Having one of your people shot in an in-store robbery gone terribly wrong is not something you ever expect. But it happened to me!

It was my second week of training as the new Director of Operations of a very well-known QSR brand, and, like all new external hire leaders, I was going through the traditional brand operations orientation at a training store.

When I started that day, I had no idea that I was going to wind up outside the hospital’s intensive care unit waiting to hear how my manager was doing – a manager I had not met and whose name I heard that day for the first time. I hadn’t even “officially” taken over the region but there I was, standing outside the hospital emergency room hoping that this manager was going to make it and thinking about what I needed to do to make sure that this never happened again. Not on my watch!

Many things went wrong that day. There was a breach of safety, a bad guy decided to do the wrong thing and...