Page 223 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Recognition

[she’d brought in more money than any of the other counter
crew] to the smile and attentiveness you gave your customers—
it was just outstanding. I wanted to thank you personally. I’m
writing in the rest of your hours for today. So go home and take
the rest of the day off. With pay.”
Well, you couldn’t have imagined the buzz among the crew.
And for good reason. Public praise for those who meet your high
standards snaps everyone to attention. Rich, I am reasonably
certain, hadn’t read about this approach in a management book.
Yet, as a part of the McDonald’s system, instinctively, he had
absorbed the kind of management style that generated results
and knew what would work. And he wasn’t afraid to try some-
thing different, while at the same time kept within McDonald’s
parameters of always striving for QSC. This is part of the very
formula for McDonald’s growth. No wonder Rich was so suc-
cessful with his people.
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Recognition: The Great Motivator
The formula had always been simple. Work hard, prove your-
self, and you were bound to receive recognition. It was a com-
mon thread throughout McDonald’s. Many of us sought that
praise—whether it was because we never received it growing up,
because some of us felt the need to prove ourselves, or because
we got turned on when representing the organization with pride
as we pushed up our shirtsleeves and made it happen every day.
Recognition left its mark, and it’s a tool many of us carried
into our post-McDonald’s life. Willis Smart, now an operations
vice president with Dunkin Brands, said to me, “I just talked
about this [recognition] at a team meeting about three weeks
ago. About the pride of doing things right and how easy it is to
recognize and make people feel good about their work.”
There was a deep-seated motivation for recognition, and
this we won through the surrogate family within the store. We