Culture Doesn't Change Till Leaders Do: 5 Lessons from Jill Stuber of Catalyst Food Leaders

Jill Stuber didn't set out to become a leadership coach for the food industry. She grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, stumbled into a food microbiology lab as a work-study student, and spent decades building technical expertise across Land O'Lakes, a small cheese plant, and Golden Plump, where she eventually led food safety and quality across three processing facilities.

She earned two master's degrees. She got certified in Six Sigma and Lean. She did everything you're supposed to do to advance in food safety. And then something unexpected happened: she realized none of it was making her a better leader.

That gap led Jill and her co-founder Tia to launch Catalyst Food Leaders, a company built on the idea that the food industry has a leadership deficit as serious as any technical one, and that closing it means developing people, not just programs.

What follows are five of the most valuable lessons from her conversation on 30 Food Safety.

1. Technical Expertise Gets You in the Room. Leadership Keeps You There.

Why another degree isn't the answer

If you have worked in FSQA for more than a few years, you have probably done what Jill did: hit a wall and reached for another credential. A new certification. A graduate program. Something to signal that you have more to offer.

"My first instinct was to get another degree, to get another certification because I think like a lot of people in food, we think we have to have all the answers, and that technical expertise will get us further." — Jill Stuber

The problem is that technical expertise has a ceiling. It gets you hired, it helps you solve problems on the floor, and it earns you credibility in the room. But it won't help you influence a senior leadership team, retain a high-performing technician, or build a department that functions without you in it.

Jill describes this as a maturity gap, and she is clear that it has nothing to do with intelligence or work ethic. It is about learning how you show up, what signals you are sending, and whether your best intentions are landing the way you think they are. The FSQA professionals who grow into real influence are the ones who figure this out before another certification cycle goes by.

2. Culture Doesn't Change Until You Do

Catalyst Food Leaders runs on a simple tagline: culture doesn't change till leaders do. It sounds intuitive. In practice, it is one of the hardest things for food safety professionals to accept, because most of you were trained to look outward for problems, not inward.

Jill tells a story that illustrates this perfectly. Early in her leadership journey, she stopped responding to emails from her team. Her reasoning was thoughtful: she didn't want to fill up their inboxes. Then a team member gave her direct feedback.

"They said, 'just respond to my email.' I said, 'I don't want to fill up your inbox.' They said, 'that is a game changer — you acknowledge that you receive it.'" — Jill Stuber

One small behavior. Huge impact. And Jill never would have known it mattered if she hadn't asked for feedback and stayed open to hearing it.

This is the core of food safety culture work: the culture in your facility reflects the signals leaders send, consciously or not. If you want to know why your team skips a step or cuts a corner, start by looking at what you have modeled, rewarded, and let slide.

3. Creating Space for Your Team to Thrive

One of the most counterintuitive insights from Jill's career is this: she was holding her team back without anyone, including herself, knowing it.

"Nobody would have looked from the outside and said, gosh, Jill is such a blocker. But I wasn't creating space for them to truly thrive the way that they could." — Jill Stuber

This happens more than most leaders admit. You step in when someone struggles because that's efficient, answer their questions before they can work through them, and take ownership of decisions because you feel responsible for the outcome. None of it feels like blocking. All of it has a cost.

The shift Jill describes is from "here's what we're doing" to "what do you need from me?" It requires getting curious about what each person actually needs, not what you assume they need, and being willing to step back long enough for them to rise.

She also carries a hard-earned lesson about empathy in difficult business decisions. During a restructuring at one of her companies, she leaned on the phrase "business decision" as a way to explain changes to her team. Years later, she sees it differently.

"Business decision is a code word for putting space between us and the people that are going to be on the receiving end of a hard choice, instead of really saying, we're making a decision, and we know it's affecting people." — Jill Stuber

Owning the human cost of difficult decisions, rather than deflecting behind business language, is something Jill now considers a mark of genuine leadership.

4. Spark Is Only the First Step

The forgetting curve erodes ROI

Food companies spend real money on training. Leadership workshops, culture initiatives, certification programs, the investment is there. What is often missing is everything that comes after.

"The forgetting curve is real. The change commitment curve is real. Those things erode ROI." — Jill Stuber

Catalyst Food Leaders built their methodology around three stages: spark, shift, and sustain. Most training programs deliver the spark. They bring in energy, new ideas, and motivated people. But without deliberate follow-through, practice, reinforcement, and accountability, people default back to old behaviors within weeks.

The pace of the food industry makes it easy to skip the sustain phase. Production doesn't stop for culture work. But if you don't build in the capacity for behavior change to take hold, you have paid for a moment of inspiration that evaporates. For practical guidance on building a strong food safety culture that goes beyond the initial training event, the reinforcement phase is where lasting change actually happens.

The encouraging part is that individual leaders can move things even when the broader organization is slow to shift. When Jill sees clients change their own behavior and then watch their teams respond differently, it reinforces a principle she returns to often.

"It takes one person to start the movement." — Jill Stuber

You don't need a top-down mandate to start creating a culture worth working in.

5. Quality Systems Were Designed as Business Systems

Here is one of Jill's most thought-provoking perspectives: the food industry has narrowed the application of quality management systems in a way the original architects never intended.

Crosby, Juran, Deming — the quality gurus who developed the frameworks that underpin SQF, ISO, and GFSI-recognized standards — were building business systems. Quality planning was about driving profit, improving efficiency, and delivering fit-for-use outcomes across an entire organization.

"The food industry has somewhat bastardized what quality management systems are. The original quality systems were really business systems." — Jill Stuber

Somewhere along the way, these tools got repackaged as compliance tools — useful for audits, essential for certification, but rarely connected to broader business outcomes. That is a missed opportunity, particularly if you are trying to earn a seat at the table with senior leadership.

The way Jill recommends starting that conversation: connect food safety to the language leadership already uses. Rework costs money, product destruction hits margin directly, and a new line nobody is trained to run is a capital investment that never delivers its full return. When you frame the food safety conversation at the CEO level in those terms, you stop being a cost center and start being a business partner.

"You can't have a business grow if you don't have people growing. If I don't build capacity in my people, how do I build capacity within my organization?" — Jill Stuber

That framing applies equally to the people development conversation. Training and leadership investment aren't soft benefits; they are the mechanism by which a facility can absorb new equipment, new processes, and new demands without breaking down.

About Jill Stuber

Jill Stuber is the co-founder of Catalyst Food Leaders, a leadership development company built specifically for the food industry. Her career spans Land O'Lakes, Golden Plump, and consulting roles across food manufacturing and processing. She holds two master's degrees and certifications in Six Sigma and Lean, and is a certified yoga instructor. Catalyst Food Leaders works with food companies on leadership development, culture change, and building the human capacity that technical systems alone cannot create.

You can explore more conversations on the people side of food safety in The Human Side of Food Safety Culture episode of 30 Food Safety. And if you want to see how the right tools support a food safety program built on both systems and people, visit Allera.