Sharing Food with Your Staff

Yesterday, we had the office Christmas party. Our business needs more than half of our employees to be scattered around the city, and in some cases, in other cities, so the Christmas party is a good opportunity for almost all of us to gather in one place. We ate, talked, did activities, contests, raffles, and more. It was a lot of fun. Sometimes our Christmas parties are bigger or smaller, in different places and with different forms of entertainment, but there's always food. In that special moment, where we all sit down and talk while eating, a very strong bond is formed between people from different areas and with me, something that isn't easily achieved at work.

Our business started as a contract cleaning service. Back then, I visited the contracts or clients and, in turn, visited our staff to talk with them, learn about their concerns, and other things. Many times, when I visited my people, they were on their lunch break, and I would approach and sit with them. In the conversation, they always, without fail, offered me some of their food, and I, terribly mistaken, wouldn't accept it, thinking I would be taking the food they were consuming. One day, a successful businessman friend of mine told me that what I was doing was totally wrong; he said I should accept their food and see their reaction. And so I did. Mostly, they were egg tacos, bean tacos, and very spicy lettuce tacos. The reaction was that the bond between them and me grew enormously, and my employees felt part of the company, simply by sharing food. Besides, it was always very delicious.

We always find behaviors from leaders that create those strong bonds that we all want in companies, and we learn from that and from what our people truly value.

We discover that our behavior as leaders is much more important than the salary (as long as it's a competitive salary). We can create a much more loyal and productive business environment simply with our behavior.

As Simon Sinek says about one of the behaviors of leaders:

“Why does the staff of a company allow the leaders to indulge in certain luxuries like meals, cars, entertainment that they do not? It is because they know that when crisis hits, the leaders are the ones who will defend the employees tooth and nail."

Manuel González