Why successful bosses love talking about their fast-food jobs
Summary
From Kamala Harris to your own boss, a stint in fast food is now a badge of honor for leaders.
Forty years after his final shift, Michael Erickson still remembers what it was like to put on his striped McDonald’s uniform with the golden arches on a chest pocket. He also recalls taking it off, which involved entering his house through a back door and dropping the grease-splattered garment in the washing machine because his mom didn’t want the rest of the house to reek of a drive-through.
Erickson, now 57, works in Michigan as a director at Melissa Libby & Associates, a strategic communications firm. He says the hard work and customer-service skills learned on his McJob left an indelible mark—like a ketchup stain.
“Being able to say I worked at a McDonald’s when I was 16, flipping hamburgers, gives me a little street cred," he says, especially with clients in food and hospitality. “The majority of people that they meet in marketing or PR have never worked in a kitchen."
A stint in fast food is a badge of honor for business leaders who want to be viewed as humble and relatable—and proof that they worked to get where they are.
Vice President Kamala Harris has talked up her long-ago job at McDonald’s while campaigning for president, a way to show she gets the struggles of people on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Her opponent, former President Donald Trump, has claimed without evidence that Harris never worked at McDonald’s.
The company declined to comment on the dispute. A candidate’s summer job is an unlikely point of contention in a race for the nation’s highest office, but it proves a point: Among powerful people, fast-food credibility is worth fighting for.
‘A little grit’
But what does flipping burgers or rolling burritos have to do with running a company?
A lot, say high-level managers who’ve done those jobs. Sweating in cramped kitchens and taking orders from hangry diners teach you how to handle pressure and deal with all kinds of people, executives say. Some are eager to find employees who hustled like they did, figuring someone who boxed McNuggets for minimum wage early on isn’t likely to be a quiet quitter.
When Erickson is hiring, applicants with fast-food experience in their past stand out.
“I think, ‘This person has a little grit,’" he says. “We’re comrades, you know? Those of us who did that have a certain gumption that maybe we don’t share with others."
In that spirit, let me establish my own cred. I manned the Frialator at Castle in the Clouds, a New Hampshire tourist attraction, for about $6 an hour during high school and college summers. There, I once climbed into a dumpster to retrieve a newlywed couple’s marriage license that somehow wound up in the trash.
A manager slipped me $20 for going above and beyond, but I would have jumped in regardless because it felt like the right thing to do.
Jamine Moton, chief executive of Skylar Security in Atlanta, says she went all in at her teenage job making sandwiches at Wawa, the East Coast convenience-store chain.
“I remember looking at those hoagies and saying to myself, ‘I’m going to be the best sandwich maker that works here,’" she says.
You know how the sandwich you get never looks as good as the picture on the menu board? Moton’s did. She went on to become a national champion hammer thrower at Clemson University, then a police officer, and says her Wawa job helped her recognize her inherent drive to excel.
“Any job where you’re on the lowest tier is a really good job to have done in your life because it shows your character," says Heather McLean, who worked at McDonald’s in high school and is CEO of McLean Forrester, a technology consulting firm in Illinois. “I always took the attitude to bloom where you’re planted so, yeah, I was just taking orders at McDonald’s—but I was really good at it."
McLean, 49, says working in fast-food means accepting that no task—even cleaning nasty bathrooms—is beneath you.
That doesn’t mean every griddle is a launchpad to the executive ranks. The term McJob is so synonymous with dead ends that it’s in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary: “A low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement."
Being a model employee is easier when you’ve got bigger and better career prospects ahead. Executives who worked in fast food say they learned empathy and gratitude by toiling alongside colleagues who didn’t have other opportunities and were trying to make a living at or near minimum wage.
Skills to go
Gene Hammett made about $4 an hour washing dishes in a pizza parlor in the 1980s. He knew the real money was in delivering pies and collecting tips, but that meant knocking on doors and making conversation—his greatest fear as a painfully shy teen.
He eventually psyched himself up to do it and credits the experience with developing people skills he later used as CEO of an event-management company.
“Working with the public and talking to strangers helped me come out of my shell," says Hammett, 53, who is now an executive coach.
Fast-food kitchens were long among the few places where future CEOs and low-wage lifers mingled and learned from one another. And because just about everyone orders a burger or pizza now and then, the customer base is a cross section of the American public.
Tracy Glynn, founder of an executive-search firm for healthcare companies, got her parents to sign a work permit so she could take a summer job at Hardee’s at age 14. Working as a waitress and later a bartender, she says the job taught her to talk with anyone—conversational skills that she uses today when interviewing candidates and getting to know her clients.
“I was with my kids the other day and we had a really great server, and I said, ‘Sometimes I really miss that,’" says Glynn, 53. “I guess that’s why I like what I do now—I just love hearing about people and connecting with them."
Write to Callum Borchers at callum.borchers@wsj.com
