Food & Beverage
The straight story
How to cut through the bull to get honest feedback
By Patrick Mayock
Smart Business Los Angeles | August 2008
Page 1 of 2
Lee Sanders
CEO, The Johnny Rockets Group Inc.
As president and CEO of The
Johnny Rockets Group Inc.,Lee Sanders doesn’t have to go
very far to enjoy a meal in a
retro-style diner steeped in an
Americana motif.
The restaurant group he oversees houses 1,530 employees
in 220 such locations around
the globe, including 35 right in
his Southern California backyard. Still, when it came time to
take his management team out
for dinner, he chose to take
them to a competitor up the
street instead.
“I found out that only one of
us has ever really eaten there,”
he says of the other chain. “We
(went) there for dinner as a
group as sort of a field trip.”
Besides giving them an opportunity to scope out the competition, Sanders says the outing
gave his team a chance to have
fun and build camaraderie that
would lead to better communication back in the office.
Smart Business spoke with
Sanders about how to cut
through the bull to get honest
feedback from your employees
and how to walk new employees
through the decision-making
process.
Cut through the bull. As a president and CEO, one of the bigger challenges is determining if
you’re getting the data you need
or if you’re getting filtered data.
It’s pretty easy to deal with
good news. The bad news? I
need that really almost more
than I need the good news.
[To get candid feedback],
admit what you don’t know. In
other words, if you don’t understand the functional area very
well or if it’s something you’re
not familiar with, ask questions.
Make sure that you get all your
questions answered from whoever is the topic expert. Don’t
assume you know what you’re
doing if you really don’t.
Make sure that the person
who’s giving you the information has done their due diligence: ‘Where did you get this
data? What makes you believe
this is the case?’ Push back on
them a bit.
[If you do that], you’re making the most well-informed
decision you can make, and
you’ve probably enrolled people to support your program.
Hire candid team members. Use
team interviewing. Each person on the management team
is going to interview this individual. If you go through that
with the senior people, they
tend to start identifying if the
person is giving the politically
correct answer versus the
candid answer.
It can slow down the process,
but at the senior level, time is
not the most important. The
quality of the candidate is
probably the most important.
Ask, ‘What is your greatest
failure in your current position?
On the greatest failure, what
would you do different?’ It’s an
odd question, but it’s hard to
make believe that if someone’s
in a position for a while they
haven’t had a few failures.
If someone says, ‘Well, I’ve
never really had a failure. I’ve
always succeeded,’ that’s possible, but it’s starting to sound a
bit like rose-colored glasses.
Within that context, ‘Identify
the greatest underachievement
and failure, and why do you
think that happened, or what
would you do differently?’ If
they say, ‘The other department
didn’t support me correctly,’ it
begins to show if they’re deflecting or they’re accepting the
responsibility. Candid people
will accept the responsibility.
