The holiday season is pretty busy. For the team at HZPC North America the holidays mean getting together despite being located all over the continent. I recently just returned from the Netherlands where I attended Potato Days and connected with our HZPC team there, and now I’m packing up to head down to Orlando to meet up with the North America team.
Each quarter we fly our North America team to a city to get together and bond. That bonding includes discussing business, visiting our customers in the area, and doing an act of service. Last quarter we met up in Las Vegas where we were able to visit a food bank. We helped them stock food and get everything ready for the families and individuals that were coming in to receive that food. At HZPC, our mission is to feed the world and we intend to do our part.
In Orlando we’re going to visit some of our customers that are growing our Colomba, Sifra and Whitney potato varieties. We’ll get to see their unique farming challenges which will help us come up with ideas about how to address those with future potato varieties. We’ll be doing another service project together as a team. We have a luxurious position of being able to go and see these amazing parts of North America, and we need to be able to give back to those communities when we’re there.
Our growers have plenty of challenges from climate to cultural to market issues, there’s a lot to balance. They need us to be there to respond and to help them with those challenges. The only way we can do that is if we’re functioning as a well-oiled machine meaning team bonding is key. Even when we’re not all in the same place we make sure we’re connected with weekly meetings. In those meetings we share what we’re working on, ask questions and volunteer to help with each other’s projects. We create a space where it’s safe to ask for help and talk about our challenges — but most importantly, it’s safe to celebrate success.
It’s important, I believe, that we care about our team and the communities that we serve. If we don’t support and cheer on our teammates we won’t be able to provide the services that you, our customers, need. We work and live in communities across North America so it’s critical we support those communities too. Hopefully over the course of time, we get the opportunity to do service projects in each and every one of those communities.
