What exactly is the key to great leaders’ success? What do strong and successful leaders know that we may not — and how can we learn from them and apply those findings in our own businesses?

In the weeks to come, we will feature leaders in industries spanning from sales and marketing to health care. We will share their answers about their business insight, leadership strategy and philosophy, methods of finding and retaining top talent, and much more.

CareerBuilder recently interviewed Jon Luther, executive chairman of Dunkin’ Brands, and picked his brain a bit about his leadership philosophy, his role in Dunkin’s talent strategy, the secret to being a great leader, and how he balances inspiration versus reality in today’s economical environment.

Read the full interview:

How do you describe your leadership philosophy?  How do people make a difference in your business?

At the center of every leader comes a passion for people, because leaders never get to where they are by themselves.  They always get there because they have people around them who can be inspired, who believe in the journey ahead, and get the work done as you go forward.  So it’s really about a passion for people that can be inspired and believe in the journey and direction the company is on.  One time I read a little clip in the paper about Casey Stengel, where he said the secret to management (and I’ll sub “leadership” into that phrase) is to keep the five people who haven’t made up their mind yet away from the five people who are against you.  So you have to have the ability to rally people and inspire people to believe, and I think the secret is understanding where everybody is.  So I think that’s part of it.  But the other part of that is, you have to give people the respect, have to give people their dignity, and you have to be a good listener to people’s issues so you can manage very, very differently.  You can’t ever demand respect along the way, and if you don’t give people their dignity you’ll never get people to believe.

Regarding Dunkin’ Brands specifically, why are you so passionate about people and how do
they relate to your business?

Well, we are in a little different business than maybe most in our segment.  Because we are totally franchised, we don’t operate our stores, but we have to be able to convince people to operate them to our standards, to our growth requirements, with our philosophies.  Our values have to be believed in so all these things are factored in to when we select a franchisee.

People are to us the most important part of the equation. I tell people we’re not cloning genes here, we’re building relationships and making sure they’re the most profitable they can be so we can be the best franchisor in the world.

Jon, you are highly involved in the overall talent strategy. What priority do you give this in
your daily responsibilities and how does it pertain to the overall business objectives?

I also tell people, in order to become a leader, you have to learn early in your career how to follow.  Otherwise, you don’t have that understanding of what it takes to build a team and execute it against the strategy.  So I think I’ve used that premise when I step into these key leadership roles I have over my career.  Now as executive chair, it’s a step further back because now I have to take a complete step back and enable our new CEO to lead and drive our business while I create an oversight role and make sure that the strategies we enact are implemented.

You also have to have a lot of curiosity as a leader when you set courses.  And curiosity says you ask a lot of questions along the way: “How’s that going? What’s that mean? What are the roadblocks we anticipated when we set this new course?  Help me be better at this.  Help me guide the teams.”  We end up having a lot of transparency, which is one of our values.  I tell people honesty is one of our values and that means you can always recover from the truth.  So tell me the truth, because you ca always recover from it – good, bad, or indifferent – but we gotta know all the information so we can drive a business in the right time.

Do you have any specific examples of how people either positively or negatively affected your business?

When I think of people who go above and beyond, it’s the people I’ve worked for who have supported the direction I’ve taken.  Case in point: Philip Bowman, CEO of Allied Domecq.  When I first came here, we made radical changes to the slope of the business, the direction, the strategies, and rebuilt the team under this new leadership. And he was so supportive and enabled me to succeed. So leaders always have to have support above them to support their goals, enable them and clear the way for their leadership.

On the other side, people that have worked for me have changed the scope.  I would point to Joe Scafido, who leads our whole innovation, supply chain, and concept development teams.  When I was at Popeye’s, I changed the course of that brand from fried chicken to “Cajun Our Way” in developing our southern Louisiana and New Orleans heritage, and Joe helped me change the scope at great risk of his peers and the franchise community, and we were able to achieve great success together. He’s with me today at Dunkin as a result of the relationship we build together there.

What do you do to rally the team and reinforce your employment brand?

What we try to do to inspire teams is provide hope in any environment, especially this environment we’re facing; but we also have to be steeped in reality. We’re always focused on what needs to be done, but all the while looking forward to provide hope.  So I think that’s how we continue to engage with the teams as we go forward: creating hope and inspiring people to do better while facing the realities that confront us.

But values are the underpinning. The sole purpose of Dunkin Brands is to lead and build brands.  We wake up every day unified in that approach.  We exercise our values of honesty, transparency, respect integrity- all those things as we define them. We calibrate ourselves against those values each and every day. And if people are not role modeling those values, they have to make a decision: They either have to leave the organization or role model these values.

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*Keep an eye out for next week’s CareerBuilder Leadership Series post, featuring Jim Rose of Mosaic Sales Solutions Corporation.

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