Papa John's Founder Explains Why He's A 'Head Coach' Manager Instead Of A 'King'
Founder John Schnatter says that the relationships inside the company are the real ingredients of its success.
That's why as a leader, Schnatter emphasizes creating "alliances" between employees.
To understand how to do that, you need to know what kind of management model you're working with, and he says there are really only two types of managers.
"It's a head coach model versus what we call the kingship model," Schnatter said at a National Small Business Week event in Washington, D.C., last week. In an hour-long onstage interview, the pizza titan unpacked lots of the lessons he learned from when he started the company in his father's bar in 1984 through today, when the company has sales of about $400 million a quarter.
In both management models, an individual has authority over a group, but the way that authority gets manifested is massively different.
"With a head coach, you make a mistake and learn," he says. "With a king, you make a mistake and get your head bitten off."
The differences go beyond that: King and queen managers are more adversarial, while coaches work more cooperatively with their employees. A queen will take all the credit; a coach will spread rewards around the team. Schnatter says that when people are working in a coach-type environment, there's less anxiety and less fighting.
Echoing the wisdom of Sam Adams founder Jim Koch, Schnatter says that it creates an environment where people don't come to work just to get paid, but for the intangible rewards of the job.
When you treat people like a coach treats her team, Schnatter says, you get "less reptilian behavior." Evolutionary neurophysiologist Stephen Porges has said that a reptile-type corporate environment will have a short-term fixation on gathering a scarce amount of resources, while a more mammalian office will have a long-term orientation with an emphasis on connection between people.
Schnatter says that 15 years ago he managed more like a king. If he or an employee made a mistake he'd "get really down on himself." But if a mistake is made today, he'll approach the incident with curiosity, asking why the mistake happened. This is crucial, he says, given that you can't innovate unless you're willing to make mistakes.
All this became abundantly clear to him when he was traveling in the United Kingdom a while back. He stayed in a castle that had been renovated to become a hotel - complete with oven and steam room.
"The next day I said to the manager, 'This is neat, how come there aren't more castles that are hotels?'" he recalls.
The hotel manager's reply: Because if the king didn't take care of the peasants who built the castle, they'd burn it down. But this king took care of the people who did the heavy lifting, so it stands to this day.
That was a powerful lesson in management.
"If you don't take care of the people doing the heavy lifting," Schnatter says, "they will burn your castle down."