Stay interactive. It constantly keeps your people charged up if they see the leader out there. They constantly have to know that you are interested in what they do and their work makes a big difference.
You might have people who come in and come to work every day, and they’re almost like the unseen hand. I can’t work like that. I have a pulse and heart and blood flowing, and I want to feel it. I want to feel the pulse of my people, too, what they’re thinking and feeling.
We play above the rim constantly. I don’t believe that there is anything we’re doing that we can’t do better. We have in our company language what we call preventable mistake, which we review after every little thing. We talk about it for a few minutes, and say, ‘What could we have done to improve that?’ Give me something. Everybody has to have some idea. It could be that after we have a community event, someone notices that we should have power-washed a sidewalk to make things look nicer. That’s one example of how we constantly talk about ways of improving, even if we just hit a home run with an idea. It can always be better, and someone always has an idea on how to make it better.
Get personal with employees. A lot of people have the opinion that you want to build an organization where you can just pull people out and replace them, almost like a plug-and-play organization. Like you’re building a machine, and the machine builds the business. I’ve heard that many times. But I wanted to do something a little different, and it works for me. I want everyone on the team to know that they’re an important part of the organizational project. If they have to leave for a day or leave early, they leave a void. I don’t care if we’re talking about the girl who answers the phone or the vice president of the company. I want to constantly reinforce that everything that they’re working on is important, and if they’re not working on it, we’re missing something. That’s sort of the opposite of a lot of people who want to say, ‘We’re building an organization.’ I have an organization that is made out of humans, flesh and blood, with pulses and emotions, and I love that.
My style of leadership is person-to-person. I try to really talk all day to everybody. The conversations have no beginning and no end, some are very specific about a particular project or a problem that we’re working on a solution for. But one of the advantages of seeing everybody in the organization every day and several times a day is you’re sending them a signal that you’re engaged and really interested in what they’re doing.
That is one of the real keys. I want whoever it is on the team I’m talking to, I want them to really feel and understand that I’m very interested in everything that they have.
How to reach: Pizza Patrón Inc., (972) 613-8000 or www.pizzapatron.com