Friday, March 29, 2024

Sharing the vision

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Former New Zealand Sharemilkers of the Year Dylan and Sheree Ditchfield shared their views on team culture at the South Island Dairy Event (SIDE). Anne Lee talked to them about how they strive to create a happy, effective team.
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If you want people to come on a journey with you, happily be part of a team and love what they’re doing, they need to know where they’re going and why they’re doing it, Southland dairy farmers Dylan and Sheree Ditchfield say.

“And they’re not going to know that unless you’ve worked out where you’re going first,” Dylan says.

Getting the right team culture and a strong sense of engagement among everyone working in the farming business starts with the business owners having a crystal-clear vision.

“It can take a fair bit of thinking to work that out – to work out why you’re doing what you’re doing,” Dylan says.

But when you do you can articulate it to others, share your excitement and bring them with you.

Your vision goes beyond financial or farming goals, equity targets, personal wealth or even a personal lifestyle balance.

“They’re important but they’re goals not a vision.

“We’ve been goals-oriented through our dairying career and over time those goals changed as we moved through the different stages. They were very much cows and grass goals and financial goals and while you have to have them they’re not your vision – they’re not going to sustain you or give you that longer-term sense of fulfilment,” Sheree says.

They’re also less likely to help bring the team with you.

“Your personal wealth goal isn’t going to motivate your dairy assistant when the alarm goes off at 3.30am,” Dylan says.

Sheree says your vision is the thing that really drives you, that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning, that you’re willing to make sacrifices for.

“It’s something you’ll continue to strive for even if it costs you sometimes.

“You have to look very closely at yourself so it’s really a process of uncovering and discovering it, not about creating it,” she says.

Top tips

Discover your vision – what makes you do what you do.

Share your vision with your staff by living it daily.

Commit to values that support your vision and live them.

Recruit staff based on values.

Know personality types and how people prefer to communicate.

Hold structured, regular meetings with agendas and action points for effective communication.

Give staff areas of responsibility, not just tasks.

Hold regular performance reviews, know their strengths and weakness.

Give them training to build on strengths and improve in areas of weakness.

Respect people.

Don’t forget the little things – say please and thank-you, use their names.

Eventually they were able to succinctly articulate it as “positively impacting people” with their underlying purpose to “empower and enable capability in people”.

“It’s entwined in everything we do. It’s what we enjoy doing, what drives us but it’s also what drives our business,” Dylan says.

The couple were New Zealand Sharemilkers of the Year in 1999 and since then have been involved in several dairying businesses both large and medium-scale through land-owning and herd-owning equity partnerships as well as their own farm which they purchased in 2004, now aptly named Freedom Acres.

It’s a 163ha self-contained property near Wendonside where they’ve milked 485 cows to produce about 200,000kg milksolids (MS). They use close to 500kg drymatter (DM)/cow of supplement, which has included grain.

Along with their home farm, they’re also herd-owning equity partners in a 500-cow sharemilking business.

Over the years they’ve expanded, driven themselves hard, been through good times and tough ones, and along the way they’ve learnt a lot of lessons.

This season they’re changing to once-a-day (OAD) milking on the home block, giving them more time to share some of those lessons with others through a new venture – a programme designed for dairying couples called Farming to Freedom.

It aims to provide skills and strategies to build a resilient successful business by focusing on people, planet and performance.

Building a happy, effective team culture is a key aspect of the course and it’s that culture that’s been at the heart of Dylan and Sheree’s business growth.

Although the move to OAD will mean just two full-time staff for the coming season, over the years they’ve had up to 12 people employed in their operations and understand what makes big and small teams tick.

Leading by example and living the vision statement is what brings people along with you, Dylan says.

It has to become part of your culture, not just a written statement.

Dylan and Sheree post their vision and values on documents, on their recruitment ads and on a sign at the farm dairy to remind them and their staff what’s at the core of the farming operation.

It also holds them accountable and acts as a reminder to all involved with the farming business.

Because their values feature in their ads for farm staff they act as the first drafting gates in the recruitment process, helping weed out those who don’t feel they’ll fit even before the application stage.

When they’re selecting people to interview and during the interview process they’re also looking closely at how candidates fit with their values and vision.

But Dylan says they’re not looking for clones of themselves.

“Don’t be afraid of diversity. Some employers are looking for a mini-me but that can create weakness in the business, because you’ll have the same weaknesses.

“You want people who will fill the gaps – bring strengths where there’s already a weakness,” he says.

Creating a good team also requires effective communication and Dylan and Sheree start by knowing the personality types and preferred learning styles of their staff as well as sharing theirs.

There are a range of personality typing tools available and using them can be a fun team exercise.

They have a range of outputs – people can be owls, eagles, doves, extroverts, introverts, even different coloured dots depending on the tool used.

The couple use Whole Brain Thinking model and say it is straight forward and there is plenty of support information so it can be applied effectively onfarm.

Dylan says understanding how people think, how they like to be presented with information, whether they like to work alone or in a team and how they work under pressure all helps when it comes to conveying a message to them and creating an effective working environment they enjoy.

 

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