One of the first sessions of Dine America featured Joe Tortorice, the CEO and founder of Jason’s Deli. From the start of his presentation, his passion for his business and even more importantly, his employees, was palpable.

Jason’s Deli is known for having extremely low turnover and high employee loyalty—for this reason, I was eager to hear Joe’s insights on the keys to success in the fast-casual business.

Tortorice opened by pointing out that many companies have the tendency to kill the employee spirit and energy that made them successful to begin with by installing overbearing processes. The overriding goal of a business should be to help the company grow up, yet still stay young at heart. A crucial component to achieving this goal is to concentrate fully on company culture. While company culture can be challenging to build, once it’s established, it has remarkable powers of survival and is the nourishment of a living organization.

According to Tortorice, company culture is a collection of values that create an ambience within a business—the stronger the culture, the greater the volunteerism. Some prime examples of organizations and teams with winning cultures are the Yankees, with 27 world championships, and the Marine Corps, with their Semper Fi (always faithful) credo. A company’s culture and DNA inspires passion in employees, and moves them to do a great job.

Tortorice mentioned that business theorists say that the life of a corporation should be 2-3 centuries; however, in reality the average lifespan of a company is 20-40 years. Why do so many companies die young? Per Tortorice, they forget that an organization is a community of human beings. The key word is managers, i.e. the command in control. We need more leadership vision to facilitate alignment, motivation, and change. Today, people are incredibly fearful. Employees are exposed to so much fear and negativity, that by the time they get to work, they’re like deer in headlights.

Tortorice introduced the term, “servant leadership”—a concept that he is clearly passionate about. In his opinion, this is the key to success in business. Servant leadership consists of empowerment through high-trust company cultures. It implies that you must love those that you lead before you can become an effective leader.

He went on to outline the 8 character values of a servant leader:

-       patience

-       kindness

-       humility

-       respect

-       selflessness

-       forgiveness

-       honesty

-       commitment

Tortorice stated that 99% of all leadership failures are failures of character values. At Jason’s Deli, their culture is a combination of core values and servant leadership. The first responsibility of leadership is to reinforce and model these core values. Employees seek 3 key things: 1) set leadership (authority is influence, but it can breed fear), 2) vision (without vision, people lose hope), and 3) removal of obstacles. Further, leadership should incorporate direction, trust, and hope.

I think it’s fair to say that Tortorice succeeded in inspiring everyone in the audience. His dedication to his employees, along with his servant leadership methodology has clearly been instrumental in the success of Jason’s Deli. It was refreshing to hear a speaker present and place such emphasis on the importance of employee respect, support, and equality. When one of the audience members asked if there should be a limit to employee commitment, Tortorice simply replied, “No.” He then went on to describe the friendships he’s forged with his employees and coworkers, and said that these types of relationships simply don’t require such limitations.

I’m interested in hearing from those of you who attended this session. What are your thoughts on the messages that were presented?