:44]

Obviously, that is part of this family, along with all of the wonderful technical information that comes through Yammer. But all of that is sharing it together. That is a great example of how, as a CLA family, we’re actually communicating with one another, staying close, and being able to make people feel like they belong to something. Unfortunately, this past summer, along with myself, many of us attended the funeral of Todd Craft.

And you talk about family coming together in times of need, in times of sorrow. It was just a clear indication to me that these are people that truly do care about one another. And when I mention the word love, uh, love one another as well. I see over the last few years we’ve had struggling offices. We’ve had struggling industries. And when I see how we’ve come together to get through those struggles and get to the other side, there’s so many examples of that.

[00:08:48]

And I don’t wanna pick out any one, but there are so many. The wonderful news is that when it comes to those struggles, as of today, I think there’s fewer office locations, industries, or services actually maybe in that struggle mode. Many of them are flourishing. But when we struggle, it’s a great example of family coming together.

And then another example is in our new acquisitions. These are obviously new family members coming together and joining the CLA family and how we’ve all embraced those acquisitions. And I’ve said many times, even on these podcasts, what a wonderful job that people joining CLA have done. And they have. But this is about how we have embraced them into the CLA family.

And I do get the feedback continuously as I visit those new locations of how they are feeling that embracement, they are feeling that sense of belonging in a time where they’re struggling through all of the transitions. I just wanted to really relate to all of us this CLA family is something that is truly, truly important. And I thank all of you when I hear you refer to us as the CLA family, because I hear the tone in your voice. I see the looks on your faces. It’s something all of you believe in.

[00:10:12]

And I just want us to continue to look at ourselves as the CLA family. I want us all to operate that way to the best that we can every single day. And I really believe that’s what’s making me feel good each and every day. And I hope it brings joy to your daily lives. I hope it makes you feel like CLA is the place that you wanna continue to build your career, because you cannot find this other places.

Or it is very difficult to find that kind of environment any other place to build your career. I want to again just thank all of you for playing your roles within the CLA family and making us all feel like we truly do belong. I look forward to addressing all of you on September 11th, and I hope all of you have a great rest of the day and a great rest of the week. Thank you.

[END]

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