Learning to lead

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.