Cheryl Bachelder's Intro

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today on the servant leadership podcast we hear from Cheryl bachelder a highly respected business leader who

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transformed popey's Louisiana Kitchen into one of the most successful restaurant brands in the world Cheryl

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has built a career on servant leadership leading with purpose and driving results as the former CEO of Popeyes she took

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the company from declining sales and struggling franchises to record-breaking growth all by putting people first under

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her leadership popey experienced unprecedented success with franchises thriving customer satisfaction soaring

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and the brand reaching New Heights all while fostering a culture of trust and service Cheryl has also held executive

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roles at KFC dominoes and Chick-fil-A making her a leader in shaping how businesses succeed through servant

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leadership in her book dare to serve Cheryl shares her bold philosophy on leadership how putting others first

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isn't just good ethics but great business I'm excited for her to share today how servant leadership can Empower

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your team accelerate growth and drive Real Results Cheryl welcome to the servant

Welcome Cheryl Bachelder

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leadership podcast thank you Chris it's great to be here uh like like I told you I am so

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honored that you are here because you are truly an expert on servant leadership I was thinking about your

Cheryl's Career Journey

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journey and just thinking about how you've worked with some of the most recognizable brands in the world could

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you share with our audience your career path and what that looked like oh I'm

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happy to do that it but I'll try to keep it shorter than it is because it's been a long and uh lovely experience uh and

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of course when I started my career I had no idea where servant leadership was going to fit into the picture but I went

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um I guess I I think I'd start first with family because I'm I'm the oldest child of four um and oldest children

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have natural leadership traits and so I do think it inspired my career in some ways

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and my dad was a really strong business executive successful in his own right

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and he was one of my biggest mentors interestingly all four of his children became I would say you know highly

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purpose-driven ethical Business Leaders so I I attribute a lot of my path to my

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family uh they were very intentional uh about a few things uh my parents focused

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on faith they focused on family as your you know kind of Circle of support they

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focused on incredibly strong education and Midwestern hard work my dad came

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from a dairy farm my mom grew up next to a steel meal I mean these people worked

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hard and so that is very formative so then I came out of IU's uh bachelor's

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and MBA program with a business degree in finance and marketing I always say I majored in marketing because I loved it

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and I majored in finance because I hated it um and it turned out to be prophetic

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because you need all of that right in business not just one and then I

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promptly married my husband Chris uh right after business school and first job we met at proon gamble we've been

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married 43 years uh today raised three adult daughters and now have a pel of

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grandkids that are crazy fun six of them to be exact so career

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path um I strangely knew that I I

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thought I knew I to the best of my ability I knew that I was supposed to both work and raise a family and boy

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that was weird in the year I began uh work and raising a family like nobody

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was doing that there were it was really popular to be a dual income no kids

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family they were called Dinks at the time that was popular and trendy what I

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decided to do was anything but popular or trendy um and so I was kind of always

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swimming uphill in a certain way right not really didn't have a lot of Role Models um but I work for great companies

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so to your question I came first out of college to Proctor and Gamble uh

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incredibly strong training company smart people uh super Integrity ethical really

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aligned with my values taught me a ton it was the best NBA I ever had um and

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that really just kicked off my career Journey because Proctor and Gamble is is good to have on your resume I guess and

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it led to Gillette and then it led to Nabisco where that first 15 years of my

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career I was deep into brand management and brand development kind of marketing and new products um I pivoted halfway

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through my career and joined the restaurant industry um that's a whole story in itself but the short version is

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I really wanted to apply my skills in a new industry and I fell in love with

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franchising working for H Tom Monahan at Domino's Pizza and he just you know gave

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me an opportunity to find out how exciting it is to be part of the franchising world and so that really led

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to my restaurant career which is what most people know about me um I'm kind of

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a chicken Queen but I started in pizza at Domino's and then KFC and then 10

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years at popey's um and today that's resulted in some wonderful board service

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opportunities at Chick-fil-A where I serve as uh lead director and US Foods uh in Chicago it's a fascinating journey

Popeye's Transformation Challenges

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and a lot of people know about Popeyes and your experience with popey's and really popey's transformation under your

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leadership is legendary uh there's there's so many people who talk about it but it seems like it only went good when

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you got got there at least that's what it seems like from the outside but I know that there were a lot of challenges

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what were some of the challenges that you were facing in really transforming Popeyes oh yeah I mean I can turn that

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whole question upside down because um popey was the last place you expected

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Legacy business performance results to occur um and really the only reason I

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became CEO of Popeyes and I tell people this all the time is because no one else would take the job I was sitting on the

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board of popey's a good friend of mine was the chair he asked me to come help I

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had chicken experience okay joined the board a year later the CEO quits the

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business could not have been in worse shape seven years of declining sales uh franchisees making no money which kind

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of busts the whole point um morale was terrible um the franchisees wanted to

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sue the franchisor I mean it it was chaotic it was bad and it didn't look on

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the surface recoverable and so the first thing I always tell people it did not look like a place to create a legend

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anything but I want you to think about that in your own careers because I then

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have basically made a career out of teaching people how to run in burning buildings and turnaround companies um

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it's a really rich career path but man it's full of risk it's very scary

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sometimes um and yeah usually nothing goes right for my first four board meetings as CEO of Popeyes

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every time I had a board meeting I told my board more bad news more bad news I said I picked up a rock and there was

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more poop under it it it just it just kept coming so yeah the beginning of a

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transformation in leader um in your leadership um if you're going to be a

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transformation person you have to get really comfortable looking at complex problems um things that have been

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embedded in the business or the culture or the strategy for years uh people who

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aren't all that psyched about turning it around they kind of like the mess and so you have to really enjoy kind of the

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ugly I just literally said to my assist assistant this morning I don't know why it is but if I join your board some mess

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is going to happen I promise because I only do messes and this happened recently in a nonprofit where I like oh

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sure I'll help you out a little bit oh my goodness what a mess so that's what

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I've learned to enjoy and appreciate but those first it took us three years to

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get to kind of the things were catching at Popeyes it was not three months uh

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the first thing we tried uh for several things we tried failed if you remember

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in the fall of '08 the whole banking industry failed that's when we made our

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big investment in media to turn around popey kind of bad timing um it you know

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it just looked like that over and over again most of our ideas didn't work the first time took a lot of tenacity it

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took a lot of oh no let's try something different uh it to took a lot of transparency with our shareholders and

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our board because we needed time it wasn't going to be fast yeah it was

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fun one of the things that hopefully people know about and we'll make sure to link to this is you wrote a book called

Keeping An Attitude of Servant Leadership During Transformation

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dare to serve and in part of your journey of servant leadership is jumping

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into all these messy scenarios and from the outside probably a lot of people

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were skeptical whether they were stakeholders or franchisors or whoever they're skeptical of can you turn it

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around or just thinking negative thoughts because it's just stuck in them how did you keep an attitude of servant

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leadership through all of this stuff well I think it goes back to why I

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took the job in the first place because um yes the board asked me to take the

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job but the real motive was I was looking for a a place to practice

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servant leadership and figure out what is the howto on servant leadership right

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there's a great philosophy in servant leadership but how do you do it and does

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it create a place that yields great performance results literally the first time I said servant leadership to my

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board they said yeah yeah yeah whatever as long as it creates results you know we don't really care what your stick is

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we just we need the share price to go up can you do that and so my the real

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challenge to me was to put some things in practice that I deeply believed in

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out of my study of servant leadership my observation of other servant leaders uh

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and just Instinct about it I said but I got to try it and see if I could prove it to some people so I call the book

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just one case study in servant leadership that might give you some how-to language around where do I start

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what do I do does it work does it yield results that's the reason for the subtitle if servants if servant

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leadership doesn't generate results nobody's going to read your book or try it right the end and so that's where the

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credibility in this conversation comes from and everyone who aspires to be a servant leader needs to remember this

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point if your approach to leadership does not gener at results no one will be

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interested in it I promise right and it's not because we're all greedy profit-driven Executives that's not my

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point have you ever seen a fumbling uh poor performing company

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where people were thriving and giving their best work no no never uh I had a

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guy that worked for me for many years who said yeah if sales are down everything's wrong you know there is

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nothing good to transport or teach out of failure in running businesses and so

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servant leaders buck up and we have to bring both the principles of servant

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leadership and the performance results with it I made a decision out of my KFC

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experience which frankly didn't go so well I made a decision that I want to lead in a way that allows people to

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perform their best work and creates performance results that catch other people's attention right Chris because

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that's what Popeyes did people are only interested in that popy story because it

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yielded some amazing results on these principles that you and I care about so

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much I think that's so key because a lot of people maybe are like your boarded where they hear servant leadership and

Servant Leadership As A Driver of Company Results

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it's totally separate from results and that's one of the things I absolutely love is that servant leadership is the

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driver of helping you achieve outstanding results right that's what you talk about in the book could I add

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one point on that Chris because you know I was working in a public company with Wall Street analysts over all over my

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business all the time and I had to give investment performance conferences in New York all the time and literally at

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one of them a 26 year-old stock analyst said why on Earth do you talk about

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servant leadership in your investment presentations and I paused and I looked

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back at him and I said because I honestly believe it's leading to the outstanding performance results of the

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company and he looked at me and goes okay I'm good with

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that what is the biggest misconception about servant leadership based on all those conversations with analysts like

Biggest Misconception of Servant Leadership

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that and Boards is that the common theme absolutely I think the skepticism

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among you know cultural leaders the norm which is we all know airs strongly

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towards performance right uh kind of the sole reason profitability and share

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price and all that uh they kind of can't conceive that anything like servant leadership would matter and so they

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think of it as squishy soft dmat leadership uh I call it Kumbaya

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campfires I mean they just see no point in the practices and in fact I've

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interviewed with a lot of private Equity firms who would like to have popey's turnaround results and they a couple of

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them actually did this they said can you bring some of that to you know our company and I said do you mean pixie

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dust what do you mean I don't have a magic wand I have principles that lead

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to Performance but it's a very bizarre concept to those that exclusively think

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business is a fin Financial Endeavor for the shareholder that it's not all that

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interesting to them so to be credible we have to poke at this conversation with a

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lens of performance when you hear servant leadership how would you describe that

Defining Servant Leadership

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to people CU people might have all kinds of misconceptions how would you describe servant

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leadership well the way I chose to Define it uh in Dare to serve was on

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those two principles um a servant leader has to have the courage to lead the

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organization to a daring destination I you have to have big Ideas big plans you

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have to inspire motivate you have to take people somewhere right uh people don't want to do status quo people don't

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want to continue to fail so you've got to be bold and daring in your strategy

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and your approach and yet this is the other side of the coin you have to be so motivated

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to be humble and walk with them on that Journey come alongside and that's where

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you create the conditions for outstanding performance right because people also don't want to go alone to

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the top of Mount Everest they go in teams and there's a reason for it they don't want to die and the same is true

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in our human nature uh at work we do yearn to go to bold PL exciting places

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but we're scared we're not sure we have all the skill sets to get there we want to go in a team um and we want our

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bosses our leaders to care about us on the way I work now for chickfila where

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their aspiration is to be the most caring company in the world and think about that when we we care about the

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people that were you know they're really entrusted to us as Leaders right people are entrusted to us for a time and for a

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season wouldn't we want to care about them in many ways care about their

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skills being in the right job care about giving them clear expectations care about coaching and feedback care about

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helping them be successful wouldn't that be a good way to get to Performance results so those are the two things

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courage and humility how did you find a way to measure

Measuring Courage/Daring and Humility

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that that's a good question um because it's not there's not

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a pure path to measuring uh courage and humility so here here's that you're

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actually Chris you're the first one to ever ask that question which I love because our plans at popey were all

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measured we were uh just Metric Mania we loved measures so I would say the daring

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part we measured in uh sales growth and market share you know just how boldly

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are we changing our position in the marketplace right is it moving um and we were in a downturn downturn in our

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industry so market share was the measure you wanted to be growing um the humility

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part much harder but our primary measure was the engagement and you can measure

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engagement you know you know how much people feel they're getting the good information the good support they need

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to be successful uh we measured engagement with our franchise owners and with our restaurant leaders and with our

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staff at headquarters and we believe that highly engaged people were being

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treated well in general right because the tenants of Engagement are trust

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communication feedback uh knowing where the you know place is going all those

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good things so that's what we measured in particular but you know now I'm going to spend the rest of the day trying to figure out how

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you measure humility because that is really that could be a whole new book Chris that's a good question I'm excited

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to read it when you write it well here's what I know about humility um and we put this in our

Valuing Humility

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values at uh at popey's we said we value humility we didn't say we had it and as

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a leader if you say you are humble the people don't think so the people don't think so so it's a

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really good idea not to claim it but to Aspire to be it on a day today situation

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to situation basis because it's hard I it's really hard to lay down our own stuff and be interested and care about

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other people consistently so um you can only aspire to

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it I I think a lot of people can resonate with some of your journey of of

Practical Steps To Turnaround An Organization

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turnarounds um and how you've taken multiple different situations that

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seemed like it was just the lowest it could get and then it kept getting lower and then continue to raise uh how would

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you think through practical steps that somebody could take to really turn something around that isn't working out

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right now well I I'll tell you the very first step and I'm working with a nonprofit

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leader on this right now usually in a situation of poor performance there are

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many things that are wrong long but there's only a few things that'll get it back on track so the example from

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popey's I did an audit of um all the things that people were working on when

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I got there and there were 128 active projects and as I told you sales had

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been negative for seven years so those projects were not working and so we

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literally did an offsite work session with the top 40 leaders of the company to figure out what was broken the most

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important things that were broken and whether or not we in the room had the courage to fix the few really big broken

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things I'll give you just one example um we were called a quick service

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restaurant you know qsr is what they call fast food chains and we had our

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speed of serving you was 98 out of a 100 chains so we were not

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quick um and so we decided that we better tackle that right if you want to

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be a qsr you need to be quick it sounds so stupid obvious but we were not and it

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was hard to do because we had a complex menu we had high turnover I can give you

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a hundred reasons why it's hard but the reality was if we couldn't get a fast driveth through our volume was capped we

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couldn't handle any more customers than we had and we only were doing a million dollars per unit at that point and that

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wasn't very good so we needed to crack the code on feed uh to be a quick

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service restaurant so we my favorite quote that I put in the book is at that

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very meeting one of the employees who'd been with the company 30 years I asked the whole

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audience um are you game to go after speed of service and and actually fix it

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this time and Sandra raises her hand and she said I've always wanted to do that can't wait to be on the team right I

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mean 30 years she's hoped for the company to be excellent at core competency of what we do right she'd

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like to be a part of that I think it says it all right wouldn't you like to be part of a company that's run well and

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doing well right it's it's a good thing that's a great point you had to

Building The Right Team

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have people that were on board with what you were pitching right because a lot of people lost belief before you got there

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and probably even through those first three years they they were losing belief in the ability to turn things around how

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did you figure figure out who the right people were and what encouragement or tips would you give to people listening

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to figure out how do you build the right team around you yes I always say it starts with your strategy and tactics

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because that determines what skills and capabilities you need so you always do strategy before Talent it's strategy

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Talent culture is the order um and so then you you profile the grid of skills

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that you need on your team to be effective like for example we had no supply chain capabilities popy when I

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got there I'm not even sure I knew what supply chain meant but I know that you're supposed to have it you know so

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we went and recruited a supply chain expert to join our executive team fill

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that Gap and so I went around the table and said you know what does my current team have what are we missing uh over uh

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a few years later we needed new uh Finance capabilities um because of the fast

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growth and the need to understand control and manage our shareholder expectations and I recruited a new CFO

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at that point in time so it's constantly looking at your strategies relative to your capability and by the way your

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board has to do that at the same time to stay with you you have to stay your team has to stay ready for the game that

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you're in what was the second part of that question just how would somebody else find the right people and I think

Finding The Right People

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you kind of describ some of that yeah so I wish there was like pixie dust for

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that um but it's it's hunting for people um that you've heard wonderful things

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about right um and doing some of the work yourself because search firms only know so many people you've got to really

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hunt I was in Hunt of a servant leader Human Resources person and there weren't

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like three in the United States and so but I heard of one she was actually working for IHG the hotel company that

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was across the street from popey's much bigger much more sophisticated much

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higher resource and I said okay well she's probably making a fortune I probably can't get her here how you know

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how will that work I just started meeting her at Starbucks until she finally took the job I think I took her

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to Starbucks six times probably before she even started thinking about being

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our head of HR uh but I convinced her that she could leave that big monolith

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Corporation and come to this Scrappy turnaround situation and put to work all

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the things she'd learned you know really put her fingerprints on things and she came her name's Lynn and she did a

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phenomenal job we're great friends to this day but it's that kind of personal investment in chasing down people and uh

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explaining the vision and making sure they're the kind of people that want to be part of something like that because

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that's why people come they don't come for the paycheck yeah you know you tried so many

Discerning When/How To Stop or Change

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things before you hit the right things and one of the things both on the career

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side and just in the day-to-day job side is trying to figure out how do you fail fast right people talk about fail fast

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and I'm wondering how did you know when it was time to stop different career moves that you were making and how'd you

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know when it was time to stop various things that weren't working well and how'd you discern all of that because

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you had to discern a ton of major decisions that affected millions of people discernment is is first a really

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good word choice um there's always too much to do there's always too little

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time there's always not enough money um so you you really have a leader

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has to force themelves through a discipline discernment um and the

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example I would give you there we created a road map a strategy uh on one piece of paper for

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Popeyes and we started saying there's 11 things we have to do to fix this company

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and we actually put 11 teams in place to chase those things

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and then we realized we weren't doing them very well so we narrowed it to seven things and you know what when I

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really look back with clear lenses we did three things really well out of the

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first 11 we picked so I cannot overestimate this discernment to

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keep honing and narrowing and narrowing the focus because when you get to the

Focus On The Vital Few Priorities

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three things and you know for us it was very simple we had to have have menu Innovation that gave you a reason to

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keep coming to Popeyes we had to be fast at the drive-thru and our franchisees had to make money or they quit you know

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it was just those were the lenses and every time you got distracted running

27:11
down some rabbit tail you had to go back and look at that and say oops nope these are the three things that make our

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business model sing right every business uh model has levers uh it can be a

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nonprofit school it can be General Motors but every in industry has three

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or four levers that you have to be on top of and Performing well to survive

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and so focus focus focus I call it focus on the vital few and all of us are

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inclined to wander I'm included um grab that list back I did a uh personally I

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did the whole time I worked at popey I did a 90-day plan every 90 days where I

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took that lens of our Vital VI priorities and chck to make that I was only working on the vital things right

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because it all rolls downhill if you're the leader right if you go and I'm an idea person so I've got the ability to

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wander and I had to constantly re back my propensity of new ideas and have

28:15
people around me that said oh stop Cheryl don't need any more new ideas we're trying to become an Innovative

28:22
company that's fast and makes money so just stop it Cheryl you know surround yourself with people that will tell tell

28:28
you the truth but it's that focus and disciplined process of staying

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focused so you've LED some of the world's most recognizable Brands you're

Next Stage Of Cheryl's Journey

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now on the board of some of the world's most recognizable Brands when you think through what Legacy you're leaving

28:47
behind talk to us about how you're viewing this next part of your career in

28:52
your journey well you know I um I'm at a really blessed stage of life where I get

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to think about things like that right you know when you're married raising kids working full-time there's a lot

29:04
going on but at this stage of life I can be really disciplined and focused about

29:09
how I give back to the business community and the area I've discovered that's so rich the

29:16
nonprofit uh side of things and so as you said today I'm so honored to serve

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the Chick-fil-A brand as lead director of their board um and then I sit on the

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US Food board in Chicago that delivers food to all these restaurants that I love around the country and has a

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phenomenal management team uh so it's a gift to get to stay in the for-profit

29:39
world and bring my skills around strategy talent and culture to bear um

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and those two companies are great fit um for me and I've enjoyed giving back to them but the discovery part Chris has

29:52
been the nonprofit world and specifically for me because of my faith background it's Ministry

29:58
is I kind of never spent a whole lot of time sharing my skill set or giving back

30:04
to Ministries I gave money I gave a bunch of money um and I had favorite

30:09
things like a Ministry in Michigan that reaches rural kids and a a camp for kids

30:14
in the summer that's just amazing and you know a school here in North Carolina that my dad founded I had all kinds of

30:21
places I thought were're doing cool work and I wanted to be a part of it therefore I wrote a check but the bless

30:28
now is I sit on their board or I Mentor their CEO or I help the board figure out

30:36
how to find the next CEO and turn around their Ministry from poor performing to

30:41
high performing and they need every bit of the for-profit skills that I have in

30:49
the nonprofit or Ministry sector and I really encourage your listeners to think

30:54
about this before they retire because it's true today in your community in your passion points

31:01
for nonprofit work or Ministry those people need you now and here's how I ask

31:07
you to think about it I used to be kind of befuddled by the church right because the church always asked me to be a

31:14
volunteer in the 2-year-old Nursery I am really not very good at that I can tell

31:19
you a hundred reasons why but that's just not my gift and they would ask me to bake cakes for the cake sale also not

31:26
a gift of mine but the church never asked me about my business gifts right

31:32
never asked and I'm like now I look back on and to say well I could have volunteered I could have said you had no

31:38
HR function and no culture function in your church I could have helped you right so whatever your business gifted

31:46
is go look around at the you know ministries of nonprofits you care deeply

31:51
about and go ask them is there anything I know how to do that would be valuable to you at this time because I'll do a

31:57
project I'll sit on your board I'll just Mentor you if that's something I can do there are a million ways you can step

32:03
into that Gap and help truly purposeful uh high impact causes right uh do some

32:13
great work for me I consider it God's work and it's just a joy to be a part of

32:18
his team to help these organizations uh do his work wow I love that hearing some of

Advice For Working Mothers

32:25
your legacy is amazing that you're leaving and trying leave there's another aspect that if we rewind you were a

32:31
Trailblazer like you talked about at the beginning in your industry being a working mom uh full-time raising a

32:38
family and full-time working in Corporate America uh what was that like and how have you been able to help other

32:45
women navigate that uh because I know you're doing a lot to help other women leaders navigate their career

32:51
Journeys well and thankfully uh the world's in a better place for working mothers today than it was was then you

32:58
know maternity leaves are longer and and uh Child Care is more available and

33:04
bosses are more used to working mothers you know and not call thinking you're weird um and so there's a lot of

33:12
progress that's been made but I would tell you the number one thing that's still missing for working mothers is a

33:18
cohort to walk through the Journey with um other people to talk to and share the

33:24
real mess that's going on in your life right the the difficulties that just by

33:29
Nature if you are a couple raising children and you both work you've got your hands full and you don't have a lot

33:35
of role models to go to and you're not even comfortable with some of your colleagues even sharing right because

33:41
you want them to think you've got it all together it is really important to walk that journey in community so what I one

33:48
of the things that I do is I for the last six years have run a um it's called

33:53
a disciple group uh I've done two three-year groups uh that have 11 or 12

33:59
um women in it who were seweet women were who were married with families for

34:04
the most part um and I just walk with them and we just talk about the real

34:10
problems and uh I'll just give you one little insight um you know working mothers uh have to figure out when to

34:17
pray and uh we all agree that it's two in the morning that's what we've decided

34:22
it's 2: in the morning because that's when we have true quiet and peace and the good thing about God is he just

34:28
wakes us up at two: in the morning every night and we talk so you know we have unique challenges and we need to talk in

34:36
a safe place we need to share some of our you know I guess today they're called life hacks I don't even know what

34:42
that means but you know kind of what are the secrets um and we need to just hold

34:48
each other up and say you know what I'm here for you I you your child's having a problem in school let's talk about that

34:55
uh your marriage is under pressure let's talk about that because to Journey alone

35:00
uh for anyone is is a bad idea and that's where I invest my time with

35:05
working mothers including my daughters wow this is so good Cheryl I

10-Rapid-Fire Questions

35:11
want to hit you with 10 rapid fire questions where you just say the first thing that comes to your mind okay who's

35:20
the first person you think of when I say servant leadership oh my first person I think of

35:31
Jesus all right five words the best describe you

35:39
responsible strong beliefs

35:44
hardworking outgoing that's four right yep

35:50
energetic love it favorite author or book well it the B for sure uh and in

35:59
business um The Purpose Driven Life favorite

36:07
movie I'm just kind of a hug Grant romcom person love it favorite

36:13
food ah I'd have to say chicken don't you think I feel like that's the right

36:19
answer favorite thing to do in your free time read all right what's the surprising

36:26
fact about you my first job was teaching knitting lessons um I taught people how to make a

36:33
scarf in mittens and I started that when I was 12 years old wow that's cool

36:39
favorite place you've been Singapore my family lived there for

36:44
uh 11 years and it's a beautiful place in the middle of a beautiful part of the

36:50
world place you want to go that you have not been Israel

36:57
and finally what's the best advice you've ever received your attitude is your

37:05
altitude that's from my mother she's 91 she's still telling me that oh I love

37:12
that well Cheryl thank you so much for being on the servant leadership podcast and sharing some insights I'm excited

Closing

37:18
for people to go read your book if they haven't and to just learn more from you well thank you Chris I've had a lot of

37:25
fun talking to you today thank you for listening to this episode of the servant leadership podcast if you enjoyed what

37:32
you heard please give it a thumbs up and leave a comment below don't forget to

37:37
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37:44
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