Today’s Advisor reports on how Yum! Brands, Inc., parent company of the KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell restaurant chains, has all the ingredients for successful leadership development.
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Based in Louisville, Kentucky, the company offers its global workers a variety of training programs and tools to excel in their jobs. And it was recently recognized for its unique and comprehensive leadership development programs and practices.
The company, which employs 1.5 million associates at 40,000 restaurants in 125 countries, says its “unique people-first culture” is focused on driving results through rewards and recognition. Despite its size, Yum! Brands describes its approach to developing talent as being “customized and highly interactive” and says that its training programs are aimed at unlocking individual talent and fostering business and personal growth.
As for leadership development opportunities, company employees have access to a wide range of classroom and online courses through Yum! University, Yum! Brand’s worldwide learning and development platform. In the past few years alone, more than 35 million online courses have been completed through Yum! University, according to the company.
In an effort to drive “breakthrough thinking and innovation,” Yum! Brands also offers Achieving Breakthrough Results (ABR) to its employees and franchisees around the world. This high-impact leadership and action-planning training provides associates with tools and concepts designed to help them achieve high performance.
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For the past 17 years, David Novak, executive chairman of Yum! Brands, has personally trained thousands of managers and franchisees in a leadership program he developed, “Taking People with You.” The program offers participants a step-by-step guide to key factors in effective leadership, including “setting big goals, getting others on board, and achieving break-through results.”
Chronicled in Novak’s book, Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make BIG Things Happen, the training is offered in 11 languages and has been provided to more than 50,000 restaurant general managers and “above restaurant” leaders.
Among other Yum! Brands training programs is “Sales Overnight, Brand Over Time,” a program aimed at helping associates build a successful marketing mind-set. This interactive training strives to help participants develop “a better understanding of how each brand’s identity comes to life in everything they do,” the company explains. Participants include Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC franchise partners and marketers.
In an effort to make learning and career development accessible, Yum! Brands also offers tuition reimbursement to salaried associates in the United States. In addition, since 2003, the company has awarded 2,500 scholarships and nearly $6 million in grants to its associates.
Late last year, Yum! Brands was named one of the Aon Hewitt Top Companies for Leaders® in North America in recognition of its leadership development programs and practices. Winners were selected based on strength of leadership practices and culture, examples of leader development on a global scale, alignment of business and leadership strategy, company reputation, and business and financial performance.
Pete Sanborn, Global Talent practice leader for Aon Hewitt, said Yum! Brands is part of “a select group of organizations that excel at building and growing a strong leadership environment.”
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“This recognition demonstrates our focus on building people capability at all levels and investing in training and development programs to grow our next generation of leaders around the globe,” said Anne Byerlein, chief people officer of Yum! Brands. “We are providing the tools, systems, processes, and support needed to equip our leaders to run great restaurants worldwide.”