They are hidden to the customer and invisible to most of their hourly staff. Yet they keenly shape and orchestrate the experience of both. Without them, VPs and CEOs would stagger and fall, but stockholders rarely know them by name. The unit managers know them, some more than others, for these invisible leaders were once managers too.
Like Batman, hidden in shadows from the customer and crew, but always alert, instinctive and ready to spring into action, the multi-unit foodservice manager or area director oversees and directs the success or failure of every restaurant chain (and multi-unit franchisee) in the world, a thousand times over, ten thousand times a day. Yet they work in near anonymity to both their guests and our industry (where are the Multi-Unit Manager panels and awards?) while walking a supervisory tightrope between producing results and successfully managing a Freudian Smorgasbord of personalities. I say: it’s time to stop to praise the accomplishments and assess the challenges of the Multi-unit Leader (MUL).
Talk to Multi-Unit leaders as much as I do as a speaker and consultant with foodservice and retail companies around the world, and a distinct persona emerges. They are fast-thinking, numbers-crunching, paper-pushing, service-driven, enthusiasm-generating mobile leaders with boundless energy and a smartphone, laptop or tablet as weapons of choice.
They influence and shape the experience of dozens of managers, thousands of team members and hundreds of thousands of customers, yet they do it by indirect influence, not hands-on control, a fantastical skill that must be learned, but is difficult to teach. They embrace technology, put a premium on soft skills, and mentor the standard-bearers of Generation Next. Most learn the hard way—trial by fire—because sadly most companies invest more time and money training their cooks, servers, and GMs than they do their MULs. In short, Multi-Unit Leaders are my heroes.
Multi-unit leadership can be as down to earth as Home Plate: everything running sharp, managers leading, team focused, nobody hurt, money in the tills and every customer leaves happy. Other days, you feel like an octopus, there’s a lot of motion but you can’t tell if it’s going to be forward, backwards, sideways or out of control. It takes a certain personality to be comfortable with chaos, uncertainty, multi-directional demands, and the occasional global pandemic.
Our company, Sullivision.com, has embarked on a ten-year journey to discover best demonstrated practices of high-performing Multi-Unit Leaders (MULs) . We interviewed high-performing/award-winning store Managers as well and were able to assess the types of leadership skills reflected at the unit level that also point to success at the Multi-unit level. Here’s a little of what we’ve learned from our research.
When you ask MULs what’s keeping them awake at night, here are the Top challenges they list:
What’s wrong with this picture?
The last two on that list—# 6 and #7—are areas where every owner, CEO, COO, or VP reading this should see a clear strategic advantage for your company. Enhance your multi-unit leadership talent by investing in resources that help them learn and grow both personally and professionally. Automate systems that choke them with paper work instead of people work. help them think more strategically instead of simply telling them what to do.
It appears that we’re not investing enough time and resources into the Multi-unit leader’s learning needs, coaching and development, or giving them time to do the same for the GMs they supervise. Information is good, but transformation is better.
Let’s take a closer look at these challenges.
Paperwork is overtaking People Work. One thing we’ve heard over and over again is that Multi-Unit Leaders feel that they have less and less time to spend in the stores developing people because of the volume of reports, data and administrative overload they have. The more time they spend out of the stores at meetings and on reportage, the less growth, guidance and support the store managers get. Hence, both the internal and external customer’s experience is lessened. Why does this happen?
Time out? It doesn’t surprise me that Area Directors complain about the time they have available to spend in their stores. Do the math: there’s only 365 days in a year. When you subtract days off, holidays, travel days, and meeting days, you’re left with about one or two days day a month that’s realistically available to Area Directors to do their most important job: meaningful store visits to individual units that help develop the skill sets of your General Managers. So here’s the irony question of the month: are multi-unit leaders so busy doing their job (paper and reports) that they can’t do their job (people and profits)?
Meaningful store visits. What are the characteristics of an effective restaurant/store visit by a multi-unit manager? “Every store visit by a District Manager (DM) should first have a defined purpose, whether it’s people, service, operations, simply reviewing previous period numbers, or some combination of the above.” says Deb Jones, a foodservice VP, “Each store manager’s experience, needs and operations are different, so each DM visit should be pre-planned with the necessary focus in mind.” I couldn’t agree more, and once you’ve defined the purpose of the visit, our research suggests that “Meaningful Store Visits” involve the following strategies:
Note to VPs, franchise owners and CEOs:, what you do about helping Area Managers and Area Directors and Franchisees get to the next level is up to you: you can do something or you can do nothing. You could invest in their education, relieve their paperwork, help them work smarter, incite their passion, and make their work a cause, not a “job”. But please, do something. Not to choose is to lose.
Jim Sullivan’s book called Multiunit Leadership has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide, his online Multiunit Leadership development elearning program is called MultiU 2.0 and the Multiunit Leadership in a Box kit (which allows you to use our slides, videos, leader’s guide, learner’s workbooks, research and insight to customize an instructor-led multiunit leadership development course for your franchisees and Area Managers) is available at Sullivision.com You can learn more in this one-minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Naa82NG6xOU.
