The Best Recipe: The Secret Ingredient to Workforce & Leadership Development

by Robin Evans

Last year our Event Coordinator, Robin Evans, wrote a blog about Leadership ( Green Flags of Leadership ). She’s back again this month with another story on this topic.

In my family, Dad was the cook. His dad had been a cook in the Army where he learned how to cook for, well, a literal army. Add to that, these men were deeply Southern and running out of food ranks up there as an unconscionable sin. Whether a Sunday supper, a holiday celebration, or church potluck, tables and kitchen counters barely contained all the food. As an engineer, the kitchen became a place of creativity for Dad. And he got pretty darn good at it.   

After decades of bringing dishes to his Supper Club dinners and Sunday School socials, he had a handful of recipes people would request. This was high praise in the South. People handed out their prized meals on recipe cards with names like, Linda’s Chili or Mama Bibb’s Angel Biscuits, to be filed away next to treasured family recipes passed down through generations.

He beamed.

One of those was his Spaghetti Salad. Mike’s Spaghetti Salad. Although, we would often hear people say, “I followed Mike’s recipe, but it just doesn’t taste the same.” Inevitably followed with the compliment, “I don’t know how he does it!”

And of course, he beamed just a little brighter.

Trying to replicate that same recipe, I got frustrated enough to ask him myself. Why doesn’t this taste the same, Dad? And he let me in on the secret: One of the ingredients, Italian dressing, had to be Zesty Italian dressing. But when he’d given out the recipe, he’d deliberately left the “zesty” off.

The secret tweak ensured his dish was still the best.

For a man who spent his life feeding and serving others, it was a delightfully silly act for Dad. Years later, we shared the secret ingredient with folks, and they giggled at the silly with us. Then promptly updated their recipe card.

At TMAC, I am part of the Outreach Team which includes Business Development, Marketing, Communications, and Event Planning. Part of our recipe: We get to host the fun stuff like our Mad Lab Halloween event last year.

(Sidenote: Our Automation Team is working on programing one of their robots to hand out swag to attendees at our events and I simply cannot contain my gleeful delight over this. Engineers are the coolest.)

Throughout our meetings, trainings, and yes, parties, with manufacturers, we hear a consistent plea for help with workforce development and leadership. How can we find, train, keep, and promote employees? In a very real sense, this is part of the recipe for success of all companies, manufacturing or service.

Our Lean Six Sigma team has some ideas on this question. They’ve seen a thing or two in their 20+ years of training critical thinkers and developing leaders. Take what Outreach hears out in the wild (i.e., outside the training rooms) and combine it with our instructors’ experience (inside the training rooms) and I think we’ve found the tweak to The Best Recipe.

Taking a cue from Dad, it’s a silly metaphor, but let’s go with it, shall we?

Workforce and leadership training are kinda’ like one of those potluck suppers for which Dad prepared his famous Spaghetti Salad.

At a potluck, there are rows of dishes you probably know nothing about. Some you’re pretty sure you don’t want to know about at all. Some are confusing, like the potato salad with raisins. I mean, it’s a choice, but not one you would make. But there are some, like Mike’s Spaghetti Salad, you’ve heard about and yeah, you’re intrigued.

When it comes to Leadership there are consultants, personal coaches, seminars and workshops, on-site training, webinars, and seemingly endless YouTube videos and social media creators. Not surprisingly, all of them promise they have The Best Recipe to help you with workforce and leadership development. Each one is like the old SNL skit with Hans and Franz. They’re there to *clap* train you up.

As you stand there, perusing the options at the Leadership Potluck, you decide to try a few things. You take a flyer from this company, schedule a call with that coach, and register for a free workshop with some consultant. Surely, in all that, you’ll find the secret ingredient you need to help your company, team, or maybe, even yourself.

You do the things, read, meet, attend, and at the end of it all you narrow it down to The One. This is the training with The. Best. Recipe.

Then reality kicks in. The program you chose didn’t turn out the way you hoped. It sounded good. Great, even. When your college roommate’s company used it, whoa, did it really take off. He talked about that dish of a program at every golf tournament, holiday picnic, and happy hour for a solid year. You went all in. Yet somehow, it just didn’t taste the same. Something was missing.

It works… if we do the work.

We’ve all been there. And it’s not just workforce and leadership development that gets old and replaced with the newest, greatest thing. Maybe it’s human nature or maybe it’s the nature of free markets, but whatever it is, we are all guilty of jumping from one big thing because of the promise of the next big thing.

But we miss the key ingredient in all of this.

Us.

You and me.

We are the Zesty Italian Dressing in Mike’s Famous Spaghetti Salad recipe.

In every system, in every The Best Recipe, nothing happens without us. We commit at first … but then stuff happens. Our commitment level drops as we get led astray by some shiny object. And The Best Recipe, the thing that was gonna transform our team, ends up working just okay.

The truth is most of these programs work. But only if we do the work. 

The Best Recipe

First, gather your ingredients. Here’s the good news: You already have them all! You’ve been to enough potlucks. You just need to move on to step two.

Next, pick a plan. You have perused enough. Over here in the LSS Team, we like Clifton Strengths (formerly Gallup StrengthFinders) for personal and leadership development. You kinda need to know yourself first – what your strengths are – before you can do the work of developing your team to achieve their potential. Likewise, we are big proponents of Training Within Industry (TWI) as foundational to effective leadership skills. Eric Thompson, one of our instructors, is a certified TWI coach. He recently finished a month of free introductory workshops on each of the main four TWI Programs. We’ll host those again in the Fall. (Make sure you’re signed up for our LSS Newsletter to hear about those first.)

Third, work the plan. Just as there’s no surefire way to cut corners in a kitchen the same is true in leadership development. Schedule time to prepare: Read, study, do the homework. Then schedule time for meetings, training, and coaching for your team. Introduce them to the program. Admit you know this has been tried in the past, but this time, you want them with you, working the plan and holding you accountable for getting it done. This is an investment in them and their future as much as it is an investment in the success of the team and the company.

Fourth, make adjustments… then work the plan. You will likely fail, at least a little bit, along the way. Observe closely what works and what does not. When things don’t go as planned get back up, make any needed adjustments, then recommit to the plan.

Repeat steps three and four for every new team member.

Now you have The Best Recipe for workforce and leadership development!

You had it all along. But now you know the secret tweak to the recipe is YOU.