Finding a Recipe for Business Success

Finding a Recipe for Business Success

By Tricia Rodewald

While enjoying an incredible meal at a local French restaurant, I was reminded of why France has long been considered to be the pinnacle of culinary achievement. The country’s commitment to providing delectable dishes is as much of an art as it is as science. It requires quality elements, proper measurements, continuous development, a commitment to excellence, and great patience.

In an inspired moment (most likely the result of the delicious food I was eating), I recognized many similarities between the process of creating exceptional cuisine and the process of developing a successful company. In fact, one of France’s signature dishes, the cheese soufflé, offers particularly apt inspiration.

The definition of soufflé is “to rise up,” and it’s the rising-up process that makes it one of the most nerve-wracking, intimidating dishes to accomplish. It also makes it a thought-provoking analogy to growing a flourishing and expanding company.

Like the process of constructing a soufflé, there are diverse approaches or “recipes” to developing an exceptional company. But even with a consistently strong recipe for success, tastes, preferences, and temperatures of every industry can (and usually do) change. This is why it’s beneficial to add new flavors and essential ingredients to your recipe. Evaluating directions and adjusting approaches from time to time are what make it possible for companies to continue heating things up, stay innovative, and keep appreciative customers coming back.

Select Quality Ingredients

As with the ingredients in a soufflé, in order for an organization to impress clients, its associates need to be carefully selected, evaluated for quality, and be able to blend well while enhancing the end result. For example, the ingredients in a cheese soufflé are butter, flour, milk, eggs, seasoning, cheese and maybe some pureed vegetables.

However, if rice flour is used instead of all-purpose flour, or pre-sliced processed cheese instead of the finest Gruyère from Switzerland is used, the flavors are unlikely to integrate well. As a result, the end product will be less than desirable. Like seeking the finest ingredients at a gourmet food shop, the same attention should be given to recruiting and hiring your associates.

In addition to establishing a hiring team to review resumes and select candidates who possess the technical “hard skills” needed for the job (e.g., ability to understand the regulatory intricacies of bringing a device to market), it’s imperative that the selection committee also identify important cultural “soft skills.”

Ideally, a candidate’s cultural capabilities augment or balance out the relational aspect of a team, department, or entire company. Technical and cultural skills contribute to the success of a company, so candidates should be evaluated for both. Giving talent and teamwork equal measure throughout the hiring process allows the proverbial “cream” of the candidate crop to rise to the top.

Stir It Up

Simply putting quality ingredients in a bowl does not make an award-winning dish. Neither does placing qualified associates in a building make for a productive, prosperous company. To create an exceptional outcome, they must be carefully blended and folded together.

Once again, the cheese soufflé is a useful example. A soufflé starts with a basic flour and butter base. Think of this base like a new associate orientation. It gently starts introducing a new associate to other team members in the organization, reinforces his or her position and role within the company, and strengthens their decision to join your team.

But any company can hold a dry, bland and basic “please-fill-out-these-forms”orientation. A top-rated company, on the other hand, takes its orientation a step further by exposing new associates to different departments and functional areas within the company where they would not normally have contact. For example, a new account manager might work with the assembly team to put together a bone drill; or a new engineer might work with the marketing team to create an ad for publication in Medical Product Outsourcing.

This added measure helps everyone understand and appreciate one another’s roles and responsibilities better, and forms a stronger, more effective base from which the rest of the organizational structure is built.

The Big Cheese

Another blending technique is cultural training. Cultural training options can be as versatile as adding cheese to a soufflé. The options seemingly are endless, but the stronger your cheese, the more robust your end result will be.

Some view cultural training as short in-service sessions that teach how to better communicate or get along with others. While those elements certainly contribute to a productive, collaborative culture and a successful company, a more potent approach is to offer cultural training that focuses on operating principles for your organization.

Depending on the values and “flavors” of your organization, operating principles may include things such as: “Be responsible for creating value for myself and others,” “Declare that each person’s contributions are valid and valuable,” and “Deal with real issues and situations.”

Training all associates on the same basic operating principles can greatly enhance the orientation process and help develop the cultural tone of an organization.

By serving as a guide for how to communicate more constructively and creatively, operating principles allow for the unique flavors of each associate to be blended more effectively, raising the organization’s productivity and progress.

Kick It Up a Notch

Hiring people who have the technical and cultural skills required by your organization and training them on operating principles that enhance productivity and collaboration is a proven recipe for developing successful teams that support an innovative, flourishing company. But as every cook knows, a recipe is just a guide. It offers instructions that can help save time, reduce errors, and provide clarification and recommendations. But it’s also a framework to build off of.

If you have a proven recipe for a parmesan and cheddar cheese soufflé, it may receive positive accolades from all who taste it. But by adding broccoli, or zucchini, or artichoke, you’re likely to kick the dish up a notch, taking it from good to great.

Offering continuing education opportunities can have the same affect. You may have a good company with good associates who do good work, but when given opportunities to strengthen their skill sets, your associates are likely to produce great work that helps your company thrive—not just survive—in the marketplace. Continuing education does not have to be a costly, time consuming, complex process. While there are valuable continuing education opportunities for associates offered outside of an organization, some of the most influential and effective forms can be integrated on a consistent basis inside your company.

For example, having multiple machine floor team members cross-trained to use various types of inspection equipment and high-tolerance technology leverages a medical manufacturer’s ability to recognize, maintain, and even increase quality.

Medical device manufacturers that do not emphasize continuing education often miss opportunities to embrace the newest technology or requirements needed to keep themselves and their clients competitive.

The Egg White Secret

No matter what type (sweet, savory, hot, or cold), all soufflés are made by folding whipped egg whites into a flavored base (flour, butter, milk, egg yolks, grated cheeses and vegetables). Egg whites are an essential element to a successful soufflé because they give the dish its volume. When it bakes, the heat of the oven causes the trapped “air” in the egg whites to expand, pushing the soufflé up. But if they are not whipped correctly, the soufflé will not rise. Think of the egg whites’ effect on a soufflé like the day-to-day collaboration of associates within an organization. If not given the proper time, respect and attention, the company will struggle to rise up. And like whipping the egg whites correctly so they get just the right amount of air, fostering a collaborative culture can be a complex, exacting process. There are different needs, perspectives, ways of communicating, and a host of other challenges. However, if there’s a strong commitment to fostering a collaborative culture, then two fundamental techniques that can increase the chances that it will arise are: 1) Hire people that share the commitment to work collaboratively, and 2) put them in an environment where that commitment is reinforced.

A highly skilled associate who values learning, growing, and adding value to the team reinforces a collaborative environment. But, like a soufflé that falls before it’s been served, even an exemplary associate is likely to stumble. This may mean he or she accidentally steps on someone’s toes or says something in a disdainful or judgmental way—even if it’s unintentional. Whatever the situation, when people work together, conflicts are bound to happen.

This is why establishing a work environment founded on robust cultural operating principles is so crucial. When issues between associates or entire teams occur, those cultural operating principles are the directions back to cooperation and productivity.

But it’s not enough just to be aware of the operating principles. How the work culture applies those principles on a daily basis is what separates them from companies that merely talk about being collaborative.

For example, at a business development meeting, a sales associate might come up with creative ideas for promoting the company’s product or service, but those ideas may be dismissed by a new marketing director as being too risky. While the newdirector may be correct in his or her assessment, the way in which the opinion was communicated was counter-productive. Furthermore, he or she potentially may alienate the sales associate and business development team, hindering the overall project success.

One strategy to prevent counter-productive communication from developing is for another associate (who also was present at the meeting) to quietly take the new marketing director aside and tactfully make them aware of how they came across. Associates who go through a careful, intentional hiring process and are hired for their technical skills as much as for their cultural abilities, will be more likely to take constructive feedback and apply it to remedy the situation. They may pay more attention to listening to the different perspectives at the next meeting before sharing their thoughts and take more responsibility for what they say and how it gets heard. The point is, when colleagues use the operating principles to help one another recognize that their communication approach wasn’t constructive, that’s the egg white that reinforces healthy, productive behavior and strengthens the commitment to learning, growing andenhancing the organization.

Savor the Process

There’s no “perfect recipe” for success. But high-quality associates, a commitment to collaboration, proactive learning, and, of course, time, all are fundamental to developing a successful medical device company. How these elements are developed is open to interpretation. The important thing is that when tastes, needs, and wants in the marketplace change, these components will position your organization to quickly adapt and meet those new preferences. Like cooking, there’s an art and a science to developing the individuals and teams that make up a successful company. It’s a process of consistent adjustments—however slight—to ensure that the unique flavors of the company are being emphasized. The aspiration is that the result will be an uplifted company both internally and externally.

Tricia Rodewald is director of marketing for Pro-Dex, Inc., an Irvine, Calif.-based design, development, and contract manufacturer for medical device OEMs.