Jim Campbell wants his
employees to be empowered. To make sure that they are, the president and
CEO of Bridge Logistics Inc.
says he and his partners —
vice presidents Jeff Campbell
and Paul Lanham — make
themselves accessible, which
is key to creating an environment of empowerment.
“It creates a comfort zone
and a sense of confidence within the employee base,” the
leader of the multifaceted third-party logistics provider says.
“We encourage creativity, and
we give them the latitude to
bring new ideas to the table.”
That environment has led to
fast growth at the company,
which more than quadrupled its
2006 revenue of about $2 million to about $9 million in 2007.
Smart Business spoke with
Campbell about how to create
an environment of empowerment and how to be more
accessible as a leader.
Q. How would you describe
your leadership style?
Pretty casual here. We make
ourselves very, very available to
our employees. There are days
kind of like this morning — we
were all three involved with
operational issues this morning.
We have open-door policies.
We do have some family working here. It’s very casual.
We are very accessible. I
think the three of us have
employees in our office bouncing ideas, ‘What do you think
about this?’ on a daily basis.
We encourage creative
thought here. We want our
employees thinking outside
the box in order to differentiate ourselves within our customer base and prospective
customer base.
Q. How can leaders make
themselves more accessible?
We’re not Procter & Gamble
here. We don’t have layers
and layers of management.
For these small to midsized,
even up to larger companies,
we think that the attitude
from the prospective
employee coming to work
here is so much different
than it was 20 years ago, and
we really try to cater to that.
We’re not big on titles here.
We’re not big on management
layers. You have to want to be
accessible to your employees.
We’re pretty relaxed
with these guys. We like
teaching here; we spend
a lot of time educating.
Every problem that
develops or logistics
challenge that develops
is an opportunity to educate our employee base
and empower them to
make decisions the next
time. No decision is the
wrong decision.
