Taco Bell CEO on success recipe: ‘Don’t try to be a black belt at everything’

Taco Bell CEO Sean Tresvant said a manager’s strength lies in admitting what they don’t know rather than pretending to be a jack of all trades.
Tresvant, the first black CEO of the food chain, held executive roles previously at Nike and Sports Illustrated. He became Taco Bell’s CEO in in January, after just three years at the Yum! Brands chain.
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“When I transitioned from being the chief brand officer to the CEO, some great advice I got was, don’t try to be a black belt in everything,” Tresvant said on a LinkedIn’s podcast ‘This Is Working With Daniel Roth’.
As a first-time CEO with primarily a marketing background, this was the “biggest surprise” during his transition to leadership, he said.
“Be a black belt in marketing and be a brown belt in everything else,” he added.
He emphasizes on the importance of admitting you don’t know everything first, and then reaching out to those who do. Afterwards, it’s all about “ask[ing] the right questions” and doing all that you can to “be able to support your team.”
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Taking an example, “I understand I’m not a CFO, but I have a great CFO who can lead the business,” he said.
Tresvant said that teams generally suffer when leaders “try to be everything to everybody and try to be a little bit too micro and don’t empower their teams to lead.”
He isn’t alone with this view. A Fortune report states that Beth Ford, the CEO of Land O’Lakes and Calvin Butler, CEO of Exelon both echoed similar views.
Another reason why this approach works better in the long run is that micromanaging usually tends to backfire in the long run, draining employee morale, leaving them feeling disempowered, while also wasting the manager’s own time and energy at the same time, according to psychologist Mark Travers in Forbes.
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