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Welcome to this edition of Influence and Impact. My name is Phillip Van Hooser. This program
is dedicated to offering our viewers ideas, examples, encouragement and inspiration that
will enable ordinary men and women to make an extraordinary difference in what you do,
where you live and with the people you meet. We do so by talking with and learn from individuals
who themselves are making a difference with their lives every day. Together we will learn
about the risks they have taken, the lessons they have learned and the specific behaviors
that they have developed. This program offers a unique opportunity to witness the positive
influence and impact that solitary individuals can have on the world around them.
Today, you will meet a man who serves as Chairman of the Board for Tractor Supply Company, America’s
number one retail farm and ranch store, a company that in 2004 was ranked 43rd by Fortune
Magazine in their list of 100 fastest growing companies in America. Tractor Supply has more
than 500 retail outlets located in 34 states with total annual that soon will exceed $2
billion. For the last quarter century, Tractor Supply Company, its 8,000 members and millions
of loyal customers have benefited from the capable and enthusiastic leadership of our
guest, Joe Scarlett. After 25 years of ever expanding leadership
responsibilities with the company, today Joe proudly wears a somewhat unique dual title
as Tractor Supply Company’s Chairman of the Board and head coach. Joe, it’s my privilege
to welcome you to Influence and Impact. Thank you for being here.
Glad to be here. I’ve got to ask you. The very first thing,
head coach, it’s kind of a strange title for the Chairman of the Board. So I’ve got
to ask you what does head coach imply for you.
Well, I kind of picked up that title over the years from the people that I have been
coaching. We believe it’s all about leadership at our company and the better our leaders
are at every level, the more successful are as a company. I’ve sort of evolved into
the role of simply helping others succeed and spending a lot of time with particularly
our key leaders and helping them do a better job at leading other people and building their
teams to achieve success. So coaching is, first and foremost, about
people? It’s all about people. It’s all about
helping leaders be successful. Helping leaders in how they select their people, how they
develop their people, how they set direction and helping leaders focus on the important
issues. Now, if coaching is about people, first and
foremost and all of these other activities, I’ve got to ask you, when I talk to Chairman’s
of the Board wherever I might find them, their focus is on the structure of the company,
the organization of the future. How does head coaching, the role of head coach factor into
that relationship with the business aspect? Well, you certainly can’t ignore the business
aspect of things and we have clear structures and we have clear organization in our company,
but with 500 and some odd location and 50 district managers and teams all the country,
we want to work to help each one of those key leaders be successful and that’s what
really produces the results for the company that’s why we, me particularly, but most
of our senior executives continue to spend time coaching and developing our teams at
every level. Obviously, in a week you have many activities
to deal with, but can you put a timeframe on how much time you actually invest in the
coaching activity? Is it 5%, 10%, 40%, 90%? How would you evaluate that?
I’m not sure I could put a number on it exactly, but for example, this year I visited
150 stores and those were a series of trips that probably occupied 1/3 of my time. On
each of those trips, I would be traveling with typically a district manager and maybe
a buyer or a regional manager or other staff people from the support center and the whole
process is three or four days on the road and you’re coaching all the time. You’re
teaching people how to achieve success, talking about individual people problems and organizational
problems. It’s all about working with people. I find that we are most successful when we
do it away from the office. Sitting behind the desk coaching people, it’s a very formal
environment. It’s much better when you’re in the stores or where the activity is or
as I’d like to say a lot of coaching takes place between stores in the car in what we
call windshield time. There’s not a whole lot of place for them
to run or hide from you during that time either, right, when you’re on the road.
There certainly is no place to run or hide. I’ll tell you an interesting story that
goes along with that. When our senior management was coalescing about five years ago, we started
every quarter going out and visiting stores and the four of us would go out together and
we would spend three or four days visiting stores and in a car and that’s really helped
our senior management team align itself so clearly behind common goals.
You talk about common goals. Is there a common theme to the windshield time? Is it all business?
Is coaching all about coaching business or are there other things that you talk and interact
with along the way as well? Well, I try to keep us focused on the business.
I try to keep us on driving our sales and driving our profits and helping our team succeed
and teaching our people how to do well, but obviously, along the way other topics come
up. We’ll even have some fun along the way, too. We not only visit our stores. We visit
a lot of competitor’s stores and have an interesting time very often in those situations.
I bet you do. When you’re traveling together like that, you’ve got to get to know each
other well. You do. You get to know each other very well.
You’re at it 12 hours a day and two or three meals every day and you really get to know
each other very well, but as you said earlier, in that environment, there’s no place to
run and hide you just have to talk about the issue and the more you talk about issues,
the more solutions you reach and the more positive solutions you reach.
So what I’m hearing, if I’m getting it right, the first and foremost aspect of coaching
is understanding it’s about the people, but the people help the business, but to do
it there has to be time spent. Is that fair? That’s absolutely correct.
Thank you for this. We’ve got to take a break right now. We’ll come back in just
a minute and continue our conversation with Joe Scarlett.