Entrepreneur Blog – Dancing Deer Baking Co.
By Trish Karter, CEO and co-founder

IN THE MOOD FOR MOTHER'S DAY

Posted on May 9, 2008

 

I'm thinking about CEOs and mothers in the context of Mother's Day, and two themes keep surfacing. First, it occurs to me that the nurturing/teaching/inspiring/protecting/redirecting people sides of these two jobs require essentially the same skills to achieve success and happiness (define happiness however you will). And second, neither these skills nor their impact on individuals and society are valued highly in economic terms.

 

There is no economic mechanism for rewarding high-performing mothers in our economy. It's unpaid, relatively low (economic) status work. The reward comes from personal satisfaction. We do it for love.

 

In business, the importance of building a team in order to grow a company is central to most theories about success. The rewards are many when things are working. But when things get tough and the numbers aren't landing, it is totally about financial performance in the minds of most weathered executives or board directors, not about growing the people. The nurturing stuff goes out the window. People represent elements of cost, strategy or implementation. Their individual hopes, potential and fears are not the point. This isn't totally unwise or unfair. It forces efficiency on the commercial/industrial complex. But it's brutal. The importance of people skills takes lower ranking in times of trouble. When the "hard" choices get made, they are rarely in favor of the nurturers.

 

Not so with mothers and their relationship to troubled children or their commitment to them. That's pretty much unmovable in spite of the economics. Of course!

 

What would it look like if business cared more about people, and society valued mothering and nurturing more highly and rewarded it economically? I don't know what it would look like, but my intuition says it would be way better than the status quo.

 

As a CEO, I've gotten in trouble many times in many different ways by going heavy on the people-nurturing side of management. It's unbusinesslike! I fail to make hard decisions fast enough. I set bad examples for nonperformers who expect to be coached, trained and given second chances. I overvalue relationships and get caught when it's not reciprocal. Yeah, I get all that, and yet I wouldn't do it otherwise because for me, business is personal, and my work and value systems are inextricably connected. It's always about the people.

 

Here's just one of a million reasons why. Today our development bench baker asked me if I had a few minutes to talk. He has been with Dancing Deer for 10 years. He started with no baking skills and little English, and now he has his hand in every new product we develop. In a recent InfoX I'd said some things that made him feel bad. InfoX is a weekly all-team, half-hour session run by staff where we exchange ideas, information and inspiration. It's a time when people get to know what's going on, what's fun, what's not working. This is a really hard time in the food business. The market is ugly, and raw materials prices are through the roof. But relative to the challenges of the past, it's still not such a big deal. I was reflecting on some of the hurdles we've jumped and looked around the room, calling out the people who had been here eight years ago when my ex-husband and ex-partner and I all got into a really messy divorce that nearly killed the company. Now that was hard.

 

He wanted to talk to me about not having called his name. It hurt his feelings. The moment he began to speak about it I realized the omission. Of the two of us, I was much more upset. We hugged and talked about the times we've been through. He told me how inspired he is by me. I told him the same. We laughed and cried. All was well. Mother or CEO, that was one of the highlights of my career. No question in my mind – that line between CEO, management and motherhood is meant to be crossed. The value of my relationship with him, the contribution he has made to the company, the growth he has experienced because of being here, the gift we gave each other of having such clarity and honesty, what that does for the organization – all priceless. That exchange wouldn't have taken place if there wasn't a culture of nurture, support and familial connection.

 

So this Mother's Day, think of ways to celebrate what is so powerful about motherhood, and go find some places to reject the status quo and cross a line. Change the world while you're at it, one relationship at a time. The economics will follow.

 

Trish Karter is CEO and co-founder of Dancing Deer Baking Company. dancingdeer.com

To comment on this blog, e-mail blog@pinkmagazine.com and enter "Trish Karter" in the subject line.

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FEARS AND CONCERNS (AND THE BRUTAL TRUTH)
Posted on March 28, 2008

In the early days of Dancing Deer, I didn't imagine that by the time we'd reached this scale it would still be so challenging on a basic daily level. The organization is still very much a work in progress. All of us had been feeling we were working too hard and making too little progress.

So we retreated to my house for the day, and with the help of a really talented coach, Ms. Jake Karger, started carving up the elephant. We also planned on making paninis together, playing in the yard and taking a hike in the woods.

We did what Jake calls the "fears and concerns" meeting. The essence of it is that through list-making exercises and trust-building, the team does an enormous data-dump of everything they're unhappy or worried about, things that hold them back, things that seem too challenging, and so on. My job as CEO was to listen – absolutely no commentary allowed. It got pretty ugly, but I knew there was both truth and goodwill in every comment. It doesn't seem like anyone held anything back, either! That's where the quality of our relationships with each other comes into play. You can do an exercise like this if you've been building trust and respect and have a reservoir of positive stuff to draw on.

A list of 150-plus issues was created in rapid fire and taped up on the walls. Each person identified the top 10 things that, if fixed, would make the greatest contribution to forward movement. When we were all ready, we each placed stickers on those 10. Not surprisingly, there were clusters around a few themes. The rest of the day was spent examining the common threads. We found it so powerful, interesting and fun that we never got to the frolicking part of the day.

As we've grown, we've gotten really good at getting things done through heroic efforts. But along the way, we'd failed to clearly identify ownership for all deliverables and essentially guaranteed the need for heroism. We would occasionally come up against a blind spot and crash. The most glaring ownership gap had been right in front of us all along.

It was the ownership of the new product management process – from start to finish. There are countless steps, with literally every function within the company playing a role. And we do a tremendous amount of product development, so it's a major resource within the company. But there was no one owner of the entire life cycle: developing recipes, packaging, copy, production testing, safety, automation, nutritionals, marketing, photography, accounting, bills of materials, pricing, purchasing, inventory management and more.

As soon as we were sitting in a room together with our frustrations pasted up on the walls, we got clarity and unanimity about that one. We got there by describing our frustrations and listing things that needed to be fixed in order to move the business forward. The ownership issue surfaced quickly. We then moved to listing other critical functions and assigning them to each of the management teams represented. We kept coming back to issues related to new and seasonal product introductions and rotations. We then brainstormed an amazing list of possible fixes. Some were wacky but useful to think about. Ultimately, we created a new position. Since we had arrived at the awareness as a group, we have tremendous group commitment and support in making this solution – and this person – successful.

Now we're in the process of defining who owns what (WOW) more broadly throughout the company and drilling in to other issues. But this was the big ugly one, and having tackled it, the others feel less threatening.

Trish Karter is CEO and co-founder of Dancing Deer Baking Company. dancingdeer.com

To comment on this blog, e-mail blog@pinkmagazine.com and enter "Trish Karter" in the subject line.