Find your role
As Carpenter gathered more leadership skills and weeded out the people
who couldn’t grow with his business, he
began to see his own role in the company more clearly.
“Being a store owner/operator, I’m
actually a franchisee of my own company,” Carpenter says. “One of my main
jobs is positioning our organization to
enhance our retail customers’ lives. That
way, it all flows from our ultimate customer, our retail customer.”
Carpenter believes there are two types
of businesses. A mission-driven organization and one that is driven more by
economics.
“It doesn’t mean in a mission-driven
organization, you’re not thinking about
the bottom line,” Carpenter says. “In our
mind, that is the way to the bottom line.
… You have to figure out what kind of
organization you are.
“There may be businesses where it’s
not a hobby or not as much fun. But I
think you can have passion for working
in a high-performance organization. I
think most people really want to work
and most people in an organization are
very motivated to do a good job. It could
be selling anything or providing any kind
of service. Maybe it’s not their hobby.
But they can take pride in the way they
do their business, the way they treat
each other and in the satisfaction of
their customers. That can happen in any
business.”
Carpenter decided his role would be to
communicate his passion for his hobby
to his employees and to the customers in
order to engage them in it for the betterment of his business.
“Be positive about your own abilities
and the ability of your people to pull it
off,” Carpenter says. “From giving them
loose leashes to do their work and enjoy
their successes and experience a few
failures. They need to be able to experience both. Both are recognized and used
for lessons for further growth. They
need to believe in your strategic direction. They should have a way to give
input to a strategic direction. Once you
have picked what way you’re going, they
have to buy in to it.”
Loyalty to your leadership and your
strategic direction for the company also
relies on your ability to be consistent
and focused in your decision-making.
“I used to be what some would call a zig-zag manager,” Carpenter says. “I
would change the plan way too often
based on new information. That would
undermine people’s confidence in what
you’re doing. They would spend a month
working on something and then you
would change directions and that all
became wasted.”
If you’re consistent with your message
and you show that you really believe in
your plan and will stick with it, your people will be willing to invest themselves in
it and work to make it happen.
“You’ve got to be able to set the foundation of the organization, the mission,
vision and values,” Carpenter says. “You
need to then be able to communicate
your strategies and then the expectations to all the participants.”
By maintaining open lines of communication, welcoming input and using others to fill in his own gaps, Carpenter has
been able to share his hobby with the
masses through his stores.
“I just created a company and tried to
work with people in the way that I
would want to work in a company,”
Carpenter says. “That means I would
have a chance for having my input and
that I would feel that it was valued, even
if it wasn’t used. … Everybody is expected to tell their true thoughts about things
and that helps us all improve our organization.”
HOW TO REACH: Wild Birds Unlimited Inc., (317) 571-7100 or
www.wbu.com
