Create emotional attachment
Think about the best company for which you’ve ever worked. Why was it so great? Maybe you had great leadership, or maybe it rewarded employees well. Perhaps you had complete autonomy, or maybe the organization was committed to a greater philanthropic or social cause.
Whatever your reasons, you had an emotional attachment to that company, and that’s what Bauccio knew his employees needed in order to retain talent and achieve his mission.
“You have to create something in your value system that has an emotional attachment by your people, so they say, ‘We have the best product,’ or, ‘We have a product nobody else has, and we’re so damn proud of it,’” he says.
Start by looking at your products and services and see what’s unique about them as compared to the competition. There has to be something unique that differentiates you in the marketplace. Bauccio knew that his differentiator was serving fresh, quality food from scratch.
“Start with the product or service and know that you have something unique,” he says. “Then it’s a matter of saying to yourself as the leader, ‘How do I guarantee that promise? How do I get recognition in the marketplace?’ We work in a cluttered marketplace, no matter what industry you’re in, all the time, so what you want to do is break out, and the only way you’re going to break out, in my view, is create a sense of belonging to that product or that differential for your employees. That means this emotional attachment.”
For him, it meant refraining from serving frozen foods and, as much as possible, buying from local farmers and artisans instead of flying food in from 3,000 miles away.
Focus on that differentiation and stay consistent with it.
“A CEO of a company … the most important thing that they can do is stay very focused and stay consistent in their message,” he says. “If I wasn’t consistent and I was all over in terms of what I believed in and what I was trying to accomplish, it would be watered down.”
Maintaining your focus may also lead to other initiatives that create emotional attachments. For example, about 10 years ago, Bauccio’s chefs began noticing that a lot of food looked great but tasted like cardboard because of chemical additives. So he began implementing higher standards to ensure quality food by requiring antibiotic-free meat and cage-free eggs. These and other initiatives have increased employees’ passion and emotional attachment for the brand and differentiated the business in the marketplace.
“The critical decisions of this brand stewardship of the company should be very tightly focused, and it should be highly centralized,” Bauccio says. “ … I’ve kept that stewardship at my level and because I’ve done that, I’ve been able to communicate it each and every day — that dream — and continue to reinforce it all the time, and somehow, it’s worked its way down into the organization so that everyone from a vice president to a dishwasher gets it and understands it — it’s part of the culture now.”
