The abbreviated answer of this question is: “inviting them to dream together, in an attainable and realistic way”. I’ll use this post to answer this question at length. First of all, before even thinking about embarking our company on such a great mission, my advice is to take your time and reflect on if you really exert leadership over your team or not. If the answer is no, it would be better to start from the beginning: “How to Prevent Conflicts from the Board of Directors”. I’m absolutely sure that it is possible to make a company’s personnel feel its colors, as well as that without leadership from the projects’ “initiator,” it would never reach a satisfactory conclusion. A director can manage to make his team believe in his word, and therefore feel enthusiasm and passion for the same cause, when he gains respect not only for his competences, as my fellow Santiago would say, but also for his values.
Having said this, I now proceed to tell you about my experience on how I made Burger King’s employees feel the colors of this great fast-food chain, and how this experience developed. Soon after I started to exert as this company’s General Manager for Spain and South Europe, I realized that almost any employee was proud of working for Burger King. What they really wanted in that moment was to work for McDonald’s, identified as the leading company in the sector. At that time, we were the second-ranked company in the sector. Anyway, that wasn’t the real trouble to solve. The root of the problem was that everyone was convinced that, independently whether we worked a little or a lot to change this situation, we would always be second. But they were mistaken, and I made them aware of this fact. One day I told them that we could exceed McDonald’s if we were determined to do so. Next question: In what? The achievable dream I proposed to them was to beat the leading company in opening new restaurants within a period of four years. This would happen exactly on June 30, 2004. And that was how all of us, little by little, began to share a same dream. The organization started to focus on a goal which, sooner or later, all the team decided to believe in and support.
We assumed it as a game where anyone could play. We placed a board where we could see all McDonald’s’ and Burger King’s open POS in our headquarters’ reception, and we updated it monthly. This board also displayed the countdown of the months to go up until “the impact”. As we got closer to the goal, we managed to make people begin to believe in this goal. Clients, employees, suppliers, etc. began to feel proud of the company to which they belonged. One year before the deadline, our great dream even started to appear in the papers and everyone talked about us in our business area. This made our feeling of commitment even more profound. A way to visualize this change is that at first only I used the Burger King polo-shirts and T-shirts to go to the office (instead of the traditional suit and tie); and by this time (a year before the deadline), we were many who used Burger King garments and felt proud of being recognized as employees of this company. For me, this was one of the most visible proofs of the fact that people now felt the colors of our company. We were the same team, the same products, the same company, but now we had turned into 100% passionate people who shared the same dream.
Finally, June 30, 2004 arrived, and on that precise date BURGUER KING opened the restaurant that made us beat McDonald’s in number of POS. Of course, there was a lot to celebrate and we spared no expense. We celebrated that finally we were number one! Everyone bet on “believing” and we achieved our goal. It was really impressive!