Senior Leadership Teams

5

Give Your Leadership Team the Structure It Needs to Work

As a kid playing high school football in Texas, Lloyd Hill learned early the importance of good teamwork. “I came to understand the power of teams,” he says, “and the fun they are.” So when Hill took the reins of Applebee’s, a rapidly growing Kansas City–based restaurant chain, he set out to recapture that power and fun “the way we played football in Texas.”

At the time Hill became CEO, Applebee’s, which had started as a small Midwestern chain of casual dining restaurants, had been growing rapidly and expanding geographically. But Hill, who has since become chairman of the board, knew that if it was to continue such growth, given the intense competition, he and his team would first have ...