Make the difference!

written by Andreas Brobeil

For today (21/07/2015) Valerie Beck arranged for us to visit with her next dear friend in our lineup: Adam Zmick. He is a Harvard MBA-Graduate and the CEO and Founder of Gardeneers. We met him at one of his high school gardening sites in an impoverished neighborhood of Chicago, where we did some gardening in order to volunteer, and in order to experience what the high school students in the program experience. Gardeneers is dedicated leaders who sustain school gardens and enable students to enrich their knowledge of nutrition, connect with their community and become stewards of the environment. In just one year, they have reached 9 schools and over 500 students in Chicago. Ultimately, it is their aim to implement school garden programs in food desert communities across the country. Interested? Click here for an inspiring TED-Talk about a similar project.

So how is that possible?

First, I was very impressed by the knowledge, passion, and professionalism of Adam Zmick. For me he is absolutely a leader! But he alone will not be enough. So he needs team members. That was actually my personal quintessence. Teamwork!

In his speech, Adam expressed, that teamwork-skills are the most important skills, because all other skills can be taught. So for him and also for us as Foodentity (We provides individually adjusted healthy food that meets our customer`s personal conditions, daily needs and actual preferences in an easy, convenient and time saving way = Business model of Foodentity) the biggest challenge is to find the right people. Click here to get some information about how to get the right people. We also started to find people with strong teamwork-skills but we combined it with some special skills which are import for our idea (IT-Skills, Knowledge in food, finance and marketing). Being authentic and innovative is always useful. In addition to that, he also said that people just need to be given the opportunities and they will thrive. How inspiring!

But what can we as Foodentity implement from this excursion to our Business concept? Referring to this, there are key elements which must be in place.

1. Defined Roles: To successfully work towards a business goal, the role of each team member must be defined.

2. Shared Team Goals: Team goals must be clearly specified and agreed.
3. Trust: Successful teams are made up of members who trust each other.
4. Commitment: All team members must be committed to achieving the goals of the team.
5. Mutual Respect: Team members must have respect for each other (for example views and activities of other team members).
6. Communications: Excellent communications among team members is important to achieve team goals.

Last but not least, steps are important (even small steps), because it is all about moving forward. And do something important in your life!

What we try to adapt and what we already adapted:
We learned a lot about Adams leadership style and organizational culture work so we decided to focus more on our group members and their team-skills to achieve together (The whole being more than the sum of its parts - Aristoteles) our goals, nevertheless defined roles are helpful. On the other hand we could observe how Adam shared his vision with us. He had a strict plan how the garden should look like and he communicated it on an understandable and motivating way that everyone knew what he had to do. He also inspired us for more social commitment and social justice. Right now we as Foodentity are on the way to combine Adams leadership style and organizational culture elements with those we have, to create a new and even more effective style to make the difference!

Best regards,

Andreas Brobeil