How I learned to be a better boss:
I was a bad CEO. Years ago, I found a McDonald’s training handbook on the desk of an employee named Rosita. Turns out she was training to become a manager there because she couldn’t survive on the income I paid here. I called her to my office.
She was hiding the McDonald’s job and thought it would get her fired. What kind of culture had I created? Scarcity and fear. Rosita is a college grad but was making $30k a year. She’d leave our job at 5 and secretly work 5:30-11 every weeknight at McDonald’s for 1.5 years. Before she got the 2nd job, there were nights where she would line up for a food bank.
In our office that day, we went over her finances. We paid market rate. But as a CEO, I was out-of-touch with what it was like to work off student debt at $30k a year in an expensive city (Seattle).
She came back and said she needed a $10k raise to quit the 2nd job. I said OK if she took on some extra duties. She quit McDonald’s, moved out of her crappy apartment and used the free time to see her friends more. As her mental health improved, so did her work performance.
Rosita quickly proved herself and got promoted to director of operations. A light bulb went off: What if we did this for everyone? So we more-than doubled our minimum wage to $70k. Since then our productivity and revenue tripled. 10x more staff bought homes and had babies.
Rosita is now our director of sales and was interviewed about her experiences by star author Adam Grant https://lnkd.in/gB8mddW
The biggest thing I learned? Listen to your damn employees. Never assume you know what’s going on – never make top-down decisions without their input. We hold weekly company meetings with everyone invited and have multiple reps from each team vote on our priorities each year.
When the pandemic hit, our revenue sunk. We needed mass layoffs. I brought the details to our 200 employees. They offered to take voluntary pay cuts to save everyone’s job. They helped us recover. We later paid them back the lost wages and gave small raises: https://lnkd.in/gvs6SP3
More recently, we asked employees how they want to work once the pandemic ends. Only 7% wanted to go back to the office full-time, so we told staff to just work where they wanted.
I’m still learning to be a better boss and only look “good” when compared to other CEOs because the bar is so depressingly low. Listen to your employees, trust them, reward them. They are responsible for a company’s success – not CEOs.
(The pic is Rosita and I on the Kelly Clarkson show where she shared her story):
Tony’s comment:
Employees are responsible for the success of the organization where they belong to.
If you belong to an organization just for wages, you cannot expect the success of that organization nor your own success.
The success of the organization determines the life of employees.
Therefore, an organization that wants an employee must draw the incentives for them to do their best for that organization.
For someone, it can be a passion for the products the organization makes, and for others, it can be a good environment or coworkers.
Employees should also recognize that the success of the organization is their own success, this is the reason why you should belong to an organization for which you are willing to spend a day.
When the organization and employees can serve each other, maybe that’s a dream job…
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