Welcome to Season 9 of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, is spending this season with Darlene Nicosia, CEO of Hearthside Food Solutions. They’re talking about operations, culture and innovation … behind the curtain of co-manufacturing. Sponsored by Reading Bakery Systems.

In this final episode, Spencer and Nicosia unpack unique leadership perspectives, using Nicosia’s engineering expertise as a starting point.

Learn more about this season here, and listen to Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple, Spotify and Google.

Joanie Spencer: Hi, Darlene. Thanks for joining me for this last episode.

Darlene Nicosia: Hi, Joanie. Great to see you.

Spencer: I just have to tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed our conversations. I mentioned it off the air, but I think that you have a great combination of deep technical knowledge and expertise, and you are an incredible conversationalist. So, thank you so much for taking this time with me. It has been a joy.

Nicosia: It has been awesome.

Spencer: Many of our conversations inevitably harken back to how you’ve merged the worlds of brands and contract manufacturing. But I want to look at it from a different perspective. This week, I want to talk about how you’ve managed to merge the world of engineering and the world of leadership. How hard is it to reconcile what seems to be two totally different styles of thinking?

Nicosia: It’s interesting. On the one hand, engineering is so focused on process discipline and logic, while great leadership is about demonstrating empathy in creating followership. I think about it that way. But on the other hand, the only successful engineers I know have been amazing at active listening, strong vision, goal setting, communication, learning by trial and error — which obviously requires patience and persistence — and being able to collaborate and use feedback to get better. When I think about all these traits, they’re the same traits that essentially all good leaders have. So, I really feel like they come together very nicely.

Spencer: From my perspective and experience, engineers sometimes have this tendency to really look at things in a very technical way. They’re checking off each list and looking at if it is technically accurate. When I look at leadership trajectories, one of the biggest challenges they say that new leaders face pertains to their ability to let go of task-oriented duties.

Hopefully, you see the path that I’m heading down here. With your experience in engineering, when you look at those technical and task-oriented things, how have you learned to let go of those things as you’ve grown in leadership throughout your career?

Nicosia: It’s hard. Sometimes I have to pull myself out of the weeds, and there are times I don’t, and my team will politely pull me out of the weeds. I have always been extremely analytical. I like to be grounded in the context. If a team brings me a proposal and shows me the journey they went on by talking about the process, the options they considered, sharing the data to support whatever they’re thinking, and then how they reach their conclusions, I have an easy time saying, “You guys got this. I totally support the way that you’re going about your thinking and how you’re reaching a conclusion. I have your back.”

However, as a leader there are times when I’m ultimately accountable for our business and there are important decisions to be made. Then I do want to get grounded in the facts. So sometimes I might get deeper into the weeds  if I have a concern that somebody hasn’t gone through a proper process or they haven’t used data to support the decisions that they’re driving. I do see at times people will take past history as fact, and the world has changed, so in those circumstances, I may ask for more supporting data: “I hear what you’re telling me. Can you show me the data? Help me understand what supports your point of view on this.” So, then I might get a bit closer to it.

But I think all leaders must ask themselves, “Is this something that I should be delegating and having others do, or is this something that uniquely requires my skill set and time?” When I ask myself those questions and decide it requires my skill set and it is an important decision, it’s easy to try and figure out where I need to play and where my team plays.

Spencer: Do you think that’s an innate skill, or do you think that it is something that someone who has a more technical background must learn when to draw on it and when to let it go?

Nicosia: That is a really great question, and I would probably tell you that it is more learned. It is probably more of a challenge around control and how to empower people and give them the ability to make decisions. One of the things that I use in our business today is Agile for teamwork and how to solve problems. I think we might have talked about this in episode one, but what I love about Agile is the fact that it brings diverse thinking together to drive and solve problems, along with getting leadership out of your way. It really empowers a team to make decisions.

If people don’t feel empowered that they’re able to have their own thumbprint on a business, it really does start to impact their long-term ability to excel in their role, the long-term impact that they can have, and you really don’t get the exponential benefit of the people that you have around you.

I think I had to learn early on how to be a good delegator, how to trust my teams, to create an environment that allowed them to feel accountable and have responsibility to make decisions. I think the other thing that’s really important in that process is defining principles so that when people reach a fork in the road, they can use the principles you shared to make those decisions.

Spencer: It’s like you’re reading my mind because I was going to ask you how do you know the difference between technical expertise and a need for control? I love that you mentioned control because I feel like there’s a fine line there.

Nicosia: Again, control and accountability are not the same thing. In my mind, accountability is what is important and what I try to govern by in the business and making sure that if I empower you to go off and solve a problem and make a decision, then I have to hold you accountable for that decision at the same time.

But I do think that people must feel like they can use their skills to their greatest capability. If you control all the decisions they make, then they’re just a task manager. That’s not what most people want to do when they come to work. They want to give their best, make decisions and change the business for the better.

Spencer: I was going to ask you if it gets harder to make that distinction the closer you get to the c-suite. But after hearing you talk, I feel like the answer is knowing how to differentiate is the mark of someone who’s heading for the c-suite. You have to have that understanding to get to that level and if you can’t, you’re probably not suited for that high level of leadership.

Nicosia: I think that I had the benefit of being surrounded by a number of good coaches and mentors. I do remember somebody was talking to me about time management, and I just felt like I never had time to do all the things that I had to do. And they said, “Well, do you have to do all those things?” It’s a very logical question. And they took me on this talk track of I have to think about what really warrants my time. What are the things that others can make decisions on? Once you start to go through that logic, you realize you get time back, because you trust and empower the teams that you have. That’s something that does come with time.

Spencer: I think there are benefits to having that technical expertise. So, from an operational leadership standpoint, what are those benefits and how has your technical experience positively impacted your leadership style?

Nicosia: I would tell you, it goes back to that idea of being very process-disciplined, just this whole idea of having data and information to make decisions. There are certainly times when my intuition will come into play, and you’ll have maybe not all the information that you want, but you have to make a decision.

There are certainly times that I have to go on experience and that intuition. But more so than ever, I go back to this point I made earlier of making sure that you have a disciplined process that’s grounded in fact, that makes sure that you’re weighing your options, supporting a conclusion or a recommendation for how you proceed, and making sure that you have taken input from others or that you’ve collaborated with them along the way. I highly value this idea of collaborative thinking because people who can build upon a single idea and make it even better over time is really the way to get the best solutions possible. Part of my leadership style is a highly collaborative leadership style.

I ultimately will call the ball when I need to, but I do try to bring my leaders in to make sure that I’m getting a diverse point of view, and then drive a decision forward. I think a lot of that does come from that engineering process discipline background that I had both through formal training and informal experience working in technical areas.

Spencer: People are like, “They’re an engineer. Engineers don’t lead companies; they get in the trenches and do the work.” But do you think that this engineer’s mindset is like a secret weapon in the boardroom?

Nicosia: Well, boardrooms are interesting places. I would probably say, the biggest skill set that I’ve got to use in a boardroom is really this whole idea of active listening. There are so many voices going on, there are different points of view and perspectives from the different board members. They’re incredibly successful leaders, they have all kinds of insight and industry experience, both in our industry and outside of our industry, and harnessing their points of view is incredibly important in the time that I get with them.

I would say more than anything, that engineering mindset probably helps more with our customers and trying to define our value proposition by making sure that they understand that we bring in incredible technical expertise to what we do. We are passionate about their brands, but more passionate about quality and process, and making sure that we care for their business the way as if it was our own.

Spencer: That makes sense and that expertise becomes almost a selling point.

I’m going to shift gears. We’ve talked about bringing your experience from Coca-Cola into the world of co-manufacturing. We’ve talked about bringing an engineering background into the world of leadership. But one thing that we haven’t touched on that I’m curious about is engineering and manufacturing are two very male-dominated disciplines. You are incredibly approachable. You’ve got this athleticism mindset that you bring to everything you do. What is it like to achieve the success that you have, dare I say perhaps, despite your gender?

Nicosia: It’s interesting you talk about sports because that is such a huge part of my background. I still remember the first formal team that I played on was the Glenn Ellyn boys baseball team. My friend Suzy and I were the first two girls to go and sign up; they didn’t have softball back then. I had always played with my neighbors. When you’re a kid, you’re not going, “They’re boys” and “They’re girls.” I just was always playing sports. I was a tag along with my older brother as well.

It was the environment that I was in, and I didn’t know any better than to pick up a ball and shoot it or throw it. I just played with everybody that was around doing the things that I enjoyed. I will tell you, there’s a part of me that doesn’t have this gender lens. I found myself always around those environments and never giving it a second thought, quite frankly. When I got into work, I was the first female supervisor in the plant that I worked at Frito-Lay, and everybody around me was so supportive. They were great mentors and coaches, and they were all men because I was the first female supervisor out there.

I felt like it was such a welcoming environment for me. And that takes a tremendous amount of courage from the employees, the managers and everybody around. Maybe then I was a bit naïve, but as I progressed in my career it wasn’t always that way. There were certainly times in my career when I was the only female in the room. I was Coca-Cola’s first female chief procurement officer in an environment where there were times when I was left out of stuff, probably because of my gender, and it was tough. I can remember a situation that happened after an international meeting that I went to, and I was excluded from the dinner.

I had just been promoted to a big role. I was leading the meeting, the meeting concluded, and the men that I was with decided to go to dinner and they didn’t include me. I called my coach/mentor who was also the predecessor of this team and I said, “I’m really crushed by this.” He said, “Don’t have a crisis of confidence. You represent change and you represent a threat to the men that have biases. And just remember, at the same time, most men will be your strongest advocates.” He was right. My strongest advocates are always men in my career.

There are pockets in this world that still have the opportunity to drive change. But I do feel like the business world has matured and has changed so much. There are so many programs to accelerate the pipeline of diverse talent. I’m certainly spending quite a bit of my time trying to do that myself as I coach and mentor so many diverse individuals in the workplace. It’s important because everybody needs a great strong coach and advocate just like I did at that moment. I certainly feel like I’m stronger because of it and I maintain my confidence in a really tough situation.

Spencer: I’m going to throw you a curveball because you said something that triggered a thought for me. I have seen a lot of panels and discussions that asked the question, can a man be a good mentor to a woman? And the answer is, of course, yes. I’m curious when you say that you’re mentoring and coaching others, are women good mentors to men? Do men look up to women as a coach and a mentor?

Nicosia: I’m going to have to answer it from where I sit; it’s probably best to ask a man who has been mentored by a woman. What I can tell you is, the ability to demonstrate empathy, because probably the most challenging coaching events occur around some crisis or setback in someone’s career or in a situation. The ability to say, “I hear you. I understand. Your emotions and how you feel is valid. And how to see a way forward to get back up and to keep going so incredibly important.” Because just as that mentor did for me, confidence can be destroyed in a moment. Sometimes it takes a career to build. Being able to feel that empathy and that support in someone who believes in you goes a long way to helping you quickly get back on your feet and get up and take another swing at the plate.

Spencer: That is such a good point. Because nobody comes to a mentor and says, “Things are going great. What should I do?”

Nicosia: Well, like I said, sometimes it does happen and we’re happy for folks. But again, if you’re really trying to accelerate learning and really help, it typically does come in those moments of crisis.

Spencer: That’s a good point. So still reflecting on your career and those moments of good and bad when you have seen success and overcome challenges, how have you seen gender roles evolve in food and beverage manufacturing? Have you seen a change over the course of your career?

Nicosia: I absolutely have. Some of it we have had to do through really focusing on creating opportunity. To give an example, earlier in my career, we were opening a plant in Costa Rica, and we had to go through a process of creating a program that was in the community to teach people how to drive forklifts so that we could have a gender-balanced manufacturing environment. We were really struggling to get material handlers and people into the facility that had the skills we needed. They were predominantly filled by men, and we really wanted to achieve this goal of having a gender parity environment in our manufacturing.

We took the effort to go into the community and train people and sometimes it takes efforts like that to really create change. I think there has been a huge change in how people view their careers in the manufacturing environment. I think we must re-engage post-COVID, whether it’s the gig economy or whatever else, there are reasons that people walked away from great American manufacturing jobs. We have to find a way to reengage them back into the workforce. I think part of it is re-engaging in the community.

Part of it is our own responsibility to create career pathing, so that people can come into their roles and see a way to build their skill sets, grow in their roles and have a lifelong engagement in this type of setting. And if they choose to exit, we’ve built upon their skill set so that they can go and do other things. There is a huge opportunity for us to think about how we re-engage in the communities and attract both male and female talent. I think there’s more flexibility that still needs to be built into manufacturing.

 Many plants today have fixed shifts that people have to work. I aspire to see the day that Hearthside can offer more dynamic shift building, where people can nominate the hours they want to work and we have a way and a path to give them those hours and provide more flexibility. That way they can care for their own children or the elderly or do whatever they have to.

It’s more typical that it’s the female that must care for the children and with the inflexibility of the way we handle our manufacturing shift operations, it makes it really hard. There’s more to be done here. I’d love to be a leader of change in that space. Hopefully, over time, we’ll get there. But there’s more that can be done to offer flexibility for quite frankly, everyone so that American manufacturing jobs are more attractive.

Spencer: This is just more of an observation than anything. As a working mother, schedules are one thing, but there are so many other external factors that are working against it. Childcare is hard to access, even for upper-middle-class working women. Then it’s exponentially harder for the ones who are living paycheck to paycheck. I’m really thinking out loud based on what you said. Wouldn’t it be great if manufacturing could be the centrifuge of change? If it starts with flexible scheduling, maybe other things can fall into place.

Nicosia: I love your idea, but I also think of technology as a huge enabler. Technology is being used in ways that are even related to more physical jobs, where there are devices that allow you to lift three times your normal strength. And you think about how to engage all these different factors, whether it’s people with disabilities or women in the workplace that have all kinds of other demands on their time, I think technology could be a big unlock to create change.

Spencer: You’re right. I try to use my position as media to project that technology and automation aren’t designed to eliminate jobs, but it’s designed to help people do jobs that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do, as well as accommodate for a dwindling headcount.

Nicosia: Absolutely.

Spencer: All right. So, you pretty much answered my last question before I had a chance to ask it. Because we talked last week about runway and thinking about it from your perspective and how you’ve grown in your career. What does the runway look like for contract manufacturing or for food manufacturing in general, for people to come into this industry, rise up in their careers and create a trajectory for themselves?

Nicosia: I think the very first thing is recruiting. We have to be more aggressive in trying to recruit more women into the industry. I think if they had the awareness of the great career opportunities within contract manufacturing, we would absolutely just simply change the numbers and bring more women in. But having said that, I also think as the industry has evolved, there are certainly more women coming in at entry levels.

Obviously, with the training and development that we’ve been doing, we’re looking forward to this pipeline of female talent that’s coming through at our supervisory level. We’d love to see more and more women in our manufacturing leadership positions. Today, one of our key platforms is led by a female. We have two COOs in our company and one of them is a female, she’s a fantastic talent. I would say Hearthside is very fortunate to have a stacked team as it relates to our female leadership across the company.

Spencer: Yes, absolutely. I’m hoping that I’m going to be able to spotlight that for the company in the coming months, that Hearthside is stacked, and I love that. Again, with such a traditional industry and engineering and manufacturing being male-dominated, and co-manufacturing being so behind the scenes for so long, it’s really exciting to see what Hearthside is doing to just really boldly forge ahead and make a change and be successful at it.

Nicosia: Well, I know the women that you’re going to be talking with. I think you’re going to find them fascinating with tremendous careers of their own.

Spencer: I love it. Darlene, that really wraps up this episode and this season. I just again want to extend my most sincere thanks for taking time over these five weeks to share your thought leadership and so many aspects of contract manufacturing. We talked a lot about some really important topics, and I just appreciate your time and insight.

Nicosia: Thank you so much, Joanie. It has been great getting a chance to talk to you these past five weeks, take care.