Transcript
John Duisberg (00:04):
Welcome to the Love Your People podcast series where we bring you inspiring stories and actionable insights from leaders who are shaping people first workplaces. I'm your host, John Duisberg, and today's episode features Kelly Costanza, chief people Officer at CAVA, a brand that's redefining Mediterranean fast casual dining with heart health and humanity at its core, Kelly has led CAVA through incredible milestones since joining in 2020, including the acquisition of Zoe's Kitchen, a successful IPO in 2023 and scaling to over 10,000 employees nationwide. Along the way, she's championed innovative strategies that empower frontline employees and operationalize company values, creating a thriving people first culture. In this episode, we'll explore how Kelly and her team connect purpose with performance, empowering employees at every level, and build a culture of shared humanity within a rapidly growing organization. Let's jump right in. As Kelly gives our audience some context about Kaba their incredible growth and the leadership responsibility she's tasked with every day to keep the momentum going.
Kelly Costanza (01:17):
We are the leading fast casual Mediterranean authority in the US and we're really excited about our growth and love to talk about from the time I joined CAVA until now, just how much we've grown. So when I joined back in May of 2020, everybody thought I was crazy going to restaurants at the beginning of a pandemic, but I was really enthralled by the leaders that I met, and I believed in the story that our founders had to tell and live out every day around this idea that everyone is welcome. Everyone has a seat at the table. And so it was interesting for me because I joined after 25 years in retail, mostly fashion retail, some off price retail, although I always tell our restaurant team members, I get some street cred with them because I was a server at Red Lobster when I was in college. So I do know what it means to serve and wait tables, and also I was a store manager. So I think that that helped at the beginning of my career set the foundation for understanding what it means to communicate with frontline workers.
John Duisberg (02:25):
I love it. You got to have some street cred. When we're laying out these strategies, and I'm going to say this term, but I kind of think of frontline employees, team members as the final frontier of employee engagement. I feel like all the tech companies, they have all the bells and whistles and the gadgets and that's been there, but frontline it can be hard. It's challenging. How do you reach and get these team members to buy into a mission and purpose and values when they're spread out all over? And so talk to us, give us a feel like what does that strategy look like for CAVA? Are there any lessons learned, things that you've experienced along the way, specifically looking at how do you reach those frontline team
Kelly Costanza (03:16):
Members? Yeah, it's a great question. I think about our frontline team members as anyone who's interacting with our guests. And when you think about it, everyone is a potential guest at CAVA. And so that includes our CAVA Foods team members who are producing our delicious dips and spreads. It includes team members who are working in supply chain in the support center and communicating with our vendors. It includes our team members who are working the line and serving a delicious bowl or delicious pita every single day, the general managers who lead those teams. And so there's really every single team member at CAVA that touches the guest in some way or another. And so thinking specifically about how do you bring all of that to life and have everyone rally around the same thing. What we did several years ago was set out on a real intention to create a mission, values and competencies, what we call our MVC that everyone could understand, could relate to, and could rally behind.
(04:21):
And so our mission at CAVA is to bring heart health and humanity to food. And we like to say that the only way that we can do that is if we bring heart health and humanity to team members. And we say that out loud. We say that to them. We say that publicly, and we create programs and systems and support of bringing heart health and humanity to team members. The other thing that we did was we reinvented, if you will, or brought newness to our values. So CAVA has always had values, but we created an enhancement to our values. So our values are generosity first, always passion for positivity, collective ambition, and constant curiosity. And then the final thing we did was we created these seven competencies. We did a lot of research around what behaviors do we want to see from every level in the organization.
(05:19):
And we came up with seven competencies, things like accountability, diversity, cultivation, enterprise leadership, and we worked on definitions for different behaviors in the organization. So if you're a frontline worker and you're building that bowl or pita every day, what does accountability mean for an individual who's doing that role all the way up to our executives? And what does accountability mean? So there's different behaviors for those competencies depending on your role, but the same seven exists for everyone. And so we created this campaign then around our MVC, and everyone at CAVA knows the MVC, everybody recites the MVC. And so we built a lot of programs around recognition for that. When you think of the entire talent cycle, so when you think of identifying the right hires and the right roles for the organization, and then you think about setting goals for people, you think about the training that we offer, the succession planning and career paths.
(06:26):
They're all centered around that MVC, we make sure that we hire people who will live out those competencies and values, and then we have impact plans instead of performance reviews. And those impact plans have the competencies built into them. All of our training classes have those competencies at the forefront, and the list goes on in terms of how we have incorporated that MVC, we also have recognition around the values. And so we have values cards that we hand out. And so things like that constant curiosity that I mentioned, I don't know if you can see this card here, but it's got constant curiosity and you write a message on the back to somebody how they showed up today with constant curiosity. And we put those on our communication boards in every restaurant. So every restaurant has a communication board where we celebrate people for bringing those values to life. And some people take them home, share them with their family members, some people keep them on the communication board, but there's a lot of ways that we've operationalized is what I like to call it, operationalized the MVC and bring it to life. So we have a quarterly MVC program where somebody from the support center in CAVA Foods is recognized for being the MVC instead of the MVP.
(07:40):
Everybody is so excited to see how many people will get nominated. We read every nomination, myself and Jen Summers, the head of operations then announced the winner, and we give them this giant size values card, and it's just another way that we bring this MVC to life.
John Duisberg (08:01):
I love it. So you shared a lot of gold nuggets right there, Kelly, and I wanted to lean into a couple. So you mentioned the word campaign, and I just think it's interesting. So as a chief people officer of CAVA, I mean it kind of sounds like a chief marketing officer strategy. And so this campaign where people are talking about the MBC out loud, right? Yes. And so is this something that you focus on at certain times of year or is this just an ongoing kind of strategy and then the communication board? So talk to us about how that campaign looks, I guess, as you operationalize it in your
Kelly Costanza (08:43):
Words. Yes, it's a great question. So a few years ago at our first annual CAVA Connect that we had where we bring all of our general managers and above restaurant leaders together, members from the support center come to this meeting and we've got a series of learnings and other things that we do at Cava Connect, mainly celebration of team members. But we set out a few years ago to create a very intentional campaign over years. And so we announced what the MVC was. We did training on the competencies themselves, and we made them relatable to the restaurants, made them relatable to support center manager, for example. We trained our general managers and we said, okay, what does emotional resilience being one of the competencies look like to you? Well, we use an example like a truck shows up late with your delivery. How do you handle that?
(09:40):
How do you adjust? How do you act with agility and make sure that we're teaching our team members how we behave with that competency in mind. We then gave every restaurant competency cards, so they have laminated cards that show the competency behavior on the front and on the back what it does not look like. And so they've got that set of competency cards on their communication board in the back. And then every morning in their huddles, we send them through our ops communication, different examples of different competencies they may encounter. So we have a competency of the month, and then in the huddles in the morning, we say, okay, let's say this situation occurs in your restaurant. How might you use this competency of the month of emotional resilience to handle this situation? We then created something a little more. So those are just some examples of what we did at an annual kickoff, ways that we bring it to life daily in the huddle.
(10:38):
But then we created something called our Competency Champion training initiative, our CCT program. So every year we go out and we select the best of the best general managers to become our competency champions. We then bring them together and we do what we call a train the trainer. And we do two things. We certify them in being training experts. So what I like to say is we pour into them, we pour into their development, and we give them an opportunity to learn how to become trainers. Along with that, we give them an opportunity to become that champion for the garden. So many of you I know have terms district or district manager. We say area leader, and we say garden for how we describe our districts. And so they become the champion of that garden and they showcase and train restaurants other than their own on how the competency should show up every day. And it's amazing when you see how excited they get to announce that there are competency champion and it's like another acknowledgement that they can have for themselves in terms of recognition as well. So those are just some of the other ways that we designed this campaign to really bring it to life.
John Duisberg (11:52):
I love it. I love, and so two things that stood out. One is how you're empowering these managers to be the champion of their garden. So it's not just coming from, let's call it corporate or what have you. It's empowering actual managers to then be the voice of what that competency looks like. And the other thing I really liked is it's the same competency, but there's different ways that it comes to life based on the role of the individual. I can just see myself, Hey, I joined the org, I joined CAVA, and I heard Kelly talking about this competency, but what does it really mean for my role? And so to be able to speak to that specific role I think is really powerful. So I love that. And this kind of goes into the next question I had, which I hear from a lot of better leaders, how do you communicate effectively to your frontline team members? And so you mentioned the huddles, so it sounds like every day when I start the shift, there's a huddle. So I'm talking with my coworkers and my manager, the communication board, so I can see updates, I can see competencies. Are there other ways that you communicate? Obviously those are effective, but I'm just curious, how do you communicate? How do you reinforce on that day-to-day, week-to-week basis? What's so important at CAVA?
Kelly Costanza (13:20):
Yeah, it's a great question. We have something on our team that we talk about all the time. And I say this to my team all the time. I always say connect all the things right? Connect it all. And so for example, the competencies are built into our impact plans. So that is basically an action plan that everyone at kaba should have. It's focused on your quantitative goals, your developmental goals, and your competency goals, and you should be talking about them every month with your supervisor. In addition to that, through our succession planning process, we have something called talent profiles. And those are created for individuals who we want to see succeed and be able to grow within the organization. And so the competencies are built into that as well. It's almost like in every facet of our people systems, we've incorporated the competencies, and so we're bringing them to life.
(14:12):
When we're talking about people, we created behavioral interview guides. They're all based on the competency. So we are teaching our leaders how to choose team members based on how are they showing up in the interview with specific examples around accountability, service, mindset, et cetera. And then recently this year we rolled out personality assessments. And so we're using a tool by the name of OAD, and we're looking at how that tool can help us understand one's personality just as an aid. It's definitely not used to select or not select team members, but it's an aid, another window into team members and how they may show up naturally on the job. Some of the other things that we do to bring culture to life, one of my favorite programs of All CAVA time is something that we call our partners in service program. Under that Partners in Service program, we have two things that shine.
(15:13):
The first is our shoulder to shoulder program. The second is our center at the source program. The shoulder to shoulder program is something that is beloved by all. So every quarter, anyone who works in the support center is required to put on a uniform to go out to a restaurant and to serve the guest. And that is however the general manager sees fit. So that means that we're prepping in the morning if it means we're working the line and we're building a bowl or building a pita, or we're helping to make our delicious juices, that's what we do. So yours truly went out recently to our Bryant Park location in New York and served the guest from 9:00 AM or 8:00 AM until around two o'clock. Our CEO does his shoulder to shoulder every quarter without fail. He puts on the uniform, he goes to different restaurants and works very intentionally to serve the guest.
(16:09):
And the other thing we do is we listen to team members. They tell us what's working, what's not working. We recognize them, we hand out values cards, we bring the culture to life. In addition to that, we travel every quarter as an ELT to restaurants and we do restaurant visits. So it is important to us to go celebrate the teams, to listen to them, to see what's happening in every part of their restaurants. We walk every part of the restaurant and we have them tell us what's working, what's not. If we could wave a magic wand, what would they like us to know? And then we listen. So for example, they've told us in the past things like you could make our lives easier if we didn't have to cut these onions all day. So we looked into ways to send them precut onions and so little things like that.
(16:57):
And then bigger things like programs or compensation or other things we to as well. The Center at the Source program on the other side of that is every quarter we have team members that come in from the restaurants and we put them in front of everyone at the town hall and celebrate them. So this is hourly team members, general managers, you name it. If they're nominated by their leaders in the field, we bring them in and we celebrate them. And we actually have them listen to round table sessions where every executive will meet with this group, the center at the source group. And again, same thing, ask them questions, what's working, what's not, and give them recognition in those moments as well.
John Duisberg (17:42):
Yeah, that is amazing. And I'm just thinking, I'm thinking for our audience, right? Like, Hey, maybe I'm in a restaurant food industry, but that's okay. You can still do a shoulder to shoulder program and have that be very meaningful. Yours truly going out and in the working side by side on the line or the prep. I love that, Kelly. And then I also love the idea of bringing folks in to the town hall from different locations and that spans across industries. So those are amazing, just what's worked, I guess, for CAVA in terms of building the culture. So thank you for sharing that. I love that leads me to the next question that you and I chatted about, which is you have a unique EVP employee value proposition brand called the Human Deal Framework. And so break that down for us. Help us understand what is the human deal framework? How did you get there? What does it mean for your team members? Just help us understand what this is all about and the impact that it's had.
Kelly Costanza (18:58):
Yeah, it's a great question. All I think that one of the things I want to make clear is that this human deal framework was something that Gartner created in a post pandemic world. And after doing a lot of research and talking to different industry leaders, what they learned about the employee value proposition that had shifted was this idea, and I describe it this way to just give it a bottom line, if you will. People used to come to your organization before the pandemic to get a better job to feel like they could have a better career. Now they come to your organization because they want their life to be better. They want to know that your organization will fill the full scope of human needs. And so Gartner put this human deal framework together and we subscribe to it. So the idea is that there are different categories that team members feel are important, and the first is radical flexibility.
(20:06):
The second is personal growth. The third is holistic wellbeing, fourth is shared purpose, and fifth is deeper connection. So people want to know what do you have in your culture that will give me radical flexibility, more autonomy over my life? What do you have in personal growth that your organization will tell me that I feel valued and holistic wellbeing? How will I know that your organization tells me that you care about me? I think this one more than ever shared purpose I feel invested in, and I feel like the organization is an opportunity for me to be part of something bigger than myself. That's actually not anything new. Human beings, as part of how we are wired want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. It's never changed over time, and I think people just want it more now than ever. So we give people a hybrid work model.
(21:09):
We are still believing in that hybrid work model in a time where I know a lot of organizations are returning to the office and mandating returns to the office. We continue to hire people all over the country allowing them to live where they want to live, and we bring them into the support center once a week for something called All Hands Week. Because we also believe in the power of human connection. We have just simply found a way to have both. We have things like unlimited PTO for our support center team members, which is still really important for people feeling like they have autonomy in the world of personal growth. I mentioned our impact plans, our competencies. We do a lot of training and development centered around those competencies. We have a career path model that we've rolled out across the enterprise, still have a few departments to go, but we're working on this career path model and the other areas, one of the things that I think matters more now than ever is this understanding, as I mentioned of we we're here together.
(22:18):
We have a shared purpose. And so under this umbrella of deeper connections, we have something called Allies in Motion, which is our one and only employee resource group outside of our network of women, which started before I arrived at CAVA. So the network of women still exists, but we decided that years ago we wanted to embark upon a way to create understanding between humans. And so we came up with this allies in motion, our aim, our employee resource group where we're focused on storytelling. And so it's really around a human connection and how do we have that human connection with one another? We believe that people are tired of being told what they should think or believe or preached at or talked to, if you will. And we believe that people just really want to know and understand each other. And so every month at CAVA, we celebrate a different underrepresented group and people just come on to something we have called the Monday Meetup, and every other Monday we have this meeting and it's just for 30 minutes in the morning.
(23:27):
And depending on the group that we're celebrating, people will tell their story of, Hey, this is who I am. And so if it's Pride Month, for example, they talk about how when they came out and they were disowned by their parents and their grandmother took them in, and it's the only person in their life that they have. You see the chat just filled with the person's name and you're important and we care about you and you belong at CAVA. At the same time we're celebrating. Yesterday, we celebrated those members of our veterans community and part of our military families, and we had a woman talk about her time in the Navy and what that experience was like, and you saw compassion for everything that she's lived through and a genuine sense of gratitude. I could go on about the stories we've had people share around homelessness. And that CAVA gave them an opportunity to get a job and get off the street, and then eventually they got promoted to general manager and they were able to buy home for their mother. I mean, there's just this incredible human connection that we're creating that we feel is really at the center of our very special culture. I could spend an entire hour just talking about allies in motion, but that's another way that we're really bringing this EVP to life.
John Duisberg (24:48):
And I feel like it ties perfectly back to the mission, the heart health and humanity. And so you've mentioned multiple times just the human connection and how you tell stories around that. I love the idea of telling stories as a way to just build community. And also I think there's a lot of power in stories. People can relate to stories and remember stories. But like you said, we could continue to go, I'm so grateful, Kelly, for just the knowledge that you've shared, the experiences that you shared. Hey, here's how you've approached this at CAVA, and that's super meaningful. And so as we wrap up, we always want to leave our audience with kind of a practical next step, like a key kind of takeaway. And you could, and then we'll open it up to questions from the audience as well. But as you kind of reflect on this past half hour or so conversation, how would we wrap up and leave our audience with a good next step?
Kelly Costanza (25:55):
I think the first thing to do is if your organization is very clear about their mission, create a very specific mission and support of that that's related to your people. Create your people mission and support of your company mission and then create a campaign around it. I think one of the things that often, if you're on here and you're a people and culture leader or human resources leader, I think some of the things that are challenging for leaders as times in our role is this idea that we are alone in charge of people and culture. We are. It is an enterprise responsibility. And so if you're feeling that way, find allies on your peer group and bring that idea of people and culture being an enterprise responsibility. Bring that to life with those allies. And then I would just say finally, I think the greatest part of the power of language is the language we choose around how we talk about people.
(27:03):
And I think it's important for us to talk about people like they are investments, and we choose that language every day. We never describe the things that we do around our people, systems and programs as expenses. We talk about them like they are investments. Just like you talk about research and development or innovation, we should be all talking about our people programs as investments. I think one of my favorite Simon Sinek quotes is, a hundred percent of shareholders are people. A hundred percent of guests are people, and a hundred percent of employees are people. So if you understand people, you understand business.
John Duisberg (27:44):
As we wrap up today, remember that the insights you've gained are only as valuable as the actions you take. Leadership and culture transformation begins with each of us as part of ITA group at Cool Leaf. We are dedicated to elevating human experiences at work and beyond. Visit us@coolleaf.com where you'll find a resources section specifically designed to help you lead with purpose and create a people first organization. These tools are here to support you and your journey to building workplaces where people feel seen, valued, and inspired. If today's episode resonated with you, please rate and share it with your network. Together we can amplify the message of creating workplaces where leadership elevates humanity and drives meaningful change. Thank you for joining us and being part of our mission to transform workplaces. Until next time, keep leading with your heart and making a difference.