Columbia Gas CEO talks of servant, inclusive leadership at Penn State-Fayette
Evan Sanders
Mark Kempic, a Uniontown native and president of Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania, Inc. and Columbia Gas of Maryland, Inc., both subsidiaries of NiSource Inc., a Fortune 500 energy holding company based in Merrillville Ind., fields questions during a question and answer portion of Penn State Fayette’s CEO Conversations series held in the Student Center on Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2016. At right is the moderator for that conversation, Robert Conti, a business administration major from Bethel Park.
Evan Sanders
Students listen as Mark Kempic fields questions during CEO Conversations at Penn State-Fayette.
Evan Sanders
Mark Kempic, a Uniontown native and president of Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania and Maryland, speaks during Penn State Fayette’s CEO Conversations series held in the Student Center on Wednesday.
Uniontown native Mark Kempic, president of Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania and Maryland, stressed “inclusive leadership” and “servant leadership” during the first CEO Conversation of 2016-17 at Penn State-Fayette, The Eberly Campus.
“I would never ask an employee to do something I would not do myself,” PSF alumnus Kempic told a lunchtime mix of students, faculty and people from the Fayette County community in the Williams Building on campus last week.
He offered a quote from the 19th-century poet Walt Whitman, “be curious, not judgmental,” as he urged his audience to respect people of other backgrounds and let them rise to the top.
“Recognize the importance of being inclusive,” Kempic went on. “We all need each other. We need to make sure everyone’s voices are being heard.”
His inclusiveness extends to his vision for energy policy after the upcoming election, as he explained in answering a question from Penn State-Fayette Director of Student Affairs Chad Long.
“Our energy policy in the United States should be an ‘all of the above’ policy,” Kempic said, including coal, solar, wind and nuclear as well as natural gas. “They all must be used their utmost capacity.”
The next question came from Bob Shark, executive director of Fay-Penn Economic Development Council, who wondered about the impact of the Shell ethane cracker plant being built near Monaca in Beaver County.
“Chances are it could trickle all the way down to Fayette County,” Kempic said, in terms of the secondary and tertiary levels of business brought in, both in the construction of the plant and its eventual operation.
“They will not be a direct customer of ours,” Kempic said, pointing out that Columbia Gas primarily is a server to residential customers. But he believed the plant would help increase customer density and “keep costs down for all other (natural gas) customers in Pennsylvania.”
In answer to a question from moderator Robert Conti, a business administration major from Bethel Park and a senator on the student governmental affairs committee, Kempic called himself a “reluctant leader” who rose in the ranks because “other people tapped me.”
He said those who are focused on doing their best with the job they’re assigned may go higher faster than those who focus instead on what their next jobs may be.
“Be ambitious, but have restraint,” Kempic urged the Penn State audience.
Beside inclusiveness, the rest of Kempic’s philosophy includes active listening, knowing the difference between influencing a conversation and controlling it, and being responsible.
Being responsible includes being able to maintain a budget.
“Everyone lives by a budget,” the Columbia Gas CEO said. “You have to hit your budget.”
Kempic attained an associate engineering degree in solar heating and cooling before moving on to earn computer and information science degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and a juris doctorate from Capital University in Ohio.
He said Penn State-Fayette prepared him for the education that would follow, as well as the work he’s done that started out in 1979 with his midnight-to-8 a.m. shift as a dispatcher at Columbia Gas in Uniontown.
He learned to be “humble and hungry to learn and hungry to do work,” he told a full house in the student center at the Williams Building.
It was part of a transition from a family of coal miners and supermarket employees, including his father who was assistant manager at the old Thorofare along Morgantown Street and his aunt Martha Kempic, a former clerk and cashier there who was in the audience Wednesday for his Penn State conversation.
“My parents never went to college, but the instilled in me the need to go to college,” Mark Kempic said. “The coal industry was leaving, the steel industry was leaving. There weren’t a lot of jobs around. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.”
Then came a meeting with the area manager for Columbia Gas. He invited Kempic, who as a junior at Laurel Highlands High School delivered the Herald-Standard, into his home during a rain storm.
The conversation there steered young Kempic away from a plan to go into the Army, and toward a school that challenged him beyond his previous lessons at old St. Mary’s School in Uniontown and Laurel Highlands High School.
“It provided me with a practical education,” Kempic recalled. “I came here and there were a lot of very bright people.”
Other advice he had during an hourlong conversation included the need for networking, for developing effective relationships and for being “very careful” about your social media.
“If you post something out there, it will be out there forever,” the Columbia Gas CEO reminded his audience.
Penn State-Fayette CEO Conversations series is designed to give audiences an opportunity to hear from and talk with key individuals in the local, regional, and national business communities about business, entrepreneurship, and leadership.
The talks are free of charge and open to the public. The next scheduled CEO Conversation is with Alexander “Nick” Nichols, retired chief operating officer for the Eastern Minority Supplier Development Council and past CEO of the Western Pennsylvania Minority Supplier Development Council.