Health & Medical
Learning to lead
How to empower your employees
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business St. Louis | February 2009
Page 1 of 2
Kurt W. Gampp
co-founder, Synergetics USA Inc.
Being a leader didn’t
come easy for Kurt W.
Gampp. The co-founder
and chief operating officer of
Synergetics USA Inc. was a
tradesman with no college
education who made the
company’s first microsurgical instruments in co-founder Gregg Scheller’s
garage.
Since its humble beginnings
in 1992, Synergetics has grown
into a burgeoning public company, earning $50.1 million in
revenue in fiscal 2008, and
Gampp has learned how to be
a business leader.
Scheller left the company in
August, and finding a new
CEO has been a whole new
challenge says Gampp.
“I feel like I just got a
divorce, and I’m on my first
date,” he says.
Smart Business spoke with
Gampp about how he learned
to manage with an open mind
and how to empower employees to make decisions.
Q. How do you empower your
employees?
I’ve always told my people
the worst decision they could
make is not to make a decision — and that’s a decision in
itself. You can’t be afraid to
make decisions. Sometimes
they’re wrong, and I tell my
people that that is OK. You
can’t make a good decision
every time.
The worst thing that can
come from a bad decision is
not learning from it. I always
try to tell my people that.
Make a decision, and we will
live with it. We will correct it if
we need to, and we will learn
from it.
Q. How do you create a
culture in which your
employees aren’t afraid to
make decisions?
The people I lead have been
with me a long time. I’m not one
to chastise people, if you will,
over making a bad decision.
Like I said, a bad decision gets
made, it’s OK. Let’s sit down
and, first of all, let’s figure out
how we’re going to correct it.
Then, what did you learn,
what did we learn from that? So
that way, we ensure that a decision similar to that gets made
correctly in the future. I’ve
earned the respect of my people, and I respect them in the
same way. Just that culture of
mutual respect and trust that
has been created here
gives us some results.
