Undercover Boss: Burger Crew Gets Surprise When They Train Their CEO

 

From NumismaticNerd.

Via AOL:

As Rick Silva's turn on "Undercover Boss" began, he spent time singing the praises of his company's high standards. The CEO of the Checkers and Rally's fast-food burger chain demands "perfection," he said, and makes regular use of focus groups to test the chain's burgers.

But on his in-disguise visits to three restaurants, he heard an entirely different story: His company's infrastructure is lacking, and you can't hear orders on the speaker system at the drive-through. Buttons are mislabeled at preparation stations. And some of his floor managers have barely received any training.

But the real eye-opener came from working alongside three rank-and-file employees. The trio of crew members who found themselves training a man named "Alex Garcia" taught him what perfection is really about.

Take Todd, a member of the grill-and-fry station at a branch in Homestead, Fla. He needs his job not just for his livelihood but also for his mom's. And so he endures the abuse of the store manager, who threatens his employees with physical beatings to get them into line. But when questioned outside by a man whom he presumed to be a random contestant on a reality show -- Silva in disguise -- about the situation, Todd overcame any fear about standing out and stood up. The treatment makes him feel "worthless," he told Alex.

Joyce works as a late night manager in Carol City, Fla., and operates the restaurant as if it's a variety show. She hops around the floor singing and dancing, adding gobs of good cheer. "I sell hospitality," she told Alex. She also demonstrated her mischievous side during the episode. "He's a concrete block," is how she described Silva's efforts at tending the station.

But it's a tale of two Joyces, as we learn (during a chat with Alex) of her Dickensian struggles. In the span of six months, she lost both parents to alcohol-related issues, as well as a brother to AIDS. "I never, ever would have imagined you've overcome this much," Alex said to her. She's also in debt, we learn.

Johanna works on the sandwich board in Mobile, Ala., the birthplace of Checkers. And she showed herself to be the Cheryl Miller of the station. Like the former basketball stars, she has a killer combination of speed and accuracy. Later in the show, Silva tells her she was "smoking," but during his apprenticeship, he can't keep up with her. "Fast food ain't called slow food," she said in a confessional. It came as no surprise when Silva told the camera he was scared he might lose her to the competition.

Silva, for his part, took swift and direct action to rectify the problems. This, too, came as no surprise. When talking about his own background, we learned that Silva was a member of the Cuban generation that left the island nation after 1959's Fidel Castro-led revolution. After relocating to Florida, Silva said that he was a target of racism and called a "spic." But when the epithet was spray-painted on his home, he stood up to the bullies. He never was bothered again, he told us. And he took the incident as a code for life.

And so it's exactly in that spirit that he approached Stevens, the manager in Homestead who bullied Todd and threatened the other crew members. "He's barking orders," was how Silva described Stevens' conduct. Silva called him out for being disrespectful, and when Stevens challenged him over his own alleged lack of experience in fast food management, Silva couldn't help but identify himself as the company CEO.

"Do our advertisements say we serve lukewarm burgers?" he added as a dig.

Then Silva took the extraordinary measure of closing down the branch on the spot. He assured the workers that no jobs were going to be in jeopa

via jobs.aol.com

Comments

[FrillyPharmacyGirl]

Win. That ass-hat manager got what he deserved for treating his employees like that.

[hiedi]

my understanding of the ass-hat manager was he got sent to HQ for "retraining"

Still, no excuse for treating your employees like that. I hope he thanked God that the only that happened to him was getting pulled from the restaurant and sent back to HQ for "additional training"

[Nic]

In his defense, from watching the whole episode, the manager had only been there a few weeks himself, and was never trained. He was just thrown into it. Yes, he is obviously still a douchey style manager, but it's not all his fault.

[Music Girl]

Agree with Nic. I saw the whole episode, and yeah, the manager was acting like an asshole - but no one in that store had been trained properly.

[Kuroneko4276]

This shouldn't be a reality show so much as a legal requirement for any CEO with more than 250 employees. Companies like Gore-Tex do well because they limit the size of a single working building to 150 people. With management knowing everyone, it works better and the corporate culture is able to value and empower employees. CEOs have no excuse for not knowing what's going on at the bottom. W. Edwards Deming's lean management method and Malcolm Gladwell's 'The Tipping Point' have extolled this philosophy in college textbooks for years -so why did it take freakin' reality TV to get the damn point across? Mad props to the show's creator, who deserves the visual-arts equivalent of the Pulitzer.

[The Last Archimedean]

Great job by thre CEO to actually rectify the problem immediately. I think more bosses should do this. Take a week and be a frontline worker, then when you really understand what happens to them, return to being CEO. Then they can actually tackle the problems going on, if any, because they'll know what they are.

[NC Tony]

I'd love for more CEO's to come down out of their Ivory Towers and see how things work in the real world. It's easy to institute policies while sitting in your corner office with a view of half the city, but down in the trenches it's not always easy to carry out those policies when you've got customers scamming and screaming.

As for the point of this post, I can't believe a manager actually threatened his staff with physical violence. I would have gone over his head the first time he mentioned hitting me and done everything I could to get him fired. I don't care how little training he received, there is no call to physically threaten the people that work for you.

[TechTiger]

Even if just some managers were required to do some of the stupid stuff they hand down, it'd make people's lives much easier.

[Lade_Deth]

That is one thing that I really like about this show is that the ceo's have to do the crap work that their employees have to do.
Its a whole new look on the company, and most times for the better.

[RainbowSlave]

Does anyone know where I can find this whole episode? I've heard of this show, but I've never actually watched a full episode. I'd like to see this one in particular if someone has an online link. (I haven't had cable in over 3 years.)