#36 Developing a New Generation of Leaders with Carrie Jones-Barber, CEO of Dawn Foods

Thank you. It's great to be here. Nice to see you virtually, but good to see you. Thanks for having me.

Well, without question it has to be my role as president of international. That's where I really learned the value of diversification, of understanding people from different backgrounds and how they bring their perspectives to the workplace, how they are different in solving problems in completely different ways and how creative that can be, and to really appreciate people from different cultures and try to understand their cultures, and the great joy that you can get from experimenting and learning about new people and what drives them and what their cultures are all about. People really appreciate when you want to understand them and their culture, and I just find great excitement in doing that. You know, my daughter and I we love to cook, so being able to eat products from all different kinds of places in the world also was a great way to have a role in the organization while really driving our international business forward. So for so many reasons for me it was a great learning opportunity in many, many different ways.

Well, I think one of the things that I learned was to focus our business. When I took over for international we were all over the place and really not doing a lot of things really well, so unfortunately that meant I had to make some major changes, and yet within a few years we were really doing very well. So really understanding the value of doing what you do well and making sure that you are doing that, and where you're not you got to make a change.

Yes, I do. I love Long John's with Bavarian custard filling and chocolate fondant on the top.

I've always been a fan of chocolate chip cookies ever since my mom made them when I was a kid. For a while, in part of my career, I would actually have a chocolate chip cookie on Friday. So every Friday I would go out and get a chocolate chip cookie and reward myself for whatever was going on that week. So chocolate chip cookies, absolutely.

Sure. I'm actually going to go backwards. As family businesses, and probably other businesses as well, but as our family business, I was able to observe my grandfather, my dad and my uncles as we would be carried around to other industry events like BIMBA and like ABA events. And we got to witness my grandfather, my dad and my uncles interacting with each other, interacting with customers, interacting with suppliers, interacting with other team members. And that really was something that I'm not sure how many people get that opportunity to observe their family in those kinds of settings as well as in addition to of course the home setting. But that really, I didn't realize it, but it had a big impact on me. And when I was about 12 years old, this has been fact-checked with my parents, you can remember there used to be telephones that were plugged into walls, and the telephone in our house upstairs was in my bedroom. Every once in a great while the phone would ring at night. So this particular instance, the phone rang about 2 am, and one of the other things that was a really cool thing I think is in family businesses, my parents would have the salespeople over when they were in town because you don't want people going out and eating on their own when you can invite them over to the house. So I knew so many people in the organization. So at this particular moment, the gentleman on the other end of the phone said, 'Hey Carrie, it's Jerry Lindahl. I'm really sorry to wake you up, I know it's really late, but I need to talk to your dad.' And then within a few days after that, I just said I want to do what my dad does. He helps people solve problems, he helps customers to grow. I had witnessed the passion and the excitement amongst my grandfather and my dad and my uncles and with the team members and with customers. So it all just kind of went together. After that, that was my goal, that was my North Star, and everything I did. I went to business school, I got my MBA, and started working not in the family firm because I wanted to build up my own confidence that I could be successful or not. I didn't think that was probably a likelihood, but to be able to go out and do it on my own first and then be able to come back into the family industry. So that's actually now part of our governance policy to make sure that family members go work somewhere else first. So I started in the medical field and sold medical products for a number of years until I had said I've got that confidence and Dad and I were like okay, time to come back. So that's how it all worked out.

When I think about what the world has gone through and when I think about the challenge that I've experienced before, the one that comes closest would have been the financial crisis that I thought was if I can live through this I can do anything. And then we have the pandemic, and without question, the pandemic threw so many things at us. Everybody in the world really, and your challenges some were the same as others and some were completely different. It has been really incredible and we're not back to normal even yet. But certainly the pandemic itself and what it did to people's physical health and mental health, I think both. We started immediately talking about physical health and keeping our team members safe, and then within a few months we said now we need to start talking about mental health and making sure we're talking to our team members about reaching out to each other, picking up the phone, how are you doing, and making sure we're keeping that connection. We started having global town halls weekly because our team members needed to still understand how we are doing as a company and it connected us all together as well. So we did a lot with our communications teams to really make sure we over-communicated at the same time. And you know, as we just continue to go through it, our business just really went 50% of our business was gone overnight. And trying to figure out okay what are we going to do about that, visiting our bank group immediately and the value of having good relationships with your bank group. We rewrote our covenants and their words were, 'We're going to write your covenants so you don't break them.' They were fantastic. And so the other thing that happened is our entire team came together, the leadership team, and said you know we're going to have to make decisions faster than we ever have, we're going to make decisions when we don't have all the information, and we really said all right, you got expertise here, you go, and you got expertise here, you go, and then we would come back make decisions and just continue to make decisions on the fly. But because we had such a great leadership team, we trusted each other and we said we're not going to get enough information, we're going to have to make the best decision we can, and then if we have to change it again then we're going to be flexible and we're going to change it. And the leadership team has grown so much even in this incredible period of time because we had to trust each other and we had to say you've got the experience, I trust you to get us through this. And it was an amazing period of time from watching how we grew to making sure we're doing everything we could to get into some kind of recovery and what that recovery looked like a year ago is nothing like what the recovery looks like today with commodity shortages and still incredible labor challenges, driver shortages. Commodity prices, it's not bad enough that you can't get the commodities to be able to make the product, your prices in some cases have tripled in certain things. So it makes things incredibly challenging. But again, thinking about today, challenges again. I talked about collaboration. Our procurement team is working closely with R&D who's working with commercial and working with logistics and manufacturing because of the uncertainty of commodities. You know, we can put a forecast together in what we think we're going to run on Wednesday, when the truck does show up on Tuesday we got to pivot and turn and make those products someplace else or make a different set of products. So keeping our teams focused and reminding them they're working incredibly well together and they never know that the uncertainty of what they're dealing with is also challenging. So reminding them they're doing a great job getting us through this, taking care of our customers. It's challenging.

Well, a couple of different things. My family knows I'm an avid runner. I listen to music, I listen to podcasts, I listen to some really crazy podcasts that make me laugh because life can be really serious right now. And you know, just being able to surround yourself with people that you know every once in a while you need to be able to let off some steam and they're good to listen or encourage. So a couple of different ways.

So one of the things that I am incredibly lucky is that I believe in mentors and mentoring both situations. But since the day I started, think about this, I've had the same mentors for my entire career at Dawn: my dad Ron Jones, my uncles Miles Jones and Steve Jones. From the day I started, whether it's direct feedback that sometimes I didn't appreciate or just someone I knew I could go to for help all of the time, and they were always there no matter what the issue was. It's a pretty good no-judgment zone as well. But honestly, when we had this pandemic hit, I went to them and said any advice? And they're like, nope, you got this. We've never seen anything like this before. But that was sort of tongue in cheek. But they're there whenever I've got a question or a challenge. Sometimes it's on really incredible stuff, like have you ever seen this before? And they're really good at being there for me whenever.

Yeah, just a funny story about that. So when we all went into lockdown, my daughter was a senior and so she didn't go to school either. And one of the things, she'd be up in her room studying and then before long she'd be on the floor in my office studying, you know, because we like to be together. And so what was happening is she was also listening in on some of my conversations. I'd have my headset on and all of that for privacy, but then at the dinner table because we always make a point of having dinner together as much as we possibly can, she would start asking me questions about hey, you had that conversation with so and so, how did it go? So it was really, whether she comes into the business or not I don't know, but it was a great experience for her because she is going into business whether she comes into the family business or not, that's her choice. But it was great to see she had an interest and was wondering the outcomes of some of the conversations and challenges.

So a couple of different things. First of all, one of my dreams was to put together a women's leadership development program and we have launched that now. And I'm super excited about it. We will be attending our first meeting hopefully in November, working with a company called Linkage who really excels in women's leadership programs. And it really is all about taking our high-potential women who have been identified and that have shown that they have a desire to improve and continue to drive their careers forward as well. And it's all about taking their passion and their desire and building up their leadership skills. Mentoring and networking are both really important to me and it's now a formal program of mentoring and networking for us as well. Then peer-to-peer, giving them an opportunity to get together actually hopefully in the same room and meet other people that are their peers within Dawn. And that's kind of a networking at a peer level as well. And then part of it is also giving them opportunities to engage with other leaders, other executives in the organization, getting them to make presentations to the leadership team and giving them other opportunities, and then providing air cover for them because it's going to be a new experience. And part of my role is to make it as comfortable for them and to make sure that one of the things we talk about is it's okay to make a mistake because we're going to, and share with them mistakes that I've made to make it comfortable for them. So those are the main tenets of our women's leadership development program. And then we're going to be launching other programs as well for other parts of our organization. And I guess the other thing would be diversity, equity and inclusion. That's a big thing that we have also been working hard to make sure that we are launching a program that really addresses making sure everybody comes to work and can really bring their whole selves and that they feel welcomed, that they are who they are and we want to celebrate that and make sure that everybody feels that they have a place at Dawn and that they can feel comfortable because you're going to get the best out of people when they're feeling the best in their own skin. And that's what we're endeavoring to do.

Well, one of the things we're doing is in October, we've asked people to actually hold up a sign that says 'I am' and then whatever they're going to write. And we've seen some examples already to really talk about what makes me who I am. And we've already seen some examples of people really going out there and bringing their whole selves to share with others. And knowing that people are comfortable to do that is really a great step in the right direction. So that's just a small example of what we do. For others, the other thing we have done is on our emails we have put pronouns for those that are comfortable. And then we have also launched inclusive leadership training to teach our team members how to make people feel comfortable. Because I can tell you, we did that at the leadership team level, some of our team members like oh I know how to do that, and then we took them through some testing and they were pretty surprised at their results. And it sort of leveled the playing field and said we can all learn how to be more inclusive as leaders.

So I've been thinking about that all weekend and I talked to my daughter about it. I went to see her this weekend as well, and she and I came up with lots of things. But she, it was really very special, I have to say. She kept coming back to me and saying, 'You're the super mom.' And she said it over and over. She goes, 'No really, that's what you need to put.' I'm like, 'But really?' And she's like, 'No, you don't take enough credit for what you've done.' And as a single mom, you know, and running the company, I got to take her advice. Maybe I probably won't put super mom, but maybe I'll say single mom. I like the 'super mom' though, I think that's maybe what you could be for Halloween this year too.

That's interesting because I just got off the phone with one of our independent directors, who also was a woman, and we talked about communication styles and what she has witnessed as an independent director and asked me what do I think, how people would react to her feedback to them about the difference in how they might have thought they were going to come across and how they actually did. So to be very honest, I think women are concerned about how we communicate and how our words are important. We're very thoughtful. And I think we play the leadership card of empathy really, really well. And being an empathetic leader, trying to put yourself in someone else's shoes, I think is a very special way to be able to lead and to understand. We were just talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, understand the whole person. But leadership takes a lot of skills and I think empathy is one of them that is especially valuable and helpful, and women I think just tend to do it a little bit better than men.

I love going to the IB for a couple of different reasons. You heard me talk about networking. I love to meet with our teams as well and be able to see so many of our team members all at one time, to be able to talk to our customers and you get so many customer interactions in such a short amount of time. And you know, you're exhausted by the end, but it's a great exhaustion. So being able to talk with our customers. And then a couple of other things: connecting with our vendors. It's a great place to connect and see what they've got new. And they'll come drag me over to their booth and they're like, 'You got to look at this, you got to look at this.' And then we'll bring our engineers out and they'll go out and look at equipment, and then they'll be like, 'You got to come look at this piece of equipment.' And so we go and we all get excited about a piece of equipment that we've been looking for. So there's so much value. And then I think a couple of other things: I love the speakers at IB. They're always just top quality, top notch. I look forward to being able to visit and listen to them and get more great ideas. Also, but one of the things we did a couple of years ago that really took off at the last IB was our trends. And we actually did the research and put the trends up on a wall. And it made such an impact on our customers. One customer came over to me and said, 'You're doing research that we can't afford to do. All I have to do is come look here and go that one makes sense for my business.' And he said, 'I want to bring everybody over here.' He said, 'Actually, I'm a speaker. Can I tell everybody to come to your booth and take a look?' I was like, 'Yep.' So there's so many ways in which we get such great value. And like you said, we have so many of our team members there, we have our technical teams and talking about the donuts, we make about 5,000 donuts every single day. And they're great with a donut and a cup of coffee. And if we can solve the world's problems, all the better.

The main way we do it, we don't have people in 105 countries, but we do have people quite spread out across the world. And it's really through our global town halls. Like I said, in the initial stages of the COVID pandemic, we went to weekly, and that was really important for our team members to be able to stay connected. We are now back to quarterly global town halls. And then we have what we call Leadership Focus, and those are every other month. And the Leadership Focus is really the top 50 to 60 people within the organization. Strong messaging, clear messaging to them what we need, what they need, what do they need to be successful, where are we going, how are we doing. And then for them to cascade that. So in between the Leadership Focus, it's got a real responsibility for those leaders to share with their teams what the lay of the land is for Dawn and where we're going, and ensuring that everyone understands. So we talk a lot about our vision and our mission and our culture, because all three of those things, including our Circle of Excellence, they're the things that set Dawn apart, they're the things that make us different. And I don't say that lightly. And the reason for that is when people come to join Dawn, they might have known us in the industry and I'll say to them it's our culture, and they'll just go like, 'Yeah, everybody says their culture is different.' Well, after they join us, they'll come seek me out because I do the big job on telling everybody what's unique about our culture, and they'll come find me and they'll say, 'You know what? You told me that the culture was different when I was working over there. I could see something was different, but you're right. It's your culture.' When people leave Dawn, I've had them call me and say, 'Do not lose your culture.' You know, we've been around for a hundred years. Our culture is incredibly important to us. We might change a little bit how we describe it, but the values haven't changed. And our vision for taking care of our customers and doing it better than anybody else in the industry, our Circle of Excellence with people at the top, our people are the most important things because they take great care of our customers and they make great products. So it all has to go together, but it does set us apart from our competition.

I think one of the things I would say is, as I mentioned, we don't know what other people are going through. So trying to put yourself in their shoes. There's a lot of strange things that are happening right now in the industry or in the world. People are, I see tension and I see more aggression, and that requires patience. I heard someone describing it the other day and it was a really good description. You know, you can be driving to work some morning and somebody is trying really hard to get in front of you. So do you let off the break and let them in, or do you honk your horn and say you can go behind me? But if you ask yourself maybe they couldn't get their kids to school today, or maybe there's a sickness in the family, and you don't know what they've been through. So give them a break, let him go in front of you. And so I get to work two car lengths later. Just thinking about the world in that way right now I think is incredibly important for us as leaders. And in our industry, you said it, we bring fun, we bring passion, we bring sweet moments of success to people whether they're celebrating my child just got an A on the test so I'm going to bring them home a cookie or a small cake, to wedding celebrations and birthdays. So we get to be a part of people's really fun times in their lives. And let's not forget that that's a big part of what we can get passionate about.

Thank you. And Katie, I love that you really came full circle with that, just like a donut is also full circle. You guys are good. Oh, we've got puns, man.