Seventeen years ago, Steve Romaniello read a book that said a manager focuses on processes, while a leader focuses on people.
Years later, that still resonates with him as he leads 150 corporate employees and about 1,200 restaurant and manufacturing
employees as president and CEO of FOCUS Brands Inc., which franchises more than 1,700 shops primarily under the Cinnabon,
Carvel and Schlotzsky’s names. Smart Business spoke with Romaniello about how he cultivates leaders in his organization, even
if those skills benefit someone or something other than the company.
Hire positive people. Frankly, I work too
much to have a group of people around me
who aren’t fun and positive.
No. 1, without any hesitation, is the attitude. You can tell a lot about the technical
skills from their resume. You can test for it.
But there’s no replacement for a good attitude. You either have a good attitude — a
can-do attitude, a positive approach to life,
a positive approach to interactions with
other human beings — or you don’t. I don’t
think that can be trained.
Look for physiology. Is it an open physiology or closed? How do they respond?
Are the answers canned or not canned? If
you present them with a problem in the
interview process, is their approach to
solving the problem one that they come
after with a positive or a negative slant?
By asking the right types of questions,
you get an idea fairly quickly as to whether
or not people are genuinely upbeat or have
a genuine approach to their business versus those that don’t. Ask them about
describing difficult situations and how
they’ve gotten through those situations.
I love to play the what-if game. Use what-if to put them into a situation where there
are different paths and approaches that
they can take. The path and approach will
indicate whether it’s being approached
positively or negatively.
Focus on people. Have constant reminders
everywhere you can. Each year, we have a
leadership survey where the associates
evaluate the managers in areas related to
communication, goal-setting, involvement
— all things that we talk about focusing on
the people as opposed to the process.
We do a monthly bulletin to our team and
celebrate those people that demonstrate
those great characteristics of leadership.
The biggest award for any associate is
called the Leadership Award, and we celebrate it to the 10th degree.
If we can create that kind of environment
where we’re focusing on them, letting them
do their jobs as opposed to making them
do their job a certain way, you get better
buy-in and a better result.
There’ve been times when I’ve had people come to me and say, ‘You’re preaching this, but you’re doing this,’ and help me get
corrected. I think it’s only possible because
it’s so prevalent in our culture, so people
see it, recognize it and can relate to it, and
remind us when we get off path.
Identify leaders. We, as a senior management team, reach out and evaluate the talent in the organization. We evaluate things
like results but also the intangibles of how
they relate to others in the organization
below them, at their level, above them,
what their organizational influence is, what
their intellectual capacity is, what their
desires for growth might include.
We’re trying to help them become better
leaders. We hope that by identifying and
investing in them, they will ultimately be
able to apply what they have learned to
benefit FOCUS Brands, and even if not, it’s
still not a bad thing.
Whether they’re going to be a coach, a
parent, a friend, at some point in time,
they’ll be leaders in life. I can’t tell you how
many times I’ve found helpful leadership in
my life that didn’t come from work, so it
certainly doesn’t have to be in just a managerial situation.
Have one personality. At the end of the day, I
make sure there’s no distinction between
how I live my life at home and how I live
my life at work. I look at business as just
another part of life.
I spend a lot of time with business, and
instead of trying to have one persona at work and one elsewhere, it’s a heck of a lot easier
to be yourself and treat business the same
way you treat people outside of business.
Stay true to your values. We talk about the difference between leadership and principle
leadership, and the distinction there is in
injecting into leadership the Golden Rule and
making sure that while becoming a leader,
you’re also staying true to a moral compass
that you can be proud of. That goes back to
the whole notion of not separating how you
act at work with how you act at home.
It is a matter of discipline, transparency
and of inclusion. If you are open as these
issues come up, and you have to solve them
as a team, it’s a lot harder to get a group of
25 people to all agree to do something bad.
Assign a great deal of value to things that
may not be financially driven. If someone
makes a decision that may appear to be in
conflict with the company’s interest financially but is the right thing to do from a
human standpoint, you should point those
out when they happen and celebrate them.
Let everyone else know that you don’t have
to compromise to be successful, at least in
this organization.
Show instead of just telling. In our culture definition, it says something about guest service. One of the managers of our restaurant
got a call from one of the guests and she
said, ‘I ordered my sandwich with olives,
and they put jalapenos on it.’
He said, ‘Don’t worry — I’ll fix it,’ hung up
the phone, made a new sandwich and then
drove the sandwich to her place of work.
What we were able to do was highlight this
person’s behavior in the subsequent leadership bulletin, not just to recognize what he
did but also to tie that experience directly
back to the exact words that relate to it in
our culture definition.
Tie the actual activity or behavior with
the written word to bring it together for
people, so they could see culture in action
and better relate to it. They can have real-time, real-life examples of what it means.
Being able to see that is probably the best
training they could ever get.
HOW TO REACH: FOCUS Brands Inc., (404) 255-3250 or
www.focusbrands.com