Culinary Culture
The organizational culture at Virginia Gourmet emphasizes consistency and attention to detail as its core values. At the beginning of each assignment, my boss expresses how success is founded by building upon small accomplishments. This is especially true for start-up businesses; businesses that usually take a considerable amount of trail and error in order to find success. This is another value that is embraced at Virginia Gourmet. At this company, we stress perseverance as a non-negotiable in the learning process. Because my boss is learning as he goes along as well, sometimes the structure of the company can be somewhat unorganized. As a result, he preaches patience and perseverance as we work through obstacles together. With the nature of the tasks that we have been assigned, these values are applicable and worked thus far.
The holistic attitude at Virginia Gourmet is, for the most part, positive as well. All of the interns have taken up a dynamic, learning mindset. Accompanied by our attention to detail, we have learned much in a short period of time. This mindset has been catalyzed by our supervisor, as he delineates the importance responding to recurring failure. Due to the nature of my internship, most of the interaction with the company is virtual. While the virtual interaction makes it difficult to understand assignments, with a dynamic mindset, it has been a valuable learning experience. A myriad of times I haven’t done assignments correctly because I faked my understanding of the assignment in order to look competent. Through my numerous failures, along with the constructive criticism of my boss, I learned that I need to make all of my needs known; no matter the perceived cost. This has helped my sense of communication drastically, as I now feel more comfortable expressing my need to do quality work in the workplace. All of these improvements were founded upon the dynamic learning mindset embodied at Virginia Gourmet. While I’m still building myself up to be comfortable in the workplace and show my positive attitude, my supervisor has helped the process along by pushing me out of my comfort zone, to develop the appropriate attitude to constructive criticism and failure.
So, it sounds as though learning values, expectations, and norms is ‘hands-on’ – you learn by doing, particularly as the organization is still ironing some of these things out for the organization as a whole. Particularly for the interns, it sounds as though most communication (from this post and your previous ones) is virtual, and you’ve already noted some of the limitations with that forum. Sounds like communication, particularly within the organization, is relatively informal too (though you have not explicitly said that). Also sounds that given the start-up nature of the organization, more so than the specific industry in which it operates, there are particular things that the leadership needs to address more than others and again, as it is young, they are still sorting out what those things are.