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Blending Leadership for Success: How Lucta Transformed Frontline Leadership to Drive Growth
With the help of: Maryland MEP
About
Flavor & Fragrance Specialties, a Lucta company and leading US-based flavor and fragrance firm, specializes in designing solutions for food and taste, fast-to market fragrances, feed intake behavior, efficiency, and animal welfare.
The Challenge
In its U.S. manufacturing facility, Lucta faced a common challenge: frontline leaders, promoted for their technical skills and strong work ethic, lacked formal leadership training. While they excelled in their specific roles, their new responsibilities as team leaders required broader leadership capabilities, including effective communication, team engagement, problem-solving, and coaching.
Recognizing this gap, Lucta’s leadership saw an opportunity to invest in its frontline team to prepare them for the demands of a growing organization. The goal was to cultivate a strong leadership foundation that would drive employee engagement, reduce attrition, improve team performance, and enable capacity growth.
The training which has encompassed approximately 25% of our workforce has provided a platform for a common language that employees from the senior business directors to high potential manufacturing associates can understand, engage, and be in alignment. Having extended the training to upper management exemplified Lucta’s commitment to this program of excellence, and is not just a manufacturing initiative. Several of our long term manufacturing leads have taken the training and improved their management skills incredibly. For example, Lucta have implemented production metric boards and better scheduling. We even had our quality supervisor, on his own, start an ad hoc leadership team for follow up training and dialogue.
Clearly, through a better understanding of the business, how to better work with team members, and communicate expectations and results our leads are setting themselves to be skilled supervisors. At the corporate level, the skill training has made our leads, managers, and director true leaders. Not just by title but by doing what is right and walking the talk. I am very proud of our team members and the way they have embraced the skills and methodologies to improve themselves, the company, and their coworkers.
MEP's Role
Lucta engaged Maryland MEP and Go-Lean-Six Consulting to deliver basic supervisor training, a program designed to equip team leads with the tools, principles, and mindset necessary for effective leadership. This immersive program clarified the role of a leader within the business and focused on practical skills such as team communication, coaching, and daily operational leadership. The training emphasized a collaborative approach to “winning” each day, encouraging team leads to improve communication within and across teams, provide consistent coaching, and empower their team members.