It can be difficult to admit when we don't know something or need help. I always worry that my team will see me as weak or incompetent. Over the years of running fit-flavors, I’ve realized that being vulnerable with your team is a strength, not a weakness. And not being vulnerable with your team slows growth immensely.
When we share our weaknesses with our teams, we create an environment of trust and mutual respect. Even better, we give our teams the opportunity to step up and use their strengths to help us overcome our weaknesses.
As my team and I built fit-flavors, we’ve individually bootstrapped a lot of our systems and processes and we’ve ultimately created really distinct departments. You can understand how our back of house team who prepares, cooks, packages, and delivers all of the food is very different from our front of house team who engages with customers in our store fronts. But you can also probably understand how something that the customers are telling our front of house team might be beneficial for our back of house team to know.
That’s where management becomes important. The management team at fit-flavors are some of the hardest working, passionate, and proactive people that we’ve ever had in fit-flavors. I’d even say that our current team is the strongest we’ve ever had.
But there’s one big thing we haven’t been talking about (until recently): our weaknesses.
Because one of our core values at fit-flavors is to have open and honest communication, I realized that my direct department leads simply needed a platform to communicate with each other. Once given the opportunity, they all opened up easily and effortlessly with each other.
What happened kind of surprised me: everyone was so forthcoming with their weaknesses and with helping me identify mine.
In just over 2 months of consistently meeting with this team, the vulnerability that the department leads at fit-flavors have shown has led to a drastic improvement in department-to-department communication and project execution.
Many businesses and people are thinking about their 2023 “goals” right about now. In your career and in your personal life, I challenge you to amp up your vulnerability. Stop pushing down the things that need to be said or done. Once you open up to yourself, your team, your friends, your family, etc., I promise you will notice a shift.
This shift is powerful.
Use it to grow.
Yours,
Jillian
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