See the forest for the trees. A
CEO needs to stand back and
not get so involved and watch
the people that he has employed
really do their jobs. A CEO needs
to really look at what the CFO
does and what the COO does.
Take a step back, and you’ve
really got to let the engine run
itself. The CEO shouldn’t be a
part of the engine. He should
just be the mechanic who oversees the engine, and then makes
sure all the parts are working.
If you become one of those
parts, then you can’t see the
whole engine. The CEO really
has to have that macro look.
Hire similar apples. One bad
apple ruins the barrel, (so) take
the time to make sure the person coming in to the barrel is
like all the other apples.
In the case of hiring somebody
… that person has to really be
interviewed by three or four people. Look at their abilities to
make sure they are who they say
they are. Put them out on the
floor and let them see if they can
do what they say they can do.
It’s really having them interviewed by three or four people,
going through an incubation period and then going from there.
Every once in awhile, you’re
going to have somebody who
just doesn’t fit, and you just
have to be there in the beginning to say, ‘It’s not going to
work out between us,’ and let
them go. If you don’t, that’s
going to create that cancer that
might spread through the company to other areas.
Filter communication through a
gatekeeper.
Every 30 days, we have a leadership exchange
where all our key people
meet. They share all of their
leadership skills to one another, and hopefully, the good
stuff rubs off on people, and
we expose the bad things and
make the group as a whole
better.
There’s a lot of communication [during those meetings].
We have a gatekeeper who’s
the vice president. Anything
that anybody wants to talk
about [during the meetings] has
to go through him.
From him, it goes out to
everybody else. We don’t have
messages just crossing each
other. They have to go through
a single line of communication
that goes out to everybody.
That’s kind of a filter.
HOW TO REACH:Yard House Restaurants LLC, (949) 727-0959 or www.yardhouse.com
