Case Study: Beckie Johnston
Beckie’s Story
Beckie first partnered with us in July of 2021 to roll out the Frontline Leadership Training and Talent Strategy Consulting, work that extended through 2022. In 2023 Beckie continued our partnership launching Lead Higher Academy in her business.
Industry: Hospitality & Food Service - Restaurants
Annual Revenue: 5-10 million
Number of Employees: 75-100
USA Region: East Coast
Solution(s): Lead Higher Academy, Culture Pulse Survey, Frontlines Leadership Training
systemization & Ownership
Beckie’s stated goal at the beginning of our partnership was to have “more independent leadership with a stronger ownership mindset of the business”. Since the beginning of the partnership we have worked directly with various leaders in her organization.
As we rolled out the Frontline Leadership Training, we worked directly with one of Beckie’s directors, Philip. Philip worked to learn and customize the training program to meet their needs over the next few months, which also coincided with some of the largest supply chain disturbances in the restaurant industry. Together we continued to work at a steady pace, but with flexibility to address the ever changing needs of the business. By September, Philip was launching the program with their leadership team.
“Rolling out the Frontline Leadership Training program with our team has given our current and prospective leadership candidates true ownership of their leadership development while allowing for tremendous flexibility in this process. Additionally, having a centralized location containing comprehensive information on developing leadership hard skills and human skills that integrate specific information tailored to our individual business has been tremendously useful to those in service of the development of other leaders.”
Informing & Equipping
In January of 2022 we launched the Quarterly Culture Survey with Beckie’s Team. Though Beckie joined for the results conversations, this effort was largely spearheaded by her leaders, Kyle, Chris, and Erik.
Every quarter we would survey Beckie’s entire workforce, compile an analysis, then engage in a conversation with her and her leaders about the results. Beckie’s team always brought incredible insight and questions to every conversation, which combined with the analysis and thoughtful follow up action items, brought steady growth in their culture scores every single quarter.
Our Frontlines Culture Survey results are broken down into categories that make up the Frontline Workforce Hierarchy of Needs - Trust & Authenticity, Recognition & Belonging, Informed & Equipped, Motivated & Engaged, Proud & Committed. Each category's score is determined by her team's positive response to several questions about their experience in her restaurant.
Beckie’s team saw steady growth in every single category across the 4 quarters, with categories increasing as much as 13%. This meant that her entire workforce was responding up to 13% more positively to the efforts of her leadership team, providing her leaders direct responses to and affirmation of the work and initiatives they were performing.
“The Quarterly Culture Survey contained insightful and thoughtful questions which gave our leadership team a clear picture of how our goals for organizational culture matched the experience of our individual team members. Through this process we were able to address and highlight specific areas for focus and gave our team members a greater ability to make their opinions heard in the business. Additionally, being able to review our sustained growth and go over the questions with Josh after each survey was extremely helpful by identifying and contextualizing the information in a way that allowed us to address any findings, whether positive or negative, which in turn helped us grow our results significantly over the course of a year.”
Seeing The Results
We are grateful for our partnership with Beckie and her leaders, and are honored that Beckie chose to continue working with us, launching our Lead Higher Academy with her leaders in 2023.
Lead Higher Academy meets an entirely different need than the Frontline Leadership Training. The Frontline Leadership Training is an ‘in-house’ program that Beckie’s team now owns and updates, which is meant to meet very specific occasions in the business — when someone is interested in growth to a specific leadership level —whereas the Lead Higher Academy provides topic based learning for a leadership team’s ongoing development, all owned and updated by The Frontlines.
“We chose to continue our partnership with The Frontlines due to the tremendously positive impact our previous partnerships have had. Josh is extremely knowledgeable, exceedingly open to feedback, and has shown that he truly cares about the growth of our team. In 2023 we began Lead Higher Academy. The courses and lessons are tailored, with our direct input, to fit our leadership development needs. These tools have served as an extremely valuable resource in opening the floor for deeper conversations and sparking productive debate.”