Strategic Discipline Blog

Watching businesses for the past 20+ years as a coach, there’s no bigger mistake made, beyond not choosing a One Thing Priority, then failing to make it clear to your people what you expect from them.

This begins when you hire. It should begin before you hire, when you share the job description and the expectations for the position. The Job Summary Scorecard by Topgrading does an effective job achieving this.

The first day you should sit down with them, explaining why you hired them. Don’t spare any details including how they answered your questions or what references said. Then go through their job summary scorecard. Make sure they understand what you expect. Ask them for questions. Get them to share where they feel they may have challenges.

Aligned Priorities

IF you fail to do this you’re probably not alone, but you don’ have to stay there. In Love is Free. Guac is Extra: How Vulnerability, Empowerment, and Curiosity Built an Unstoppable Team, Monty Moran shares, “When I first joined Chipotle, …. There were really no operational priorities that the whole company was focused on. Rather, there were a few dozen field leaders who oversaw multiple restaurants, who were largely left on their own to keep their food and labor costs near certain targets that were set for them by corporate. The problem was they were all focused on different things. There were no clear standards for how all of our restaurants were to be run. Senior leadership was not effectively leading the teams in the field. Even the financial targets, such as food and labor costs, were not good ones. The targets were set based on what poorly trained teams were accomplishing, rather than being set on what was possible with a well-trained, strong manager and team.”

How to Hire – Get Your Team Involved – Increase Ownership

Moran shares his belief about new people, “One of the most important and significant events for any team is the hiring of a new person. For this reason, everyone on the team should be involved in this process. Each team member should meet the new prospective member, have a chance to talk to them, and be able to voice an opinion about the wisdom of hiring them. There are a number of advantages to doing this:

• It shows your team that you value their opinion, which is empowering.
• It allows your team to teach you something, which is empowering.
• It demonstrates to the new candidate that we value our employees’ opinions, which signals to the candidate how special the culture is.
• It ensures better candidate selection.
• If the new person is hired, it causes your team to work harder to ensure the success of the new hire, because they vouched for them to be hired. This empowers the new hire and makes them feel a sense of belonging.
• It gets the team thinking about the types of things that leaders need to consider, which starts their education towards becoming leaders themselves.
• It takes some of the responsibility of team-building off of your busy shoulders.
• It causes everyone on the team to start thinking about what a team of all top performers looks like.
• It teaches your team to communicate better, which they will need to learn to become leaders themselves one day.
• It gets your whole team thinking about and discussing the mission. What are we trying to accomplish and who will help us get there?
• Your team gets to know the company better, as they answer the many questions posed by the candidate.
• It dramatically increases the sense of ownership that your team feels toward the workplace, which will soon be filled with the people that they selected.

With all of these advantages, why would you not do this? This is an example of a single act that accomplishes many different desirable results. It is what I am always looking for when creating priorities.”

This segment is so powerful, so consistent with my own beliefs on hiring and starting people right, I wanted to share it in entirety from the book.

I don’t believe there’s a better book today about sharing the humanity, and the People part of the business then Love is Free. Guac is Extra.

This blog’s original intent was to share how Monte determined to make the General Manager his priority at Chipotle. When I read through my notes, and realized how many businesses absolutely fail at hiring, training, retaining their new team members, I decided to share these thoughts before Monty’s GM priority decision.

Reread his ideas. We invest so much time recruiting, hiring, failing to set expectations, losing good people, when a simple change in how we train and make a team member feel a part of our team could change this quickly and dramatically.

To create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best, contact us today to schedule a free exploratory meeting.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

To build an enduring great organization, requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, to produce superior results, and make a distinctive impact in the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period of time, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $250M) business Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG – Decisiveness – Chipotle’s GM Position

Monty Moran made many good decisions when he started at Chipotle. None more important than focusing on the GM as the most important position at Chipotle.