A Changing Organization and Culture at The Lebermuth Company

The organizational culture of The Lebermuth Company has changed dramatically over the past three years. While I believe the company’s values have remained unchanged, the collective attitudes and expectations that employees have about the work they do here have completely changed. I attribute these positive developments to the profound changes in the company’s daily routine, and new hires that both manage and lead effectively.

The Lebermuth Company has always strongly believed in promoting company values that reflect the culture it wants to build. It lists four values on its webpage: do the right thing, family focused, learn & share knowledge, and responsiveness. It is impossible for any company to guarantee the absolute application of the first and last values. However, I have specific, concrete examples of how the company builds a culture that reflects the second and third values.

Lebermuth’s emphasis on being family focused extends beyond those employees who are related to the owners. There are many employees that work here who have family members in different departments, too. Furthermore, some of the landscaping done at the company is done by younger teens who have siblings or relatives that work at the company; I think this says a lot, especially given the limited amount of good paying jobs for high schoolers.

Learning and sharing knowledge is integral for the fragrance and flavor industry. Gaps of knowledge exist between the science oriented perfumers/flavorists, creative marketing team, and ambitious sales department. It is difficult to sell a product that you do not understand. This is especially relevant at Lebermuth, because its products are chemicals that are described with scientific, olefactory, and gustatory descriptors. To help bridge these difficulties, the perfumers and flavorists hold open information sessions about one molecular compound each week. Everyone from IT to Sales to Marketing gets the opportunity to appreciate the industry. This is just one example of the company’s unique culture that exists because of the different departments.

Attitudes and expectations about the work that employees do have changed dramatically since the last time I interned at the company. It is apparent to me that employees are much more willing to share their honest feedback and suggestions about how operations could be improved. This is very different from the days when employees would refrain from sharing their real feelings about the individual owners and their business decisions. Instead, sometimes employees would share their feedback with me in private or during a lunch break. Of course, they would not act on these convictions… I think they are afraid “to bite the hand that feeds them,” even though their feedback would help the company in my opinion.

I know the owners and their personalities very well, so I have a general understanding about how they, as individuals, impact the organizational culture. Likewise, I am not surprised when employees raise legitimate complaints about the way the owners communicate or demand for complex tasks to be completed. Both the owners and employees have expressed to me how the other group simply does not think practically. But even still, I feel like employees are far more willing to offer their actual thoughts now than they were in the past. In my view, this is a healthy business environment, because it forces those in positions of power to confront their own shortcomings when making business decisions. I suspect that this new culture of open and honest feedback has developed in part because of a major leadership change at the company.

The Lebermuth Company appointed its CTO, Craig Sroda, to be the company’s president. He is the first president outside of the Brown family, and he is an incredibly driven and intelligent individual. Sroda is the former CEO of Pinnacle of Indiana. He is an energetic, transformative leader who many employees enjoy working with. Sroda has his own leadership blog, where he writes about the ideas that he strives to implement as a leader. One change to the organizational culture that Sroda is directly responsible for is the social events that take place on Thursdays. At the end of the work day, Sroda invites employees to join him for conversation, drinks, and food. I think this type of event, although expensive, fosters a positive organizational culture where employees feel comfortable.

In a future blog post, I plan on evaluating more of Craig Sroda’s unique contributions to the company. He is driving a lot of change at the company. I am impressed by the substantial changes that he has helped implement, many of which have impacted the organizational culture at The Lebermuth Company.