Does Culture Trump Strategy? With Dee Ann Turner

What comes first: culture or strategy? 

My guest today is Dee Ann Turner, who’s been the VP of Global Talent for Chick-fil-A for 30-some years.  She’s also the author of a new book, It’s My Pleasure: The Impact of Extraordinary Talent and a Compelling Culture, which unpacks some of those insights around why culture is so important.  Dig in as Dee Ann and I discuss:

• The power of the ‘and’, and how culture need to work in tandem
• How purpose is a stake in the ground and why mission can evolve and change
• The tension between faithful steward and continuous reinvention
• The one key question to ask yourself when looking for extraordinary talent

You can bookmark this link to listen to the show, or read the full transcript below. 

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Full Transcript

Michael: So one of the conversations that I see regularly on the Internet, discussions on HBR and other places like it, is which comes first, culture or strategy?  And it is actually an interesting conversation for all of us interested in that kind of bigger picture about how does an organization grow, how does it stay distinctive, how does it maintain its cutting edge, how does it maintain its competitive edge.

So that’s part of what made this conversation with my latest guest, Dee Ann Turner, who’s been the VP of Global Talent for Chick-fil-A for 30-some years.  Now perhaps you, like me, don’t know that much about Chick-fil-A.  It’s really a Southern fast food business.  And you know, I’m Australian.  I’ve lived in England.  I now live in the far north, in Canada, so I haven’t actually come across Chick-fil-A before or eaten in their restaurants.  But certainly, reading Dee Ann Turner’s new book, It’s My Pleasure: The Impact of Extraordinary Talent and a Compelling Culture, helped unpack some of those insights around why culture is so important.  And certainly, the saying out there is, you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

But I think you’re going to enjoy this conversation because her point, even though their culture is so strong at Chick-fil-A, is perhaps that’s not the whole answer.  So certainly in this conversation, we get into some of the things that have made Chick-fil-A so different and some of the ways they’ve really tackled some of the inherent contradictions that always happen when you’re trying to build a consistent culture, but also you have an eye for future growth. So enjoy this conversation with Dee Ann Turner, VP of Global Talent for Chick-fil-A.

So, Dee Ann, it’s fantastic to have you on the phone with us right now.  Thank you for joining us.

Dee Ann: Thank you.  It’s my pleasure.  Absolutely.

Michael: So you’ve got this great book out, It’s My Pleasure: The Impact of Extraordinary Talent and a Compelling Culture, and you’re really talking about and drawing upon your 30 years as VP of Corporate Talent at Chick-fil-A.  But you know, one of the questions that came up for me as I was reading the book, and just kind of keeping my eye on the pulse of the Internet, there’s a real conversation about what’s more important, culture or strategy?  And the sort of saying that’s out there is, you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast.  And you know, you’ve made a real stand for culture in your book.  I’m wondering what your take is on culture versus strategy.  How do they play together?

Dee Ann: Well certainly, I have this bias over time because, you know, I’ve spent 30 years of my career focused on the culture of Chick-fil-A.  However, I believe it’s the power of the ‘and,’ and we have to have both strategy and culture to be successful.  Now I actually—and especially the way It’s My Pleasure is set up in the book, you see where one builds upon the other over time, and I do think that organizations who are able to build a strong culture from the beginning, it helps them put their strategy in place and for all those things to work together really well.  But I do think that over time, they’re equally as important.  And for any organization to be wildly successful, they have to do both very, very well.

Michael: So you know, I have a background; I’ve spent lots of time working with organizations, talking about their corporate culture, and often this stays more like a good conversation in theory than actually the practice of turning it into a really strong culture.  So for you and Chick-fil-A, and you’ve been working there, as you say, for more than 30 years, so you’ve got a pretty deep knowledge about how it’s developed and grown over time, what was the foundation stone, would you say, for the strong culture you’ve developed there?

Dee Ann: Well, it certainly came from the founder, Truett Cathy, when he founded the business, and I’ll explain some steps that he built on along the way.  You know, he started with the purpose of being in business at all, and that was based—and you know, the story goes, in the book, and it didn’t start that way, although Truett led that way from the beginning.  He didn’t really define it until 1983.  So he opened his first restaurant in 1946.  In 1983, the organization had moved into a new corporate campus and we were experiencing a first time ever sales slump.  And so, it really caused Truett to pause.  Deeply in debt and experiencing a sales slump, and he took the executive committee away on a retreat.  And you know, they didn’t come back with a new sales contest for operators or debt reduction or a reduction in force plan.  They came back with a purpose of why we were in business at all.  And they decided that, you know, it’s really more than about the chicken.  It’s just not motivating enough to anyone to be just about selling chicken.  It has to be for a greater impact.

Michael: Right.

Dee Ann: And so for Truett, it was to be a good steward of everything that had been entrusted to us and to be a positive influence on all with whom we come in contact. And really, that was foundational to Chick-fil-A’s culture and it’s the thing that Chick-fil-A operators—you know, our franchisees; we call them both.

Michael: Yeah.

Dee Ann: That’s what they live out every day.  That’s their filter.  So, and they apply it in their own methods and they create their own stories within their businesses, but that’s the filter that’s kind of been applied over time that made the difference between just selling chicken and impacting lives.

Michael: So in the book, you set out this kind of hierarchy: a clear purpose, which you’ve just spoken to. A challenging mission, and then core values.  And let me ask about the challenging mission.  Does that stay the same?  I mean, has that been the same since 1983 or does that constantly kind of get evolved and changed and updated?

Dee Ann: No, that’s constantly evolved and changed and updated, and I think that’s the difference between purpose and mission.  Purpose is a stake in the ground that does stay the same over time unless you change businesses or have, you know, significant disruption.  But mission changes according to where the business is now, and I think, you know, the mission is what’s related to the strategy.  The purpose is the culture; the mission is the strategy.

Michael: Right.  That’s interesting because actually it’s like a Chick-fil-A sandwich here because you’ve got purpose, mission, and values, and the purpose and the values kind of stay the same, the outer casing, but the mission changes as the strategy evolves and the marketplace evolves.

So here’s one of the questions I have.  So you’ve got a leadership model and the acronym is SERVE, and the R stands for reinvent continuously.  And so, here’s the tension that I’d love to kind of unpack with you.  You know, your purpose is around being a faithful steward.

And there’s a degree of stewardness and culture that is about maintaining things as they are, and yet one of the core drivers for your leadership model is reinvent continuously.

So how do you balance that tension between those two?

Dee Ann: Well, that’s a great question because it speaks so much to where we are even today at Chick-fil-A, and It’s My Pleasure really talks about the foundational principles of Chick-fil-A. But you’re talking about what Dan Cathy, who replaced his father as CEO, is focused on, which is Chapter 2.  If everything I wrote about was Chapter 1 of Chick-fil-A, we’ve moved into Chapter 2.  And so, what we’ve decided is there’s things that don’t change.  The purpose of the organization, the core values, as you’ve already articulated, but there are things that do change and you have to be relevant in the marketplace, whether it’s the menu or the service model or it’s your social responsibility.  Whatever those issues are, you have to be relevant. And so, we also know that there are things that have to move and grow and have a really strong commitment to innovation, including an innovation centre where we’re constantly trying new things and new ideas.

Michael:  That’s interesting.  And the other question I have around maintaining a culture, and I may get this wrong because I don’t really know your business model, but my guess is that, you know, it’s a franchise-driven business, which means that you have operators who own their own space but they kind of follow the rules that Chick-fil-A lays down for them about this is what you need to do to deliver.  But there’s always this—but they’re independent, right? They’re business people.

So there’s a degree to which they’d be kind of wanting to tread their own path, wanting to make their own mark, wanting to put their own thumbprint on the experience that they’re delivering.  And assuming that some of those assumptions are true, and they may be wrong, I’m also curious to know how you build a consistent culture when you have a franchisee relationship with the people who are the face of Chick-fil-A.

Dee Ann: This is actually one of the things that amazes me as I’ve worked with it because you are exactly right.  We have over 1,500 different franchisees.  Our model is a little bit different in the way people are able to come into business with Chick-fil-A, and just real quickly because it’s a great and unusual story.

Michael: Yeah.

Dee Ann: When Truett went into business in 1946, he was leaving the army and he and his brother took their life savings and opened this little restaurant with, I think, four stools and three tables in it called the Dwarf Grill.

And of course, you know, he was very successful.  He didn’t open his first Chick-fil-A restaurant until 1967.

Michael: Which was when he was in his mid-forties, which I think is a wonderful story for any of us in our mid-forties who are going, “Oh, my life is over.  I’ve left it all too late.”

Dee Ann: Exactly!  Well, and then you think about the age he was when Chick-fil-A hit a billion dollars in sales.  You know, he was 80 or 81, something like that.  So it is an amazing story.  But anyway, when he opened this—when he started there with the Dwarf Grill, and I’m sorry, Michael, I totally lost—when we got off on that, I totally lost your question.

Michael: Yeah, I’m sorry, it’s because I rudely interrupted you.

Dee Ann: No, that’s okay.

Michael: But we were talking about how you manage a consistent cultural experience with a franchise model.

Dee Ann: Yes, okay.  Yes, I’m sorry.  So anyway, with all these 1,500 different franchisees, that’s amazing that we’re doing—Truett created a model.  After he spent his life savings opening his restaurant, he wanted to give other people who had an entrepreneurial spirit and a heart to serve others the opportunity to do the same, especially people who didn’t have the financial resources to do so.  So he developed a really unique operator agreement that allowed people to go into business actually at a pretty nominal fee, and then, you know, sharing the business with him.

And so, what was amazing about this is that we create a brand standard but we don’t dictate all these behaviours.  When we talk about the culture, it’s the corporate culture.  It’s not a dictated culture to operators, of course, because they are independent franchisees.  But I think it’s through the selection of those franchisees and the model that we’ve created there that we select great leaders, and then they’re able to—they just seem to mesh, and so you can have a food and hospitality experience in Washington, D.C., and you can have a very similar experience, not identical, in Orange County, California.

Michael: Right.

Dee Ann: And so, it’s really an incredible model that we’re able to actually have that kind of consistency across the culture.  It’s amazing to me, but I think it goes back to that selection of people.  And let’s unpack that for just a moment.

Michael: Yeah.

Dee Ann: When you think about operators, so what do we do that’s consistent about that? Well, I’ve already mentioned that we look for people with a heart for service and an entrepreneurial spirit.  And additionally, of course, an ability to lead people and engage guests.  Those are four really strong things that we look for.  And then the last question I always asked when I was interviewing an operator, and my predecessor did before me, and I believe others have done after me, is, “Would I want my children to work for this person?”

Because of course, our industry is still dominated by young people.  And if I wouldn’t want my children to work for this person, why would anyone else want their children to?  And I think that one question and the selection process has a little something to do with that cultural consistency that we see even among clearly independent operators.

Michael: That’s really interesting.  I mean, again, we’re looking at that tension or that dance between strategy and culture there where you go, “Strategically, here’s our business model about how we invite operators and franchisees in so that they can own and run their franchise.”  But then, there’s that culture piece around through selection and through that process that allows them to role-model the experience that you want Chick-fil-A to have even though you don’t get to actually have direct control over that behaviour.

Dee Ann: So let me give you two—I want to give you two recent examples of what we’re talking about here among operators.  So a couple years ago in the Southeast, we had what was affectionately referred to as Snowmageddon.

Michael: Yeah!

Dee Ann: And we had people stuck on highways all over the Southeast.  And one of our Birmingham operators, recognizing the crisis that was unfolding and people were stranded, some literally for days on highways, but certainly many thousands of people stranded overnight.  And so, this operator boxed up Chick-fil-A meals and took them to the highway near his restaurant.  Now, he did not sell these.  He didn’t even—you know, some people were out taking advantage of this opportunity.  He didn’t even sell them on the cheap.  This man gave away thousands of meals to stranded motorists.  That was all on his own.  That’s not a brand standard or anything that’s dictated, but it fits in with that positive influence that we talk about in our purpose.

The next day, he and his team, who spent the night in the restaurant, got up and cooked thousands of biscuits, chicken biscuits, and gave those away to stranded motorists.  So that’s how an operator takes this spirit of generosity, this core value that Truett created, and this desire to impact lives and pulls it off himself.

Another example which just—going through social media in the last couple of weeks, an operator who—as you know, we’re closed on Sunday, which means we don’t sell any chicken on Sunday.

Michael: Yeah.  Right.

Dee Ann: But he saw the need that tornado victims needed food, and so he went into his restaurant and prepared food and gave that food away for the people in Texas that were suffering through those recent tornadoes.

So those are the kinds of things nobody tells these people to do, but we’ve selected leaders who embrace what the purpose is, and then they put their own spin and brand on how to actually implement that and execute it in their own communities.

Michael: How do the operators kind of carry that forward in terms of the people they select to work in their stores?  Because, again, I don’t really know the details here, but my guess in the QSR markets, the quick service restaurant market, is that it’s probably a pretty high turnover of people who work in stores.  And I know that you have an incredible retention around your operators and your corporate store of in the kind of high 90s, but I’m guessing it’s a lower retention for the front-line staff.  Because that’s the touch point, right, where the experience happens, with the person behind the counter.

How do you help maintain that experience through that sort of hiring, that process?

Dee Ann: Well of course, all of those employees are employees of the individual franchisee. And for that reason, you might experience more variability.  It’s actually another thing that amazes me about our Chick-fil-A operators, is the consistency.  So I think we’ve chosen great leaders as franchisees and they have some of those same principles.  They know they’re not just in the chicken business, as Truett would say, they’re in the people business.

And so, you know, a big thing is the investment that they make in their team members of their own choice.  We have one operator in Albany, Georgia that in addition to the Chick-fil-A scholarship that is available to Chick-fil-A team members, he’s given away $300,000 himself to his team members in educational assistance.

Michael: Wow.

Dee Ann: Which is incredible for someone running a small business.  And so, I think that, first of all, to answer your question about our turnover, we still lead the industry.  And of course, hourly turnover is much greater than the others that you mentioned, but Chick-fil-A is fortunate to lead the industry and I think it’s primarily the various investments that operators make in their team members.

The other thing that’s different about Chick-fil-A is that these team members have an opportunity to work for the owner of the business.  And a lot of times in a franchise system, you know, you’re working for a manager and that young team member never meets the operator or the franchisee of the business.

And that’s just not the case at Chick-fil-A.  That doesn’t mean that operators, some of these guys do some really high volume so they have general managers and other leaders in their business.

Michael: Sure.

Dee Ann: But they’re still very engaged and they’re not absent leaders.  And so, I think that makes a huge difference in the work experience that Chick-fil-A team members have, and so it’s a ‘give more, get more’ kind of employee value proposition.  The operators give more.  They do amazing things to support their team members.  You know, the book, It’s My Pleasure, tells numerous stories of things.

Michael: It does.

Dee Ann: Everything from renting a limousine on prom night so that that operator knows his teenaged team members are safe to the educational investment that I suggested or the story where the operator recognized that one of his team members, a single mom of four, was coming to work in a taxi every day and he made arrangements to provide her a vehicle.  Those are just above and beyond what you naturally expect out of a franchise restaurant operator. So it’s that give more, and in return they just get more.  They get that commitment that I talk about in It’s My Pleasure.

You know, that’s one of the great things, Michael, that people ask me about the phrase, “It’s my pleasure,” and how that happened, and the wonderful thing, you hear that phrase a lot now in different businesses, which I love.  I love when I go, I was in another restaurant the other night and I bet the young man serving me told me ten times, “It’s my pleasure,” and I was so tickled by that.

Michael: Right.

Dee Ann: I think it’s great that we’ve changed an industry from that regard.  But at Chick-fil-A, what that means, it’s not just a phrase they’ve been taught to say, it really means it is our pleasure to serve you.  And our team members do an amazing job of demonstrating that by going the extra mile all the time with their customers.  So I think that’s the Chick-fil-A difference that you’ve asked me about for us.

Michael: So let me ask you perhaps a trickier question here because there’s lots of great stories in the book just as you say, but I’d be curious to know, over the 30 years or so you’ve been at Chick-fil-A, has there been a time when you’ve felt the culture has been under pressure or potentially facing compromise?  And I’d be curious to know what that threat looked like and how you managed to kind of navigate around it.

Dee Ann: Not so much personally to me, but I’ll give you an example.  All Chick-fil-A restaurants are closed on Sunday, and when Truett, he decided that really probably the first week his restaurant was open.  He got to Saturday night and he was exhausted.

Michael: Right.

Dee Ann: He ran a 24-hour, six day a week restaurant and he said, “We’re taking Sunday off.” And he realized that he along with his employees needed a day of rest.  And so, he said, “If a person couldn’t make a living in six days, they probably should be doing something else.”

Michael: Right, that’s a nice way to frame it.

Dee Ann: Yeah.  And so, he continued with that practice.  Now, in 1946 most businesses were closed on Sunday.  That was not that unusual.

Michael: Right.

Dee Ann: But as he began to expand his business in the late ‘60s and then into the early ‘70s, and he was all in shopping malls at that time, that was not the case.  In fact, it was a requirement to be in those malls that you would have to be open on Sunday.  And so, he was able to negotiate leases in some malls and remain closed, but in others he had to turn down the opportunity because they would not change.

Michael: Right.

Dee Ann:  Now after a while, the malls realized that Chick-fil-A did as much volume in six days as the others did in seven, and usually more.

So after a while, we just became a much sought-after tenant and that was not as much of an issue.  But during that time, that really limited Truett’s growth of the business.  He did not compromise his principle.

And then as we opened freestanding locations and grew as a business, of course we remained closed on Sunday in those locations, and Truett was sometimes asked, “Did you ever calculate how much sales you lost by being closed on Sunday?”

And his response is, “No, I was far more concerned with how much sales I would have lost if I remained open.”

Michael: Nice.

Dee Ann: And so, I think culturally, that was where Truett really put a stake, put his money where his mouth was, so to speak.  And really, he demonstrated that he was about impacting lives and sticking to his principles, not about making another dollar.

Michael: Dee Ann, this has been a really interesting conversation for me.  I didn’t know that much about Chick-fil-A.  You know, I’m Australian by birth and now I live up in Canada, so we’re a little bit out of your sphere of influence.  But certainly, reading the book gave me a really great insight into just how strong a culture that you and others have been able to build and it’s been great to kind of unpack and look at that tension, particularly between strategy and culture and see actually it’s not an either/or, it’s an ‘and,’ and how do they play best together.

Dee Ann: Absolutely.  And I hope you’ll get, before long, I hope you’ll get the opportunity potentially in Canada to enjoy Chick-fil-A out there in the Toronto area.  Hopefully one day we’ll be out your way.

Michael:  That’s great.  Now, Dee Ann, if people want to find out more about you and your work, where can they find you on the Web?

Dee Ann: They can locate me at deeannturner.com, D-e-e A-n-n Turner, dotcom, and my book,It’s My Pleasure: The Impact of Extraordinary Talent and a Compelling Culture, can be purchased there or it can also be purchased on amazon.com or Barnes & Noble booksellers.

Michael: Brilliant.

Dee Ann: And available in lots of airports across the U.S.

Michael: Oh, good for you, yeah.  Well, thank you again, Dee Ann.

Dee Ann: Thank you so much, Michael.  It’s been my pleasure.

 

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ABOUT MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER & BOX OF CRAYONS

Michael Bungay Stanier is the Senior Partner and Founder of Box of Crayons, a company that helps people and organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. They're best know from their coaching programs that give busy managers the tools to coach in 10 minutes or less.

Download free chapters of Michael's latest book The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever here.

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