On Leadership

For the last handful of winters, while our season is slow, I have pieced together my salary using savings in addition to utilizing connections I have made in the past as well as those I continue to forge while in the many meetings I have with other professionals. I have been very fortunate in this way; to have enjoyed the company and tutelage of a handful of mentors, as equally eager to share their knowledge with me as I am to learn from them. It’s largely because of these connections that I am where I am today.

To honor them means that I must, at the very least, be the kind of leader for my people that they were to me. I must ceaselessly seek the most current knowledge in our field instead of resting in the comfort of what has been done before. I must listen far more than I speak. I must pay them fairly for their skills and allow them to lean on me at times, even when it feels painful to do so. I realize that this is not the ethos held by all leaders, but it is the one I feel most resonates with me and also the one that yields me the most dedicated, loyal, hard-working staff members that will return the favor when or if the time comes, who can seamlessly conduct business and the execution of our vision, even in my absence.

Culture is a top-down phenomenon. Transparency and constant communication is key. As a mid and senior level manager, I have had the unfortunate experience of being the subject of policies that, even when considered from the three bottom lines of a successful company strategy, i.e, people, profit, planet, simply did not make sense. I have also had the experience of a company moving too quickly forward, scaling before they were ready, without a clear vision for what the future will look like. It is usually in the pursuit of paying off bank debts or investors, but in either case, it is not sustainable for the long term. These decisions, seemingly void of reason, seep through the foundation of the company as if like water, finding every possible weakness, however infinitesimal, leeching through and down, layer by layer, until finally flooding the entire proverbial basement. While a solid learning experience for me, running businesses following such emotional decision making is simply not sustainable and should be avoided at all costs.

The three ‘P’s’ I mentioned above are a useful guiding principal for all aspects of decision making and we have ven diagram printed and hanging in our studio for reference at every meeting. Each individual and team is encouraged, no expected, to keep us all accountable to adhering to at least two of the three aspects for any change we are considering. If the decision to move forward provides an increase in personal satisfaction for the clients or our people as well as in profit, it is a potential win. If it means only one of those will be made better, a loss. This philosophy came to my by way of a mentor, the always interesting, ever evolving, Richard Jewell, who previously worked for Zingerman’s, a multi-million dollar foods corporation rooted here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, known locally to have the best work culture around. It was the core of their decision making process well before I was of the age to understand it. Executed on small scale, with a local artisan deli, it currently serves as a foundational business philosophy worldwide. People fight for the right to earn their place in this company. I aspire to achieve the same level of culture at Basil & Blooms.

I mentioned above that being a part of team who is pushed too hard and to0 fast has the potential to result in slipshod processes and ultimately, failure to achieve the kind of greatness the leaders desire. That is not to say that deadlines are not helpful. The looming date often provides a needed framework and gentle pressure that helps speed up processes in the pursuit of both short term and long term goals. We might think of this in terms of a pressure cooker, when provided the proper temperature and time, reduces the cooking time of a particular food while not sacrificing the integrity of the final product. It may be that an employee, who on the surface appears lazy or uninterested at work, is simply in need of the proper motivation to get started. Deadlines can achieve this for some. There are still lots of people in this world who believe that work is a place to take seriously, particularly when leadership has the best interest of the company, its clients and also them in mind. The input is as important as the end result in this regard. This is where emotion and feeling diverge.

At Basil & Blooms, we make that particular distinction apparent to everyone. To feel resistance to a deadline does not necessarily mean that we should not move forward. It could be simply the result of apprehension, of a feeling the mind creates when we have the potential to accomplish a big achievement. When I am on the cusp of new projects, I often feel this tension in my body. It is uncomfortable to experience and I have learned, it is in no way a good indicator of whether we should try something new. To understand this fully, we must employ our imaginations and envision what the success of said project will feel like to all of us, to not get bogged down in the minutiae for now. I am often asked after assigning a task that will require the ironing out of multiple layers of details in order to finish, ‘what does that look like and who is responsible for what?’ As a leader, it is my job to assign the first tasks to the teams or individuals who are most likely to be able to be successful in accomplishing them and to remind them that the process unfolds while we are moving towards it, often not in the static contemplation period. I’ll offer that the term faith is overused and implies some religious aspect, but scientifically speaking, we hold vasts amount of information in our minds that are not readily available until they are needed. ‘Move,’ I say. It is when we are frozen that tension builds and has the potential to incapacitate us. Self-sabotage is a real aspect of some failures and is often rooted in looking from the bottom of the mountain to the top instead of where we can safely take our next step.

This is all to say that what owners and CEO’s do and say, how they conduct themselves in the public and in meetings, matter. It isn’t enough to hire good people and empower them to do a good job. It is absolutely essential that managers on every level have been supplied a clear vision, that they believe that their superiors are making decisions in the effort of achieving said vision and that the quality of their own lives both within and without the workplace is considered as well. Without these principles in place, financial gains are simply luck masking as success and will appear and then disappear, as quickly as a bullet train, cosmically speaking.

-Angela