Q. What can prevent a company from growing?
A company won’t grow if
its leader doesn’t have any
appetite for trying to create
an atmosphere for the future
leaders of the company.
From my perspective, I have
to prepare a plan for the people who are going to sit in
my chair in the future, and
we’ve got to have a plan for
that. A true leader will not
be afraid to let somebody
take their position.
You have a host of talented people around you, and
as people grow and become
more talented, they have a
couple of choices: They can
grow with your company, or
they can go somewhere
else. We would rather have
our employees continue to
grow here.
Q. How do you help people grow without feeling threatened in your position?
It has been a maturation
process and a learning
process. As our company has
evolved and grown in size,
we had to think differently. I
don’t think we even thought
about that potential 10 years
ago, but as we continued to
strategize and talk about
what we’re trying to accomplish, it became very clear
that we weren’t doing this
for any one of us but we
were doing it for all of us in
the team. We were going to
do whatever was best for the
team, not for any one person
or for any one profit.
I went from being a player
to a coach to a leader. As the
evolution happens, you have
to trust other people to be
able to do things, too.
Our founders had that philosophy of not being afraid
of the potential of people.
From the first day here, it
was instilled in me. I’m not
going to say I totally understood it at the time, but it
became clearer as I matured
and got some practice at it.
You realize you can only do
so much by yourself. It’s like
a sports team: Most teams
don’t work out too well with
one all-star.
HOW TO REACH: Diaz Fritz Isabel, (813) 254-0072 or www.diazfritz.com
