Honored Leader: Bruce Woolpert, President and CEO
Company Name: Graniterock
Location: Watsonville, Calif.
Nature of Business: Supplier of building materials to
the highway, transit and residential construction markets.
Founded: 1900
Revenue: Over $100 million
Growth Rate (2002): 18 percent
Number of Employees: 790
Average Tenure: 10 years
Key Workplace Traits and Programs:
Woolpert on leadership: "Most businesses are set-up consistent with a traditional top-down or family (father/mother -- children) model of organization design. While some companies preach 'empowerment' of individual decision making, there is really not a true drive to build self-leadership and build team member responsibility for company-success. A self-leader ‘owns’ his or her work, sets improvement goals, works to improve results, and owns responsibility for job function performance. A very high level of job satisfaction is developed from this approach and company performance greatly improves.
"Some businesses practice organizational approaches which basically teach and reward 'dependency' (adult-child) of employee action. Companies come to believe that the 'only happy employee is an employee who is being taken care of.' Instead, a business should be growing independent people (adult-adult) who carry an understanding of the company’s challenges, successes, and areas for improvement, and work together to address needs. Our experience tells us that independent people are the only ones who can really develop a sense of making a profound and important difference."