Cheryl A. Bachelder's Blog, page 10

People. Process. Potential

I get tired of hearing people refer to people practices as “the soft stuff.”

Accessing the full potential of your team? That is the hardest thing you will do as a leader.

I love to watch sailboat races. It is thrilling to see the boat tilt to the wind, lean on its side, and gain speed. It is mesmerizing to watch one boat overtake another. This collection of people on the deck, each one doing something entirely different, making it look easy. But wait… They each know their role. They have trai...

Process Trumps Chaos

At Popeyes, our third principle is: “We are fact-based and planful.” I know that sounds really boring as a principle, but we have to talk about it because it has revolutionized the way we work and helped us reach our performance goals.

In the fall of 2007, the work environment at Popeyes was chaotic – a state of confusion and disorder prevailed. The word “chaos” is derived from a Greek word meaning “chasm” or “void.” In our conversation today, “chaos” means a “void” in leadership.

One of the...

Two Ears. One Mouth.

Somewhere along the way to adulthood, we tend to stop listening and learning from others. In fact, it’s worse than that. We start telling everybody what to do – and call it leadership. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

Why is this the case?

The first thing that works against listening and learning from others? Our own ego’s.

Last year, our Popeyes Leadership Team asked our franchise leaders for feedback mid-year. Going in, our belief was that our relationship was in a pr...

I See Your Passion

Yesterday morning I visited a summer day camp for children in Traverse City, Michigan. As the children arrived, they were greeted by a welcomomg tunnel of jumping, singing, high-fiving camp counselors. The kids’ faces lit up with excitement as these counselors enthusiastically celebrated their arrival. This was Day 4 of camp – and these kids were delighted to be there.

One of the signature traits of this camp is the group of passionate, high energy leaders that run the camp. The camp is anyth...

Principles: Alive and Well?

Think about a time when one of your close friends disappointed you. They let you down. They acted in a way that was inconsistent with your expectations. Perhaps the behavior was so unexpected, you were surprised and taken aback. You couldn’t comprehend why they would act that way.

They lied, when you thought they valued honesty. They gossiped about you, when you thought they had integrity. They betrayed a confidence, when you thought they were trustworthy.

A principle that you thought was...

Pursuing Personal Purpose

Lately it seems that everyone on the planet is in search of their personal purpose. It’s “trending.”

Simon Sinek says Start with Why Jon Gordon offers The Seed: Finding Purpose and Happiness in Your Life and Work There is The Purpose of Your Life: Finding Your Place in the World by Carol Adrienne Oprah recommends A new Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle You could take on Eric Maisel’s Life Purpose Boot Camp: The 8-week Breakthrough Plan for Creating A Meaningful Life Th...

Access Their Superpowers

I have a core belief about people. I believe each and every person on this earth was created and designed to be special. They have unique gifts and talents. I want to help people reach their full potential.

But even with that worldview — the strengths of a team member are not always evident to the leader. We need help to understand our people.

At Popeyes, we are using a tool called StandOut to discover the unique design and strengths of our team members. It is a short assessment tool, availab...

The Values Lens Of Leadership

We have been talking about the importance of knowing the people we lead. This week we continue this conversation by exploring the benefit of knowing the top priority values of your individual team members.

At Popeyes, we ask our team members to explore their values and share their top three priority values with their supervisor and their peers. When we started this activity in our Journey to Purpose class, I thought of it primarily as another way to get to know people. Sharing values would re...

Two Truths And A Lie

Several times in my career, I’ve been asked to play a “get-to-know-you” game at a business dinner. The game is called Two Truths and a Lie. The way it works? Each person states three things about their life that the rest of the people would not know. Two of them must be true. One must be a lie. Then you go around the table, with each person guessing which statement is the lie.

The first time I played this game, a woman I thought I knew well, made her three statements. One of them was, “I am m...

Measures Matter

In the second year of my role at Popeyes, trust with our franchise owners remained low, data for decision-making was still limited and consistent positive sales results were not yet evident. My team and I were sitting in a meeting with skeptical franchise leaders, debating the performance results of the June promotion event. We had fielded our first aggressive price promotion on our famous Popeyes chicken – and discounting the core menu was not a popular idea.

One of our veteran owners said,...