This piece on how Chipotle develops its management team is fascinating. Essentially, the company builds from within, plucking cashiers, cooks, and other highly effective, downstream employees and rapidly elevating them through training and incentives to management positions.
Last year, nearly 86% of Chipotle’s salaried managers and 96% of hourly managers were promoted internally.
Fundamental to this transformation is something Chipotle calls the restaurateur program, which allows hourly crew members to become managers earning well over $100,000 a year.
I became a McDonald’s manager through a similar, albeit less profitable, path. I started working for the company when I was 16 years old. By the time I was 17, I had been promoted to an hourly manager, and less than two years later, I was a salaried manager.
Promoting from within is an admirable and profitable means of identifying and training future managers, but despite this democratic, pluralistic approach, Chipotle, like McDonald’s, is an upside-down organization.
At Chipotle and McDonald’s, the greater your level of advancement, the farther away you step from the customer. In order to climb the corporate ladder at Chipotle, McDonald’s, and many other businesses, you must distance yourself more and more from the point of sale. But the point of sale is the most critical position in the organization for profitability in a consumer-facing company.
It’s where your best people should be.
Time and time again, I would watch highly effective restaurant managers leave their stores for corporate positions, leaving behind less effective, less profitable managers in their place. These corporate positions generated no profit for the company. Employees in these positions did not interact with customers or drive sales. In McDonald’s, Chipotle, and many other businesses, these promotions often remove the most skilled and effective people in the organization from the most critical positions in the company.
I’ve never thought it made much sense.
Sadly, education also operates with an upside-down model. In many ways, the bottom rung of the educational ladder is the teacher. In order to improve your pay beyond a teacher’s salary and climb the career ladder, a person must leave the classroom and become a principal, curriculum specialist, administrator, coach, or something similar that removes these people from the most critical position in all of teaching:
The classroom.
If a highly effective teacher wants to significantly increase his or her salary, he or she must step away from students and do work that has a considerably reduced impact on instruction and children’s futures.
In business terms, these people are stepping away from the point of sale.
People in these positions may try to tell you otherwise. They may say that their work as a principal, administrator, or coach helps teachers to be more effective by ensuring adequate training or support or by fostering a climate where both teachers and students can thrive. They often argue that they are indirectly helping more students through their work than a single classroom teacher.
This, of course, is bunk.
If you want to make the greatest difference in students’ lives, become a teacher.
The best principal I have ever known would tell you the same.
Sadly, in today’s world, the classroom is viewed by many as a place that must be escaped by teachers. The list of responsibilities of a classroom teacher is impossibly long and grows longer each year. The number of people, both students and adults, that the classroom teacher must interact with is immense. It is often acknowledged that the classroom teacher has the most difficult position in all of education.
The classroom is not for the faint of heart.
That’s why the position of classroom teacher should be viewed as the most prestigious in all of education. People should not be promoted from the classroom. If anything, people should be promoted into the classroom.
Classroom teachers should be paid the most.
In countries like Finland, which boast the most successful education systems in the world, they are.
In education, if you have an office and you don’t have constant, dorect contact with students. you probably need a pay cut. A portion of your salary should probably go to a teacher who works directly with students throughout the day.
You might also aks what would happen if your position was eliminated entirely.
Maybe you really do belong in the classroom.
If you are not standing in front of students on a minute-by-minute basis during your work day, you probably need a pay cut. A portion of your salary should probably go to a teacher who is in the classroom all day long.
Send those dollars where they belong: Into the pockets of teachers.
The people who should be paid the most money in education are the classroom teachers. Rather than having teachers fight like dogs for a scant few administrative positions, our most effective people should be fighting for classroom positions, where they can significantly impact the lives of 20-25 children each year.
Education, like Chipotle, McDonald’s, and so many others, is upside down. The goal should be to remain as close to the customer as possible.
Not escape them.
Pay and prestige should be trickling down in these organizations to the people who make the biggest difference in terms of organizational success.
Not up.
