‘Undercover Boss’ teaches a valuable management lesson
MBA lesson coming from Business Matters:
At Hooters the CEO saw a manager abuse the serving staff, and at White Castle, the CEO observed the lack of teamwork that existed at many of the restaurants. Additionally, White Castle CEO David Rite saw how policies and procedures imposed by his top staff just did not work in practice.
The lesson is that for the CEO, your perception of the business is vastly different from that of your employees. Further, the problems you think staff is having are a whole lot different than their actual problems. In one case, a manager at Hooters thought he was doing a great job because he was making his sales numbers, but his staff despised him and morale was in decline.
It is amazing to me to see entrepreneurs who conduct their regular visits to various parts of their operation, see everything looking great and staff appearing so happy, then leave thinking everything is going well. However, management knew the owner was going to visit, so of course the place was cleaned up and everyone was on their best behavior.
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