RFM Welcomes New Leadership Upon Celebration of 35th Anniversary
Dean Kelly and Gunnar Gladics join Jennifer Fleming and Greg Belding at the helm
BREMERTON, Wash. — This September, Rice Fergus Miller celebrates 35 years as Bremerton’s beloved architecture, interiors, and planning firm. The occasion comes at a meaningful nexus of change, with two new Principals—Dean Kelly and Gunnar Gladics—joining the ownership team alongside Jennifer Fleming and Greg Belding. This is the first full change in leadership guard the firm has seen.
Kelly is a leader in specialty housing projects and Gladics is regionally-renowned for emergency response design. It’s their industry knowledge paired with their balanced leadership talents that create a strong foundation for the new ownership foursome.
“Jennifer falls into operations and talent management and Gunnar falls into financial management,” said Belding. “I fall into project process and Dean falls into project design. That’s how we leverage our strengths across how we will be moving forward from a leadership standpoint in our firm.”
This appreciation for diversity of thought is also reflected in new structural changes. As the new owners usher in a new era, they are reimagining a firm structure that supports what they call a “distributed leadership” model.
In a distributed leadership model, market leadership is not siloed within any single leader, but rather emphasizes the market expertise present within the broader team, allowing the firm to have the greatest impact within their community-based work. “I want our associate principals and our associates and even our untitled staff to feel empowered,” said Fleming.
Besides bolstering brain power, the distributed leadership model is a mechanism to cultivate future leaders. The firm grew very organically in its first generation of ownership, said Belding. But there are “people who were growing up in the firm [and] were actually looking for more firm structure. It was something they wanted because it gave them a better sense of what a path to leadership looked like.”
For Fleming this looks like inviting teammates into meetings they may not have been a part of before and, quite literally, giving them a seat at the table. It’s an important step because it allows people who are interested in leadership the opportunity to learn incrementally and have increased self-determination about how they’d like to grow in their careers.
Ultimately, Fleming, Belding, Kelly, and Gladics saw a distributed leadership model as an
opportunity to harness firm ambition and infuse it into a structure that is thoughtful, strategic, and emblematic of broader cultural workplace values. Namely, that of mentorship both up and down and transparency of processes.
The swell of change leading up to RFM’s 35th Anniversary celebration is part of a natural
evolution, yet the firm remains rooted in their legacy of serving the community through their work in housing, healthcare, hospitality, community impact, education, and fire and emergency services.
