Smart Business Cleveland

Smart Leaders: Carl J. Grassi, Complete Communication

The business law, litigation, restructuring and estate-planning firm was fine from a business standpoint, growionog from one office to five in the last five years, but it was dealing with the unexpected death of Grassi's friend and predecessor, Joseph J. LoPresti Jr. Grassi did his best to comfort his people through open communication, mixing understanding and the time to mourn with an appropriate focus on the future.

Fast Lane: Tom Marshall, Moving Forward

To improve customer satisfaction, the chairman and CEO of Andrews Moving and Storage measures both the quantity and the quality of his employees' work, which develops a healthy competition among the staff. If it gets to a point where it's becoming a problem, we've got a formal program that we'll put in place that will allow the manager to give the employee more focused retraining with 30-, 60- and 90-day timelines for that employee to improve performance.

Lincoln Electric Holdings Inc., Joining Forces

In addition to those efforts, Stropld and his team have increased training efforts in environmental, health and safety areas, and they've strengthened communication and employee development initiatives. It doesn't sound like rocket science, but the company had struggled with larger strategic plans in the past "It was a very high-level plan, of which there was very little communication throughout the organization to all the people who really had to do all the heavy lifting to get the work don...