How a T.G.I. Friday's restaurant was saved by a dedicated manager who invested in the development -- and the future -- of his employees

To hear Dennis Greer tell it, he was simply trying to live up to the expectations of the three most important women in his life.

His mother, although she was poor and raised a family without Greer's father, constantly made sacrifices for others. Greer couldn't believe the number of people who came to her funeral to talk about something she'd done for them.

His wife would not let him take the comfortable route when a chance to help other people presented itself in his career.

His daughter hears his lectures about integrity and credibility. Greer knows she will disregard his advice unless he lives up to his own rhetoric.

By aspiring to leave a positive legacy, Greer took a restaurant that his company wanted to close and made it the most profitable in the region. Along the way, he changed some people's lives for the better.

An appeal to conscience

The T.G.I. Friday's restaurant in Southfield, Michigan, sits on the boundary between two vastly different cultures of the Detroit metropolitan area. On one side is prominence and wealth; on the other is poverty, drugs, and crime. In 1999, both the restaurant property and the morale of its staff were run-down. The restaurant was seriously underperforming.

"We were ready to close that unit," says Mark Snyder, who was the local director of operations at the time. "It was only doing a couple million dollars in sales, and we were working on how we could get out of that lease, because the restaurant was twenty years old, and we hadn't been successful there in the last, five, six, seven years."

That might have been the end of it, but the lease made it more expensive to close the restaurant than to take one last shot at turning a profit. Casting about for who might take on the task, Snyder turned to Greer, then the kitchen manager of the T.G.I. Friday's restaurant 13 miles south in Dearborn. Greer had earned high marks for hard work and solid personnel decisions. He made himself the "obvious choice" to lead Southfield, Snyder says.

Greer turned down the job. "We had a nice life going for us, and I was comfortable," he says. "I heard the stories about what goes on there. My wife was going through a difficult pregnancy. I didn't want to put myself in a situation like that and take a chance on losing everything that I had worked so hard for . . . everything I had done for my family."

Greer's wife, Kathleen, reminded Dennis about his own childhood in the public housing projects of Jackson, Tennessee; he had always talked about wanting to make a difference. She suggested that maybe he should accept the job. "She was actually disappointed in me because I took the easy route instead of going over to help the people," he says. "She kind of, like, made me feel guilty about not going."

So Greer went back to Snyder, telling him that not only would he take the job, he'd also turn around the business. "Listen," Snyder recalls Greer telling him, "I'm going to make this restaurant successful. There's great potential here. There are great people here. And I'm going to make it work." Snyder promised to back him up with employees and managers from other restaurants who could help in a pinch.

Maintaining standards

Turnover was very high, and that made it impossible to retain trained and experienced staff or to give the guests a consistent experience. "A guest would show up, and they could get great food and service, but the next time it might be extremely slow, or the food could be wrong, or the food would be cold," says Snyder.

The customers were demanding but didn't tip much, making it even more difficult for the restaurant to keep people on staff. General managers -- who usually didn't last more than six months in the Southfield restaurant -- made excuses for why they couldn't live up to T.G.I. Friday's brand expectations. Snyder says their attitude was essentially, "We deal with a different clientele. We deal with a different employee base, so [the expectations have] to be different."

In its 12-item employee engagement survey, the Q¹², Gallup asks for a reaction to the statement "There is someone at work who encourages my development." In Southfield, many workers couldn't even say they had someone at home encouraging their development, let alone at work.

"A lot of the people come from very dysfunctional homes," says Josephine Costew, a 69-year-old veteran of the restaurant and de facto mother hen to the workers at Southfield. Between child-care problems, staying out too late the night before work, or lack of transportation, they often showed up late -- or not at all.

Trying to balance compassion with resolve, Greer set his sights on turning around the Southfield restaurant. First, he had to organize a group of like-minded managers. A half dozen were shown the door as he struggled to create a consistent approach.

Greer aimed to be more open with the staff about the restaurant's results. "I didn't want to operate in the 'secret squirrel world,'" he says. "I call it the 'secret squirrel world' because all the managers would go into the office, where employees weren't allowed, and it sent a message that something secret was going on. If people wanted to know what was going on with the business, they could just come and ask me." In return, he expected the staff to get involved in improving the numbers.

Once a stronger management team was in place, Greer could focus on front-line staff. He began by rejecting excuses. "His whole mantra was, 'No, this is a Friday's. These are our standards. This is how we operate. This is how we treat people. This is what we're going to do,'" says Snyder.

Maintaining standards wasn't easy to do with employees whose personal lives were often in turmoil. Even though Greer came from a tough background himself, he admits, "I was still in for a culture shock" as to how some employees and customers behaved in the restaurant.

One day, a waiter reported that a man had a gun with him at his table. "Dennis walked up to the guy and said, 'Listen, put your gun away. This is not how we do business in here. If you want to stay here, you need to put your gun in your car. If you don't want to do that, I'm going to ask you to leave and not come back,'" says Snyder. "It didn't rattle him the least bit. He was a leader. Everyone saw that, so they had confidence in him."

As for the employees, Greer says, "We had to change a lot of their behaviors. I told them, 'What happened in the past is the past. Whatever it was, I forgive you, and I'm willing to press on today as if nothing ever happened.' I told them I would judge them from this day forward, not by what happened in the past, as long as they came in and did the right thing."

The Clifton StrengthsFinder and the 34 StrengthsFinder theme names are protected by copyright of The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ, 2000. All rights reserved.