38 Year Old Model still proves to be Successful for Motivating Employees
C.A.R.E.S. is an acronym for the "hot buttons" that a supervisor must push to get an employee to serve the customer and produce a profit for the company.


SURPRISE, AZ, January 16, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ -- A model built in 1972 by Don Lombardi, the Vice President of Human Resources for the Burger King Corporation at the time, was needed to motivate the employees to perform at a high level and support their new company marketing campaign of "Have It Your Way".

After visiting the Disney's training facility and discovering how they went beyond the traditional recruiting and training methods. Lombardi challenged his staff to come up with something that would motivate employees to deliver the service that was being promised by the new commercials.

"We looked at different motivation theories and latched on to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs." said Lombardi. We knew that the theory had 5 levels of needs. The question was how to apply the Maslow theory to what the customer wants and the company expects from its employees. "We first looked at the commercial itself for a clue and we found that the promise talked about affordable fast food delivered as you like it. We broke it down into 5 parts so as to link it with the Maslow theory and we came up with: product, quality, personalized service, timely delivery, and a real value. We knew what the company wanted from its employees and that was a "no brainer" to break into 5 parts: work, efficiency, loyalty, production, and profit."

Lombardi noted that after, we put all this "good stuff" on the white board, we discovered that we were still missing the links to connect the company wants to the customer wants. "We recognized that the link was the employee, and thanks to Maslow we knew the employee had needs. The trick was how to push the employee "hot buttons" to activate the links.

We found the answer by going beyond Maslow and pulling in the theories of some other behavioral scientists like Herzberg, Gellerman, Kay, McClennan, and Vince Lombardi. And that gave us the following: Spend time to get to know and recognize the employee basic needs; Educate the employee so as to build confidence; show Respect for the work that is being done; show and give Appreciation for a job well done; and Communicate goals and objectives.

The model was then put together and tested live in 12 restaurants in Detroit before being rolled out nation wide.

Since that time, Lombardi has moved on and started his own consulting firm and took the C.A.R.E.S. model with him and taught it to various business clients in a variety of industries. Lombardi states, "I am proud to report that after 38 years the application is still successful. It is a powerful model once you understand it and should be applied in any business that wants to recognize and maximize its human resources!"

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Donald Lombardi
Lombardi Associates
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Surprise, Arizona
United States 85374
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