Name: Yum! Brands CEO Greg Creed Fosters an Innovation Centered Workplace
Uploaded: 2017-12-13
Duration: 3 min 28 s
Description: He believes that empowering employees is the key to growth.

Greg, you always talk about the importance of a company's culture and you wanna create a culture of innovation at Yam where employees make big courageous and disruptive decisions. As a CEO, how do you make that happen? First of all, you have to believe in all people. And one of the fundamental values at Yum! is that we believe in all people. So, religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, it doesn't matter. What we're going to do is create a culture where everyone matters and everyone has an opinion. That's where the first, that's the fundamental. The second thing is, I look for leaders that have really three characteristics. They have to be smart, they have to have a huge heart and they have to be courageous. And for me those characteristics will really will define us within ou culture making this big bold transformative decisions that we're making. I understand that you teach these leadership classes with small groups of employees. What is the number one thing you want them to learn from these sessions? I wanted to learn that in- out culture. You can make big, bold decisions and you'll get support, because not every big, bold, courageous decision is going to work, right? I want people to come to work and be their true self. I find the best employees are when we've created a culture, you come to work, you can be your true self, you will contribute so much better. Then if you think you have to sort of behave or act, or look a certain way. I hate that, what I love is people that come to work to be themselves. Greg, how did you learn all of this leadership stuff? Well I think I got it from my dad, I got it from people that I was with in the beginning, in the early days who So I said look, it's the old things, you know. People don't care how much until they know how much you care. I think having compassion for people, you know. I think everybody brings something great. It's just, do you have en environment and a place where that greatness can shine. And you've got to be a kind person. I think you have to be kind. And I think leaders today have to have more humility. Well getting back to all your focus on innovation, coming up with new food ideas is critical to your success. So have you found a way to motivate and inspire your employees so that they experiement and they try new things? Yeah, well innovation can't be what you do on a Thursday. You can't tell we're gonna innovate on Thursday, and the other days we're gonna run the business. Innovation has to be in the spirit of the organization, which is you always have to be restless, relentless, you always wanna do better. And then you just have to encourage experimentation. So what is your tolerance for making attempts at new things and then having them fail? My tolerance is very high, cuz I've tried new things when I was much more junior in my career. I tried things, I failed, I learned. I think you learn more from failure than from success. You can try something in one restaurant. We've got 44, 000 restaurants. So even if it doesn't go well in one restaurant it's not gonna impact the business. So Gray, you spent a big part of your career, the early years, at Unilever. You've been at Yum for 23 years. I'm sure you've had a lot of mentors along the way back, what's the best leadership advice you ever got. So [ UNKNOWN ] who was my marketing manager my first job at [ UNKNOWN ] that said Greg I want you to do the job that no one else wants to do because in those jobs, you can demonstrate the depth of your cabability and you can do things that you can't do when you had the big brands. What he was really saying was, he didn't use the words courage, but what he was saying if you do the jobs that no one else wants, you've got to be couragous to even want to do the job And I think what he was encouraging me to be is courageous as I could be. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Yum! Brands CEO Greg Creed Fosters an Innovation Centered Workplace

Leadership

He believes that empowering employees is the key to growth.