Food & Beverage
Food for thought
How Judy Spires keeps her employees focused at Acme Markets by never losing sight of the basics
By Erik Cassano
Smart Business Philadelphia | October 2007
Simplicity is beautiful to Judy Spires.
The president of Acme Markets Inc. says simplicity is the oil that
greases the cogs of any business organization, making growth and
good communication much easier to achieve. She believes in keeping her messages simple, her philosophies simple and her overall
leadership style simple.
Of course, trying to keep things simple can be a rather complex
process when you’re the president of a company composed of 129
supermarkets in Greater Philadelphia, New Jersey and Maryland,
staffed by about 16,000 people.
That’s why Spires has made it a priority to work at it and see to
it that her managers work at it.
“You have to be very organized and disciplined,” she says. “We
have a president’s meeting every Monday. The meeting has to be
meaningful, it has to be precise and concise, and people have to
come to the meeting prepared to share the key things they’re working on so we all understand each others’ priorities, and we’re
joined at the hip with regard to what’s going on.”
Spires says to keep things simple, you have to know how to
communicate and never lose sight of the basic principles that
guide your business. If you lose sight of the basics, your
employees will lose sight.
“You have to keep your goals stated very simply and keep
repeating them,” she says. “You have to make them a part of
everything you do. That’s how you keep people focused.”
The front lines
At Acme Markets — a subsidiary of the $37 billion Minnesota-based grocery store giant SUPERVALU Inc. since 2006 —
Spires keeps everyone focused on three basic goals that serve
as driving principles for the business: “We want to be the best
place to work, the best place to shop and the best place to
invest.”
Every collaborative project and every individual goal needs to
address one of the three main organizational goals. Spires says if
it doesn’t, it’s not worth discussing.
Spires places an emphasis on enabling the employees who
interact directly with customers and shareholders to take the
initiative and come up with ways to make the company a better place to do business. Those employees are the eyes and
ears on the ground for any business and are the people who
will be able to react quickly to the changing needs of the customer base.
For example, Acme faces a unique challenge in that the company must sell essentially the same products from city to city
and neighborhood to neighborhood but must also cater to the
specific needs of the local community.
Spires says in areas of suburban Philadelphia that have a
large Jewish population, Acme stores need to have a full-service kosher deli in order to best serve customers. Stores in commercial districts might need a large salad bar for the business
lunch crowd.
Giving managers on the store level the power to steer their individual stores didn’t happen overnight. Spires says it took
an extensive organizational restructuring on the operations
side.
“We set up our new structure in the organization, we restructured our operations team to afford those very close relationships with the marketing and merchandising people so we
could make sure that we are supplying the store managers
with what they say are their needs for their particular neighborhoods,” she says.
The ideas that form on the store level aren’t necessarily limited to one particular store.
Spires says if you allow ideas to well up within the organization, you’ll find that an idea that was formed in one area can
potentially benefit other areas of the company.
That’s why, whenever possible, Spires brings representatives
from individual stores together in face-to-face meetings. It’s an
opportunity for managers across the Acme chain to find out
what is going on in other locations, and perhaps form ideas for
improving their own stores.
“It’s amazing how many people are doing some best practices that we don’t even know about,” Spires says. “When people hear stuff from their peers at work and they get a live testimonial, it ignites them to go back and try that, it ignites their
thought process to say, ‘What can I do to better please customers, to get a better spirit in my store?’ It creates such wonderful momentum.”
The meetings have built so much momentum, Spires and her
team decided to formalize it into a council. In Acme’s
Associates Council, one representative is elected from each
store. Quarterly, all the store representatives meet with Spires
and her senior vice president of operations.
“The Associates Council gets to come in and tell us what is on
the minds of the people in their store,” Spires says. “What are
we doing, what aren’t we doing, what can we do better? It gives
our associates a way to know that they’re being heard, and it
also gives us an opportunity to get to our main source of contact with the customer and let our associates know what is
going on.
“The growth we’ve seen there and the communication that
takes place are doing wonderful things for our organization.”
Communication matters
New ideas can well up from the bottom, but Spires says the
culture that allows those ideas to take root starts at the top.
As the company leader, she says you need to be able to set
examples that everyone can follow. When it comes to communication, it all starts with keeping it simple and casting the
widest possible net with your messages.
“Communication is about three things: listen, listen and listen,” she says. “It has to start at the top of the organization.
When you truly listen to people, the results are incredible. You
hear how they respond. It’s amazing what you hear on many
levels.”
Spires sets the example at Acme by practicing what she
preaches. She goes out of her way to make interaction with her
team a priority.
There is no magic formula to making time for employee
engagement when there are dozens of other tasks that need to
be taken care of. You have to make a schedule, and then stick
to it.
“I schedule blocked-out time with each individual I meet with
on a weekly basis,” Spires says. “The door gets closed, and no
one interrupts us. On-the-fly conversations don’t allow you to
do that. My team knows that my door is always open and that
we’re always talking and communicating. They know that
when it gets down to the business issues, they can schedule
specific time and have my absolute, undivided attention. The
door gets closed, I listen intently, and it’s their time.”
Management repeatedly emphasizing open, honest communication is how employees overcome any reservations they
might have about approaching upper management with a question, concern or idea. The only way employees will become
convinced that you want to hear what they have to say is if they
see it for themselves over and over.
That’s a big reason why Spires likes to take her open communication philosophy on the road. In addition to having an
open-door policy in her office, she frequently visits Acme
stores.
“You have to make yourself accessible and walk the talk,” she
says. “For me, I love being out in the stores, talking to my people and making myself accessible.
“We have a town-hall meeting once a month where we tell
people what is going on in the business. We share our numbers
with everybody. There are no secrets. You get people to believe
you by walking the talk, by being in situations where people
say things, and it doesn’t come back to haunt them.”
When you communicate a mindset of best practices and
problem solving, Spires says you encourage teamwork by creating an environment where people aren’t afraid to bring their
shortcomings to the table and discuss them.
“In one of our first associate council meetings, we had a store
manager ask if we would take a look at the store because it
needed some neighborhood merchandising help,” she says.
“By the afternoon, our merchandising team was in that store
and worked with the store team to do what they needed to do.”
She says the store’s revenue production has grown rapidly
since then.
“My message to management is that I don’t need to come to
the store and tell you what you’re not doing right. I need you to
show me the things you are doing right and the things you need
help with.”
Realizing potential
While good communication is a must for any company that
wants motivated employees and a successful culture, you can’t
stop there. You also have to reward employees for realizing
their potential and helping the company grow.
One of the first lessons Spires learned in business was that
people want to feel like they matter.
“People need to feel attached to the company they work for,”
she says. “They need to know that there is an importance to
what they do.
“It’s something I experienced firsthand when I was just
starting out. My store director, when I started working in this
business, he had this ability to make me feel that this company wouldn’t run if I wasn’t here to do my job — and I was a
part-timer. I knew how much money I made in an hour, but
that wasn’t the thing that made me fall in love with the business. It was how he made me feel about my job and my worth
to the company. That’s something I firmly believe in.”
Spires tries to make people feel like they matter by doing
things like handing out service recognition cards, which are
handed out to high performers on the spot. She recognizes
achievements on her weekly organizational broadcast. Stores
that reach organizational benchmarks receive a storewide
employee lunch.
But she says the tokens of gratitude and pats on the back
don’t tell the whole story. Truly rewarding a high achiever
means giving that person a chance to grow within the company.
Spires has helped launch a career fair program aimed at
allowing the talents of her employees to blossom before they
have a chance to work elsewhere.
In July, Acme invited more than 100 employees to one such
fair.
“Having people do things they’re interested in, it just makes a
world of difference,” she says. “Finding a cashier who is a high
school art student and would really like to be a cake decorator,
that makes all the difference, as opposed to finding someone
from the outside and hiring them as a cake decorator.
“It all starts at that basic level, asking people, ‘What interest
do you have in this company?’ or finding out what department
they’d like to work in. People need to know what opportunities
you have for them as they move up the ladder. That’s where we
really start to get tremendous success stories from our people.
It all goes back to one of our main goals of making this the best
place to work.”
HOW TO REACH: Acme Markets Inc., www.acmemarkets.com
