Lean on Me

FoodService Director - What I Learned - Troy Gauthier - Mayo Clinic Arizona - Lean On Me

FoodService Director - What I Learned - Troy Gauthier - Mayo Clinic Arizona - Lean On Me

“We felt like we were a strong team, but we felt like we really wanted to take it a step further. We have another location that is about 13 miles away. The sites never really communicated. It was always them out there and us here. We decided we wanted to build cohesiveness between the two sites to better serve our customers.

We had a retreat the first day of training with two coaches. We talked about what was important to all of us, where we saw our vision of where we wanted to go. This was just for the managers. We developed a statement of intention for service excellence. The statement is: ‘The food and nutrition leadership team will strive to go beyond service excellence to a common vision, collaboration, mutual trust and respect and humor. Through our actions we will encourage our team to utilize their individual strengths to achieve endless possibilities.’ Before this we didn’t have a vision statement. We had a general one, to provide high-quality food and education and to support the overall mission of Mayo Clinic. We felt like this clarified that.

We put the statement on cards and handed them out to all 125 of our staff at both sites. We made posters for each of our offices. We told everyone where we wanted to go as a team. Since passing out these cards, we’ve seen such a positive outlook. They know that we are willing to do what we have to do to work together as a team.

One of the areas we wanted to focus on with the leadership training was our staff and making sure that the staff was recognizing each other. This has grown into what we call a Super Star. We’ve made up these stickers that they wear on their uniforms and they say, ‘I’m a Super Star.’ We pull everyone together for a daily meeting and we go through some general departmental information. Then we open it up to the staff to nominate a coworker for going above and beyond. They articulate something like I saw my coworker get up from her lunch break yesterday and help somebody in a wheelchair get through the cafeteria. For such a small thing, the staff really gets excited. The biggest thing is that it’s gotten everyone looking at what we do every day and how we take care of our customers and what can we do better.

The managers meet on a monthly basis and we decide the big projects we want to focus on. The organization has rolled out a Live Well program for all the employees at Mayo Clinics throughout the country. Our role in that was to come up with how we could support this program through our department. That’s one thing that we’ve really done a lot with. We offer whole-grain pastas and whole-wheat breads. We’ve introduced organic and locally grown produce. We’ve come up with a daily special in each of our stations. We offer the recipes and the nutritional information. It’s called our Live Well feature of the day. We do a punch card where if you buy nine Live Well meals, you get the tenth for free.

I think as a management team, we didn’t know each other’s strengths. It’s rewarding to learn that we all have our individual strengths and to be able to use each other’s strengths and learn from it. We learned to be able to lean on each other and learned who to turn to in different situations to rely on other people’s expertise to make you a better manager.

Before the training, when we would have meetings, they were task-oriented meetings versus vision oriented where we could learn about all of our personal values and what we wanted out of our careers. We learned that we all had similar desires for where we wanted this department to go.”