Corner Office: California Pizza Kitchen’s Chief, on 6 Steps to Leadership

Q. What was the first time you were somebody’s boss?

A. We’d have to go all the way back to when I was head of a bunch of umpires in Little League. We were all teenagers.

Q. Was that easy for you?

A. I’ve always taken control of situations. If you were to ask me why that is, I’m not really sure. I think it’s because I just want what I want and I feel like someone has to take the lead. I’ve always done that. I’ve been captain of every sports team I’ve ever been on. And as I’ve moved into new roles, failure has never been an option for me. It’s like I always have this person on my shoulder sort of invoking the fear factor, that I can’t fail.

Q. Where do you think that comes from?

A. Our family came to America from the Netherlands when I was young, and I had to work that much harder in any situation. I had to learn English. I had to try that much harder to be a normal kid. I went to a pretty affluent high school where the kids’ parents were doctors and lawyers, and I’m a cop’s kid. Also, I’ve always wanted to make a difference in people’s lives and in an organization.

Q. Tell me about some leadership lessons you’ve learned.

A. I worked at a poultry processing plant during college. I worked my way up, and became general manager of the plant when I was 21, overseeing 500 people. I had done pretty much every role in the operation. That was a big advantage — knowing and living what people do every day. That allows me to understand people and help them grow. I like to say that leadership is about getting people to exceed their own expectations. You can’t do that unless you understand what they do and how they do it, having lived some of it yourself.

Q. How do you feel your leadership style has evolved?

A. One thing I’ve learned over time is a lot more patience and tolerance. I used to always want things yesterday and would be very anxious about moving things along faster. But now I understand that tomorrow’s another day and that things will move along. I think more about whether something really matters and how it will make a difference, versus thinking that everything matters and everything makes a difference. It’s also much clearer to me now what the leadership qualities are that are most important to me.

Q. Can you elaborate?

A. I call them the six steps of leadership, surrounded by courage. Courage is an interesting one because any leadership role is about stepping out and having the courage to be different, because you have to be different to be a leader.

The first step is to be the very best that you can be, because you can’t lead anybody if you can’t lead yourself. So you have to be honest with yourself about your good qualities, your bad qualities and the things you need to work on.

The second thing is to dream, and dream big. What’s the world of possibilities for yourself and for your organization? You have to be able to say, “Here’s where I want to get to.” It’s not that you’ll ever necessarily get there, but if you don’t dream, you’ll never even get started.

The third is to lead with your heart first. Let people see that you’re human and that there’s a human side. Show people that you have compassion. It doesn’t mean that you don’t set expectations and standards. But if you lead with your heart, people figure out whether you’re genuine, whether you’re real.

The fourth thing can be the hardest for young leaders: to trust the people you lead. It’s about letting go, and allowing people to grow into leadership roles. At the end of the day, it’s O.K. if they make a mistake or if they fall down. Because as leaders, it’s your job to pick them back up.

The fifth is do the right thing, always. It’s easy to say. But the way I like to describe it is that if the rules say one thing, particularly as it relates to people, and you genuinely believe in that person, sometimes it takes courage to do the right thing and give that person a second chance. Because we’ve all made mistakes and somebody picked us up.

The sixth is that it’s ultimately about serving the people you lead. It’s about putting the cause before yourself, and a willingness to see it through. I developed this list over time because it’s the way I live each day. My job is to lead and to make a difference. I’m a catalyst for change, to create an environment where people can grow and prosper.

Q. Let’s shift to hiring. What questions do you ask?

A. I’ll ask unpredictable questions like, “What do you like to do for fun?” That gives you an insight into what people do with their time and what they value. But more than anything else, I hire for attitude. Skills can be learned. I’ll take attitude any day over a good skill set.

Q. How do you get insights into their attitude?

A. I’ll ask questions like: “What’s important to you? Why is it important?” Or I’ll push the résumé to the side and say: “Let’s just have a conversation about you. Tell me about yourself.” You learn a lot. If they start with where they were born, then that person is probably what I call a checklist manager who needs to be told what to do, compared to somebody who just says, “this is the type of person I am, and here’s what’s important to me.”

A lot of interviewing, quite frankly, is based on experience, gut, what makes sense, and what’s in their eyes. What are they feeling? How will they react? You know there will be tension, and there will be politics if you’re not careful. So will this person create that kind of environment or will they be part of the environment and help build a partnership? I’m a believer in partnerships, that we’re in it together. So you have to find people who will be collaborative. It doesn’t mean they can’t be strong leaders, Type A personalities. But will they act as a partner? I think you can get at that with the right kind of questions, and asking about their experiences in certain situations.

New Sbarro Pizza Recipe to Drive Chain’s Turnaround Plans

Executives at Sbarro, the chain ubiquitous at shopping malls and airports, are hoping to elevate their restaurants in consumers’ minds with a better quality of pizza.

Aided by some technological changes, the company will return to making tomato sauce fresh and shredding cheese in each restaurant, instead of using prepackaged ingredients. The reformulated pizza is intended to help transform Sbarro into a “fast casual” restaurant chain like Panera Bread and Qdoba, said James J. Greco, who became chief executive at the beginning of the year.

Such restaurants offer customers better food quality and specialization without full table service, thus falling somewhere between fast food, or what the industry calls quick service, and casual dining restaurants. Customers often can select the ingredients for, say, a basic item like a pizza or a sandwich, which is made in a few minutes and handed over a counter for a meal costing $8 to $15.

Several pizza chains that have emphasized quick service are making the transition to the fast-casual category, said Darren Tristano, executive vice president of Technomic, an industry consulting firm. Pizza Inn, which has 300 restaurants, recently started Pie Five Pizza, a fast-casual chain that bakes nine-inch pizzas “designed” by customers in five minutes. Naked Pizza of New Orleans and 800 Degree Pizza out of Los Angeles are other examples.

“Sbarro fits into the quick service category because of its price point and service format, where nothing is made to order,” Mr. Tristano said. “In malls and food courts, they’ve struggled during the recession, and in their stores in urban and suburban locations, they’re really up against much larger chains in the delivery space.”

A 56-year-old pizza chain founded in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Sbarro staggered into bankruptcy in April 2011 with more than $400 million of debt. Its sales, like those of many other restaurants, had slid during the recession as customers ate out less and prices rose for commodities like flour. It exited bankruptcy eight months later, after shedding 28 stores and securing a $35 million line of credit.

Now Apollo Global Management and more than two dozen other investors are banking on Mr. Greco to achieve the same kind of turnaround at Sbarro that he did in his last post, at Bruegger’s, the bagel chain. A private company, Sbarro said it had $650 million in worldwide sales in 2011, $420 million of which was in the United States.

“We have to change people’s perception of us,” Mr. Greco said over one of the company’s new cheese pizzas at its store north of Times Square. “We feel there’s no better way to do that than to get this pizza into as many mouths as possible as fast as we can.”

Thus, two vintage trucks are beginning a national tour, starting in New York and Los Angeles and working their way around the country, handing out free slices.

Mr. Greco faced a similar challenge at Bruegger’s, one of the many bagel chains that thrived during the bagel enthusiasm of the 1980s but suffered when consumer preferences changed. He added soups, wraps, salads and sandwiches to that menu and, while the stores still sell bagels, it is a place to have a light lunch today.

Bruegger’s was sold in 2011 to Groupe Le Duff, a French restaurant company that also owns Brioche Dorée, earning a hefty return for Sun Capital, the private equity firm that had hired Mr. Greco to fix it.

“He grew the brand and shifted it into a fast-casual place,” Mr. Tristano said. “He did a nice job of moving it more to a cafe.”

Since June, Sbarro has been testing a fast-casual format at 10 locations across the country. The updated restaurants offer pastas made to order in front of customers in 45 seconds in sauté pans on induction stovetops or in fast boilers sunk into countertops.

But the test has shown that pizza still drives Sbarro’s sales. Pizza accounted for almost half of sales in the test sites, according to Nation’s Restaurant News, while pasta generated just 6 percent.

For advice, Mr. Greco turned to a local pizza restaurant in New Haven, where he lives — though he would not divulge the name of the shop or its owner. The goal was to come up with a basic, Neapolitan-style pizza that could stand up to the local pizza wherever there is a Sbarro store. “Why can’t we do that?” Mr. Greco asked.

Along with changing ingredients, the chain is adding open-flame ovens to increase the “theater” of the experience as well as cut the time it takes to cook a pizza and reheat a slice.

To ensure consistency, the company long ago began making its tomato sauce and shredding its cheese in central locations and shipping it to restaurants.

Every pizza was the same — but every pizza did not taste as good as it could, said Anthony J. Missano, president of business development at Sbarro.

The company is now shipping whole peeled San Marzano tomatoes, which are put through a food mill as needed and made into a sauce with minimal ingredients at the restaurants.

Cheese is shipped in blocks and shredded on site as well. “People are much smarter about what they’re eating,” Mr. Missano said. “They have higher expectations of what they’re going to get when they go to a restaurant, and we’re going to give it to them with this new pizza.”

The next step in Sbarro’s turnaround will be to adjust its real estate mix. The company has about 1,000 stores, about 420 of which it owns; the rest are franchised. Four-fifths of them are in mall and airport food courts, where rents are high and it is easy for customers to move to a different counter.

Mr. Greco’s plan is to open new stores on street fronts, where the company has about 70 restaurants.

“It’s as if we are doing a jigsaw puzzle,” he said. “You dump out all the pieces on the table, sort through them and look at the picture on the box — except that instead of putting the pieces back together to form the picture, you have to make a new picture out of them.”