What ‘Undercover Boss’ Teaches Us All
With far too many Americans out of work, and employers cutting another 20,000 last month, many people have come to blame chief executive officers for not having the pulse of their own companies. Undercover Boss has done nothing to change that impression.
In the first episode Larry O’Donnell, the CEO of Waste Management, poses as “Randy Lawrence,” a construction worker supposedly being filmed for a story about down-on-their-luck Americans in search of entry-level employment. O’Donnell, who earns nearly $3 million a year according to company filings, experiences the backbreaking work of the company’s frontline employees. He’s even fired during his seven-day stint after failing to fill a trash bag.
During his undercover week O’Donnell sees an employee stretched impossibly thin by performing eight different jobs and also finds that he can’t keep up sorting cardboard and recyclables. “I’m going to approach the whole way I do my job differently,” he says on the show. “I don’t want to be doing things that are going to cause disruption. The things I’ve learned could change the way we do business forever … and make things better for our frontline employees.”
His experience shows why leaders who focus solely on the balance sheet can’t succeed. If executives look only at numbers, they can’t make the most of honest feedback, recognize the limits of their knowledge or avoid repeating mistakes. When leaders see their shortcomings as a chance to learn and grow, they gain the ability–and credibility–to help others do the same.
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It will take a while to see if any of the leaders featured onUndercover Boss fulfill the promises they’ve made on the show, but that the program is on at all illustrates that CEOs are beginning to understand that they’ve got to change if they’re going to truly succeed in a postrecession world.
Read the full story on Forbes
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Local 7-Eleven official discusses reality show
NewSok talked to Jim Brown, CEO of Oklahoma’s 7-Eleven stores, which are separate from the Dallas-based chain, about his thought of the show:
“It resembled a one-hour commercial,” the chief executive said.
The two companies are remarkably dissimilar, he continued. At the end of the show, several employees were given opportunities within the company — in the marketing department or ownership of a new store — that they didn’t think were available.
“Our employees are taught about the opportunities on their very first day with the company,” Brown said. “We promote our operations management staff from within. The positions with the most responsibility are occupied by men and women who started with the company working in stores, including me.”
Read more: on NewSok.com
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‘Undercover Boss’: What Execs Can Learn Flipping Burgers
White Castle was founded on the belief that happy employees make for happy customers. The company’s employee retention statistics are impressive. About 20 percent of its 11,000 employees have been with the company for over a decade, and about a quarter of those have over 25 years of service.
bnet has an interview with Dave Rife, owner and executive board member of White Castle and the oldest member of “the family’s” fourth generation. Here are the highlights:
Tobak: White Castle was the first fast-food hamburger chain. Given what McDonalds and others have done in terms of corporate growth, do you have any regrets?
Rife: Our people are first, that’s what it’s all about for us. We have a slow and consistent growth model that has taken us from one restaurant in 1921 to 420 today. As well as the bakeries, the meat plants, the frozen hamburger facilities, and we’ve done all that without taking on any debt. That’s a big key to survival especially in today’s economy.
Tobak: White Castle seems to be a throwback to a time when employees were treated differently, like part of the family. How do you pull that off?
Rife: My great grandfather founded this company on the belief that happy team members make for happy customers and it still holds true today. That’s the one thing that, as a company, we’ve been able to embrace, hang on to, and stay true to that course. We really do try to make everybody feel like they’re part of the family.
Tobak: Can you be more specific about how you do that?
Rife: We try to treat everybody with respect, the same way we would like to be treated. We have a long term view of what we think our business should be, and that long term view enables us to focus on those people that are behind the counter. We don’t sit back and talk about our earnings per share; we’re looking way down the road.
You know, we sat down a long time ago as a family and came up with what we call our vision, values, and guiding principles, which is the cornerstone that we base our decisions on and run our company by. Our team members are the center of that.
Tobak: Undercover Boss seems like a risky proposition. With such a conservative business model, what was your motivation for doing the show?
Rife: When they first contacted us, we sat down as a family and had a discussion. We decided the opportunity to really find out what’s going on and live the life of our frontline people and see what we can take away from that to make our organization stronger was huge. The more we can learn about that, their trials, their tribulations, and what we can do to make things easier for them, to help them succeed, the better off we all are.
Also, as a family member and owner, when I go out in the field, people know I’m coming. I’m not saying you don’t see reality, but you see maybe a polished version of reality. To truly understand what your people go through, you’ve got to live their lives.
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