Blog Posts

We are often asked, “How did Zingerman's build this great group of people? How do you get people to care and have such a good time at work?"

Ian Gurfield, Co-Founder of Ian's Pizza, is a long-time client and dear friend of ZingTrain.

Below, he shares how he came to learn about Visioning, what the process of writing his first Vision was like and the impact it's had on his business. And be sure to scroll down to to the end of this post to see his January 2018 Vision realized... it involves delicious Italian pizza!

Check it out below and prepared to be inspired!

Before I get too far into this blog post about how to write a vision, it feels appropriate to share a vision of what success looks like for this blog post.  Here goes:

Ask any Ann Arborite where to find a pair of shoes that are as comfortable as they are stylish, complete with a truly enjoyable shopping experience, and it’s more-than-likely that you’ll be guided to MAST Shoes.

This may seem too simple to even mention, but I’m going to say it anyway:

There may be industries out there where employee turnover isn’t a problem, but retailing certainly isn’t one of them. Finding, hiring and retaining good staff is one of the biggest challenges that retailers face, and many owners and managers get discouraged by how hard it is—regardless of the economy.  One of the most frustrating situations is hiring a new staff person, only to have them quit a month or two later. At that point we’ve usually invested a lot in terms of training but haven’t really gotten much back in terms of productivity—certainly a negative bottom-line impact.  Therefore, making improvements to our interviewing and hiring systems (and then making sure that our managers are trained in how to use those systems) is a very good bottom-line investment.

In the Servant Leadership workshops we teach, we often lead in to the content we’ve adapted from Robert Greenleaf by asking the group:

OK.  How many of you are willing to admit that you’ve experienced this scenario: You needed someone to train a new hire, automatically chose the person who was the best performer in the job that needed to be trained—and then were disappointed with the results?  Unfortunately, it's likely that we’ve all done that at one time or another.