Do franchises fail because they have bad multi-unit leaders?
Sullivan: Companies don’t fail because they have “bad” multi-unit leaders. They fail because they have a large number of mediocre ones. Our tools help companies identify the areas their multi-unit operators can be better at to succeed. Great leaders are characterized not by the absence of weaknesses but the presence of strengths, and these strengths are not always the same ones. Effective leadership practices are specific to an organization. Many leaders who are successful in one organization sometimes switch to another and then fail. We’ve tried to identify and then teach the core competencies that all high-performing multi-unit leaders share. Your book–Multi Unit Leadership: The 7 Stages of Building High-Performing Partnerships and Teams–stresses that a common failure of new multi-unit operators is that they don’t spend enough time in their stores. Why is that so important? Sullivan: Because the store is where the company meets the customer. You can’t manage a territory by simply r
