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

The Four Disciplines

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

Teamwork Model

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

Melissa’s words of wisdom

When someone shows you who they are

…believe them!

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

A True Team Effort

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

A True Team Effort

But the best outcome of all…

CRAZY

GREAT &

BEAUTIFUL

RESPECT

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

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