Get to know your people
To follow the guidance of Jim Collins by getting the right people in the right seats on the bus, Damico had to first know the people with whom he was working.
“The first step was really getting to know who the team is,” he says. “I spent a lot of time meeting with the team I had inherited.”
One of the keys to knowing people is to socialize with them.
“Don’t be afraid to have a social occasion with every member of the team, whether that is the clerk or the senior vice president of marketing,” he says. “Bring them together because we all have a common goal.”
Damico doesn’t just grab a burrito at the restaurant with his employees. Instead, he invites them into his home.
“That really takes down everybody’s guard,” he says. “It strips away everybody’s title, and it brings the team together in a comfortable setting. There’s nothing more comfortable than inviting people into your living room. If we can convey that to the team and the team can react to each other that way, maybe that’s what transcends into our restaurants at the end of the day.”
While social get-togethers were part of the puzzle, the biggest piece was having one-on-one meetings with everyone.
“I would ask everything from, professionally, what they were focused on, what they should be focused on, and what they thought they should be focusing on but weren’t focusing on,” he says. “Then the conversation delved into their personal lives — do they enjoy what they’re doing? We talked about wives and husbands and kids and families. For me, it’s important to get to know people on a personal level.”
It’s also critical to find out if your employees are happy.
“Find out what people want to do,” Damico says. “If you were to poll any organization, you’d find that 50 percent of the work force are doing things they’re OK doing, but it’s not getting them excited.”
Instead, he wants his people to be fired up about their jobs.
“Don’t sit in a role where you are not going to be absolutely stoked to come to work every single day,” he says. “Don’t do it for the paycheck.”
You also need to recognize if people are more suited for another position, even if they’re content in the role they currently have.
“You get that through fairly direct interaction and direct questions. You find out fairly quickly what people are excited about and what their history is, what their professional history is, and I’ve had conversations where I was speaking to a person who clearly had the passion, the education, the experience in the human resources arena, but that person was running company operations, and that’s a bit of a disconnect,” he says. “That’s a big disconnect for me.”
And you also have to recognize when people are bad for your team.
“It’s less about the role and more about your management attributes, if you will,” Damico says. “We look at things like energy. We look at things like can you play in the sandbox with the team. You may be the best operator, and you could have 15 years of being the VP of operations, but if you can’t play in the sandbox with the rest of the Moe’s team, then you’re really detrimental to the team.”
By taking the time to speak to people individually, Damico was able to see the moves he would have to make to ensure he had the right people.
“Those one-on-ones revealed to me some of the challenges the individuals were going through with the acquisition,” Damico says. “It revealed to me some super talent we had on the team, and it also revealed to me some lack of talent we had on the team that we needed to shore up.”
