Corporate Culture
Setting the tone
How Tom Fleming leads Supplies Network by instilling his work ethic in his employees
By Mark Scott
Smart Business St. Louis | July 2008
Page 1 of 4
Tom Fleming is proud of his roots and the traditional upbringing
that he received from his parents.
Growing up on the not very mean, but also not very wealthy,
streets of St. Louis, he was taught that those things in life that are
worth having are also worth your own blood, sweat and tears.
Fleming paid his own way to attend a private high school and also
bought his own baseball glove.
“I had my first job delivering newspapers,” Fleming says. “It was
safe for an eight-year-old to be walking around delivering the local
newspaper on a Saturday night. You develop that understanding
that if you want something, you work for it. That’s built into me.”
It’s also built into the way he runs Supplies Network, a private
wholesaler of information technology consumables like ink, toner
and CDs, which generated $345 million in revenue in 2007. But he
has learned that being a good leader means accepting that not everyone is wired exactly the same way that you are.
“I’m a traditionalist at 63,” says Fleming, the company’s founder
and CEO. “I have a tendency to say, ‘This is the way it is, this is
the way it was for me, and I have a work ethic, and this is how I
dress, and this is how I think.’”
The trick for a CEO is to take your people of differing backgrounds and build a cohesive group that will enthusiastically follow your lead. And you need not look any further than what parents do for their children to learn how to do so.
“The best example of leadership in this country is good parents,” Fleming says. “Not only do they have unconditional love,
but they have an unconditional sense of responsibility.”
In other words, a good leader is constantly focused on taking
steps to make his or her employees better rather than basking in
the glow of being the CEO.
“You can sit down with the child and say, ‘Look, this is the
way it is, and this is what smoking will do to you,’” Fleming
says. “‘I don’t care whether you like me or not because I love
you and you’re going to get the best I can give you as far as my
advice.’ We can do it as parents, and we need to do it as managers and leaders.”
The best way Fleming knows to serve his 185 employees is to
show up each and every day, work hard and set a solid example
for them. So when he recently decided to step back a bit from
his responsibilities by taking Fridays off, he took a 20 percent
pay cut to support his reduced workload and to show he wasn’t above his employees.
“You have to have a single standard of behavior,” Fleming says.
“I can’t expect my leadership team to behave any differently than
I behave. If I don’t demonstrate strong leadership skills, not only
will they not follow me, but someone will probably try to take
over as alpha.”
Here’s how Fleming has grown Supplies Network by earning
the respect of his employees by both respecting their differences
and engaging them in his contagious work ethic.
