Take these ‘steps' for effective management

Business is full of acronyms, quips and sayings. This one's from baseball legend Yogi Berra: “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

A manager gets to do exactly this by simply walking around.

MBWA — or management by walking around, according to an artificial intelligence search — was popularized by management gurus Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman in their book, “In Search of Excellence.” (Physically getting out and walking around your business. Imagine that.) The 1982 book sold 3 million copies in its first four years and was applied by many top companies, most famously by the founders of Hewlett Packard — and the grocery chain I worked for as well.

Yeah, yeah. That’s nice, Armand. That was also over 40 years ago.

So true. You must also admit that some things such as fine wine, firewood and great ideas age rather nicely, and that includes MBWA. The idea that managers make spontaneous visits to operation areas never gets old and, in fact, works great in the produce aisle.

Even before MBWA was a thing, I remember my old boss, produce director Mike Aiton, would frequently begin his day early by stopping into any one of many stores on his way to the office.

We were open 24 hours then, so it wasn’t unusual for Mike to pop in at 5 a.m. and walk through a produce department. Certainly, things weren’t in top shape at that hour, but Mike would look around and talk briefly with the setup person working on the wet rack. Or he might poke his head into a produce cooler, looking at the load sitting on pallets, delivered from the night before.

Sometimes, Mike would make the warehouse his first stop, another good MBWA practice. He would walk through a few areas. He told me his focus was on what labels were on different commodities, both in the pick and reserve slots.

Mike noted some “license plates,” or slot tags, with receiving dates so that when walking stores later in the week he’d see if some of those produce items with that same information were in stores’ coolers, mentally noting how long it took to get from the warehouse to the stores. He popped a few lids on cases, inspecting items he thought might be of concern, depending on the season, the ad and so on.

All this was done long before he went into the office, where it was nonstop meetings with vendors, advertising, buyers and upper management.

Mike tried to get out of the office by mid-afternoon. Not trying to beat traffic necessarily or get home at a decent hour (although he probably did so at least occasionally). Rather, he liked to stop into a store on the way home once or several times each week, sometimes going out of his way to do so.

Our produce managers were never surprised by his visits. As a supervisor, it wasn’t unusual for a produce manager to tell me, “Hey, Mike stopped in one night last week. It was nice to see him.”

How many senior managers would do this? I suspect not many.

The produce managers responded positively because Mike talked to them and asked for feedback. Especially, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

MBWA wasn’t a negative thing. Sure, it might surprise a produce manager or two during an unannounced visit by Mike, who poked his head into a back room, walked outside on an open receiving dock or wandered into a cooler. That’s just what he did in addition to all his other responsibilities.

I don’t think MBWA was what prompted Mike to do all this; it was just how he managed.

To be fair, the impromptu walks sometimes caught some departments in rough condition. When that happened, Mike was always calm but made his supervisors and the affected store managers aware. Usually, one call or follow up visit was all it took to get conditions under control. Just knowing that the produce director or produce supervisors might drop in unannounced was key.

“Produce managers reason to themselves every day, ‘I better be on my toes, as ‘they’ might be in to check,’” Mike once explained. “Well, we are the ‘they’ who our produce managers are referring to, but it only works if we are regularly out there visiting stores.”
Armand Lobato works for the Idaho Potato Commission. His 40 years of experience in the produce business span a range of foodservice and retail positions.

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