The #1 Key to Leading Your Team With David Brandon: Chairman of the Board, Domino’s Pizza

Well, thank you. It's great to be with you. I actually was brought into the business world as a result of the fact that I was a student athlete at Michigan. Bo recommended me to a recruiter at Procter & Gamble and interestingly enough a couple years later I became a recruiter for Procter & Gamble and I went back to the University of Michigan as well as a number of other universities and one of the first places we would go would be the athletic departments because it's been long understood that if you can compete at the highest level, if you understand preparation, if you understand time management, if you understand the intensity of practice and the ability to both win and lose and do it with class, communication skills, leadership skills, learning to play, learning to be a part of a team, all of those concepts that are very much a part of team sports and athletics translate very, very well to the world of business. And since I never really was at the business school at Michigan and didn't have a degree in business, I really felt I've told people I went to the Bo Schembechler school of leadership and really took what I learned from observing him as a legendary coach and I took it to my business life.

Well, I don't know if my journey is that typical, but I came from a very small school. I came from a family that had never had anyone go to a 4-year college. I grew up on a farm and I happened to be pretty good at playing football and I got recruited and signed a scholarship at Michigan. And when I got there, I really didn't have anybody to mentor me as to degrees and majors and minors and career paths. I mean, I wasn't there mentally. And so when they asked me when I arrived, what do you want to study? My role models at that point, other than my father and my parents, my role models were coaches and teachers. And back in those days if you wanted to coach a sport at the high school level, you had to be a teacher. So, I immediately responded, 'Hey, I want to be a teacher and a coach because those are the people that I related to and they changed my life.' So, I went to the school of education and I was in the process of doing my student teaching to get a degree, a certification to teach and I'd already lined up a coaching job in my senior year and I got this call from a recruiter at Procter who said, 'We were over at the athletic department. We talked to your coach and he recommended that we talk to you.' And I said, 'You've got the wrong date, Brandon. I mean, I've never had business class. That's not what I'm doing. I'm going to be a teacher and a coach. I don't know anything about Procter & Gamble.' And they said, 'No, we understand that. We're not hunting majors here. We're hunting individuals and talent and we'd really like to talk to you.' So, at the time I thought it was a good free lunch and I agreed to meet with them and ultimately I found out that they paid a lot better than teachers did starting out back in the '70s and it also became a bit of a new challenge for me. So, I always figured I could go back to teaching if this business gig didn't work out. And so I started with P&G and now, as I work towards the end of my career, I've been a CEO of three different companies for a total period of 25 years and taken a couple companies public and sat on the board of a dozen or so companies and so I've had a wonderful business career, but it all really started more by happenstance and by Procter & Gamble being willing to take a chance on hiring talent and skills and aptitude and energy and enthusiasm as opposed to necessarily someone who brought a lot of the business book smarts to the job.

Well, listen, I believe that the art of leadership today is surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you are and surrounding yourself with people who share your values as well as your aspirations for what you want to accomplish. I believe if you can develop that skill to assess talent and get alignment not just in terms of job skills, but alignment in terms of culture and philosophy and commitment and shared values, but also a shared feeling of aspirational endeavors. Here's what we want to accomplish together. And that's what teams do. That's what you'll learn as being part of a football team or a basketball team, any team. If they all get in a room and say, 'Here's what we want to set out to do this season or this year or this quarter.' And we all buy into it and we all understand clearly our roles which enable us to get there. That's two-thirds of the battle. And if I'm good at anything, I think I've been good at identifying talent, both skills and attitude, both culture and shared values in such a way that I've been fortunate to have great people working for me who have made me look really good from time to time.

Yeah, I look for, first of all, goal orientation. I want people to prove to me that they have almost built into their DNA this notion of setting high expectations for themselves, setting specific goals, and then working hard to achieve them. Proving to me that they not only achieve those goals, but they have plans and they've been able to execute those plans in a way that allowed that success to happen. I think most leaders in business today, what we primarily are is problem solvers. I always said that if there weren't for problems, probably the companies I work for wouldn't need me. Usually the little problems get solved by other people, the middle-sized problems get solved by people who work for me, and it's the big problems, not the campfires or the bonfires, the forest fires, come to the CEO, and you have to have that innate ability to identify a problem, understand what the possible options for solving the problem are, and then executing that plan. So, problem-solving is something that I spend a lot of time interviewing people, hearing about how they think about that, how they approach that, and what problems they've had and how they've gone about solving them. And then I really look for that alignment. I try to study what other organizations do real effectively, and I always was impressed taking my kids to Disney World and seeing the energy that all those characters and those people in that park. And I went down there to their school of management to try to really understand how do you program these people to be so happy all the time? And really happiness is their mission, right? And it was fascinating to me that when they hire people, when they assess talent, they put 50% of the weight on their skills and aptitude and ability to perform the functions of the job, but they put an equal amount of weight on their attitude, their enthusiasm, their personality, and fundamentally their cultural fit with this Disney notion of creating happiness. And I always remember that and I embody that into the way I assess people, because I think both of those qualities and characteristics are equally as important.

Well, I've been around long enough that leadership has changed and evolved over the decades. I think when I first became a CEO back in the '80s, it was almost the expectation was that a CEO you should never let them see you sweat, right? You're the one who's always got the answers, and you kind of play that role as the answer person, and nothing upsets you because you're unflappable, because you're not a human, right? You're a CEO. As the world has unfolded, I think it's almost the opposite. We're in a time now where, first of all, CEOs have to make themselves vulnerable. They have to understand they don't have all the answers, because everybody knows they don't have the answers. And so when you're confronted with those problems, I think the first thing that you need to do is open up the funnel in terms of listening to your subject matter experts and the people who trust around you who can help you get to the right answer. The wrong answer is to say, 'Well, I'm at the top of the pyramid, and that means I'm the smartest, and that means I've got all the answers.' That's wrong, and people see it as very disingenuous. You are not authentic if you're confronted with a forest fire problem, and you immediately put a smile on your face and say, 'Well, this is just an average day.' Welcome to the pandemic, right? So, holding yourself out there as a real authentic human who has the same emotions as everybody else, and react in an honest way, and being very transparent about the issues that need to be resolved, and listening carefully to the people who can help you get to the right answer. I've often said, if you put your leadership team around you, and you want to go north, and all of them say that's wrong, let's go south, you're kind of a fool. And you've certainly got the wrong team if you don't listen and change your direction. If you say, 'Let's go north,' and all of them agree to go north, that's an easy day. You earn your money when you say, 'Let's go north,' and half of them want to agree and half of them disagree. And so sometimes you got to make the call. But, most of the time, I think in the world of problem-solving and really in the big decisions that you need to make, if you have the right people around you, you can really use consensus, good communication, and open honest sharing as a way to get to the right answer.

Well, The Apprentice was just a media buy, and it gave us great brand recognition. At the time it was the number one show on television. And so, it's part of my job description, right? If there's a way for me to add recognition and bring attraction to the brand and a coolness factor, so I did that and spent a couple of episodes on The Apprentice with then the judge in the boardroom, Trump. It was fun, but it was also my job, right? It was a responsibility that we had as part of the deal that we did to get some good media coverage and some good brand recognition on The Apprentice. I did a couple of commercials, but I was always very careful that I never wanted to be the celebrity CEO, because I think that can be a bit of a trap. I think you can get caught up in that to the point where that starts to get in the way of your authenticity and your ability to interact with all levels of the organization. And sometimes you can just fall in that trap, where you start to see yourself on TV and you like it. And that becomes more important than your day job. So, I always try to create that balance. For instance, one of the most fun things I ever did was we were launching at Domino's during my CEO days, we were launching a new line of oven-baked sandwiches, and we put an ad campaign together where we tested our oven-baked sandwiches against Subway sandwiches, which at the time were the number one in their category, and ours were preferred two to one over Subway. So, we came out with an ad campaign to brag about the fact that we had these sandwiches that tested so much better than Subway. So, as is typically the case in America today, if your competitor gets a leg up, the first thing you do is you call your lawyer and try to come up with a way to sue them. So, I got this letter one day, a cease and desist letter, from the general counsel at Subway telling us to pull these ads because they didn't like them. So, I went down to the marketing department and in about the course of a 15-minute discussion which started out as kind of a joke and turned into a strategy, we decided to film a commercial where I would oven bake the letter. So, we actually put a commercial together where I showed the letter to our customers. I said, 'Look, this guy at Subway is trying to get us to pull our ads because he's upset that our sandwiches are so good. I just want you to know how I feel about this letter' and I toss it in our oven and the audience watches it explode. So, CEOs can have fun and they can put themselves in a position where they can be part of that, but if you start to think that's your day job, then you're going to lose track of what's most important.