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| W. Mark Bennett and Kevin Pennell of Thompson & Knight quoted in the Texas Lawyer newspaper Super Wise Me: How First Jobs in Fast Food Helped Lawyers Think Outside the Box |
| July 14, 2008 |
Recognize hard work. Pay attention to detail. Treat everyone with respect.
These are some of the tenets Alex Gonzales follows every day in his role as the managing shareholder of Winstead's Austin office. They've contributed to his success as a law firm leader. They've guided his relationships with clients, colleagues and co-workers. And they're among the many lessons he learned from his very first job - at McDonald's.
"I was 16. It was my first real job other than delivering newspapers," says Gonzales, 55. He started working behind the counter at a Golden Arches in his hometown of Killeen and ended up staying with the franchise owner, Austin-based Haljohn Inc., for a decade.
A manager by the time he was 19, Gonzales worked full time while attending college (he took evening classes) and eventually rose to become a regional training manager. "If there was a management issue at a given restaurant, I would go there for nine months or 10 months, however long it took to turn it around," he says.
In his McDonald's management arsenal? "Attention to detail, learning that everyone is important - the customer is certainly important, but so are the young people who run the counter. If they don't do their job properly, people won't come back," he says. "And if the maintenance man doesn't do his job properly, you're hosed."
Gonzales, who left McDonald's to join the U.S. Navy before going to law school, finds these lessons helpful even today. "Going back to everyone's important; that's a lesson that's stuck with me for a long time," he says. "As managing shareholder of this office, I try to have the same approach. Whether it's staff or shareholders, what I've found is that when the work environment is such that everyone gets treated with respect, that's a good environment for shareholders, for associates and support staff - it's just a good place to work. You get more work done and people are more motivated."
Gonzales isn't the only Texas lawyer to look back and realize that an early gig with a fast-food restaurant - usually while in school - delivered life lessons with lasting merits. Even the fast-food industry acknowledges that there's nothing flippant about the burger-flipping experience.
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Kevin Pennell says he gained insight into the dynamics of friendship during his year-and-a-half at Baskin Robbins, a job he began when he was just 14 years old.
"The people you work with, you can develop a friendship with them that you don't have with people you just hang out with," says Pennell, an associate with the Houston office of Thompson & Knight. "If I am late for my shift, my friend has to pick up the slack, and if I'm late, that puts extra responsibility on me, so there's a mutual respect that develops when everyone does their job that can lead to lasting friendships."
Speaking, however, wasn't part of the Showtime Pizza job description for W. Mark Bennett, now a partner in the Dallas office of Thompson & Knight. That's because he spent the summer of 1989, when he was between high school and college, working the Arlington restaurant's birthday party shift - inside a giant dog costume.
"It was a very large, very brown hairy dog wearing I believe shorts and a shirt," Bennett recalls of the character suit that was the restaurant chain's mascot.
"There was a whole dance we had to do for the birthday party. I had to pretend to sing a birthday song. It was a very interesting experience - the uniform was actually very hot as well - but I was 17 and got free video games and pizza, so what else could you ask for?"
Bennett couldn't have known it at the time, and certainly he wasn't asking for it, but he now believes his stint as the Showtime Pizza dog provided him with an invaluable foundation for developing nonverbal communication and evaluation skills. They're skills that come in quite handy today, he says.
"One of the job requirements was that you had to be able to sense someone who is scared, to read their face through a big furry mask," he says. "When you're walking out and you could see the little kid whose birthday it was, you learned how to read a face really fast to know whether they were going to run and hide or run and hug, and now that's part of my job - to read people, to give clients the best advice we can based on instincts."
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