It’s good to be king, but sometimes it pays to know what it’s like
behind a retail counter, too.
Just ask Chuck Fallon. Long before
he took on his current role as president, North America, for Burger
King Holdings Inc., he worked at his father’s auto parts retail store.
Working after school and weekends, the hours weren’t all that
great but the lessons were.
Watching his father, he learned about passion and determination.
Working behind the counter, he learned exactly how much a field
employee knows about what’s going on.
Fallon brought those principles to his business career, and it was
only fitting that when the fast-food enterprise famous for its hamburgers started to come out of a slump and needed a new leader
for its 23,000 full- and part-time North American employees, it
turned to Fallon.
Pushing those same principles that he learned long ago, Fallon
turned his focus on the company culture. By turning to employees
to help shape his own education about what was going on in the
field, he has created a culture that brings in passionate employees
and puts the onus on them to help the leadership team come up
with new directions.
“If you are truly inquisitive and passionate enough about the
business, you can cobble together or aggregate those great ideas
and say, ‘Those are the kind of things we should be doing’ and
then put the resources behind those,” Fallon says. “That is an
iterative process, and it’s a very collaborative process. This is not
a business that I knew walking in here, and I respect that there
are a lot of people who do, and the more you genuinely engage
with them on what works and what doesn’t work and what
they’ve seen in the past, the more effective you are.”
By hiring passionate, driven employees, traveling the North
American circuit to put a human context to his leadership and
taking the time to ask the questions that every leader should
know the answer to, Fallon has helped the North American market cook up some nice results: Revenue has grown to $1.45 billion in 2007, up from $1 billion in 2006.
