Post on 14-Jul-2015
Drink the Cool-AidCreating Leadership Teams with Shared
Vision and Purpose
Presented by: Warren Dietel, Puff ‘n Stuff Catering
My Story
Warren Dietel, CEO & Owner
Puff ‘n Stuff Catering & Chef’s Commissary
• Serial entrepreneur since my teen years
• Professional experience:
– Car detailing, Disney Weddings, Disney
Institute, Scott Kay
• Purchased Puff ‘n Stuff Catering in 2003
• Opened Chef’s Commissary in 2013
• Restaurant Partners Procurement Partner
Housekeeping
•I speak fast
•We are going deep - big initiative for my companies
•Questions welcomed during and at the end
Copy of the presentation available on
www.slideshare.net/warrendietel
You can reach me later for questions
warren@puffnstuff.com
407-227-5697
What’s in it for you?
•Follow up to last years presentation with a recap of the program fundamentals and case study on how it is working for us
•Examples of initiatives we took – both successes and failures
•How it impacted the team
•Ideas on how to improve your company’s culture
Organization Health
“When an organization’s leaders are cohesive,
when they are unambiguously aligned around a
common set of answers to a few critical questions,
when they communicate those answers again and
again and again, and when they put effective
processes in place to reinforce those answers,
they create an environment in which success is
almost impossible to prevent. Really.”
Patrick Lencioni
And then what…
•Hyper engagement at the leadership level permeates
through the every member of the organization
Old Puff
• Opened in 1980 as family-owned business
• Positive reputation in the community
• Purchased in 2003, annual sales of $1.8M, at
operational limit
• Infrastructure required improvements to support
growth
New Puff
• Tremendous potential + aggressive growth plan = 267% growth in 3 years – 2004 – 2007
•13M Sales Goal for 2015
• Expanded to Tampa in 2010 with acquisition and now a new 32,000 sq ft commissary opening in 2015
• 600+ team members Passionately perfecting our clients life celebrations
• Diversifying segment base
• 8 Exclusive venues
• 220+ Preferred venues
• Chef’s Commissary’s now in stand alone factory
• Cohesive leadership team…finally
Two Requirements for Success
• Strategy
• Marketing
• Finance
• Technology
• Minimal Politics
• Minimal Confusion
• High Morale
• High Productivity
• Low Turnover
Smart
Health
Discipline #1
Building A Cohesive Leadership Team
• Team #1 - Leadership team - Small group collectively
responsible for achieving a common objective
• 3 to 12 members , but ideal would be 3-8
• Collectively responsible – selfless and shared sacrifices
• Common objectives with collective focus
Puff’s Leadership Team
2014
• 9 people
• First meeting on 2/26/14
• Committed to one
another that we will be
collectively responsible
• Defined #1 goal for 2014 (financial responsibility to budget)
• Redefined core values
and strategic anchors
2015
• 9 people (one open)
• Leader changes – right reasons
• Bi-Weekly meetings
• More cohesive and trusting
• Defined #1 goal of 2015(building up team #1)
• Continuing to fine-tune 2014 initiatives
• Laser focused on departmental objectives (vision letter)
2015 Puff Team #1
Warren
Rosy Usmani
Marketing
Fred Miller
HR
Mary Dickson
Finance
TBD
Tampa Operations
Heather Hofmann
Orlando
Operations
Heidi Brice
Orlando Sales
Amy Pryor
Venue Relations
Raul Matias
Chef’s Commissary
Lauren Balden
Tampa Sales
Vision - Goal Setting Letter
What does your business look like 1 year in the future?
Create a vision of the future describing how you achieved your key goals. Measurable = Accountable.
Process Steps
1. Brainstorm alone or with a colleague to identify your goals
2. Present to your peers for feedback
3. Finalize Vision Letter incorporating these insights
4. Attend quarterly review meetings with peers to review your progress
5. Review Vision performance at the end of the year
Five Behavioral Principles
1. Building Trust: Team members who trust one another are comfortable being open, even exposed, to one another about their failures, weaknesses and fears.
2. Mastering Conflict: When trust is present, teams are able to engage in unfiltered ideological debate around ideas, issues and decisions that must be made.
3. Achieving Commitment: The ability to engage in conflict and provide input enables team members to buy-in or commit to decisions.
4. Embracing Accountability: After commitment is established, team members must be willing to hold one another accountable and remind each other when actions are counterproductive to the team.
5. Focusing on Results: Collective team results must supersede any departmental or personal objectives or pursuits.
#1 Building Trust Exercise
•Purpose: To improve trust by giving team members an opportunity to demonstrate vulnerability in a low-risk way and to help team members understand one another at a fundamental level so that they can avoid making false attributions about behaviors and intentions.
•Time Required: 15 - 25 Minutes
• Instructions: Go around the table and have everyone answer three questions about themselves.
1. Where did you grow up?
2. How many siblings do you have and where do you fall in that order?
3. Please describe a unique or interesting challenge or experience from your childhood.
•Debrief: Ask team members to share what they learned about one another that they didn't already know. This reinforces the purpose of the exercise and allows for a natural ending to the conversation.
#1 Building Trust
Sales and Marketing as One Unstoppable Force
• Fall 2013 new Marketing Manager hired
• 3rd in 2 years
• Tampa: Doesn’t always have the same access / unique
challenges due to commissary location
• Orlando: In the past a constant struggle and lack of
cohesive support from marketing
• Persistence, patience and an open-mind
yielded growth and trust
• Unified decisions have brought Tampa
and Orlando together, through marketing
#2 Mastering Conflict
• With trust, conflict is just pursuit of truth
• Conflict avoidance at the top transfers it down
• Ideally, the team should engage in constructive conflict
but not destructive
• Willing to recover if the line gets crossed
• Mine for conflict in meetings, and
reinforce it when it happens
• Trust is critical
#2 Mastering Conflict
It’s not all roses and sunshine!
• Trusted team member came up the ranks to leadership
level. Trust was breached.
• Unhealthy conflicts moving away from vision (shared
goals)
• Created two opposing factions
• Team #1 opened the door to face the conflict
• Attention to the challenges and offered a “reset” button
#3 Achieving Commitment
• Can’t happen without trust and conflict – people need to
provide input, ask questions and understand the rationale
of decisions
• Can’t wait for consensus – disagree and commit
• Leader’s responsibility to break ties
• Prevent passive sabotage (not speaking up then
instigating “the meeting after the meeting”)
• Must have clear agreement on message
•Move forward UNITED!
#3 Achieving Commitment
Hear No Evil; See No Evil
• Team #1 committed to “financial responsibility” in 2014
• To support this goal finance department committed to
reporting financial results on time and accurately
• Required commitment from all leaders to submit invoices
on time and be mindful of spending
• Monthly reports provided clear snapshot of progress
• Finance department also provided additional support by
offering advice and knowledge to leaders to assist with
maintaining their budgets
#4 Embracing Accountability
THE HARDEST PART
•Requires commitment first
• Peer-to-peer accountability is the primary and most
effective source of accountability on the leadership
team of a healthy organization
• Can’t all come from leader, but leader has to be willing to
confront
• Hardest part of building a cohesive team
• Ultimately, courageous and selfless (it’s not about you or
me, it’s about the company)
#4 Embracing Accountability
Blame Game
• Over $1m spend on (all) discounts in 2013
• Determined there was no ownership, accountability or
process in place
• Finance, Marketing and Sales teamed up to create a
better system that would reduce this amount and provide
greater understanding of our discount dollars
• Reduced total amount by 20%
• Shared accountability has increased trust among these
three departments.
• Positive results fuel additional shared projects
#5 Focusing on Results
• Ultimate outcome of trust, conflict, commitment and accountability is results
• Need to focus on collective goals – not departmental goals –one team, one score
• Place higher priority on leadership team than the team they lead
• Leadership team must embrace the power of team #1
CELEBRATE
#5 Focusing on Results
This Feels Good…NO, better
• Steady decrease in employee moral for past 4 years
• Led to poor productivity, high turn over and reduction in overall quality of service
• Single, most difficult challenge faced by leadership
• Frequently discussed during meetings
• Solution: Added HR position to oversee current efforts, become employee advocate, relieve Finance of HR tasks
• Action Items: Better staff communications, targeted hiring, anniversary lunches, personal birthday cards, Token of Appreciation Program, accurate job descriptions, progression planning, improved training, and many more
People who don’t fit our core values are invited to work elsewhere
Checklist for a Cohesive Leadership Team
•The leadership team is small enough to be effective
(3 to 10 people)
•Members of the team trust one another and can be
genuinely vulnerable with each other
•Team members regularly engage in productive,
unfiltered conflict around important issues
•The team leaves meetings with clear-cut, active and
specific agreements around decisions
•Team members hold one another accountable to
commitments and behaviors
•Members of the leadership team are focused on
team number one. They put the collective priorities
and needs of the larger organization ahead of their
own departments or themselves.
The leadership team must agree on the answers
to six simple, but critical questions
1. Why do we exist?
2. How do we behave?
3. What do we do?
4. How will we succeed?
5. What is most important, right now?
6. Who must do what?
Discipline #2: Creating Clarity
Question 1: Why do we exist?
• Core purpose from Built to Last
• Why a company exists has to be completely idealistic
• Employees in every organization need to know that at the
heart of what they do lies something grand and
aspirational
Here is why we exist…
Deliver a better world for our valued team members in
order to deliver a better product to the client.
Question 2: How do we behave?
• Core values guide employee behavior
• Can’t be effective if broad and inclusive
• Core values
–Apparent in the organization for a long time
–100% of the team must be committed
–Found in best employees (and missing in employee misfits)
–Must be embodied and modeled by leadership team
Here is how we behave…
• Quality
• Creativity
• Dedication
• Consistency
Question 3: What do we do?
• Simplest of the six questions
• Not idealist – just a description of what the organization
actually does
• One-sentence business definition
• No adverbs or qualifiers, no details on strategy
• Can change over time
Here is what we do now…
Provide catering solutions to diverse markets in the Tampa
and Orlando communities.
Question 4: How Will We Succeed?
• Essentially – the strategy
• Strategy is simply the plan for success – intentional decisions a company makes to thrive and differentiate from competitors
• Broad – every decision is part of it
• Important to boil down to 3-4 strategic anchors
• Create an exhaustive list of everything intentional you do – hiring, product/service approach, marketing, décor
• Then look for patterns to find three strategic anchors
• Strategic anchors change when market conditions change
• Provide clarity to walk away from opportunities that don’t align with strategic anchors
Question 4: How Will We Succeed?
Here is how we will succeed..
• Strategic Anchor: A care in selection and development of
team members at every level.
• Strategic Anchor: State of the art equipment, technology
and processes for superior execution.
• Strategic Anchor: Establish our identity as the ultimate
caterer in the market place…Really.
• Strategic Anchor: Enable each team member to
understand their purpose within the organization.
Question 5:
What is most important, right now?• Most immediate and tangible impact on the company
• Companies have too many top priorities
• Create alignment by having one top priority at any given time
• Identify a thematic goal
– Singular – one thing is the most important now
– Qualitative – not about specific numbers (yet)
– Temporary – clear time boundary of 3 to 12 months
– Shared across leadership team – all member focused on this as their
top priority
• Not about rallying the troops – more about clarity for how the
leadership team will spend their time and resources
• Must identify four to six defining objectives to achieve, and also
identify standard operational objectives
What was Goal #1 for Puff in 2014?
Financial performance to 2014 budget.
Objectives to Achieve This
• Finalize the budget – gain commitment & buy in (I can’t commit if I
don’t understand)
• Staff training for great efficiency and Leadership training to better
understand the budget
• Transparency – Communication about productivity expectations
needs to cascade down
• Provide a consistent message – this is the budget and it must be
achieved. That’s it!
• Daily measureable results – accountability & follow up
What Is Goal #1 for Puff in 2015
Building up Team #1.
Objectives to Achieve This
• Mine for conflict
• Hold each other accountable
• Providing a consistent message
• Ask for clarification
• Measurable Result: Employee moral and retention
• Measurable Result: Staff satisfaction survey’s
• Transparency – Communication about productivity
expectations needs to cascade down
Question 6: Who must do what?
• Division of labor – starts at the top
• Easy step but can’t be overlooked
• Worthwhile to clarify so everyone on the leadership team
knows and agrees on who does what
• Make sure all critical areas are covered
Back to the org chart for who does what…
2015 Puff Team #1
Warren
Rosy Usmani
Marketing
Fred Miller
HR
Mary Dickson
Finance
TBD
Tampa Operations
Heather Hofmann
Orlando
Operations
Heidi Brice
Orlando Sales
Amy Pryor
Venue Relations
Raul Matias
Chef’s Commissary
Lauren Balden
Tampa Sales
•Members of the leadership team know, agree on, and are passionate about the reason the organization exists
•The leadership team has clarified and embraced a small, specific set of behavioral values
•Leaders are clear and aligned around a strategy that helps them define success and differentiate from competitors
•The leadership team has a clear, current goal with a collective sense of ownership for that goal
•Members of the leadership team understand one another’s roles and responsibilities, and are comfortable asking questions about one another’s work
•The elements of clarity are concisely summarized (‘Play Book’) and reviewed regularly by the leadership team
Checklist for Creating Clarity
Discipline #3: Over-Communicate Clarity
•Employees are skeptical about what they’re told unless they hear it consistently over time.
•Need to be CROs – Chief Reminding Officers. But Leaders are hesitant to repeat themselves. Why?
– It seems wasteful and inefficient – want to avoid redundancy.
– They fear it is insulting or patronizing to repeat a message.
– They get bored saying the same things over and over.
– Need to overcome all this and do more reinforcing of key messages.
•Leaders need to tell ‘true rumors’
•Cascading communication takes the message through the company
•Three keys to cascading communication– Consistency of message
– Timeliness of delivery
– Live, real-time communication
•Have to end leadership meetings answering the question: What are we going to go back and tell our people? And make sure there is agreement.
Checklist for Over-Communicating Clarity
•The leadership team has clearly communicated the six aspects of clarity to all employees.
•Leadership team members regularly remind the people in their departments about those aspects of clarity.
•The team leaves meetings with clear and specific agreement about what to communicate to their employees, and they cascade those messages quickly after meetings.
•Employees are able to accurately articulate the organization’s reason for existence, values, strategic anchors and goals.
Discipline #4: Reinforce Clarity
• Every process that involves people needs to reinforce the answers to the six questions
• You need to institutionalize culture without bureaucratizing it
• Hiring, performance management, training and compensation need simple systems specific to the company
• Hire for cultural fit
• Orientation needs to be built around the six answers and leaders need to take an active role in design and delivery
• Performance management needs to be simple and stimulate the right kinds of conversations on the right topics.
• Compensation and reward has to be tied to one or more of the big six questions
• Leaders need to give recognition and personal appreciation, and be quick to take out employees who don’t fit the values
Great Meetings
• A cohesive team with clarity requires more meeting time, not less.
• Eliminate meeting stew – can’t combine tactical, admin, strategy, personnel and brainstorming in one session.
• Emotionally engage your people –Anniversary lunch hard questions
–Be careful what you wish for
–Be ready to take action
• Making them feel truly a part of the team
It is crucial that leaders bring back key content (agreed upon by team #1) to their teams.
Impacting and engaging future leaders
• Heather Allen, Special Event Coordinator
• Started in 2010
• Awarded ICA & Vertera’s scholarshipr
• Demonstrates Puff values (the right hire)
• Department leader has provided a
clear progression path
• Clearly communicated goals, while
providing tools to achieve them
• Takes initiative to gain hands on experience
• Receiving promotion to Special Event Planner
Checklist for Reinforcing Clarity
•The organization has a simple way to ensure that new hires are carefully selected based on the company’s values.
•New people are brought into the organization by thoroughly teaching them about the six elements of clarity.
•Managers throughout the organization have a simple, consistent and non-bureaucratic system for setting goals and reviewing progress with employees.
•Employees who don’t fit the values are managed out of the company. Poor performers who do fit the values are given the coaching and assistance they need to succeed and grow.
•Compensation and reward systems are built around the values and goals of the organization.
Dirty laundry - When it Doesn’t Work!
Case Studies
1. “Ops”
– Wrong hire and waited too long to react
– Disrespect was tolerated
– Horrible communicator
– From day one the mistake was obvious, but we kept trying to re-align
– Terminated, refined job description, better recruiting/vetting process, must follow gut
2. “Chef”
– Wanted his skillset so bad we overlooked what he was telling us from the beginning
– Not a fit for our values
– Terminated, re-evaluated the Corp. EC position, added middle level leaders
– Isolated himself through individualized initiatives
Walking the Walk…every day
Critical to cascade messages throughout organization.
Discipline #1: Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
Discipline #2: Create Clarity
Discipline #3: Over-communicate Clarity
Discipline #4: Reinforce Clarity
Two Organizations
•First - Led by a team who remind employees why the company exists, its core values , its strategy and its top priority. They communicate the same message to employees, and make sure they know the concerns and ideas of their people to use in decision making. The company has simple practices for recruiting and orienting people based on core values, managing performance based on top priorities, and training and rewarding based on culture and strategy.
•Second – Leadership team limits communication to a few events each year, mainly on tactical initiatives, doesn’t share consistently after meetings, and aren’t aware of employee opinions. The company has plenty of processes, but most are generic and complicated, not customized to the unique culture and operations of the company.
How much of an advantage does the first have over the second?
A recent success story
Weekend of 2/27 was HUGE and a HUGE team success!
• Saturday February 28, 2015
–Polk Museum Gala: Plated 277 guests
• Food from Tampa, but service, culinary and sales from Orlando
– DeBatolo Gala: Plated 820 guests
– Trivedi Wedding: Buffet 188 guests
– Grace O’Malley: Plated 345 guests
– 5 additional events between Tampa and Orlando
– 500+ team members working in concert with support from every team
• Hard rains all morning, making set up very difficult
• Traffic congestion 2x long as expected
And if that wasn’t enough…
Sunday February 29, 2015
Discerning, luxury client’s house warming brunch party
– 10 day lead time
– Managed all portions of event production too
– New action stations
– Custom designed décor and menu cards
– Elaborate menu and bar options
– Many of the staff worked late Saturday night, and
brought their A game to put on a great event
You can market this stuff too!
By uniting the entire organization around Team #1’s
initiatives it can be used as a motivator and a way to
communicate the company’s culture as a differentiating
feature of doing business
Here’s a little taste of our Cool-Aid…
Drink up!
THANK YOU!
Warren Dietel | warren@puffnstuff.com | 407.227.5697
To download a copy of my slides, go to:
http://www.slideshare.net/WarrenDietel
www.facebook.com/puffnstuffcatering | Twitter: @pscatering