Page 156 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Everything I Know About Business I Learned at McDonald’s

I made my way back inside, unscathed but no doubt flushed
with fright, and clueless to what the outcome would be, and told
the crew, who’d been glued to the window, to get back to work.
Suddenly, we heard the racket of screeching tires and smelled rub-
ber burning as the last of the bikes left. I walked out the door,
and started to clean up some of the mess they left, looking up the
road to discover that they had actually done what I suggested
and set up in the empty lot across the street. Back then, I wasn’t
sure how I had the courage to take on not just one gang, but two.
Yet now I see that I summoned up everything the system had
taught me about treating everyone with the same degree of
respect, regardless of age, gender, even appearance, to stand up
for the brand, and never stop thinking about protecting the cus-
tomer experience. And as a backup, instruct the crew to be pre-
pared to call the cops. Breaking up gang fights wasn’t covered in
the manual, but somehow the system still taught me what to do.
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I know this scenario is not unusual—it has played out thousands
of times by managers within the system over the years.
In fact, courage at the crew level is pervasive. As Roland Jones
describes in his book, Standing Up & Standing Out, one crew
member, disturbed that an associate had written and left racist
notes in a soon-to-be-opened Tennessee store, stood up after a
motivational meeting and said “to the person who wrote this . . .
we don’t want you on our team and we wish you’d resign now.”
According to Roland, the rest of the crew gave her a standing
ovation, and consequently two male workers never showed up
again. It also demonstrated that the social unit of the crew, when
operating as a truly engaged team, will do much to self-police
their own actions.
In deploying his street smarts, Roland also managed to stop
crime in his Nashville store, which had been the scene of several
armed robberies. He placed a police radio monitor out of view,
with the volume set just loud enough to suggest that police were