Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Monty Moran [Part 1]: Spice Up Your Company Culture | Leadership | E85

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

Want to know how to build and maintain a strong culture? This week, our guest is Monty Moran, former co-CEO of Chipotle Grill and a previous lawyer and managing partner of a law firm. Monty was integral to the massive popularity explosion of Chipotle across the United States in the late 2000’s. Currently, he is a chairman on many corporate boards, an advisor to many start-ups, and a new author. His new book, Love is Free. Guac is Extra. is released October 20. In today’s episode, we have a lot to cover - so much so that we’ve made this a two-part episode! We will start off our conversation with Monty today by hearing his early career journey and how he ended up at Chipotle after being a lawyer for 10 years. We will then dig deeper into his best strategies for creating a great culture, nuances in communication, and hear his fascinating stories of interacting with people from all walks of life.    Links:    Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com   Timestamps:   00:55 - Monty’s Career Path Thus Far  03:00 - How He Built Trusting Relationships With Employees 13:05 - Where Monty Got His Confidence 16:51 - The Best Strategy to Succeed 19:19 - Why Monty Went Undercover at Chipotle 28:30 - Monty’s Definition of Leadership 31:03 - Why Culture is So Critical 40:39 - Monty’s Learnings from Raw, Honest Conversations 45:26 - Importance of Curiosity and Vulnerability  51:40 - Body Language Tips 58:09 - Characteristics of Looking for Talent 1:06:52 - Advice for Promoting a Mission 1:18:00 - Quick Phrase Explanations 1:24:24 - Monty’s Secret to Profiting in Life   Resources:   Monty’s Website: https://montyfmoran.com/ Monty’s Book, Love is Free. Guac is Extra: https://montyfmoran.com/pre-order-book/ Monty’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/montyfmoran/

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If you're an Android user, head over to the Google Play Store to download Podcast Republic, and don't forget to rate and review Young and Profiting Podcast while you're at it. You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and profit. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Halitaha, and on Young and Profiting Podcast, we investigate a new topic each week and interview some of the brightest minds in the world. My goal is to turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your everyday life, no matter your age, profession, or industry.

There's no fluff on this podcast, and that's on purpose. I'm here to uncover value from my guests by doing the proper research and asking the right questions. If you're new to the show, we've chatted with the likes of ex-FBI agents, self-made billionaires, sleep psychologists, CEOs, and best-selling authors. Our subject matter ranges from enhancing productivity, how to gain influence, the art of side hustles, and more. If you're smart and like to continually improve yourself, hit the subscribe button because you'll love it here at Young and Profiting Podcast. This week on Yap, we're chatting with Monty Moran, the former co-CEO of Chipotle and former CEO, of the law firm Messiner and Reeves. While at Chipotle, Moran led a team of more than 75,000 employees

and helped to grow the company from eight locations to more than 2000. He was key to the massive explosion of Chipotle across the U.S. in the late 2000s. Currently, Monty is a chairman on corporate boards, an advisor to many startups and a new author. His first book, Love is Free Guacca Extra, comes out tomorrow, October 20th. In today's episode, we have a ton to cover, so much that I've made this a two-part series. In part one, we'll discuss Monty's early career journey and how he ended up being the co-CEO of Chipotle after being a lawyer for 10 years with no food industry or real estate experience. And then in part two, we'll go super deep into his expert leadership strategies,

including his perspective on creating a great company culture, his top ways to connect with people, and how you can design a mission that will motivate employees to do their best work. Hey, Monty, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Hey, thanks so much. Glad to be here. We are very excited to talk with you. You've had a very fascinating career journey. You were formerly the co-CEO of Chipotle during its massive growth period from 2008 to 2016, and it was under your watch that the organization expanded from eight restaurants to 2000 globally.

So you've got a really extraordinary career path. You started as a lawyer. Then you became, you know, managing director, CEO of a priority law firm, or premier law firm, I should say. That's a very unique career path going from lawyer to managing a law firm to then becoming the CEO of Chipotle. So help us connect those dots there. How did you end up becoming the co-CEO of Chipotle getting that role there coming from a lawyer background? It just seems like a very unique. career path. Yeah, I think it is a unique career path. Really, I was a lawyer in Los Angeles for a few years. And

during that time, my friend Steve Ells, had founded Chipotle back in Denver. And he had opened the first door, and he and I just sort of stayed in touch during that time. And during weekends, I'd come back and I'd eat the incredible food he was making there. At that time, he was working personally at the restaurant. And the food was just unbelievable. It was like way too good for a burrito. And so I was really proud of what he had done there. And after a few years practicing in Ellis, I got married and wanted to come back to Colorado to raise my family in Colorado. And so came back to Colorado and got a job at a law firm in Denver. And I was, I think, the eighth lawyer at that law firm.

And it was an associate position. And then I started working as a lawyer. And during that time, I started developing clients at the law firm. I basically worked my way up and very quickly became a partner of that law firm after about a couple years. And then became CEO of that law firm after a few years. So as CEO of the law firm, I was really working. I mean, it was working hard on my own cases as a lawyer, but I was also working really hard to build a culture in the law firm

because there were so many clients coming in my way, and I got busier and busier and I basically started to figure out I couldn't handle all the work. And so I had to hire more people. And when I'd hire more people, my clients got mad, you know, when I started giving the work to other people. And they'd say, hey, I want you to do my work. I want you to do my work.

Why are you slacking off on my work? Why are you giving it to associates? It's don't I matter to you anymore and that kind of thing. And what's really funny is that initially that felt really good to me, that they wanted me to do all their work. It was like, oh, cool, I'm glad you like me, you know. And so my ego was sort of warmed by those comments. But at the end of the day, I was getting way too busy to do all their work.

And I really needed to get the help of associates to do the work. And so what happened was something had to give. You know, either I would have to start saying no to new clients, which I didn't want to do because I was building a really neat law practice, or I would have to find a way to have my clients be happy with working with junior associates. And so basically the thing that had to give was my ego. I had to be like, okay, I've got to be glad if clients like and want other people to work on their cases and are happy to have me off their case.

And that's really counterintuitive for a young lawyer who was working really hard to build a practice, right? Because the way you become a partner of a law firm these days isn't like 30 or 40 years ago when you just hang in there. Time doesn't get you there. most of the time you have to develop a book of business. You have to develop your own clients and bring that value to the law firm. And that's what I had done. But in order to develop even more clients, past the amount of work I was able to do in a 24-hour day, I had to make sure that clients were happy to have other people do the work. So in order to do that, I had to do a lot of

things very differently. I had to empower the associates at the law firm to have a direct relationship with a client. Now, most of the time, partners in law firms like myself would not do that because they'd be afraid if they allowed the young associate to have a direct relationship with the client, that then that young associate could take the client and leave and go form their own law firm if it was a big enough client, or they could take a few clients and leave and start their own law firm. And that was very, very common that young lawyers would do that. Of course, it makes sense. They'd get a higher percentage of the money from the work and they'd get paid all, you know, they wouldn't have to accept a salary. So the only way to get them not to leave

is to create a culture at the law firm that was so excellent, so good for them, that they didn't want to leave. So I basically had to give them the power to have direct client relationships and have it be that they wanted to stay because it was such a great culture for them. So how did they do that? Well, I trained them really, really. First of all, I picked great associates. I learned to really interview carefully because I hated firing people and I had to do that sometimes when I had someone who wasn't very good and didn't want their success for themselves as bad as I wanted it for them. So sometimes that happened and I had to fire people and that was awful and I hated it. So I started interviewing very, very, very carefully. And I didn't interview for experience. I started

interviewing more and more for character, you know, to get the kinds of people who I knew would want to do really, really well and who are ambitious and motivated and hospitalable and charismatic and high energy and happy and enthusiastic and those kinds of things. So anyway, I started hiring better. And then once I hired the people, I would work very, very hard to train them to be excellent young lawyers. Well, young lawyers want to be trained. They want to become excellent. And so since I was putting all my time into training them, they liked that. Then I would pay them a good salary, but I would give them incredible bonuses when they do great work. And so they knew that I would reward them.

So they weren't afraid that they were going to go without reward if they did great work. And then I gave them direct client contact. I would actually introduce them to the client and say, hey, this is the young associate that will be taken care of you. You know, you probably won't need me. I'm around if you need me. I'm certainly there if the associate has questions. But, you know, just go ahead and develop a relationship there.

Well, that happened. And these young associates would develop relationships with loads and loads of clients, I would have less need to be involved directly in each matter, which meant that I could develop more clients, develop new areas of practice, say yes to more new cases. and basically grow personally as a lawyer as well into new areas of practice. And so the need to build, I build a great culture, not because I thought, gee, I'm going to build a great culture. I built a great culture because I needed to build a great culture in order to continue

to be successful growing my practice. It was that simple. It was out of absolute necessity. And that necessity pushed me off my ego where I decided, where I had this great big bell ring in my mind. And this is one of the biggest bells that's ever rung in my life. And it was this, wait a minute, becoming the very, very, very. best lawyer that I can be and doing more and more hard work and making it all about me being

excellent was actually a less desirable thing than to actually bring in young people, excellent people with a lot of potential and make them excellent. So I finally saw that it was a more powerful thing for me to do in life to make others better than just to keep making myself incrementally better or work incrementally harder. I got to the point where I couldn't work a lot harder. I was working all the time. So I had to find a way to make others better. And so that thing about making others better, making others better. And then what I soon learned is that was really immensely satisfying making others better, training them, teaching them, you know, mentoring them, helping them emotionally, helping them as a person, just trying to make them the strongest

version of themselves I could. And then, of course, the benefit was that strongest version of themselves, which was already a great person, became a wonderfully powerful asset to the law firm. Well, during that time, I was doing lease work for Chipotle and started to do more and more stuff for Chipotle because it was a young company and I did things very, very inexpensively. If I got into that story, it was actually absurdly inexpensively looking back because I wanted to take care of Chipotle and it was a very young company. They only had eight stores when I started doing the lease work. And Steve Ells was a friend of mine. And Steve started, you know, he came over to the law firm to talk with me and we were both very excited myself about the young law firm that I was

continuing to build and Steve about his young burrito chain that he was continuing to build. And we had a great time talking about it and we were really enthusiastic for ourselves but also for one another's success because we were doing something very different. He was building this company where he sold burritos. I was building a law firm, very different businesses. But yet any business can and should benefit from an excellent culture. And what Steve, when Steve came over to law firm, he started to say, man, what is it? How do you do this? The culture here's great. Like, these people are working really hard, but they're stoked and they're having, I don't know if Steve said the word stoked, maybe my word, but he was like, God, they're really enthusiastic. You know,

they seem really smart. They'd come into my office and they'd meet Steve and, oh, hey, Steve. And they're all excited. He's like, God, these are great people. How did you do this? And, you know, I don't know if I explained how I did it initially, as well as I did just to you. I just sort of said, oh, I don't know, you know, we're working hard here, you know. And but he really kept, no, no, really, how did you do it? And so I stopped and sort of said, well, let me tell you how I did it. And I explained it to Steve. And so he and I would start talking about culture.

And he's like, hey, how about if you come to Chipotle and build this kind of culture? And I was like, oh, gosh, that's really flattering. Thank you. But gosh, I love what I'm doing here. But, you know, we continue to talk about this. But over the course of the next five years, he continued to sort of up the any. No, really. No, really, come to Chbola. No, really, come to Chbola. And eventually, he offered me

various officer positions. And he said, hey, why don't you be the real estate director? And I said, well, that sounds like a lot of travel. And I just had young kids. And so I kind of waited on that. And then he said, how about come be chief administrative officer? It was the next thing he, and I said, well, I don't you know what that means, but administration doesn't sound very fun. And I'm like, what does that do? And he's like, oh, I don't know, but it's a cool, but you know, you'll get in, you'll do good with it. And I was like, okay, well, I don't know. anyway, over time. But eventually he said, hey, how about you just come run the company? Because I've been doing this a long time. And I think you could build a great culture at Chipotle. And it would really help us. And I thought, God, it's flattering. It sounds wonderful. I loved Chipotle. It sounded like a great opportunity. But I was really reticent to leave my law firm. But then Steve said something that actually was, he said a lot of smart things. But this was probably the thing that most powerfully caused me to decide to give it a shot to run Chipotle. And that is he said, Monty, you think you're a great lawyer. He goes, but really what you are is a great leader. And if you come to Chipotle, You know, instead of the, at that point, maybe at our law firm, we had 30 or 40 employees at that point.

Maybe more than that. Maybe it was 50 by then. I don't know. But anyway, I don't remember the total number of employees. But basically, Chipotle, it was like, hey, we're up to like 8,000 or something. You know, by the time we were at this point. And I'm like, wow. And he said, yeah, you have an opportunity to come change and affect that many people's lives. You don't want to you try it. And eventually, long story short, I said, okay. And, but during that time, I had become general counsel, during that 10-year period of time of starting at the law firm and going to Chepotla, I had, and I'd been a lawyer before that in L.A., but I was talking about the one law firm in Denver where I was. So during that 10 years, I had become General Counsel of Chipotle. I literally had a business card that said Chipotle, Monty Moran General Counsel,

even though I really wasn't an employee of Chipotle yet. So for many years, I was General Counsel of Chipotle, and I spent, and the deal there was the then chairman of Chipotle, told me he wanted me to spend, which is a guy named Jeff Kindler, he told me, hey, you know, you should spend like, tried to spend like 16 hours a week of your time at Chipotle. And so they gave me an office at Chipotle and a desk at Chipotle because you said, hey, the more you're there,

the more you'll be able to help the company with various problems that come up. People feel quicker to come approach you and just drop things on your desk. And so the agreement was when they may be General Counsel, I'd have to have an on-site presence of 16 hours a week. So, okay, cool. So I did that for quite a long time. And then it was from that position that I made the jump to become president and COO, which after a couple years became co-CEO of Chipotle.

So that's how I came. to be there. But it was a slower transition than it sounds in the sense that before I went over to be at Chapolet, Steve, it asked me to come to all the board meetings. And then I was doing the minutes for the board meetings as the lawyer. And so then he asked me to come to all the leadership meetings, which is where you'd have the top leaders of the company, but usually something, maybe 16, 18 people, and I would go to all those meetings. And then Steve noticed that at those meetings, I was very participative. I'm a guy with a lot of opinions and a big mouth and I'm not afraid to speak. And so I did. And he really appreciated that. He appreciated the fresh look at things.

And I think he very much continued to want me to be involved. And so ultimately, I agreed to jump on board. At Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world.

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trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash profiting. Go to Shopify.com slash profiting. That's Shopify.com slash profiting. Yeah, fam, hear your first. This new year with Shopify by your side. Wow, what a great story. And, you know, I'm really happy that you unpack all that because I think it's really great context for our listeners as we go on to talk about your leadership style, your new book, and some of this other stuff. There's a few themes in there that I want to dig into. So, you know, you started off as a lawyer. You then started working at Chipotle. A lot of your responsibilities had to do with like real estate leasing and things that you didn't really know about yet. The food industry obviously was totally different than the law industry. So that

was a whole different move. Women, especially nowadays, they have imposter syndrome, right? They're worried about taking on a role that they don't exactly have the credibility or, you know, the resume on paper to back up. So how did you go for it in terms of, you know, working at Chipotle, helping out Chipotle, even though you didn't have the relevant experience, how did you have the confidence to kind of learn as you went along? Wow. You know, well, first of all, with regard to imposter syndrome, you said a lot of women have imposter syndrome. I didn't know that that was a particularly woman thing, but I can tell you, I have imposter syndrome really badly. You know, and I always have. So maybe that's part of my very,

maybe it's my feminine side, which I think I have a large feminine side. But anyway, so I've always had that. And so, you know, I think my willingness to do more and more and more work for Chipotle arose a lot more from my need to please and be useful than it did from any particular confidence that I'd be great. So in other words, when Steve asked me to do real estate leases, I said, Oh, cool, yeah, I'd like to do that. But then I ran to the library and spent literally weeks at the University of Calvada Law Library reading every book on real estate leasing that I could find. I mean, like taking notes and I mean, really, like all my time. And I didn't bill any of that time to anybody. You know, couldn't build at Chipotle. It wouldn't be fair because I was trying to get smart. And then I talked to my partner, Ron Reeves, who was a real estate lawyer and I learned from him. And well, actually, I said I talked to my partner. He wasn't even partner. He was a partner. I wasn't. But I talked to the man who became my partner, Ron Reeves, and learned about much as I could about real estate law. And I learned. I just became a sponge and tried to learn, learn, learn, learn. And then the first few, you know, I did these leases for a flat fee, which ended up being a $1,200 flat fee.

And the funny thing there is I think it took me 100 hours at least to do each lease initially because it wasn't just the lease. There was a lot more associated with it, like site assessments and environmental impact statements and superfund information about sites that had pollution and this and that. So there was a lot to it. And I was going through all this stuff with a fine tooth comb and trying to learn, learn, and I didn't really care about my billings. I didn't care about whether I made money.

wanted to please Chipotle, please Steve, help Steve, help the company, and be someone who they were glad. Every job I've ever had, I wanted to prove to my boss or my client that they made the best decision in the world to hire me. And I've been willing to break my back to prove that. So, I mean, even when I started out at Dairy Queen, that wasn't even my first job, but it was my first like W-2 job where I had, you know, withholding taxes and all that. I was 15 years old. I had to be 15 to get the job. As soon as I turned 15, I got the job at Dairy Queen. And I felt so lucky to have that job, I got paid, I think it was $2.45 an hour. And I felt so lucky to have that job, I couldn't believe someone was paying me.

So I felt like I want to prove to them that they made a great decision to hire me. And I worked there for years while I was in high school. And then my next job, I was a janitor. And I wanted to prove they made the best decision to hire a janitor ever. And so every job I've had, and I've had a whole bunch of jobs that people would call, quote unquote, dead end jobs. There's no such thing as a dead end job. In fact, I've learned so much from my so-called dead-end jobs that I call them in my

minimum wage MBA. I mean, it's like I learned a ton working at these places. So to me, there was no job that wasn't good enough for me. It was almost like the opposite. I was so afraid I wasn't going to be good enough for any job. Whether that be Dairy Queen, being a janitor, let alone being a lawyer starting to do work for a young Chipotle Mexican grill, which even though it was a very small company, I had all the confidence. I had all the confidence. I had all the confidence.

It was so delicious. And Steve was such a visionary and he was hellbent to make it a really successful company. And I thought that he was going to do that. Anyway, so it's not that I had such confidence. It's that I was going to please them. And I was going to work myself to death to do it. And so in doing that, I think I just kept surprising and maybe even myself, but I kept surprising people with doing a great job and getting involved and trying to help them and making sure that whatever I built them was like they got way more value

than I built them. And I carried that through my entire life. I mean, I've always tried to be of more value to whoever hires me than they pay me. And that helps. So you have a quote in your book. I think that summarizes it really well. You say, to this day, when people ask me about the secret of my success and how I can get ahead in life. I tell them, don't worry about getting ahead. Totally focus on what you're doing right now. Do it very well with all your passion and energy. People will notice and when they do, they'll want more of your time. So it's not about you actually having the experiences, having the knowledge, the exact, you know, experiences of the past to implement in the future. It's really about having the attitude, the right attitude and having good

intentions to do well. And I follow the same strategy and I always accept. sell when I do that, just having good intentions. Yeah, if your goal is to really help someone and really take care of them and make sure that their association with you is something that is great for them. How can you fail if you think about it? Right? Like if you don't provide that much value, well, then don't bill them as much or work harder or, you know, it's like, so yeah, this idea. And I think that a lot of young people now, and I was just talking to my oldest son the other day. And he's at that point of having graduated from college. He did well in college. And he's looking for a job. And he's like, dad, it's really hard to find a job right now. And you know,

there's tons of people out of work and, you know, and I don't even know how good I'll be at these jobs, which I do, which I do, which I do. And I was like, get a job, like any job. Get a really bad one. You know, get one where you're sure that you can succeed and they'll be lucky to have you and then work so hard at it that you blow them away. Like that you're like, holy crap. I mean, this kid's flipping burgers, but man, he makes great burgers and he makes a lot of burgers and he does it with love and care, you know? And I said, and then what happens is what happens then is your confidence builds because you start being good at something. And if you're good at something, I don't care what it is.

If someone is good at something, they get confidence that they can be good at something else. Then they can go to that something else. And then they get good at it. And then they get confidence, oh, I've been good at two things now. Maybe I can be good at a third. And then they're good at a third. And then they're good at a fourth. And eventually, they get a string of being good at stuff.

And when you're good at lots of things, you can be good at more things. And you get confidence that, hey, I'm useful. I can help people. And you start to actually accumulate real skill. And then that skill, well, then it just snowballs. you know, it just keeps getting more and more powerful. Yeah. Take heed to what he's saying, everyone. Monty is giving really great advice in terms of how to just succeed.

It's not about, you know, everything that you know and what you have on paper. It's about your attitude and the effort that you give. So let's talk about your role as CEO-O. I read in your book that when you first started, you immediately decided to go undercover. So tell us about why you went undercover and some of the lessons that you learned. there. Well, listen, this was a company that by the time I joined officially as an employee, as a W-2 employee, after having been general counsel for the better part of a decade, you know, when I officially joined, there was like 8,000 employees in like 350 or 400

stores or something. I forget the exact number, but there was a lot of restaurants, right? And so I went in there and I thought, what can I really do to help this company? You know, I mean, I can't go in and clean every store. There's hundreds of them. I can't go in and make sure the food's good. there's 100,000 customers, hundreds of thousands of customers every day. So what could I do? Well, I thought, well, the one thing I could do is really understand how we're training our managers. Because if the general manager was excellent in any given store, that store would hire great people, produce great food, serve quickly, have great customer service, and do all the things that would make Chipotle successful.

So I said, you know, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in and go through our manager training and see how we train these people. because I did already have an understanding that some managers were really good, but a lot of them weren't so great. And so how can I make them all great? So I thought, well, the first thing I better do is find out how we're training them. So I asked Gretchen Salfridge, who was a woman who was at that time a regional director. So she had a whole bunch of stores reporting to her. Maybe it's at that time 60 or 80 stores.

And I said, hey, can you find a restaurant where you can put me in as an MIT trainee? Because that's what we called managers who we hired off the streets, usually with fast food experience. And we put them in as trainees. And then after a six-week training program, they would become managers and go off to usually a new Chipotle or a Chipotle that needed the manager and become the general manager. And so I said, hey, can you put me in as a fake MIT,

well, a real MIT trainee? But I want people to not know who I am. I don't want them to know that I'm the new president and CEO of the company, which was my title at that time. And she goes, yeah, I can do that. And so we found a store where no one knew who I was except the general manager. And she was told. And her name was Kay.

And she's fabulous. Great trainer. Really neat. She sat me down the first day. He goes, okay, I know your president and stuff. So I'm just going to do this. Like, I'm not going to tell anybody. And I'm going to train you.

And I'm really going to train you. Like, I train in the world personal. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I want. She's like, I mean, but I'm going to be tough on you. I'm like, good, good, be tough on me. Like just I don't want any positive. I don't want any, what do you call it? You know, advantage.

I don't want any other way. It's like, I want you to beat me up and make me a good manager. Okay. And you know what? she did. I mean, she didn't beat me up, but I didn't make her have to. I worked really hard. You know, it's like I was really motivated to get to be a great manager at Chipotle. So I knew what I was doing. And so anyway, I went through that program and it was awesome. But I learned some things that weren't really part of the training program. Okay. So one thing I learned was that the crew people

who we had working there at this time, it was a largely Hispanic crew. In fact, 86 or 87 percent of our workforce nationwide was Hispanic at that point. So it was a largely Hispanic workforce. Most of them didn't speak English. And I spoke this little tiny bit of like crumming. Spanish, but I'd work it through, and we'd communicate. And so I would ask the crew people, and keep in mind, that's who was training me, really. Like, Kay was responsible for training me, but she would set me up with a person to help me show me how to cut onions, and that was a crew person. She would set me up with a person to show me how to use the grill. That was a crew person. She would have someone that show me how to do an inventory. That was a crew person. So I was

really being trained by the crew people. And what I learned really quickly is these crew people were awesome. They were really smart. They were really cool. They were super ambitious. And ambitious not to get ahead because they didn't know they could. but ambitious to deliver a great customer experience, to cook great food, to be the best grow cook, to be the best person slicing onions, the best prep cook, you know, the best at cleaning,

the best at doing an inventory. They were really great. And I was like, man, these people are awesome. Like, there's so much better than I will be in six weeks, like, because they've done it for years.

And so anyway, so I learned, wow, these people are awesome. And so I'd ask them, I'd ask the crew people, hey, so what do you want to do? Like, do you want to be a manager here someday? And they'd be like,

and they'd look at me like, yeah, the exact way that if I say, said, do you, you know, hey, Holly, do you want to be a major, do you want to win the lottery? You'd be like, yes, what's the trick? Like, what's the catch? Why are you asking me that? Do you know what I mean? And so like, if you want to win the lottery, yeah, I want to win, but are you saying, I mean, I'm not going to win the lottery. You know, so, that's the way they looked at me like, yeah, sure, I'd like to be a manager, but and so they'd say, well, I said, well, what do you want to do in five years? Oh, let's keep doing this.

Great. I love my job. No, but would you like to be a manager? Um, yeah, but they had no thought that there was any possibility of becoming a manager. I thought, well, that's wrong. Because these people, I very quickly knew would be a much better general manager than I would be after six weeks, you know? And what we were doing at that time is we were hiring people with fast food experience, the vast, vast majority of which were white people, to go in, train with the largely Hispanic crew to become managers. And I thought, well, this is wrong. You know, it doesn't make any sense. So I made up my mind right then, hey, why don't we train these crew people to be our future managers? Like all of our managers in the future should come from crew, because these people are

better. You already know a bunch of things about them, don't you? But will they be a good manager? Well, you don't know for sure, but you do know they show up on time every day. Because they've worked for you for two, three, four years, right? So you know they're going to show up on time every day. You know they have a great attitude. You know, they're hard worker. You know that they are really nice. You know that they care. You know, they've got integrity. You know that they're honest. I mean, that's 99% of the battle. Can you teach them to be a manager? That's the easy part. That's the easy part. You know, teach them how to use the keys to open the front door, teach them how to hire someone, fire someone,

on board someone, teach them how to deal with really sophisticated customer service complaints or problems, you know, they can learn all that. I mean, good Lord, they can learn it easily. So very quickly during my training, I said to Steve and the other officers, I said, hey, we got to get rid of this MIT training program and stop hiring people with experience off the streets. And instead, we got to rely on our crew people. And that's going to do a ton of things that are going to help our company. You know, number one, we can stop hiring people with experience because what is that experience? Fast food experience. Is fast food experience really good experience? Did we think, of any other fast food restaurant as having awesome people, especially these are people who don't

work there anymore, who couldn't maybe hold their job at a Taco Bell or whatever, you know? And so we're hiring the people who aren't the best fast food workers for fast food experience, and we don't even value the experience they've had because the experience they've had might be that they were operating something messy and serving bad food and giving bad service. So why look for that? Why look for that? Why not look for someone with character, which is the one thing you can't train? You can't train character. That's up to your parents when you're one-year-old, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight years old, right? And so you either have that or you don't by the time you come in as an 18 or 19 or 20 year old person for an entry level job at Chipotle.

Like you have that character or you don't. If you're just honest, I can't train you to be honest. Can I? Probably not. Can I train you to be happy or enthusiastic or motivated? Probably not. So I said, hey, if we hire everyone from crew, here's what's going to happen. First of all, we're going to inject so much enthusiasm into our crew because they're going to be like, man, these people care about us.

They believe in a chance to move up. And guess what they're going to do, especially in the Hispanic community. There's a lot of people with large families. They're going to tell their brothers and sisters, and aunts and uncles and moms and dads and say, hey, man, you should work. This is awesome. This is a great job.

We're going to move up. I'm going to move up at this job. And the word's going to get out through not just the Hispanic community, but through all communities that, hey, Chipoli is a place where if you get a job there, even at the entry level, you're going to become a manager, right? So we're going to have more enthusiasm at the crew level. We're going to have more people applying for jobs. We're going to have more people to pick from in terms of choosing who our future leaders are.

We're going to have much, much, much, much better managers. And then I actually went back to the corporate office when I came up with this thought. and looked at the data. I looked, are there any people who have gone from crew positions to manage your positions? Well, there were very few, okay? Statistically very few, but there were still dozens and dozens that had. I looked at their performance versus the performance of people hired from the outside. What I found was that the people who came from the inside, that is to say, from crew positions,

had much, much, much, much better restaurants, ran better operations, and were four times less likely to leave. The turnover was four times less. So that was a home run. Anyway, so we started doing that. And over time, I said within two years, we're going to hire one hundred, 100% of the people from within. And we might not have achieved 100%, but we achieved like 80 or 90% in two years. And within a few years after that, we were like 95% fired from within. And the only

acceptance to that were we'd find someone who was a hot shot at Starbucks and say, hey, come to Chbote, or wherever, you know, someone would get to know someone. So one of our people would get to know someone and say, come to Chpola and we'll train you real quick to be a manager. And we'd fast fast track a few people. But almost everyone else came from a legitimate crew position into management positions. And it was a home run for our company. Yeah. Well, you clearly have some great leadership skills. You clearly know how to empower people, make them motivated. Really cool stuff here. Let's talk about your leadership style. So your book, which is coming out, when is it coming out exactly? The 20th of October. It's just a few days here. Tuesday. Okay. I think I'm going to put out this episode Monday. So I'll be right on time to help you promote your new book. It's called Love is Free, Gwok is Extra, How Vulnerability, Empowerable, Empowered.

and curiosity built an unstoppable team. So I definitely want to dig into all of this stuff. Let's start off with your definition of leadership. I know you have a unique definition of leadership. What is that at a high level? Yeah, so basically, I look at management and leadership as totally different things. And most people just, you know, we talk about managers, managers. Even if we even kept the general manager label, but we really didn't want general managers to manage. We wanted general managers to lead. So basically, management is is about getting someone to do what you want them to do, you know? hey, I want you to keep this restaurant clean. I want you to serve good food.

I want you to give a good customer service. Please do that. Thank you. That's management, right? And the people who can do that well are valued in our society. But leadership is something much more powerful and much more enlightened. Leadership is about getting someone to do something that they themselves find value in, that they want to do for themselves.

That also happens to advance the cause of, you know, the organization, Chipotle in this case, or whatever, right? So I have to find something in you, you know, that I have to know you. I have to care about you enough to know what makes you tick, to know what really fires you up, to know what excites you, to know what brings the best out of you, okay? And once I find that about you, I find out where does that dovetail with what our organization needs? And the answer is usually there's an enormous overlap, right? Like I can do something that's going to help you become the most powerful version of yourself

while simultaneously advancing the organization immensely. Okay, so that's where leadership is. It's at that juncture between finding what you're passionate about and what's going to make you have a great life and enthusiastic, fun, excited life where you're at your very, very best, and the thing that actually helps my organization or the thing that the boss, quote-unquote, boss or leader is in charge of, also have a huge advantage from your work. Okay. So it's a win-win. It's about finding that win-win. And that's leadership. Young and profitors. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday

wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know. It's not a character flaw that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. And here's the thing. When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing. Some work gives you energy and some work simply drains you.

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around the fact that I didn't like enablement, which is one of my working frustrations. So I actually don't like to support people one-on-one. I don't like it when people slow me down. I don't like handholding. I like to move fast, invent, rally people, inspire. But what I do need to do is ensure that somebody else can fill that enablement role, which I do have, K on my team. So working genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team,

helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the spots that they're going to really excel, and it's also helped me in hiring. Working Genius is absolutely amazing. I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the Working Genius assessment and get 20% off, you can use code profiting. Go to workinggenius.com. Again, that's working genius.com.

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Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. I think that's an excellent definition of leadership. So when you are at, Chipotle, you actually had a reputation of having these really great one-on-one calls with your employees. So there was like 75,000 employees who worked at Chipotle, and I think you had 20,000 one-on-one calls. This reminds me of somebody named Claude Silver. I'm not sure if you know who she is. She's a chief heart officer of VaynerMedia, Gary Vaynerchuk's right-hand woman at the company. And she has a goal of like touching every employee and they basically have a role designed for her to connect with employees.

And basically it sounds like she had like a very similar job to what you had at Chipotle, only they call it like a Chief Heart Officer. So there's obviously a trend out there in terms of connecting with your employees and things like that. So why do you think that having a strong culture is an important aspect to having a well-run company?

And, you know, why did you decide that that was something that you needed to kind of take over at Chipotle? Yeah, well, first of all, that's a cool Chief Heart Officer. that sounds cool and I'd love to meet her. That's really neat. It sounds like she's doing something great. At Chipotle, we, well, we had 75,000 employees in 2015, I think, in 2016. I grew about 75,000 at that time. We were hiring, though, it's a very high turnover business, even though we had lower turnover than all of our peers.

It's still over 100% a year. You know, you lose that that hourly position. So we were hiring 100,000 people a year, okay, 100,000 people hiring a year. So, but what I did, I didn't have phone calls with people. I sat down one-on-one with people. I was traveling to restaurants all. over the country, and every time I went to any restaurant, I had a rule. I mean, I would sit down with every single person, one-on-one at a table and talk to them. And some of these conversations were five, ten minutes, and some were three hours in the rare case, you know. But it just depended what I was learning. And a few things happened during that. Okay, so I, first of all, I really got to know people and what really drove them. I got to know what they loved about the job, what they didn't like about

the job, what we were doing well in the restaurants, what we were doing poorly in the restaurants, what our best leaders were doing really, really well, and what our worst leaders were doing that wasn't helping. And so I got an understanding of the entire leadership structure of the I got an understanding of the operational specifics of the company. I got an understanding of the individual people in the company, the kinds of people we were hiring, whether we were making the right hiring decisions, whether we were training them properly, landing them in the job properly? In other words, what do we do on their first day?

Did we give them something a really encouraging first day that made them feel good and welcomed and invaluable, or didn't we? So that and a million other things, I would learn from doing these conversations. So even though I was CEO of the company or co-CEO, these conversations, which took a large percentage of my time. Maybe it was 30 or 40% of my time. I was in these conversations. But guess what? During that 30 or 40% of my time that I was actually talking one-on-one with people, I was learning how to run the company better, how to be more efficient, how to waste less food, how to buy better food, how to prepare the food better, what techniques were best, how to run the restaurants better,

what equipment to buy, what equipment not to buy, how to calibrate the equipment, how to treat the equipment so would last longer. I mean, and a million other things, okay, lots and lots. From which I was able to, as I left every restaurant on almost every occasion, after every visit, I would leave that restaurant, A, really understanding the people in the restaurant, understanding whether it was run as well as it could be, understanding whether the operations are excellent, understanding whether they're not a great leader. But I'd also understand something global about what we could do better as a company. And I would call whoever is in charge of that particular skill, whether it be, if it was someone who's in charge of, you know,

of operations or an operations officer or one of our regional directors, I'd say, hey, let's get the regional director together and talk to them. We're going to change the way we cut an onion, because we can save, you know, we can use 10% more of the onion and have much better cut sizes, to yield a much more delicious food by doing this one thing differently everywhere. So even though it was very specific, when you roll that out over what ended up being when I was there over 2,000 restaurants, small changes make for huge, huge savings or huge huge benefits to the customer. So that was just really, really awesome.

And so I just went and I sat down with people at every restaurant. And it wasn't like I went there and quiz them about something specific or said, hey, how can you do better? I would first of all just go, hey, hi, you know, how are you? And so, you know, how do you like it here? What's it like? And I'd get to know them personally. By getting to know people personally and actually caring about them and caring about who they are,

what their heart feels like, how they feel being at Chipotle, you know, whether it's helping them become a better person, a happier person, a more fulfilled person, whether it's helping them be a better father, a better mother, sister, daughter, brother, whatever. So I would sit down with these people and just really work on helping them be at their best, and they were blown away. I mean, people would all the time, oh, my God, I can't believe you're the CEO. I didn't think you'd be like this. I thought you'd be like, I was like, well, what did you think I'd be like?

Well, I didn't think he'd be such a normal person, you know? And I'd be like, well, okay, cool. Well, I'm glad I'm a normal person. And it was like people expected to because I was in the top job in the company that I would have some sort of error of superiority. Well, it's not just that I didn't have an error of superiority. I know I'm not superior. There's nothing superior about me.

I just had more time in the job and I had more experience and I had worked really hard and I'm older. It's like, I'm not, that wasn't superior to anybody. In fact, a lot of these people, I was blown away by, I mean, each and every one of them, I was blown away by something. Like, they're better. I was like, wow, they're so articulate. or some people I was like, oh, wow, they're so sweeter.

Oh, wow, the way they look at you with their eyes is so nice. I feel like safe. So people have all these different characteristics. And basically by finding out the beauty of individual people and understanding them and actually loving them, I mean, you can't help but love someone when you really get to know them and understand what's in their heart. It's very hard not to love them. So basically people found out that I love them.

And when I love them, they were like, oh, man, this is awesome. Even the CEO, like, he loves me. And he loves this company. He loves this culture. And so people began to really believe. believe in the culture as something real. They believed that the company actually was, you know, a company of people who cared about them. And so then more importantly than my own interviews, the most important thing I did was to teach the hundreds and hundreds of field leaders how to sit down,

how to have these conversations, how to learn to actually really care about the human beings. Because by caring about the human beings, you get much, much better operations. You know, you get much, much better financial performance, all the things that the shareholders wanted, you'd get the most of that way. Yeah. And I think people probably felt really valued because, you know, I've worked at HP, I work at Disney streaming now, and having a conversation with the CEO is unheard of, like, unless you're an SVP, you're a senior level executive, you know, you're not really getting airtime with the CEO. And so that must have made them feel really valued, really heard, and that's really important when it comes to motivating your employees. So I think

that was an excellent strategy. Absolutely. Yeah, and it was. And everybody, and I don't care what position you're in. Everyone actually works better from a position of passion and a desire to do well, knowing that they can do well in a sense when they're empowered, basically. And my definition of empowerment is feeling confident in your ability and encouraged by your circumstances such that you feel motivated and at liberty to fully devote your talents to a purpose. So people are at their best when they're confident in their ability and encouraged by their circumstances. So confident in your ability is pretty easy. You train someone so they know what they're doing. That's kind of that simple. And I talk about it in my book, but I don't make it that much more complicated even in my book.

The harder part is creating encouraging circumstances. So when are your circumstances encouraging? Well, if you ask anyone that, you ask them to really think about it and to think about someone around whom you feel at your best. You know, sometimes people say, oh, I feel that way around my father or my mother or my sister, my best friend. And some people say, well, my father makes me feel terribly unempowered. But, you know, it's all over the gamut, right?

But someone, you can always think of someone around whom you feel at your best, right? Well, what that person is doing is creating encouraging circumstances. And the way they're always doing it. and it's almost always the same. Well, it's always the same. Anyway, it's that they care about you, believe in you, come to know you, want what's best for you, challenge you, won't stop until they see you at your best, right?

So the person you feel the best around isn't someone, if you're, like to say, it's your parents. You know, if you're a 15-year-old kid and you come home, you know, smoking a joint, a joint in your left hand and a scotch in your right hand, and your parents like, hey, that's great, man, as long as you're happy, kid, well, that's not what the parents are going to say

if they're an impact, that's not encouraging circumstances. that's like letting someone not be at their best. A great parent is not going to tolerate that, right? They're like, hey, wait a minute. You know, hey, you're a young person. You have a life ahead of you. Let's get you on the, you know, you've got to do better.

You know, you're really smart. You can do more than this. So it's not always going to be sweet and kind. It might be quite rigid and disciplined at times. But overall, that person's going to be someone who cares about you, believes in you, and it wants you to be at your best and will not rest until you are at your best. And that's encouraging circumstances, right? And so when I started doing it myself and then trained the other hundreds of field leaders

to do this, the whole culture, became this place where we created encouraging circumstances. And in those encouraging circumstances, guess what? People are at their best. A friend of mine recently wrote a book called Choose Love, Not Fear. And if you just think about that title, choose love, not fear. And it too is a leadership book that talks about a lot of the principles that I happen to cover in my book. And basically, the point, you know, if you could summarize it, is that, you know, when people are in fear, they don't work very well. They're not at their best. They're not, they perform poorly. But when they're when they're feeling loved and cared for and then are also challenged, right?

It's not all about just love and kumbaya. It's got teeth, too, right? Like, you're demanding that people do well. You're going, we've got to do excellent work. And you also have to have a vision, right? To empower someone, someone has to have a vision and work towards that vision. And the vision can be very difficult to achieve. A lot of these companies, a lot of super ambitious companies that are performing incredibly,

but they have all the employees rowing in the same direction towards what might be a very difficult thing to achieve, but something that everyone deems incredibly worthwhile. You know, so it may be very hard, right? climbing Mount Everest, maybe your vision, it's hard, right? But you're going to, you think about the feeling how are you going to feel at the top in the sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. And so you're willing to work very hard to take very difficult steps through deep snow, through horrible freezing temperatures, through danger, what have you, to get to the top of that mountain. So it may be very difficult, but you're still encouraged by your circumstances because each step, you know, is getting you closer

to your goal. Yeah. So I want to take a step back and talk about your teenage years. You mentioned previously, you worked, you know, several years at Dairy Queen. And I read that you used to meet homeless people and hang out with homeless people at Dairy Queen. And I think that probably had a lot to do with your leadership style later on and influencing, you know, the way that you ended up leading and your need to kind of connect with people and have no judgment against people and being able to relate to them. So can you tell us about that story and maybe what you learned from it? Yeah, yeah. That was incredible. That was an awesome job working at Dairy Queen. And we were just lucky for a few reasons, I suppose. But one reason we were lucky is that our dairy queen was located

just a block away from two different mental health facilities. And so there were these homeless people and most of them that came into dairy queen were mental health patients. And they would come in and they would usually buy a coffee. And that was it. And they'd sit around, they'd wrap themselves around that cup of coffee for two, three, four hours, sometimes all day, you know. And so I would, during my breaks, I would just go say hi to them. Hey, you know, how are you doing? And a lot of them would look up and I think a lot of them were like, oh, good, hi. You know, but you could tell they were actually, like, almost shocked that I took any interest, even enough to say hello. I don't think many people saw value in them, which is a horrible, horrible shame because they're incredibly

valuable people. So I would sit down across from these folks on my breaks because I had 15-minute breaks, like twice a day or whatever, or on my lunch hour sometimes. So I'd take a whole lunch with them. And I would sit down to say, hey, so hey, how'd you come to be here? Like, where are you from? And they'd be like, oh, I'm at the mental health facility over there. And they might say that with some embarrassment. Like, oh, is it cool? Like, what's it like there? And I was just super curious. And I had no judgment, like no negative judgment. And that's something that I think just is broken in my brain. I don't have negative judgments about stuff that other people do. So I don't think it's bad to be homeless. It's only bad if someone's not enjoying it, right? Like,

I don't think it's just inherently bad. Someone might choose to be homeless. I mean, when you go camping, you're homeless for a minute. Some people like to camp, some people like to camp six months at a time. That's homeless, kind of. I mean, I don't want to dumb down the problem and say it's not a problem. It is for a lot of people. But I just sort of said, hey, so, like where do you live? And they'd be like, I'm not, I don't have a home right now. I'm just, I stay in the, you know, I stay old behind the whatever, under the bridge. Oh, wow. What's that like? I mean, is it, you have some freedom, I guess, right? And like, yeah, they'd laugh. Yeah, I guess I'm free, you know, but well, how do you like it. Well, I don't know.

I guess I'd like to have, I'd like to have somewhere to live. Oh, wow. Well, well, I don't know. I mean, right now it's really hard because blah, blah, blah, blah. So I just talked to them and I'd learn how they got to be where they are, what their life was about, who they loved, you know, what had happened that led them to this place that was sometimes very difficult for them. And a lot of these folks were they had maybe some dysfunction mentally. They were having a hard time and struggling. But I found such value in their struggle because I had had less struggle. I had come from a family where I knew where my next meal was coming from.

I knew that generally speaking I wasn't worried about my safety. I wasn't worried about a place to live. And so I learned so much from dozens and dozens of people who really were concerned about having a place to live, who really didn't know where the next meal was coming from, who were making maybe some really bad decisions, like buying cigarettes instead of food or, you know, drinking only coffee and putting tons of creamer in it to get their calories. So I started like, you know, to say, hey, why don't you like, why don't I get you some food? And I'd bring them and I got to free food when I was at Chappoli. I mean, when I was at, well, Chippoly too, but when I was a dairy queen,

one of the things I loved about the job is they'd let me eat for free. And so I would bring, you know, my lunch out and I would share it with them. And I'd go here, have half my hamburger. And they would eat it, you know, to eat it like, you could tell they were hungry, you know, really hungry sometimes. But then I would just notice that they would start to get nursed back to a better place as I'd talk to them day after day, week after week. And really, I think most of the better place that they were coming to. It wasn't because they were necessarily eating better, although some of them really started to prioritize like food instead of cigarettes or maybe instead of a coffee they'd get something to eat and get a chicken sandwich or whatever because we had food at that

Dairy Queen, not just hot dogs, but burgers and chicken sandwiches and fist sandwiches, that stuff. And anyway, so, but I'd noticed that a lot of them would start to really feel more confidence as it came and be happier. Their head would be held higher. They'd talk more to me. They'd take up more of their conversation. They'd see their confidence being restored. And I think the biggest thing that restored their confidence is just that, like, I love them, you know, and they were seen and understood and valued. And in that being seen and understood and valued, those are parts of the things that I just said to you were part of encouraging circumstances.

So all of a sudden, these people who were in maybe very not encouraging circumstances, very lonely, a hungry, poor. maybe not a lot of people that were caring for them or looking after them, maybe nobody. All of a sudden, there was at least one person myself who was like going, hey, how are you? And I knew their name. Hey, Tim, how are you doing today? It's great to see you. You look good today. Are you feeling better?

Yeah, I'm feeling better. Oh, good. Hey, I noticed you're not smoking. Well, I'm trying to give up cigarettes. Good for you. Tim, that's great. And I was encouraging them. And I cared about them.

And I knew them. And I got to see who they really were. And I saw that the beauty in their hearts. And having someone look into your eyes and see the beauty in your heart makes you see the beauty in your own heart. It starts to heal you. It starts to make you feel better about the person you you are. And guess what? You know, when you feel better about the person you are, then you are a more productive person who can add more value to the world around you, start helping others, and maybe even get paid for that or get a job if you're a person with that one. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting

Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please write us a review or comment on your favorite platform. Nothing makes us happier than reading your reviews. We'd love to hear what you think about the show. don't forget to share this podcast with your friends, family, and on social media. I always repost, reshare, and support those who support us. You can find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search for my name. It's Hala Taha. Big thanks to the Yap team.

As always, this is Hala, signing off.