for northwest Missouri, and it takes a while when you make that commitment, you say we want this community to be proud that we’re here. We appreciate them, we support them. We want to do our part. Takes a little while to get recognized, but I appreciate that recognition, and I think what it means is that work is paying off. When I have an opportunity to see the mayor of St. Joseph, again — this is a wonderful town to do business. They are proud of St. Joseph’s community pulling together, representing each other well, and I think it’s a recognition not only of Triumph Foods, but just really what this northwest Missouri can do. Let’s get some leadership insights. In your opinion, what makes a leader truly influential, and specifically what qualities make someone an effective leader in the pork industry? So I mentioned two individuals a little bit earlier, Bob Christensen and Myrl Mortenson, and I want to talk a little bit about each of them and how I’ve tried to bring that into my own style. Myrl is a gentleman who when you talk to him, you feel just a little bit smarter, a little bit taller, every time you finish a conversation. He just has a way of building people up that is pretty incredible. And so he served on our board for quite some time before he retired, and I learned a lot of things about how to communicate, how to build people up so they can go be their best self. But the other lesson, and the thing that I try to remember each day as a CEO, and I mean, you’re talking to CEOs, the perspective from this job is challenging, because every day you wake up, you get out of bed, you’re a normal person. You brush your teeth like a normal person. You talk to your wife like a normal person, you communicate with friends, and then you get to work, and it’s like this weird shield descends, and people don’t treat you like a normal person. And it takes active engagement to be accessible. And Bob Christensen, when I first met him, I mean, I was just an accountant, no reason to get the level of attention or access that we had. We were losing a bunch of money. He had bigger things to do. But you know, when there was an opportunity to interact, Bob was accessible, and I miss him. And the legacy that I
think about for Triumph Foods, what that meant to me is you have to go out of your way to be accessible to team members, to make sure they don’t think that there’s a myth of a CEO. So around here, our headquarters at our plant, I get a chance to go walk around and if somebody thinks they’ve got an idea, I ask them to raise their hand. We have people who come up with different ideas down on the line . There was a production process, and somebody said, you know, this would be easier if I took this shelf, made something out of a cardboard box. It’s much easier to do their process. That’s great. Let’s fab up something permanent so we don’t have to make it each day. The commitment — there’s a woman that’s in our FSQA, and when I first took over responsibilities for food safety, I’d see reports that always had her name, and she just kind of always was minding the store, making sure we didn’t leave any small bit behind — and making sure that we’re in a position so that she always feels like her voice is being heard, is important to me. As we transition to success stories, SwineWeb, we have a people and profiles page. I know you emailed me happy about the profiling that we’re doing of successes in the pork industry, because I feel like we need to celebrate successes in people. Why do you believe these stories are impactful, and how do they shape our industry’s narrative? It’s important to tell our stories. We have on our website different stories about people in their journeys here at Triumph Foods, when they started, where they finished. And I think a lot of times in agriculture, people are so separated that they don’t really understand the transformative power of this industry. One of my favorite, I have a lot of favorite managers around here, but one of them, it’s a guy who’s in our IT department, but he started out and he’s from Cuba, didn’t speak any English, and the guy next to him on the line said, we’re going to learn to speak English. And for several years, they were de-boning and practicing English all day. And he developed a command in English. He was in the maintenance department, and he got some ad ditional training. He joined IT. He told me the story because I thought he grew up speaking English. I didn’t realize he learned it here.
42
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online