Good Morning Friends! Here are my 5 Things to Consider this week!
Culture – Teach people how to think. I was having a conversation the other day with another restaurant company owner. We were talking about training and how to best approach developing a full-blown training program. He said to me, “Mikey, you can’t teach your people how to handle every individual scenario that may come up, that’s impossible. The only thing you can do, is teach them is how to think. How you want them to think. Once they know how to think about your company, based on your culture, your mission, vision and values, they’ll know how to handle almost anything that might come up.” Whoa. That is what you call wisdom. I think we’ve done a great job over the last few years to develop the cultural framework for our company. The challenge to us next is how to properly deploy and convey that information so our Piesans, Spirit Guides, Home Slices and managers will know how to think and react to the situations that arise daily. The next part of our journey MUST be about steering and teaching our teams how to think.
Leadership – Silence is Golden. I often credit my road trips to Cincinnati as some of the most rewarding and productive times in my week. Not because I listen to podcasts or catch up on phone calls, but because I turn off the radio, put down the phone and drive for 90 minutes in silence and reflection. I think we have a tendency these days to relentlessly cram our brains with info like we’re foie gras geese! Constantly filling filling FILLING, cramming cramming CRAMMING. Podcasts. Books. Meetings. Conversations. TV. Radio. Our phones. It’s a constant influx of information and we rarely take the time to digest and process all the info we take in. Scheduling some creative visualization, mental rehearsal, or even meditation time into your schedule can be life-changing. It’s not just about learning something, it’s taking the time to PROCESS the new material and figuring our where it belongs in our lifes. Knowledge is good, but Applied knowledge is truly powerful.
History – Nationwide, Chase and the Corporate Cafeterias. It’s sort of a rite of passage here in Columbus for any up-and-coming restaurant company to eventually become part of the Aramark Corporate Cafeteria program. It sounds like absolute hell, but I can confidently say, the 3 years we spent partnered with Aramark made us a better company. See, when you have to feed tens of thousands of people in an office building, day-in and day-out, your food safety protocols have to be air tight. And when you partner with one of these huge companies, you MUST rise to the level of their standards, or you get kicked out. Eventually, we just became part of the background in the cafeterias. Because being a part of this program no longer aligned with our value of being an “experience-based” restaurant, we had to leave. The amazing growth and maturing we did with Aramark will always be with us.
Motivation – “You can learn more in an hour of silence than you can in a year of books” – Matthew Kelly
What I’m Reading or Watching – I just started a new book called the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. Our buddy Chris Macalister has a line I always like that states “most books should be articles.” This is one of those books. Now, that’s not saying the content is bad, it’s just the concept is super easy to grasp. He states you should start every morning with the following; moments of silent reflection, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading, and scribing (or writing in a journal). If you’re reading this in the morning, it totally counts as one!
Baby Update – Well kids, I’m officially a dad. It’s truly been a crazy week and a half. I don’t think anything can prepare you for having a newborn. No matter what people tell you, no matter what you read, or how much you prepare. A new baby is like a bomb going off in the middle of your life. They blow up everything and what you’re left with is a hundred little fractions of something that used to be familiar. A life you can recognize…almost. Rachael and I’s task now is to begin to put back those familiar pieces, along with all these new pieces into this new mosaic of what our lives are now. Something way bigger than it was before.
Thanks for reading! Like or hate any part of this? Let me know! I really value your feedback.
Have a great week!
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