Matt Crouse
CISO
Taco Bell
June 2020
For Matt Crouse, his team has always thrived in Taco Bell’s face-to-face culture. However, now that people can no longer drop by for meetings Crouse has had to pivot his leadership style in this new environment. In this interview, Crouse explores how he is embracing transparency and adaptability in his communication to lead his organization through the COVID-19 crisis.
How has your organization responded to the new environment forced upon all of us by COVID-19?
Like many organizations in the early weeks, we weren't certain what we were going to be dealing with. We responded early by doing a work from home test for the entire building. We wanted to make sure that we could do it and that we had the right remote collaboration tools available. It went so well that the following day we told everyone to come in, get their stuff, go home and that we would see them later.
Very quickly, on the heels of going remote, we found that as a highly distributed organization we had a lot of pockets within our organization where people were leveraging multiple remote collaboration and video sharing technologies. One of the first things that we did as a security team was provide guidance around what is approved, what is available to use and how people can mitigate some of the things they were reading in the press, like Zoom bombing. We also sent out information to the different brands, the franchisees and individual team members about their new risk profile now that they are working in a different environment.
Beyond the increased communication from the leadership team, I started having more formalized communication with my direct team. For a while we were having daily calls, but we have scaled back now. One thing I noticed was that in the early days, people were on calls all day long. I intentionally walked my communication back a little bit so they have time to walk their dog, make lunch or catch up on the work that had accumulated while they had been on calls. I want to make sure they have space to focus, but also make sure they are informed.
What innovations have been brought on by this crisis, and do you think they will impact the way your business operates in the future?
We are a public-facing retail business so there have been a lot of changes and innovation from this crisis, specifically in terms of how we interact with our customers. We are redefining what normal looks like and how we can maintain operations and work together during this. Since we are an essential service, we can continue operating with closed dining rooms. We have placed increased importance on drive-thru, mobile orders and curbside delivery.
On a smaller scale, we started sending out a daily security operations update to the Global CISO of our parent company Yum! Brands, which has now expanded to all of the Brands across our system. This gives our Global CISO an up-to-the-minute view into the state of security across our different Brands. Now if he gets a call from someone about something happening in one of the Brands, he is ready to have a conversation about what is going on. We didn’t have something like this before, but I think it is a very positive change that has come from the security team during the crisis.
“People First” has always been the foundation of everything we’ve done, and that includes being the safest place to eat and the safest place to work. With everything going on, we made the decision to close our dining rooms to ensure the safety of our customers and team members. That means more customers are using our drive throughs than ever before, and we are seeing an increase in the importance of our e-commerce and mobile platforms as people order ahead for pickup, or for delivery.
At Taco Bell, we have always been edgy in the way we grow those platforms; now it is more important than ever to remind people that we are here to meet them when they want, how they want. We want to speed our service up and make things as easy as possible, and so the e-commerce platforms are playing a vitally important role in what we do right now.
How are you growing as a leader through this? What leadership principles are carrying you through?
I think what is important to remember right now is that everyone across the country is in crisis mode and as leaders we are trying to figure out:
- How do we manage through this crisis?
- What are the real risks that we are facing?
- How can we effectively manage team member anxiety?
What is guiding me most is the fact that teams can be resilient; they will go to battle for you if you have their back. Transparency is always important, vitally so during this time of crisis.
There are so many questions, on so many different fronts, and while I don’t always have the answers, I always do what I can to share everything that I am able to share. If I don’t have the answer, I tell them, “I don't know right now, but I'll see what I can run down for you.” I want my team to know that I am in the trenches with them every day, that I have their back and that I am being as transparent as possible.
Anything else you’d like to add that we haven’t covered?
One thing I have been encouraging people to do is to continue to reach out to their network. Even if you don’t have an operational challenge you need their help with, sometimes you just need a break. So, it is important to call your buddy and vent. Everyone is saying, “We are all in this together,” and that really rings true for me.
The biggest thing is to make sure you don’t isolate yourself and spend all your time focused on the tactical problems in front of you. You need to take care of yourself, too, and part of that is reaching out and connecting on a personal level with your network outside of your organization and keeping that communication going.
Special thanks to Matt Crouse and Taco Bell.
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