It’s an ordinary office, really.
An L-shaped wooden desk. Two windows overlooking the top floor of a parking garage in the Loop. Bookshelves lined with company awards. Family photos on the windowsills.
But it’s filled with the drive and warmth of Renato Zanichelli.
The partner and tax practice leader at Chicago-based Grant Thornton was raised by Italian-born parents who adopted the American way of life and the entrepreneurial spirit it offered.
“My dad was a student of a lot of things, and (other Italian immigrants) would come to him to get through the laws that we have here in filing taxes,” Zanichelli said of his dad, Dario, who was a real estate agent by trade and a tax man on the side. “I just saw this level of gratitude from the guy who is a mechanic, and he can’t even get the stains of his labor out of his hands because he’s constantly working to support his family, and my father being able to help him.”
That’s what sent Zanichelli on his way to becoming a CPA, with a stop at entrepreneurship. In high school he started Twin Landscaping to help pay for his undergraduate education in accounting at DePaul University. And though he’s no longer an owner, the business is going strong.
So is his family, as evidenced by the portraits of Nic, 14; Lia, 12; Antonio “T,” 10; and the “5-year-old rock star” of the group, Elena-Li, who Zanichelli and his wife, Gina, adopted from China in 2009.
“We have early-on pictures of my daughter, and she’s expressionless in every single picture they sent us,” Zanichelli said, tears welling in his eyes. “Not a single smile. Within 20 minutes of interacting with my wife, she started smiling, and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, we didn’t even realize she had dimples.'”
On his second windowsill is his wedding photo. “I always want to remind myself of how young I was when I got married, and I still think I look that way,” the 41-year-old said, laughing. “We work so hard, and we’re here so much, and I don’t want to forget that I have a family.”
He was referring to the long hours he and his 160-member Chicago staff put in during tax season, serving clients on the phone, in the office and even at dinner. Zanichelli describes his job as part technician, part psychologist, part strategist and part supervisor.
“It’s not just the client-service element that creates our busyness,” Zanichelli said. “It’s all the things we do when we’re not busy that don’t stop when we are busy, like managing the operations and personnel, recruiting and going on business development calls.”
Zanichelli joined Grant Thornton in 1994 as a tax generalist and worked his way up to specialist and then service line leader, building the research and development specialty in Chicago. With that, he said, grew “a desire to take on more of a leadership role with (Grant Thornton’s) federal tax practice,” a path he took simply by telling his predecessor and mentor, “You’re busy, dude. Do you need help with anything?”
That and attending one of Grant Thornton’s first management-training programs.
A framed photo of the Partner Support and Development Program class of 2005 on a corner of the desk brings to mind a quote from organizational culture consultant Tim Kight: “You’re perfectly designed to get the results you’re currently getting.” Zanichelli expanded, “If we’re not happy with our results, we need to challenge the design.”
It sounds like Michael Scott in “The Office,” but Zanichelli believes it, and the dog-eared, scribbled-in copy of “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable,” by Patrick Lencioni, on his desk is proof. He once rattled off the five dysfunctions when he met the author, and Lencioni sent him a copy of the book. Zanichelli said he saw one of the dysfunctions — lack of trust — among one of his teams and had each member read it.
“As a leader, you have to know how to bring out the conflict,” he said. “Our ability to enter into healthy discussions, not being intimidated about sharing our opinions, that creates an ability to have a trusting, open dialogue without fear of retaliation. We don’t dance around the issue. Let’s talk about the big ol’ elephant on the table.”
That approach helped in his 2005 training. His team was asked to assess a Grant Thornton program and suggest ways to improve it. The team chose the firm’s “Secondment” program, a British term, which “allows folks an international experience” by bringing members of the London office to the U.S. but not much more. The participants, he said, felt like “second-class citizens … like a plane flies over the U.K., they drop-kick you out, and you parachute down (to the U.S.).”
Grant Thornton took their suggestions to rename the Secondment program GEMS, for Global Employee Mobility Solutions, and make participants feel like a “crown jewel” of the company. A crystal inscribed with “GEMS” rests in a box on the bookshelf above his desk, recognition for his work.
CTA elevated trains provide the background music in Zanichelli’s 13th-floor office at 175 W. Jackson Blvd., but he doesn’t notice, another throwback to growing up nearO’Hare International Airport.
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“After a while, you got used to it,” Zanichelli said. “You’d be talking to someone who was in Schiller Park and you’d hear the airplane there, and then you’d know it’s coming your way. Where I live now (in Lake Zurich), it’s tranquillity and peace.”
Other than a plastic samurai sword from his 2009 visit to the Great Wall of China, most of the tchotchkes in his office are footballs or basketballs with the Grant Thornton logo. A Grant Thornton-branded football helmet covered in circular stickers with the “no-limit” Autobahn emblem stands out. When Zanichelli first became a tax practice leader in 2009, the firm had just undergone a demoralizing downsizing, he said.
“When you do well in football, you get these stickers,” Zanichelli said. “My first meeting as a (tax practice leader), I said, ‘I gotta kick it off right … there’s no limit to what we can do.’ We were trying to promote the concept of doing all we can for our clients. Let’s not be bound by limitations.”
With every sticker he gave to a team member, he added one to his helmet. But he said with “so much going on … this helmet would have been encased.”
For more photos of Zanichelli’s office, visit chicagotribune.com/zanichelli.