The situation (2007 to 2008, and 2011)
Food Services of America, part of Services Group of America, is a large regional privately held farm-to-table foodservice distributor. Roughly 3,000 people, built over decades around one founder. Pilot had been inside it before, and had been chosen on the merits. In 2007 Steve Manuszak, then Senior Vice President of Human Resources, put three options for leadership development in front of the C-suite and the family owners: the Center for Creative Leadership, Thunderbird University, and Pilot Advisors. After interviews, the group chose Pilot unanimously.
Andrew ran the development process through the organization across 2007 and 2008, which is how he came to know its leaders by name, its operating values, and the way a decision actually moved through the place.
Thomas J. Stewart founded Services Group of America and owned it outright. On February 14, 2010 he was killed in a helicopter crash. He was 64, he was still running the company, and there was no warning of any kind.
Pilot was called back in 2011. An organization can lose its systems and rebuild them. Losing the person it was organized around is a different problem, and most of what gets written about culture has nothing useful to say about it. The processes still worked. The people still knew their jobs. What was gone was the assumption underneath every decision that someone knew where this was all going.
Look at how the company was actually wired and the size of the hole becomes clear. Stewart had established twelve operating values, and he ran them himself. Every leader in the company answered to him individually. He reviewed each of them and directed each of them, and that was the leadership model. There was no other one. The values were real and they were proven, and they existed as one man's personal mandate rather than as anything the organization could operate on its own. So the day he died, three thousand people kept their jobs, their customers and their processes, and lost the only mechanism the company had for deciding anything above the level of a single manager's authority. The team was execution-oriented, and execution without direction raises the risk of failure rather than lowering it.
The choice among the three had been made four years earlier. In 2011 the company came back to the firm it had already picked, and asked it for something considerably harder than leadership development. Ownership passed to Stewart's son, who took over the business. Andrew worked as executive advisor, the role now called Fractional COO, to the newly placed owner and to the presidents of each profit center and operating unit.
What we did
- Started with an evaluation, not a program. A composed, practical read of the business model, the team's capabilities and the constraints, and the resolution of the internal conflicts that had opened up after Stewart's death. Nothing else on this list is possible until that is done, and an advisor who skips it is running a program rather than an engagement. It went faster here than it would have anywhere else, because most of it had been done three years earlier. An outside firm arriving cold at a 3,000-person distributor in that condition spends its first quarter learning the company. This one already knew it.
- Formed the Presidents Council and chartered it. The fifty-seven were not selected. They were the leadership the company already had, the heads of the profit centers and operating units and the people around them, every one of whom had spent a career reporting to one man individually and to no one collectively. They were also substantially the same fifty-seven who had been through the 2007 and 2008 development process, so the Council was formed out of a group that had already done work on itself, together, before it was asked to govern. The Council made them a body. Its charter was to work together to provide leadership to the organization, including to the newly placed owner and chief executive and his executive team. That last clause is the unusual one and it is the whole design. A new owner arriving at a 3,000-person company that has just lost its founder has no independent read on the business except what he is handed. Chartering the operating leadership to lead upward as well as downward gave him one, and gave the leaders a legitimate standing to provide it. It also settled, on day one, the question every organization in that position spends two years litigating: who decides now.
- Made Stewart's twelve values operable. The work did not produce a new set of values. The twelve were already right and already proven in the business. What they had never had was implementation as a culture, because they had only ever been implemented through his review and direction of each leader personally. Workshops and processes were built to carry each value into how the company actually worked, run through the fifty-seven so they arrived at what the values required in their own words rather than receiving an interpretation.
- Led the formulation and dissemination of the organization's mission, vision and strategy, with the fifty-seven carrying it.
- Established governance protocols to enforce execution accountability. This is the step that separates culture work that holds from culture work that decays. A set of values with no change in who decides what is a poster. Governance is what makes direction binding on real decisions.
- Designed executive and leadership development programs to carry the change across the enterprise rather than leaving it with the fifty-seven.
The mechanism
Why it worked
The reason this held for a decade is that almost nothing about it was invented. The content was the founder's own twelve values, already tested against thirty years of the business and already believed by the people being asked to run them. Nobody had to be sold on whether the values were right. That is usually the entire fight in culture work and here it did not exist, which meant all of the effort could go into the part that is actually hard.
What was built was the delivery mechanism, and that genuinely did not exist. A company where every leader answers only to the founder has no horizontal structure at all, and it does not need one while he is alive. It needs one about fifteen minutes after he is gone. The Presidents Council was that structure, and because it was chartered to lead rather than to advise, it had something to do on the first Monday.
The 2007 and 2008 work is why it could be stood up rather than studied, and the reason is specific rather than general. The fifty-seven were substantially the same people. They had been developed as a leadership group, together, three years before anyone asked them to become one. So they were not meeting each other for the first time in a crisis, they had a shared way of working already, and the advisor asking them to form a governing body was not a stranger asking.
Speed is the whole variable in a situation like this. An organization that spends a year deciding who decides now will lose people, customers and standards it never gets back, and no amount of good design applied in month fourteen recovers them.
- Culture work usually fails for one of two reasons, and the design here avoided both. It fails when it is done to people rather than by them. Values written by an executive team and distributed to the workforce are an announcement. People comply while someone is watching and then go back to how the place actually runs. Fifty-seven leaders working out what the founder's values required of them produces something different, because each of them then has to defend a conclusion he helped reach.
- It fails when it is separated from how the business operates. Values on a wall and a decision process that contradicts them teaches everyone which one is real, and it takes about a quarter. That is why the governance protocols were part of the work rather than a follow-on. The work has to change what gets decided and who decides it, or it is a poster.
- There was also a specific reason this organization could rebuild rather than simply mourn. The strengths were still in the building. Three thousand people who knew the business, customer relationships built over decades, and a leadership group who had watched the standard being set for years. What they had lost was not capability. It was the authority to use it without checking first, and the work gave that back in a form that did not depend on any one person again.
- One more test is buried in the decade that followed, and it is the one culture work almost always fails. When a company is sold, the buyer arrives with its own systems, its own standards and its own reasons to replace what it finds. What survives an acquisition is never a set of values. It is whatever is load-bearing, meaning the decisions people actually make and the way they make them. A culture that lives in a founder's presence has nothing load-bearing to hand across. One that lives in a governing body, a set of decision rights and a governance protocol does, because the buyer finds it running and has to decide whether to break something that works. That is the difference between culture as a feeling and culture as a mechanism, and it is the whole argument of this page.
The result
The culture held, and the decade it held through is the point. On September 13, 2019 Services Group of America sold its Food Group of companies to US Foods for $1.8 billion in cash. Years after that sale closed, Steve Manuszak reported that what the leadership group built together had lasted almost intact.
Count what it came through. The founder who was the company's entire decision-making mechanism died without warning. Ownership passed to his son. Then the business itself was sold to a strategic buyer, which is the event that ends most cultures, because an acquirer arrives with no obligation to keep anything it does not need. The structure the fifty-seven built came through all three, and it was still there to be reported on afterwards.
Manuszak is the same man who put Pilot in front of the owners, and today he is one of Pilot's senior partners. Both facts are on this page rather than left for a reader to find on his own. He is also the person in the best position to know, because he ran human resources for the company across the period the structure was built and stayed close to it afterwards.
Most consulting outcomes cannot be measured a decade out because there is nothing left to measure. A culture is one of the few things an advisor builds that is still visibly standing or visibly gone ten years later, which makes it the hardest claim to make and the most valuable one to have. This one was measured on the far side of a sale, which is harder still.
What they owned afterward
They owned all of it. That was the design. The fifty-seven did not receive a culture. They took twelve values that had lived inside one man's judgment and built the structure that let three thousand people run them without him. That is why it survived a succession, a sale, a decade of ordinary turnover, new hires who never met the man it started with, and every pressure a distribution business takes in ten years.
There is a second piece of evidence on this page and it is the company's own behavior. In 2007 Food Services of America weighed Pilot against the Center for Creative Leadership and Thunderbird and chose Pilot unanimously. Four years later, when the worst thing that can happen to a founder-run business happened to it, it went back to the same firm. A client that returns for the hardest problem it will ever have is making a statement no testimonial matches.
“In each instance, Andrew was retained to address uniquely challenging strategic and organizational issues, demonstrating exceptional capabilities in leadership development, change management, and operational transformation.”
Manuszak engaged Pilot at three companies across his career, at Groupe Danone, at Dean Foods and here, and today serves as one of Pilot's senior partners.