Listen for the answers
In his career before Burger King, Fallon took enough Myers-Briggs tests to know that it’s not his natural tendency to bring people in when he makes a decision. To keep his team involved, he’s
learned one trick that he’s pushing to the core of Burger King’s culture: Ask questions — and then listen to the answer.
When he’s out traveling his area, Fallon encourages feedback
because it helps build relationships with the field employees, but it
also helps him understand what’s going on in the company.
“One of the first orders of business is to understand the business,”
he says. “If you don’t have the right kind of understanding of their
hot buttons around being successful, then there’s no way you’re
going to direct change or help create a vision.
“If we would just listen to what our people were saying, then the
minute that you hear something that you don’t understand, what
does it cause you to do? You ask a question, so it causes you to listen more. If a leader is doing all of the talking, they’re not gaining
any credibility or insight and they’re not gaining any ability to collaborate. If you’re doing the talking, you’re not getting the facts. If
you’re doing the talking, you’re already making judgments based
on what may be a subset of the facts.”
Asking a lot of questions also helps Fallon know that messages
from the top are being successfully pushed down. It’s easy for people to just nod their head at corporate initiatives, but he wants to be
sure they really understand what’s going on. By inquiring about the
way they understand their jobs, he does an evaluation of how well
the communication is coming through.
“There are so many people that nod their heads, and say, ‘Yeah, I
get it,’ but they don’t really, or they have questions and they don’t
raise them,” he says. “Part of being a good leader is not letting people off the hook and ensuring that you are really putting yourself
in their shoes and analyzing how you’re communicating to the
organization. We have a very dispersed field team, and the minute
you start communicating a point, by the time it filters to the West
Coast, it could be interpreted very, very differently. It’s important
for us to have that self-evaluation and really assess how our message is getting interpreted.”
To Fallon, the most important thing is to hold his emotions in
check while he continually gives others a chance to speak. It takes
practice, but he has learned to let people finish what they’re saying
and hold his judgments until he has all the facts. In turn, he’s built
a culture where people are willing to explain what’s going on.
“Don’t be less than curious when you are in a situation or presented with a problem,” he says. “If I’m below curious, that means
I’m already being judgmental. I walked into this company with a
desperate desire to listen and to learn, and I bite my tongue a lot
by listening and asking probing questions. When you do that, emotions can’t creep in because you’re driving and probing to the facts.
I need to know enough of the details to help us as a team come up
with the right decision. You can’t be successful in any organization
trying to come in and think you know it all. You have to realize that
vision and change don’t happen by one person. By being inquisitive
and really gaining that credibility, you’re able to help direct people
and aggregate ideas.”
HOW TO REACH: Burger King Holdings Inc., (305) 378-3000 or www.bk.com
