There’s an unwritten rule in the publishing world to not write about Chick-Fil-A and a handful of other companies. Not because these companies have done something wrong. Quite the opposite. Because these companies have done a lot of things right. I wrote about Chick-Fil-A in my first book draft seventeen years ago and my editor said, “Everyone knows how great Chick-Fil-A is, now go find new great companies to write about.”
I’ve wondered for years what makes Chick-Fil-A one of the greatest companies in the world. I now know the answer: it’s people.
For the past fifteen years, I’ve been honored to facilitate Heart-Led Leader Retreats for rising to senior leaders across all types of industries and organizations. We’ve been blessed to serve over a thousand leaders – teaching and inspiring them to lead with love, humility, and with a servant’s heart. We’ve had a couple dozen Chick-Fil-A leaders participant in our Heart-Led Leader Retreats over the years. They are the nicest, kindest, and most genuine people. Every one of them.
A couple of years ago, I ran a Heart-Led Leader Retreat at Lost Tree Club in North Palm Beach, Florida with twenty-eight leaders – three of them from Chick-Fil-A. It is not polite to pick favorites, but this group was beyond special. There was one participant name Giezi from Tijuana, Mexico. Giezi might just be one of the most beautiful and inspiring human beings I’ve ever met, and the twenty-seven other retreat participants unanimously agreed – nobody had ever met anyone quite as special as Giezi.
Most of our retreat participants work for corporate America or private companies. Not Giezi. He founded a ministry across the Mexican border called Hope Zone. Giezi and his wife, Amanda, have dedicated their lives to saving young teenage girls from selling their bodies into prostitution. We were all shocked to learn from Giezi that Tijuana is the teenage prostitution capital of North America. The work that Giezi and Amanda are doing is changing lives. Giezi won all our hearts, and we all left inspired to do more good in the world because of him.
Towards the end of the retreat, it came up in conversation that Giezi had a dream to one day take his wife Amanda and their two young boys, Klay and Luka, to Disneyland. But, admittingly so, the cost was more than Giezi could ever afford.
A few days after the Heart-Led Leader Retreat, I got a phone call from a guy named Jeff Moran, who was one of the three Chick-Fil-A leaders that attended the retreat with Giezi. He was organizing a fundraising campaign with all the retreat attendees to send Giezi and his family to Disneyland. And thanks to Jeff and the generosity of the other retreat attendees, Giezi and his family visited Disneyland two months later – all expenses paid.
What makes Chick-Fil-A one of the greatest companies in the world is there are thousands of Jeff Morans that work there. And when a Chick-Fil-A leader attends one of our Heart-Led Leader Retreats, my team jokes that you can always pick them out.
This got me thinking… How rare (and beautiful) it is to build an organizational culture so powerful and that you lead so differently, that people can pick you out.
This summer is the twenty-fifth anniversary of our National Leadership Academy. Each summer, for two and half decades, we invite hundreds of high school students to Denver, Colorado to learn how to become a Heart-Led Leader. Thanks to my friends Humberto Lopez and Jim Click, we’ve had ten students from San Miguel High School in Tucson, Arizona attend our National Leadership Academy for the past fifteen years. These San Miguel students are different. They are the most polite, disciplined, and respectful kids. Most of them are economically challenged, but all of them have a diverse work ethic and demeanor that is unlike most of their peers across the country. They are doing something at that school in Tucson, Arizona that is different. Out of the 5,260 students that have participated in our National Leadership Academy over the last twenty-five years, you can always pick out the San Miguel High School student participants.
There is a hockey coach in Colorado name Andrei Krivokrasov – an old school Russian hockey legend that has dedicated his life to teaching kids how to become the best skaters in the world. When our son, Tate, was just a few years old, he knew he wanted to be a hockey player. And when he turned six, he started skating with Coach Krivo. For six years, Tate got up at 5:00 in the morning five days a week and skated. Most of the time the kids didn’t even have a hockey stick in their hands. Coach Krivo believes great hockey players are first, great skaters. And he wants to develop the best skaters in the world. Today, when you watch any Colorado youth hockey game, you can always pick out the hockey players that once skated with Coach Krivo.
Whether you are selling chicken, teaching high school students, or coaching hockey kids, we have an opportunity to do something so well and so different, that we stand out. Great organizations understand that it is not the products or services you provide that make you different, it is the people behind your products and services that truly matter. And if you develop your people so well, so differently, you not only can pick ‘em out a mile away, but publishing companies will forbid authors writing about you because everyone already knows how great you are.