Build a sandbox
Bauccio doesn’t care what his chefs serve in Bon Appétit’s 400 locations.
It’s not that he’s not interested, but he prefers to empower them to create their own menus based on what’s in season and best appeals to customers in their local regions.
While the mission is very centralized, how his people work toward achieving it is highly decentralized.
“You have to allow people to have freedom to innovate, and you’ve got to say, ‘Go run with your idea, and it’s OK if you make a mistake or fail. Don’t worry about it — at least I know you’re trying to innovate,’” he says. “I think that’s how people can get emotional attachment to a company.”
Bauccio likens it to a sandbox. You can make it as large or as deep as you want. You can fill it with lots of different buckets, tools and toys for them to play with inside. And you can tell someone that they can do whatever they want with those tools and toys, as long as they stay inside the boundaries of the sandbox.
“The boundaries are really the key elements of the dream or the key elements of the brand,” he says. “But it’s your sandbox, so you can make anything you want within it. You can create the castles or whatever you do, as long as you stay within the box — or the rules.”
For example, Bauccio doesn’t care what kind of soup his chefs serve. But he does care that all soups start with a simple ingredient — homemade stock. Anytime he walks into a kitchen, one of the first things he’ll check is if the chef has a stock pot going because it helps achieve the mission of fresh food.
“The boundaries have to do with the original values of what you’re trying to accomplish, so that you can continue to create distinctiveness in the marketplace,” he says.
A sandbox has few boundaries — each side and the bottom. Similarly, don’t put too many boundaries on your people.
“Throw the rules out the window, for the most part, with the exception of, ‘This is our focus and our brand, and these are the things that are critically important,’” Bauccio says. “Talk about the things that are critically important. Everything in between that, go do your thing.”
Sometimes people will stray outside of the sandbox.
“Try to bring them back and make them understand why they have to come back, but if they continue to go out, they don’t belong,” he says.
How many chances they get really depends on the situation.
Sometimes you want to give people two, three, four, five chances,” he says. “It depends on what they did when they went out of the box. There are times when they go outside the box once that you have to deal with ethical or integrity situations that you won’t tolerate, and those you just cut them loose.”
For example, if someone was stealing food or money, taking kickbacks from suppliers, or sexually discriminating against people, he would let them go. This sends a message that you don’t want ethical issues jeopardizing your company. But there are other situations that you can give people a second chance.
“Those kinds of things are intolerable,” he says. “Making a mistake by not having the stock pot in for a couple days, we can tolerate that.”
