I believe success starts with an attitude and the empowerment culture at Capital is one that fosters that attitude and breeds success. Our employees are continually challenging themselves and those around them and using their victories, mistakes, and failures as opportunities to grow, learn and improve. Our de-centralized structure allows our individual business units to function autonomously, using their own specialized knowledge and relationships within their markets to succeed. The corporate office functions as a centralized center to lend support in each business unit’s success.
I subscribe to a mentoring leadership style, rather than pure management. I prefer to ask my employees what they need and how I can help them meet our collective goals, rather than control or dictate the specific steps required. This helps invest our employees in our common goals and allows them to focus on the “why” rather than the “what” of a situation. This attitude also creates accountability and helps foster an entrepreneurial spirit in our employees. These are the type of people that succeed in Capital’s autonomous culture.
When I first started at Capital, the accounting team was not viewed as a partner by the business units, but rather as a required overhead function to enforce compliance. Over the course of a few years, that attitude has changed. We have built a partnership with the business units and implemented many process and technological improvements that have allowed them to spend more time on building the business, rather than on every day required accounting tasks. We are all now part of the same team working toward a common goal – Capital’s success and the success of our employees.