People
Mike Stigers is the president of Wakefern Food Corp. and a board member of the Western Association of Food Chains. In advance of WAFC’s annual convention, Mike sat down with AlixPartners to discuss his views on leadership and training and development in grocery.
Q: How do you think about developing people in your organization?
A: I believe in continuous improvement. At the end of every year, I evaluate what I did to enhance my ability to drive our business forward, and I evaluate what we did as a company to enhance the ability of every associate, manager and senior leader to do the same. I’ve seen it over and over: people who are growing individually create growth for their company.
We spend hundreds of thousands annually on our internal program, for leaders at all levels, and we also invest in sending people through a number of different external programs.
Every company says their most important asset is their employees, but investing in training and development is how you prove it.
Q: How would you describe the industry’s general inclination toward training and development?
A: There’s obviously a spectrum. On one end are grocers that view training and development as a non-negotiable, an investment for the long-term health of the business. One the opposite end are grocers that view training and development as a lower-tier expense to be managed. It lives at the bottom of the P&L, and it often gets cut in Q3 or Q4 when the race is on to hit the numbers. In general, I believe it’s fair to say that training and development is more commonly treated as a “nice-to-have” rather than a “must-have.”
Q: What harm does it cause to put training and development on the back burner?
A: As an industry, we would never consider not putting fuel in our tractor trailers or not changing the oil. Yet we’re often less stringent about fueling and maintaining our people.
Think about the cost when associates — or executives — run out of gas and quit. Think about the cost when they stay but deliver below-average performance for years.
These consequences compound over time, too. Every delay until next year of the training and development planned for this year, for example, puts your people and your organization further behind, both in terms of capability and in terms of morale.
Q: What’s the business case for training and development?
A: You can expect more from your leaders if they’re trained and educated and motivated properly. Retention and continuity come into play here.
For example, AlixPartners analyzed the career progression of people who went through WAFC’s programs compared to peers who did not and found that graduates stayed with their companies much longer than average.
What kind of financial targets would you set if you could expect your executive team members to stay, on average, eight years longer than what is typical? What goals would you aspire to if your store-level leaders stayed five years longer than average?
When you’re starting a program from scratch, you figure out what the rate is on invested capital that you have to earn, and you embed those numbers into your budget. You put training and development at the top of the P&L, and you start slow in year one. Then, as your program becomes established, you can raise your ambition for the whole organization because now people are equipped to deliver a level of growth they couldn’t have before.
Q: How do you handle it when someone you’ve invested in decides to leave?
A: You can’t be afraid of that. You may train some incredible people and not have enough big jobs for them, and they may leave to chase some of those big jobs. To me, that’s just a badge of honor. When I get phone calls from people 10-15 years after we’ve spoken last, and they say they never would’ve gotten the new job they just landed had I not sent them to a certain program, those are some of the best calls I get. That’s where you leave legacies.
Q: What would you say to executives who might be hesitant about prioritizing training and development because of pressure from bosses focused on the short term?
A: Spending money in areas where ROI is easier to calculate might feel less risky, but in reality, there’s no decision you make where your neck’s not on the line. There’s no decision you make that’s not a gamble to some extent. That’s just part of being a leader.
You have to have a tremendous amount of self-confidence to train and develop and allow people to truly lead. It can’t be about you. It’s got to be about your people, and it’s got to be about the long-term growth and evolution of the organization under your stewardship.
