Episode 003: Insights from My Company’s Management Team

Key Takeaways:

• A CEO focuses on the future of the organization rather than the details of how things get done.

• It’s best not to approach a problem as if you know the true answer already.

• Be careful not to solve the symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself.

• Micromanaging and trying to do everything yourself often leads to burnout.

• Communicate with and ask questions of those who are closest to the work to find out what could be done differently or what changes they would like to see.

• There’s usually more than one “right” way to do something and it’s important to be looking for the new “right” way to do things.

• Everyone should have the freedom to learn skills as they develop and then to put their own spin on them.

• Create an environment where people feel comfortable to learn at their own pace.

• People get confidence when they feel trusted. It gives them the confidence to keep going.

• People often learn the most from their mistakes. Mistakes may be costly in the short term but they usually become valuable lessons for the future.

Resource Link:

Cornerstone Baptist Church — Stratford Podcast: Work as a Blessing + Interview with Cindy Dockendorff (interview starts at 27:30)

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Transcript

Cindy 0:05

Hi, church leaders! Welcome to the CEO Pastor podcast. My name is Cindy and I am your host for today's episode. My goal is to provide the management expertise every church leader needs to produce the ministry experience every church leader wants. We'll skip the jargon and cliches and focus on ideas that will help you accomplish the church's mission in your unique ministry context. Ready? Let's go!

Today's podcast is going to be a little different than usual. This episode is going to be an interview between our management team at my company. I thought you might be interested in hearing how we interact with each other and some of the insights that we've gotten from working together.

There are four of us and we're all under the age of 40. And I thought you'd like to hear how we interact with each other when we're talking about things having to do with the business. The first guest will be my brother, Jacob. He's the CEO of the company. And our second guest will be Bobby. He's the VP of Farm Management and he happens to be our cousin. He has a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Prince Edward Island. And the third guest is Ashley. He's the VP of Product Development and he's been with the company for over 20 years now so he's the guy that we go to when we have questions. If he doesn't know the answer, nobody knows the answer!

And also we have an extra special guest that you'll hear at the end of the interview. It's Jacob's dog, Roland. He was in the room with us when we were recording but he kept panting and you could hear it on the microphone so we had to put him outside the door. And by the end of the interview, he was pretty anxious to get back in so you'll hear him kind of whining and howling a little bit at the end. I hope you don't mind. So without further ado, let's listen in.

Interview

What do you do as a CEO?

Jacob 2:15

The CEO's job is relatively fluid in that you're focusing on more of the future than you are of the... what's necessarily right in front of you. So you need to have a good handle as a CEO on what is currently happening, but you also have to know how that will affect your future plans within the company.

Cindy 2:46

And what don't you do as a CEO?

Jacob 2:50

I don't get involved in minutiae. It's more or less that I'll come along and I'll, I'll talk to the team and I'll let them know what needs to happen and explain why it needs to happen sometimes or, like, it needs to go in a certain order so that people can all get on board with the ideas, but, basically, the... the role of the CEO is to make sure that everybody is on the same page. The role of the CEO is not to get involved in all of the details on how that happens.

Cindy 3:30

So, Bobby, how do you think your business degree has helped you in your role here?

Bobby 3:36

Well, my business degree I would pretty much sum up as four years' training in problem solving. They give you lots of different tools and language... so different financial abilities, I guess, and language and the ability to read financial statements, but also just general tools for analyzing strategies and figuring out problems. So it's been helpful to be able to come up with different solutions and look at problems in different ways in lots of different situations within this business, but, like, every business is just problem solving. You're solving problems for your customers and then you're solving problems internally. So it's... getting a degree in problem solving was very useful.

Cindy 4:26

Do you have an example of a problem you've solved?

Bobby 4:31

Well, for... one of the first problems I solved here was inventory management on the farm because there wasn't any. Like, we didn't have a grasp of what we had on our farm. So using some of the tools I learned about spreadsheets, and I was able to kind of solve that and take it from there to more of a predictive inventory management system. But, yeah.

Cindy 5:02

And, Ashley, you've been here for over 20 years now. What changes have you seen as we've applied different management ideas in the business?

Ashley 5:11

Well, the biggest changes I've seen over the years was the transition from, like, a wild grown oyster, like, and then into the cultivated, whether it's growing on our own or buying from other people. So with all that, you got different packaging, different methods, like grading. It went from hand grading into the vision graders, which makes everything go a lot smoother. And just... there's basically lots and lots of changes and it's always changing every day so...

Cindy 5:41

Alright, so we'll have a discussion here amongst all of us of what... the best advice we have.

Jacob 5:48

I think, for me, the best advice would be to not approach a problem as if you know the true answer already. You need to kind of work through it and live with that problem for a minute. It's not, it's not that you have to solve everything immediately. It's that you need to fully understand where the problem originates and then how are you going to get to the solution, whether it's two years or three years down the road or whether it's something that needs to be solved immediately, that... that's kind of my best advice. It's just put yourself in perspective of whether or not this is a life or death situation. It's typically not. So...

Cindy 6:44

So would you also say that... be careful not to solve the symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself?

Jacob 6:54

Absolutely. The symptoms are easy to see. But a lot of times the problems that we've solved here had very little to do with the actual symptomatic... you know, you can see that things aren't working the way that you want them to but you don't realize that sometimes it's just because you're doing it on paper instead of doing it on a computer system or you're doing something that that is taking more time than necessary. So being able to identify those symptomatic problems and smooth them out but bear in mind that you need to smooth it out in perpetuity, that... that, to me, is the job that any… any manager is really looking to complete at their business or their organization.

Bobby 7:52

Yeah, I also think it's... as far as managing any people, it's important to not get tied up in micromanaging or trying to do everything yourself because it's very easy to say, "Well, it's gonna be easier if I just do this myself, and then if I just do that myself." But that piles up and then you burn yourself out and you can't keep on top of everything and things fall apart. But, like, it's worked really well, like, for us, you know. Jacob's been able to step away from all the details and the day to day minutiae that, you know, other people can take care of and that gives him more mental capacity to deal with the bigger ideas and problems that arise rather than being too burned out to be able to even contemplate what we're... where we're going next year.

Cindy 8:43

Allowing other people to take over some of those different aspects of the business also helps people develop their own skills?

Bobby 8:52

Oh, for sure, yeah. They'll learn a lot more figuring it out for themselves and also take on more responsibility and ownership of their roles within the company and feel more invested and want to contribute and stick around.

Ashley 9:07

It's also good to ask people's opinions, like, on what could be done differently or what changes they would like to see or... you know what I mean? Because, especially if you're not around the work all the time, it's good to have the input of what they're doing. Because whoever's doing it's gonna see what has to be done. So it's good to just communicate and ask questions.

Cindy 9:25

Well, I remember one time when Donnie was here, he was wondering why we filed our paperwork a certain way. And we just never thought of doing it a different way because we've been doing it that way for, like, 15 years. And then he said, "Well, why aren't you doing it like that?" And it was just kind of like a facepalm, like, "Well, why didn't we think of that?" But it was just an outside eye, right? Just kind of questioning, well, is there a reason why we're doing it this way or can we do it this way instead? I was like, "No, we like your answer. We like the way you think and that's...." We switched it around to let them do it that way.

Jacob 10:04

I think it's important, too... like, when I was first starting, like, on the farm side of things, Ashley was there. And it was always, "Well, let's give it a try." It was never, "This is the way we've always done it. This is the way it needs to be done." It was, "Well, if, in that moment, you want to use your left hand instead of your right hand, let's give that a try and... and see how it works. Maybe it's faster, maybe it's more efficient." But you have to be willing to try and not, not necessarily take it as a personal offense if things don't go perfectly immediately.

Everything is a work in progress as you're solving problems and, like your story about Donnie... like, it was just something that none of us had thought of. So it is very important, like Ashley says, to listen to the boots on the ground. You need, you need to really... I guess, in the organizational... like, a church organization, you need... you need to listen to the congregation more so than necessarily going top down and trying to teach people the right way to do things. Because a lot of times there's more than one right way and, if you're not willing to look for the new right way or the better... the better way of handling it, then you'll get bogged down.

And burnout is a real thing. Trying to... trying to... like, we've... we've talked about micromanaging and it's a real thing. Like, if you try to do everything by yourself, you... you will burn out, you will struggle, where if you're able to step back, allow yourself to step back and let somebody else take control of a situation, whether it's a big one or a small one, the more you train yourself on how to do it -- it's not natural. You have to train yourself to step back. And when you do, typically, you're going to be quite surprised with the outcome.

Cindy 12:33

So when you allow other people to do that, do you just kind of throw them into the deep end or what do you suggest that a person does in order to give them the tools that they need in order to have success at that new... that new aspect of what they're doing and so that you have the confidence that it's not going to completely go sideways?

Jacob 13:00

It depends on the situation. I mean, Bobby and Ashley'll both tell anybody, like, there... there are times where we have just... like, it's baptism by fire. You go out and you figure it out. Like, I'm not going to give anybody any information on some new idea because I know already that I don't have the answer. I don't know how to do it and... and it's more freeing for the individual or the employee or whoever to solve that problem on their own and really take ownership of the situation.

Ashley 13:40

I guess trust would be one of the biggest things. Like, whether you trust the person to do the job that you're... like, without the trust, you really don't got the capability.

Bobby 13:48

Yeah, and it takes a while to build that up. Like, you know, we never take somebody new that... or somebody that we think is just not ready yet and throw them into the deep end. But, like, you gotta build that trust up and, once you get there, you're more comfortable to do that. And even when we say "throw into the deep end" or "baptized by fire", like, there's... we're still here and if... if a problem comes up or if somebody can't handle it, like, you know, we're not cutting ties and sending somebody on a mission and see when it's done.

Ashley 14:28

Yeah, and with trust you'll get more reliability, too, I would think. I see... well, that's what I see.

Bobby 14:34

Oh, yeah.

Ashley 14:37

People get confidence when they feel trusted. It gives them the confidence to keep going.

Jacob 14:44

And we're lucky as an organization or a business that our staff... we have very little turnover. And I would like to think that it's because of these ideas of, you know, letting people choose their own place within the company. You... you're not always going to be the one cleaning the toilet. You're not always going to be the one driving the boat today. Like, everybody is allowed the freedom to... to learn new skills as they develop and... and then put their own personal spin on it so that it's not, "Okay, well, Ashley showed me how to drive the boat and this is the only way I can drive the boat." Well, years later, Bobby comes along and tells you you're doing it wrong. Well, that doesn't help!

Like, because you learned it from one person... it's... it's something that we've all done a very good job, in my opinion, as employees of the company -- I still see myself as an employee here. I'm only learning and there are things that I don't know and there are things that I can learn daily and that... that is really, I think, an important thing to foster -- that... that learning or... or to create an environment where everyone is comfortable to learn at their own pace.

Cindy 16:20

Well, and the other thing, too, I find anyway, is that you have to be willing to try things even though you think it might not go as well as you would like and know... you know that you have the safety there that if something goes wrong, nobody's going to be coming down on you and blaming you for, you know... "Oh, what'd you do that for?" Everybody makes mistakes and you just learn from it and say, "Okay, I guess that doesn't work" and move on and try something else.

Bobby 16:53

Yeah. No, that is a good part of our organization, I think, that has helped a lot of people do well here... is that, what you just said about you make a mistake and you don't worry about any hammer coming down or any sort of, you know, recourse. You're not getting suspended from your job because you backed a truck into something or you caused damage or made any kind of mistake that happens around here. Like, people know that they're allowed to try things if they're a little out of their comfort zone and, worst that happens, you own up to your mistake and deal with it, learn from it, and move on. And that's not something every organization is able to say but has worked really well here.

Jacob 17:39

And I think it's important that... like, all of us in this room right now that we're recording, we've all made $1,000 mistakes, we've all made tens of thousands of dollars of mistakes, like, but none of us feels any less about the other person when that does happen. It's more that we... okay, like, you tried and you did your best and, like, what more could you ask for? What... like, what more? I didn't know the answer either. So it was just... it's always... it's always good to know that you're in a safe place, you're in a safe environment for learning.

Ashley 18:24

And most people, that's how they learn... is by mistakes. I learned the most from my mistakes. Pays off in future but... takes time.

Cindy 18:36

Thanks, guys, for sharing your insights with us.

Next Steps

Did anything resonate with you or did you hear anything that you hadn't thought of in quite that way before? Let us know either by sending us an email at podcast (at) ceopastor.com or getting in touch with us on social media.

Would you like to hear more about our company? Well, I was interviewed at our church during a series about creation and how we work within creation. I talked about some of these principles that we go by, specifically in creation but also just in general in how we relate to one another as human beings in the image of God. And if you'd like to hear more, I will link that in the description and you can listen to that further.

On Our Next Episode

Our next episode was going to be interview with a business owner who also happens to have pastoral training... who also happens to be my dad. But I found out after I asked him that he's in the middle of a series of regular plant audits that we have going on. So instead we're going to move right into our strategy map series.

And the strategy map is the foundation of any organization and it talks about your vision and mission and your strategies and how you're going to accomplish those. And it's a good lead up into the new year -- or anytime, really, because you should be reevaluating your strategy on a periodic basis. But we're going to start that strategy map series in our next episode and I hope to see you then!

Thank you for joining me for today's episode of CEO Pastor podcast. I hope you discovered an idea that you can apply in your unique ministry context. Head over to ceopastor.com for more resources and meet up with me and other church leaders on social media for further discussion. Any questions or suggestions? Email me at podcast (at) ceopastor.com. And don't forget to share, rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast to help spread the word that managing ministry better makes ministry better.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai