As it is, a dairy is most often only as strong as its leadership. For High Plains Ponderosa Dairy, that leadership is Bethard, and it’s strong.

A group of farmers in southwest Kansas started High Plains Ponderosa Dairy in 2001 out of a desire to make better use of their crops. Bethard, who holds a Ph.D. in dairy nutrition and management from Virginia Tech, joined the group as a managing partner in 2017.

Today, he leads a team of dedicated farmers toward continued growth and sustainability using tested management methods. During the webinar, Bethard eagerly shared what he’s learned about leadership throughout his career.

Leaders are fully committed

Contrary to what instinct may tell us, at the top of the dairy management pyramid is not an employee handbook, crystal clear expectations, or consistent constructive feedback. What trumps it all, Bethard said, is self-awareness — that is, one’s personal awareness, as a leader, of their perceived effort, attitude, and investment.

If you aren’t fully present, fully prepared, and fully involved, people who rely on you for direction will take notice. They may even decide to put less effort into their own roles. If you’re a person in leadership, caring for yourself directly translates to caring for your employees.

What is the easiest way to put this into practice? Go to bed early, Bethard said. Though it might sound inconsequential, the effect may be more significant than you’d think.

“Above all, you need to wake up fully rested. You need to show up to work ready to work. Your mood and attitude carry throughout the organization,” said Bethard.

In an industry where success is based largely on how well one cares for the land and animals, it can be easy to let people skills — both toward ourselves and others — slide. But Bethard argued that it is exactly those abilities that can make or break a work environment.

“How you treat people matters,” he said. “They have to trust you. You need to show you care about them and that they can count on you. You have to be genuine, and you have to be all in. I don’t see any other way other than being fully committed. There’s no other way in dairy.

“This job is hard,” he continued. “There’s never been a better job I’ve had than being a dairyman, but it’s hard. If it were easy, a lot more people would be doing it.”

Even on days when you struggle to put your boots on in the morning — and, Bethard conceded, those are many — as long as you’ve been proactive about taking care of yourself, thereby bringing your best, others will bring theirs.

In an environment like the one Bethard cultivates, leadership means showing up with more than what is expected. If people see your vigor and believe in it, and if it is steeped in application, the passion will begin to spread on its own.

Pretty soon, you will have a team of individuals who are equally die-hard about making the dairy succeed.

Leaders define culture

Have you ever been in a job that felt inconsistent? A job at which coworkers, management, and documentation all seemed to consider expectations differently? Such discrepancies may have stemmed from an ill-defined culture.

“Culture” is thrown around so often these days it’s practically lost its poignancy. But at its core, according to StatPearls Continuing Education, organizational culture is a set of values, beliefs, attitudes, and rules that give employees a feeling of unity and purpose. It is created through authentic and consistent behaviors, rather than goals or mission statements.

As Bethard observed, “Meetings and protocols aren’t what it takes to get a team together and motivated to do their job.”

Because of its abstractness, organizational culture can be challenging to define and even harder to implement. Every work environment’s culture is different, and each leader’s approach to culture varies, too, with their strengths.

The values and attitudes at your dairy need to fit with your personality, Bethard said. “It should be a part of who you are.”

In this way, the making of organizational culture needn’t be intimidating. Consider your strengths, what’s important to you, and what these might look like in practice.

For example, the culture at High Plains Ponderosa emphasizes accountability, excellency, transparency, persistence, and trust. Their official core values are caring, supporting, contributing, and stability. Bethard asks his employees to be comfortable with autonomy, open to new ideas, and data driven.

“You want to have motivated people that hold themselves to high standards and are intrinsically motivated,” Bethard described.

People who independently find value in their work will continue to uphold both personal and external standards of being. Plus, these kinds of employees don’t need the oft performance-diminishing incentivization of reward. In a well-cultivated organizational culture with respectable starting salaries and guaranteed growth and sustainability, motivation nurtures itself.

Leaders promote stability

One piece to organizational sustainability is employment. Employees want to know that their place of work will allow them to realistically commit to the long haul. If they don’t see evidence of long-term financial stability in their job, it’s likely they will not bring their best to their responsibilities, and the operation will suffer. Bethard said he nips this risk by offering respectable salaries up front.

“I want my employees to feel stable. As long as they do their job, they can do it for as long as they want. If someone has an issue with their pay, I’ll listen. I want them to feel valued,” Bethard said.

Of course, there are times when an employee’s requests, pay or otherwise, are out of the ordinary.

“If someone asks for higher pay than I’m willing to give, all I say is, they better earn it,” said Bethard. “So far it’s worked out. There are so many more things to get done in a day than I can do alone, and I have wonderful colleagues.”

Another way to practice stability in your business is to visit and learn from others. Bethard said he visits neighbors far and wide to see what works for them and how he may be able to improve. He is also intentional about spending time on his farm to understand the successes and needs for improvement that exist alongside his workers’ responsibilities.

“It’s important to go out on the farm and observe how things are going and then challenge our business to be better, how it can grow and improve,” he said.

Stability through growth is a major goal for the group’s leadership. Bethard and his team focus on being “infinite,” or, in other words, strengthening and adapting for decades to come. As he has found, it is more difficult to attract quality employees to a static business than to a growing one.

But, Bethard noted, this path is not for every dairy. Depending on your business goals, expansion may not be a good fit. After all, growth may depend on there being someone ready to take over leadership roles. Additionally, not every operation can afford to take on more cows, labor, and equipment. For some, staying as-is is business sustainability.

Bethard said that for their continued growth, the most important thing to consider is profit. This may seem obvious, but if a dairy is not profitable, it will not be sustainable.

Next comes cows, environment, and community. A dairy cannot be sustainable if it does not commit to caring for its most treasured commodities: the cow and the environment it lives in.

For instance, in southwest Kansas where they are, it is paramount that farms use water as wisely as possible. Bethard said their careful attention to how and when they tap into that reservoir helps preserve their resources for, hopefully, decades to come.

“If we can do all four of these things (be profitable, take care of the cows and the environment, and maintain community) and still be profitable,” Bethard said, “we can be infinite.”

The meaning of leading

Leading a dairy in action, culture, and vision is clearly far from cut and dry. But, Bethard emphasized, if you focus on leaning into your personal strengths and the dairy’s big-picture goals, it will be hard to fail.

What might it look like for your dairy to be infinite? What might have to happen to ensure your dairy will continue into the as of yet unknown?

Think through what sustainability means for your operation, what kind of culture you want to prevail among your employees, and how you can personally show up each and every day ready to set the standard of effort and excellence. You might just find that effective leadership happens without your noticing.

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