STRONGER TOGETHER
The STOVE Leadership Framework for Leading, Supporting, and Inspiring Your Team
The hardest moment in any school nutrition kitchen is rarely the moment of failure. It is the quiet shift that comes before it. A manager who used to ask questions stops asking. A cashier who once made eye contact with every student starts looking past them. A team that used to move in sync starts working around each other instead of with each other. By the time those shifts show up in the data, the conditions that produced them have been building for months. Through my work at the Institute of Child Nutrition, I keep coming back to a single observation. Strong teams are not built through
personality, luck, or hope that things will improve. They are built through consistent leadership behaviors. And those behaviors can be named, taught, and refined. It was through this lens that the STOVE Leadership Framework was born. STOVE is not a checklist. It is a diagnostic. Think of it as a dashboard for the conditions your team is operating under. When one area shifts, even slightly, performance shifts with it. The work of leadership is not to react to that shift after the fact. It is to notice the pattern early and adjust before the team feels the weight of it.
The five conditions are Shared Purpose, Trust, Operational Clarity, Visible Leadership, and Energy and Recognition. S, Shared Purpose. Does your team understand why your program matters beyond compliance? Compliance gets you through the audit. Shared purpose gets you through the difficult day. When a cashier knows the meal she just served may be the most reliable thing a child eats that day, that is shared purpose. When the connection is missing, you feel it in the energy of the kitchen long before you see it on a report. T, Trust. The test for trust is not whether your team likes each
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