What’s the best way to ensure that the next generation of the Chick-fil-A organization has the historical context of the way Truett and the first executive committee made decisions? What value lens was virtually every major decision seen through for more than thirty-five years—decisions about initiatives, investments, and people? What common themes weighed heavily with Truett, which, in turn, he coached and modeled for us?
Other than the corporate purpose, these went unwritten for decades because we implicitly learned and understood them. Then in 2013, a group of executive committee members and other long-term leaders said, “If we don’t make a conscious effort to capture in writing how he led us, then the next generation will have to discover it on their own, if that’s even possible when the founder is no longer around.” We’re the ones who have to coach it now. So a group of us did just that—we wrote down the core values that shaped and filtered virtually every vital decision we made during the course of more than thirty years of working with Truett. It took us more than a year to do the work and agree, but here they are. You will see some familiar themes.
Being a Good Steward
As I write about Truett Cathy’s stewardship, the things he did are a reflection of who he was. My hope is that the next generation would not simply copy his actions, but embrace his heart so that the actions flow naturally. Truett didn’t keep a list of ways to be a good steward. He simply was!
He was modeling stewardship long before “being a faithful steward” became a tenet of the Chick-fil-A corporate purpose. He was a good steward of his relationships, beginning with his family. He and Jeannette were about to celebrate their sixty-seventh wedding anniversary when Truett “graduated.” The two of them saw their children as gifts from God to be nurtured and taught, and they kept in mind that their children always belonged to Him.
In the Dwarf House restaurant, which he operated for twenty-one years before the first Chick-fil-A opened, several employees worked there for decades and often spoke of the love and respect they felt for Truett and he for them. One of the oft-told stories centered on Eddie White, a young African American man who worked at the Dwarf House in the early 1950s. Eddie didn’t have enough money for college, so the waitresses put a mayonnaise jar on the counter and labeled it “Eddie’s College Fund.” When school was about to start and the money collected would only cover half the year, Truett wrote a check for the balance. Good stewardship? As an adult, Eddie White worked for three decades in the Clayton County school system developing other children.
In 1973 Truett began offering one thousand dollar college scholarships to restaurant team members. An industry first. By that time he had already been teaching Sunday school to thirteen-year-old boys for more than twenty years. Those boys, he believed, had been entrusted to their parents and also teachers, Scout leaders, and others like himself, and he took his stewardship opportunity seriously.
Truett believed that every dollar that flowed through Chick-fil-A belonged to God, and we were to be stewards of it. That point of view allowed him to be both generous and thrifty. Every dollar mattered, whether invested in the business, people, or charity.
Building Long-Term Relationships
Truett’s relationships were for life. He and Jeannette were married for almost sixty-seven years, and ideally, he wanted all his relationships to be as permanent as his marriage. He even used those words, it’s a marriage, when he was interviewing potential Operators for Chick-fil-A restaurants. He was giving his full commitment, and he wanted the same in return. In his mind, if you were going to be a part of Chick-fil-A, there was no reason for you to ever go anywhere else in your career. I will always remember him saying that to me.
From a purely business point of view, experience comes with time, as does institutional learning, and he didn’t want that stuff walking out the door. The inefficiency of turnover and retraining hurts more than just the bottom line. The restaurant and the company do not run as smoothly, and customers notice. At a deeper level, with time people come to understand one another’s hearts and motivations and grow into closer alignment.
At the same time, one has to balance long tenure with making sure people don’t become lazy, stale, or out of touch. So we spent a lot of time, effort, and money on continuous improvement, training, and education, as well as moving people around to new assignments to keep them sharp.
Providing Hospitality
Truett always insisted on the highest quality ingredients and the best recipes, but he also knew that good food alone would not guarantee success. Hospitality became his major competitive edge in creating a sustainable business at the Dwarf House.
It’s interesting that it took us almost thirty years as a brand to figure out how to translate Truett’s heart for hospitality into the Chick-fil-A business. It took him asking us to say, “My pleasure,” and that phrase became emblematic of his heart of hospitality. Once we understood, hospitality became a powerful engine for the brand.
“My pleasure” creates an immediate communication that you really do matter. When said, it almost invariably gets a smile back from the customer. So why did Truett do it? He had the gift of hospitality, and he couldn’t help himself. But the bigger reality became clear—the phrase is transformative in terms of the guest’s experience.
Hospitality is not natural for the fast-food category, and quite frankly, at a personal level, not everybody has the gift of hospitality. So when we talked about the hospitality director at a Chick-fil-A restaurant, we learned that Operators had to be able to spot the gift of hospitality. Because one of the great things about people with the gift of hospitality is they attract more people with the same gift.
Taking Personal Responsibility
Personal accountability is empowering. And it was an important aspect of Truett’s relationships. When he selected people to work at Chick-fil-A or to become restaurant Operators, he sought people he knew could do the job, and then he trusted them to do it. He gave us the keys then stepped out of the way. Sometimes he literally said, “I trust your judgment.” But even when he didn’t say the words, we knew he did. I knew he did.
That trust gave us the feeling, and that sense of responsibility, that we were acting on his behalf—and long before WWJD (“What Would Jesus Do?”) bracelets were created, we approached every major decision asking ourselves, “What would Truett do?”
We were personally accountable to him, to the brand, and to our customers. We were accountable in the deals we created, in the relationships we built in the business, in our behavior on the road, in how we talked about the business, even in our language on the golf course. When he placed his trust in us, we responded with personal accountability.
He never followed me around to be my personal accountability judge. It was up to me to know why I existed, what I stood for, and what the business stood for. I was accountable.
I told people at Chick-fil-A not to worry about losing their jobs. Not to worry about messing up. As a part of Chick-fil-A, they were implicitly entrusted to make their own judgments. They would learn. They would do the right thing. That is empowering.
Choosing Personal Influence over Position Power
Chick-fil-A has a history of not giving anyone a title until their performance already looks like that role for a long time. For example, Jimmy Collins was executive vice president well into the 1980s, even though he was doing all the work and taking all the responsibility of a corporate president. When Truett announced at an Operator seminar that Jimmy Collins was now the president of Chick-fil-A and everybody stood up and applauded him and roared, most everybody was either thinking or saying to the person next to them, “Well that’s certainly overdue.”
Truett and Jimmy were not concerned about the title. I’ve heard them both say many times, “If I ever have to use position power to influence somebody, I’m probably only going to get to do that once. And if I have to do it at all, it probably does not bode well for their future.” So they sought people who could perform in the strength of their personality and their values, not because of their position.
They were looking for people who could create followership and get things done completely independent of what their title was. If their influence and their performance depended on a title, they were the wrong person for Chick-fil-A. We’ve hired many people in our business at a title level significantly below one they had somewhere else. The ability to inspire teamwork and rally people around a mission or project are much more important than position power.
Even at the highest level, Truett almost never used the power of his position to force the company in a direction that the executive committee disagreed with. As sole owner, he could have, but he seldom did.
Having Fun
Truett never took himself too seriously. On Cow Appreciation Day, Truett wore his favorite Cow attire—not an entire Cow costume, but enough to make people smile. He loved walking through an airport with a bag filled with plush Cows so he could give them away and make people laugh. He was sneaky funny, with a dry wit that would catch you off guard and make you wonder, Where did that come from?
One of the virtues that evolved in the business was a tangible effort to be unexpectedly fun. For us, it’s more fun to work in an environment like that, but the primary reason was because Truett was unexpectedly fun.
These six legacy principles have served CFA well. They are truly cultural pillars that have helped keep CFA’s leaders and “family” focused on what makes CFA uniquely different.