How McDonald’s makes leaders

The importance of working at McDonald’s as a teenager is one of oddest subplots of a very odd presidential campaign. After Vice President Kamala Harris argued that her time as an employee under the Golden Arches helped her understand the severe economic pressures on many households, Donald Trump, himself a famous devotee of the chain’s food, falsely claimed in campaign speeches that she’d never worked there at all.

The former president’s counterclaim was as strange as it was predictable. But there are good reasons to pay attention to what one can learn from working at McDonald’s: It is a company that is always in the hunt for future leaders, in part because the company could not function without them. And, at some level, finding the best leaders is what every election is about.

The Illinois-based chain calculates that 1 in 8 Americans will work at one of its 13,500 U.S. outlets at some point in their lives. It is a common first job and often where a young employee first takes a step into management. It is a massive leadership training ground with an alumni network that includes Jay Leno, the singer Pink, and even The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos.

That transition from worker to leader is one McDonald’s has carefully mapped and analyzed — not surprising given that its 2.2 million employees make it one of the world’s largest employers. It begins with a two-part test: Does a worker aspire to do something more? Then comes the hard part: Can the employee make the mental shift needed to go from peer to coach?

When Jose Pacheco, 21, walked through the door of a McDonald’s in Somerville, Mass., last year, he didn’t see himself as leadership material. He’d worked in restaurants before, but after his first day at the bottom rung of the shift, he wasn’t even sure he’d cut it as an employee. The work seemed chaotic, almost overwhelmingly so. It was all too much, he recalled. 

But he loved the customer service and as he settled in, his bosses identified him as a comer. Within months, they spoke with him about taking on more responsibility. Soon, he was on course to become a shift leader.

The McDonald’s where Pacheco works, on the edge of a strip mall, is a neighborhood gathering place — police officers getting coffee early, followed by tradesmen and workers in fluorescent vests eating early lunches, all before the noon rush of office workers and families descends. 

The dual drive-through lanes stay busy, and a steady stream of mobile app and delivery orders pour through, too. The restaurant is one of the busiest franchises in the northeast, says Cherag Selhi, who owns and runs it and 18 other Boston-area franchises with his father and brother. 

Together, they now employ about 850 people, including about 85 shift leaders who lead the teams.

Across the Selhis’ outlets, shift leaders begin as crew members first; managers keep a constant eye on who has the right stuff to step up. Often, as with Pacheco, they can see potential where the workers themselves don’t even recognize it yet — they look for the workers who are trying to master their role and not just punch in and punch out. “We’re a huge proponent of growing from within,” Selhi says, as it helps inspire junior employees to follow in someone’s footsteps.

The McDonald’s human resources experts say they never expect someone to be fully ready to become a boss, because the only foolproof preparation for leadership is doing it. “No one is 100 percent perfect,” says Shannon Mullaney, the dean of Hamburger University, the chain’s corporate training camp. “‘Are you 80 percent ready?’ is normally what we say when we’re looking at the shift leader.”

This simple step, from doing “your” job to leading a bigger team, is the critical ingredient required of anyone stepping into management in any organization. It’s a shift from the “hard skills” of getting your basic work done to the “soft skills” of emotional intelligence, listening, coaching and inspiring. 

McDonald’s has plenty of manuals for food safety, but there’s no book that can teach a worker to think differently. So, the Selhis put their shift-leader candidates through a two-day course that includes role-playing to help trainees like Pacheco put their focus on their co-workers.

Because even at that first rung on the leadership ladder — perhaps especially on that first rung — managers need to be able to read people and know how to inspire them to do their best. The goal is to ensure that when an employee goes home at night, Selhi says, he or she comes back the next day feeling respected and appreciated by their leaders. “If we don’t take care of anybody behind the counter,” he adds, “we’re never going to be able to take care of anybody in front of the counter.”