Leadership Levers
This podcast spotlights leaders' actions so they may enhance their organization’s performance and culture.
We feature CEOs and industry-recognized Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who share their experiences and insights on three key challenges: people, performance, and profit.
If you are a leader who wants to learn from your peers about improving performance and financial returns, please join us.
Leadership Levers
From Scrambled Eggs to Empowered Leadership - Joshua Miller’s Journey to Organizational Clarity
What happens when empowered leadership goes unchecked - and everyone "starts running with scissors?"
In this episode of Leadership Levers, Joshua Miller, Founder & Principal of Remarkable Foods, shares how his food service consulting work revealed a hidden leadership trap - giving too much freedom without clear frameworks.
Joshua’s journey started with scrambled eggs at age eight and evolved into executive leadership in the food service industry.
Today, he helps organizations turn chaos into clarity by building cultures where process and empowerment work together.
A great real-world example - a client’s well-meaning efforts to empower leaders & managers led to confusion, overlapping innovations, and operational slowdown.
Joshua stepped in to help realign, but there was a turning point - a discovery process that surfaced surprising insights through confidential, one-on-one interviews - showing that even in dysfunction, the team deeply respected their leaders, wanted to improve and drive growth.
Joshua walks through:
- Why process - not people - was a real problem in this leadership challenge
- The downside of innovation without alignment or structure
- How linear thinking can be a leadership asset or a liability
- Why psychological safety and clear feedback loops drive better outcomes
- His reminder that leading others well starts with treating them how you'd want to be led.
For leaders navigating complex teams or culture drift, this episode offers practical insight into how empowered leadership and intentional process can unlock performance.
We'd love your feedback on how we can improve - send us a Text!!
Seeking to align your culture, boost performance & impact your bottom line? Let’s chat—no sales, just real talk about your challenges. Not ready? Join our PL3 Community for free insights & connections.
Welcome to the Leadership Levers Podcast. I'm your host, Will Gladheart, CMO at the Culture Think Tank. At the Culture Think Tank, we empower leaders with metrics that strengthen culture, drive performance and return. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address organizational change. Today, our guest is Joshua Miller, founder and principal at Remarkable Foods. Thanks for taking the time to join us.
Joshua Miller:Thank you for having me
William Gladhart:Excellent. Well, let's begin by having you share with our audience a bit about yourself, your background and your organization.
Joshua Miller:Yeah, so I'm founder and principal of Remarkable Foods, as you said, and really food service obviously is where I am and that's where I've always wanted to be, Since the moment I made scrambled eggs at the age of like eight. That was the first thing I ever cooked. Looked up at, my mom said I want to be a chef. That never stopped or slowed down and I've been like married to the industry ever since. That's how I got started in it and today I'm a former executive chef and culinary director for a food service management company before I decided to venture off and start this business along with my wife partner obviously in life and business to do this venture of consulting, management, advisory services for food service organizations, Really just trying to make innovation accessible and implemented into organizations through training, culinary strategies and operations.
William Gladhart:Yeah, it's definitely a unique field to be in, for sure that you're one of the few leaders that we've had on recently that has a background in that particular area. It's usually sometimes manufacturing, tech, etc. So, as we begin today, we'll be talking about three questions as a warm-up to start our conversation. Would you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?
Joshua Miller:I believe it's critical because it drives everything in organizations. I don't care if you're a nonprofit, I don't care if you're a for-profit organization, I don't care if you're a food service or manufacturing, whatever it is right. It drives everything. And we know in business there's always, especially top leadership are looking at KPIs, measurables, finances, all that stuff. If you really look at the culture, it's not just oh, what is our financial culture like, it's not oh, what is our safety culture like, what is the culture outside of those measurables? Before you even start thinking about, oh, we need to make these improvements and we need to hit these targets, Because really I think that that's where it starts to make improvements to everything you can measure.
William Gladhart:Yeah, I think that's a really valid point, because without people, without the people that built the business, but also without them facilitating change and growth, that's not going to happen, no matter how good your numbers are, no matter how good your consulting services are, etc. It's been our experience, joshua, that leaders tend to struggle in three key areas people, process or profit. You know in your role as a leader and working with other leaders. Could you identify which one of these three areas presents a cultural challenge?
Joshua Miller:Yeah. So I would say, for me it would be process. If you ask my wife, it's probably people.
Joshua Miller:We're small and people meaning me, Because sometimes the process for me that I feel like it's one of those double-edged swords I've always said throughout the years of like, yeah, I love data, I love getting into details, I'm very detail-oriented, I'm very process-oriented. And then my wife said something to me one day. She says you know what? You're very linear thinking. And I was like I've heard that before, like that sounds like it might be it. Give me the definition. And she read it to me and I was like, yep, that's me, and so I'm going to actually spell it out here.
Joshua Miller:So linear thinking is the problem-solving approach that involves a step by step framework, logical progression from a starting point to a conclusion, and so it's characterized by sequential and analytical mindset, often relying on established rules, formulas and patterns. And that is me, that is me to a T. And what I've realized is that that can be a double edged sword, especially in business, especially dealing with clients. Right, because I want it can lead to like almost this data dump, right Of information, and it's like you hire consultants for expertise and time, either one, both or together. And it's like In food service, time is probably up there right On you know we need to hit these goals.
Joshua Miller:We need to. You know we have, you know things that we need to improve on. You have the time. Help us get there. And then that doesn't help when I come in and like data dump on them and like we don't need to know the period and the column of everything that's happening in our project. So that's where I feel like it's been a challenge. For me personally, it's a gift and a curse.
William Gladhart:Yeah, as you've been working with that personal challenge, but also as you've been working with other leaders, was there a particular challenge that had a negative impact on an organization, either culturally or process?
Joshua Miller:wise, yeah, yeah, definitely. So, in terms of challenge, from a culture standpoint, there is this empowered leadership culture is where you give a lot of freedom to the leaders. They don't have to be senior leadership right, just your. It could be your managers, entry level managers, supervisors. Giving that empowerment to them to help solve challenges is great, for I think, from a hyper collaboration standpoint and working together towards a common goal, but without frameworks, without guardrails in place, it can lead to it going off the rails where now there's too many what's the saying? Too many Indians, I don't know cheese, something like that, right.
William Gladhart:Well, I think, I think the better term is we call it idea fairies, where, like, there's an idea for everything and then magically things start to happen and then everybody gets really confused, because there's lack of clarity, so I'm sure you can appreciate that.
Joshua Miller:That is exactly it, and that's exactly what we encountered in the discovery process with them is that like this is it's great, but it's also not great because there's not enough like management of all the different things that everyone's trying to do and accomplish. There's no singular roadmap. It's just kind of like everyone running around with scissors, running around with scissors is the way to say it.
William Gladhart:Yeah, that's a good descriptor. Well, and you probably found also with this client, it was impacting productivity, innovation operations, where things had just either slowed to a crawl because nobody knew what was going on, but there were lots of ideas about what should be happening.
Joshua Miller:It's still a challenge to rein it in from an outside perspective. Right, obviously, their organization, they're separate from us. We're just there to advise. While it's been helpful some of the things we've been bringing to their attention, it's also it's hard to know that there's only so much we can do. Right, we can give advice, but they have to keep going, going with the business and we have to keep going on the rest of the project as well.
Joshua Miller:One thing I would say for sure that I loved is in that discovery process.
Joshua Miller:Yes, it brings challenges. Eventually you hit the point where you're working against yourself because you're trying so many different innovations in so many different arms in so many ways that it starts to slow things down, it starts to make it a headache for your operators. They have too many systems to work with because everyone had great ideas and there wasn't alignment on it. And at the end of the day, though, in those one-on-ones, which was actually the client loved that, because in a group setting you might keep things hush-hush, you may hold back, but I mean, we made it very clear in these one-on-ones the good, the bad, the ugly, everything in between let it out, because, at the end of the day, a report and everything that's said isn't going to have names attached to it. We just want to know the facts. It was really awesome to hear like, even despite all of those downfalls, people really loved working for their leader and they want to make improvements. So it's like you guys can get through this together because you're already in it and it's like you.
William Gladhart:Right. I think that anonymity, but also the ability to provide that feedback to the leader with course and direction, where it was that personal check-in with every person, I mean I know those are very timely but also hugely critical because you really do start to understand how vested people are in the business, how much they love their role. They just sometimes need clarity, direction, a little focus and better communication from the leader which helps everyone understand what their next steps are going to be. I think that kind of rolls into our next question, that you know what was maybe one thing you identified that helped impact either your culture and your business or a client's culture positively.
Joshua Miller:Yeah, I would say it is. That was eye-opening for me, because we all know we can. No one likes micromanagement, right, I don't like micromanagement. I never met anyone that likes being micromanaged.
William Gladhart:It's our top requested stop behavior, stop micromanaging us.
Joshua Miller:So I'm going to say I'm actually going to go with that. That empowered leadership culture has been mesmerizing for me and I wish that more organizations would take that on.
William Gladhart:Very cool. Well, as we wrap up today, is there anything else you'd like to share or add for fellow leaders?
Joshua Miller:Yeah. So, going along with that last answer, I would definitely say treat others as you want to be treated, right, it's easy to say don't micromanage. I know I've been a micromanager. I feel like at times maybe not the worst, but definitely had those tendencies At the same time, if you just look at the people that you're working with and people that refer to you knowing that, hey, they probably want to have some empowered leadership, some empowered decisions and control over what they're doing. Just treat them the way that you would want to be treated in their position and you'll probably get to good results with that.
William Gladhart:Yeah, I think that's some really wise advice. Joshua, I've enjoyed having you on our Leadership Levers podcast. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, thank, you for having me.
William Gladhart:Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers podcast. Find all our Leadership Lovers episodes on the Culture Think Tank website at www. theculturethinktank. com or listen on your favorite streaming platform. We'd love to hear from you about the challenges you have faced as a leader. Tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experiences in strengthening culture and performance, one action at a time.
