None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.
—MOTHER TERESA
There is a pervasive myth about leadership—a falsehood often fed by the media, which portrays entrepreneurs and CEOs as larger-than-life geniuses who single-handedly create breakthrough technologies and great companies that change the world. We are led to believe that all of these great business accomplishments are achieved by almost superhuman individuals such as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sara Blakely, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Reed Hastings, Meg Whitman, Michael Dell, Anne Wojcicki, and Jack Ma. While each of these leaders is undoubtedly a brilliant and exceptionally talented entrepreneur, let’s be clear—they wouldn’t survive an audition for the Avengers or the Justice League. So how do they accomplish so much? At least part of the answer involves an important, underappreciated secret to transcending our individual talent level: a fantastic team. Working alongside each of these successful individuals is an amazing, talented group of people who both complement the strengths of the leader and compensate for their weaknesses.
In the real world, everything we accomplish is done with and through other people. As leaders, we are only as good as our teams. That may be a cliché, but it’s no less true because of it. While the leader of the team often gets too much credit for successes and too much blame for failures, it is the results of the collective that are ultimately being judged. Given that truth, attracting, hiring, inspiring, developing, and retaining the very best team possible is critical for the success of an organization and its leaders. For conscious leaders, the necessity to invest in and constantly evolve our teams is a priority that far outweighs the need to individually shine. A growing organization that creates great opportunities for talented people to excel has potential far beyond the genius, real or media-hyped, of any one person. Its opportunity set is larger, its runway is longer, its culture is healthier, and its future is brighter.
For a conscious leader, the health of the team around them is a never-ending project, a living, three-dimensional, ever-evolving puzzle that they are always working to complete. They know that the development of the team is not simply something they can outsource to the HR department. Yes, it may take help and support from others, but it also takes care and real engagement. When we say that a conscious leader is constantly evolving the team, we mean that they are living with that imperative—working to ensure that growth, positivity, synergy, and expansion are the primary experiences of the people around them, regardless of external circumstances. Is it healthy? Is it thriving? What does it need? Is it productive? How can I help it develop?
It sounds like a simple project: create a great team of smart, capable individuals and provide a culture in which they can develop and thrive. Okay, but how? This chapter is all about that question. And let’s start with a clarification: it’s not fundamentally about hiring and firing. If a leader thinks all of the answers to team performance are to be found in the realm of recruitment, the chances of a truly conscious culture developing in that organization are probably minimal. Nevertheless, it’s also true that the journey of a great team begins with good hiring decisions.
The crucial importance of good hiring decisions is well understood by Steve Hall, founder of the highly successful car dealership company Driversselect. In the process of building his business, Hall learned that the key to creating a thriving organizational culture is to invest significant time up front in the hiring process. Even when interviewing for entry-level positions, he now seeks to hire people who can eventually do jobs that are two or three positions up on the organization chart. For example, when hiring a receptionist, he looks for someone who could eventually become an office manager. When hiring a car lot attendant, he looks for someone who might one day become assistant controller. Then, once a new hire is brought on board, Hall invests in leadership training to develop his entry-level people. Even though this training is costly, his turnover rate is one-third the industry average, which more than compensates for the extra training expense.
When it comes to hiring, leaders have two options: they can seek new talent from outside the organization or they can promote existing talent from within. When weighing these choices, leaders should be aware that businesses are very similar to complex ecosystems. They have multiple interdependencies that coexist to create dynamic and evolving organizations. When one part of that system is disrupted, it can cause a chain reaction that impacts the entire system’s ability to thrive. Hiring new team members from outside the organization is one of those activities with tremendous disruptive potential—in both positive and negative directions.
Creating the right ratio of internal to external talent within an organization is a delicate exercise. Overdoing it on either side can have far-reaching consequences for a business and its culture. We need to strike a balance by providing our best people with opportunities for promotions while simultaneously recruiting top candidates from outside the organization to elevate the whole team’s potential. The continuity and stability of the team are critical, but so is occasionally shaking things up by bringing in an outside perspective. A leader must always be looking several steps ahead and asking: Does our internal talent line up? Do we need to add specific roles? These are the delicate decisions to evaluate.
Inevitably, there will be times when a leader needs to reach outside the organization to find new talent. Just don’t make that your default. It’s easy to fall in love with the shiny new hire who appears to be full of upside potential, with no obvious downsides. In that workplace romance, as with any infatuation, we can get caught up in our fantasy of what a new team member will be like—the ideal skill set, the perfect synergies, the imagined impact. But as in romance, fantasy is not a healthy basis on which to pursue a long-term relationship. It’s much better if we live in reality, and in reality, the best person for a role is often already working in the organization. He or she has already proven to be a good leader, earned the trust of the team, fits into the culture well, has developed the professional experience and skill set needed for the new role, and is ready to take on more responsibilities. Growing our internal talent by rewarding high-performers creates more opportunities for the next generation of leaders to step into new roles. Research has shown that internal hires tend to be more successful. And it creates tremendous internal goodwill. It shows how the company recognizes and appreciates hard work, commitment, competence, and potential.
Rewarding productive team members with promotions and a clear path upward in the organization is not just a practice for the executive suites. For example, one of the great things about Whole Foods is that a college degree isn’t a requirement for becoming an effective leader in the company. More than 90 percent of our store team leaders have been promoted to their positions from within the company. We have many people who have been with the company for twenty or more years, starting their career in one of our stores and working their way up to become a regional president or senior vice president. Every industry has different dynamics and career paths, but never underestimate the power of smart, effective internal leaders who already know your company and are committed to its success.
In order to better reap the rewards of promoting from within, a company needs to be willing to invest in training. In 2019, Amazon committed to providing skills training to 100,000 team members over six years, through a $700 million investment. Some companies skimp on training, afraid that they’ll simply be training their people to go and get a better job elsewhere. The computer service outfit Geek Squad turned this fear on its head. Understanding that most of their young technicians saw their job as a stepping-stone to further career achievement elsewhere, they set up an outplacement service for their senior team members. Geek Squad found that the payoff in trust and loyalty was well worth the investment.
So what is the best ratio for internal versus external hires? Every situation is different. At Whole Foods, we strive to fill about 75 percent of our leadership roles with internal candidates. If we dip too far below that ratio, our morale dips, too. At the same time, we also need to be careful about making too few external leadership hires, because it not only limits our intellectual capital, it also hinders our potential to revitalize the organizational culture with fresh perspectives. For many years, we tended not to hire leaders from the outside. In retrospect, I think that bias toward internal promotions ultimately meant that we were not always evolving our team as effectively as we could have been. It took a couple of decades to really learn that sometimes the very best people weren’t working for the company yet. Today we consciously work to keep the level of outside leadership hires from falling below 20 percent.
“Show me the money!” screams Cuba Gooding Jr. to Tom Cruise in a famous scene from the iconic 1996 movie Jerry Maguire.1 That phrase has gone on to become a signature cultural meme when it comes to negotiations of all types. It even became the name of a short-lived American game show. But despite the ascendancy of that phrase in the cultural lexicon, money is often overrated when it comes to compensation. Of course, paying a competitive market rate for talented leaders is important; nobody wants to feel like they’re being cheated or that their experience is being undervalued. But people who view financial compensation as their driving motivator—instead of more meaningful factors such as purpose and cultural fit—often don’t last long. More often than not, they’ll be looking for the next, higher-paid gig rather than staying around to really make a long-term contribution to the organization. There’s always going to be someone else willing to pay more if a person has a good résumé and track record, so we must look carefully at whether someone is passing through our organization just to upgrade their résumé until a better opportunity in the future comes along.
As we look at compensation, it is essential that internal and external compensation be both competitive in the marketplace and widely seen as fair. If we are paying external hires below the market rate, we’re probably going to have trouble recruiting the best people, because their reaction is likely to be “I like the company, but I can’t justify that kind of pay cut.” At the same time, if we pay people from outside the organization more than we are paying our existing team members, that’s going to create resentment. That’s why both internal and external pay equity is so critical.
One of the ways Whole Foods tries to achieve this is through wage transparency. This has been a hot topic for many years now, particularly when it comes to executive pay ratios and gender pay gaps, but it’s something we’ve practiced for decades. Total compensation for all team members companywide, including the company’s leadership team, is available to everyone in our company through our wage disclosure report. We want team members to have a clear line of sight into pay equity. It also empowers people to consult with leadership if they feel there is a lack of fairness. This, in turn, gives the company an opportunity to change and evolve potential inconsistencies, creates a sense of solidarity throughout the organization, and helps keep resentment and gossip about pay low.
Have you ever been “wowed” by someone in an interview because he or she had amazing charisma and an ability to captivate their audience? It’s a true gift. However, the reality is that often the most talented candidates don’t have it. That doesn’t mean that they won’t become a fantastic team member. Never overselect for presentation skills. Remember, you’re not hiring for the position of “good interviewee.” Go beyond your gut instinct. Take the time you need to get to know someone more deeply than initial impressions. In fact, that’s one of the many reasons we’re great believers in the power of multiple interviews, particularly a series of group interviews, when hiring and promoting. Finding the right fit can take time, reflection, conversation, and extended consideration. It might be easy for a candidate to charm one person with a blast of charisma during the hiring process, but that becomes far more difficult when there’s a group involved. We all have conscious and unconscious biases, but the collective wisdom and varied perspective that comes with a conscientious interview group makes it much harder for a candidate who isn’t a good fit to convince multiple people otherwise.
The person who’s responsible for the overall performance of the team should have the authority to make the final decision on who is hired, but it’s a consultative process that accounts for the collective feedback from the entire group. The worst decisions that people have made in hiring at Whole Foods have occurred when a leader made a unilateral decision by either avoiding doing a final group interview or disregarding concerns and feedback raised by the group.
There are several things we look for when considering the best candidate. Obviously being smart and having a high IQ is important, particularly if the role involves intellectually demanding work. But that’s not enough anymore. We also need to carefully evaluate:
Emotional intelligence: This is a characteristic that’s increasingly important, particularly in more complex organizational environments that are organized into teams. Team members need to be able to connect with people, listen well, and empathize with what others are feeling. Communication, brainstorming, collaboration, and sharing ideas is a day-to-day necessity, so people without this quality can prevent teams from fully flourishing and damage morale.
Character: Does this person have good ethical character? Are they fundamentally going to act with integrity? If not, it doesn’t matter how brilliant and capable someone is. The always wise Warren Buffett has said, “We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don’t have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you’re going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb.”2 He may have been partly joking, but there’s a lot of truth in his words! Integrity is not always easy to determine in a few interviews, but we should always be aware of its importance as we make decisions about new hires.
Cultural fit: Every organization has a culture, and many teams within an organization have subcultures. Don’t underestimate their power. If we hire someone who fundamentally is not aligned with and open to our culture, he or she will eventually fail. Just because someone has the relevant experience and was successful in another company in the same role doesn’t mean those skills will translate across the cultural divide. A team reacts to a bad cultural fit the way the body’s immune system reacts to what it perceives as harmful bacteria or viruses—it creates an immune response to repel the foreign invader. Of the sixteen senior executives that Whole Foods Market has hired from outside the company, only 50 percent were ultimately successful. Each, without exception, had a high IQ, an excellent résumé, strong references, and great work experience. The reason for the failure, in every instance, was poor cultural fit.
Once we’ve hired the right people for the team, the next challenge is to continue to develop a culture in which individuals and teams can grow and thrive. It’s hard to overestimate the power of culture in the success of the organization. One of our goals as conscious leaders is to create the absolute healthiest culture we can possibly create. “Healthy cultures everywhere” should be our motto, because we know creating a wholesome culture will help the business to flourish and help team members to reach their highest potentials. We’ll have lower turnover rates, lower training costs, and greater loyalty. Our customers will develop a true affection for the business and become its best marketers. Our stakeholders will benefit in all kinds of ways. When our culture is flourishing, the business synergizes at a much higher level. Everything functions better.
How, then, do we make our organizational culture healthy? It sounds obvious, but the most important first step is to make it a high priority. Too often, leaders take their organizational culture for granted and don’t focus much time or attention on it. An organizational culture is a bit like a garden—it takes careful tending to turn a patch of soil into an abundant, verdant, flowering, productive ecosystem. And if we neglect it, all kinds of toxic weeds will begin growing, which will eventually crowd out the healthy fruits and vegetables we want to harvest. A healthy culture doesn’t get built overnight, but the long-term rewards of cultivating one are enormous. We need to be vigilant in weeding out unhealthy aspects, while also making sure to implement processes and structures that lead to team member satisfaction, growth, and happiness. Our goal should be to build a culture of enjoyment, appreciation, and satisfaction, but also of hard work and productivity, one in which the values of development and growth become widely shared across the organization.
Of course, every team experiences highs and lows. An effective leader uses their emotional and cultural intelligence to understand the right decisions they need to make. At one moment, that might mean nudges, pushes, or even big changes; at another it might simply mean a supportive and appreciative “job well done.” The art of leading a team, like many things in life, involves interdependent polarities. (See “The Conscious Leader’s Tool Kit: The Art and Science of Polarities,” page 22, for more on this concept.) And one of the most important polarities for conscious leaders to keep in mind is challenge and support. Because challenging and supporting are both important modes of leadership, if we focus on only one side of this polarity, we will create a problematic imbalance. While the support side of this equation is anchored in patience and nurturing care for team members and their needs, the challenge side often involves pushing and pressing team members and even other stakeholders to put in the extra effort necessary to achieve the organization’s higher purpose.
Conscious leaders, in other words, must integrate concerns for both people and purpose so that both of these aspects of the organization can realize their full potential. Ruthlessly pursuing the purpose at all costs may temporarily lead to progress, but at the expense of people’s needs. Pampering team members without regard for external results may yield short-term gains in culture and satisfaction, but the purpose may languish. Conscious leadership entails the harmonization of this polarity. A conscious culture strides forward on the two legs of challenge and support. We must strive to act both as nurturing servants of our people and as courageous champions of our higher purpose.
Here are some suggested leadership practices for developing a truly conscious culture.
Make team member happiness a core value. Team members are not a “human resource” for the organization to exploit as it sees fit. Rather, they are “sources” of innovation, creativity, and productivity that need to be respected and supported. They are participants in the organization’s shared mission. When you make that shift in thinking, you start reimagining the kind of environment that you create. For example, conscious businesses such as Southwest Airlines and The Motley Fool make sure that their cultures are fun and enjoyable every day. That can mean many different things—it doesn’t have to be the conventional perks and foosball tables of millennial tech campuses. The most important thing is to put on your creative hat and consciously design happiness, fun, and goodwill into your work culture. Cultures that are fun have lower turnover rates and higher levels of productivity. Everyone benefits.
We have said this before, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it: team members want to know that they are valued, cared about, and appreciated. As conscious leaders focused on creating as healthy a culture as we possibly can, it is essential that we demonstrate our care and gratitude for the people we work with every single day.
Practice what you preach. Once we accept and embrace our role as leader, one of the most important things we can do is to always lead by example. People pay a lot more attention to what we do than to what we say. Whether we want to or not, we are going to be a role model, and everything we do will be observed by our team. Our actions will have an impact and ripple out far beyond us, first to the team and then to the larger organization. A good leader doesn’t shrink from that reality. Be respectful and caring to your team every day. If you disparage people, how can you possibly think you’ll maintain positive morale? Ultimately, we each get the team that we deserve. The quality of our character, our integrity, our sense of purpose, and our capacity to lead with love will all shape and impact our team. They will evolve and grow under our leadership, or the lack of those qualities will hold back their development.
At the same time, don’t let the need to lead by example encourage any kind of leadership pretense. Authenticity is especially important when it comes to leadership today. People can sniff out pretense quickly.
As leaders, it is very difficult to develop any team beyond our own level of consciousness. Our own level of development can provide an upward pull on those around us, but it can also act as a ceiling. This is one more reason why it is important that we practice the virtue of continuously learning and growing (see chapter 9).
Leader, know thyself. It’s no secret that the initial culture of an organization is usually created, unconsciously, by the original founders. Their strengths and weaknesses become the default character of the organizational culture. But over time, through greater self-awareness and by directly soliciting feedback from our team, we can come to better understand these dynamics. The more we’re aware of those things, the more effectively we’re able to build a team that compensates for those weaknesses, and that can make a huge difference in overall productivity.
When I look at Whole Foods Market, I see my strengths as a person and leader well represented, but the organization also mirrors back to me my weaknesses and the qualities I don’t love about myself. For example, I tend to be a very creative person who’s good at brainstorming and coming up with innovative solutions and new ideas. The shadow side of that strength, however, is that I frequently don’t pay enough attention to the details. One of the consequences is that Whole Foods has been highly innovative but too often hasn’t paid enough attention to all the operational details—especially in our first twenty years as a business. Over time, as I became more and more conscious of both my strengths and my weaknesses as a leader, I slowly but steadily developed a team that could compensate for my weaknesses. My executive team today is extremely good at thinking through structure and complex details while maintaining the innovative, entrepreneurial culture of Whole Foods. Over the years, this team has included many exceptional people, such as Glenda Flanagan, A. C. Gallo, Walter Robb, Jason Buechel, Sonya Gafsi Oblisk, Jim Sud, and Keith Manbeck.
Create an environment of safety and trust. “Google is not a conventional company. We don’t intend to become one.”3 This phrase appeared in the founders’ original letter to investors when the tech giant went public back in 2004. And Google has been true to its word. One of the characteristics of that independence is that when it wants to know the answer to a conundrum, it doesn’t rely on other people’s work or opinions. In 2012, when Google’s executives decided they needed to understand the most important attributes that make a team really work, they didn’t call up McKinsey or some other consulting firm for research or advice. No, they pursued the question themselves. Dubbed Project Aristotle—in recognition of the great philosopher’s phrase “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts”—the company’s research included an exhaustive study of 180 internal teams, along with all of the relevant internal research material and survey data they could find. They subjected that data to rigorous statistical models to determine the most critical factors for producing positive outcomes—measured both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Several of the key results were not exactly surprising. For example, we should hardly be shocked that they found that teams should have clear structure and transparent roles, responsibilities, and goals. Or that teams work best when there is a sense of being able to rely on the contributions of fellow team members. Still, several other findings don’t exactly jump off the page of your average MBA textbook. For example, the research found that two of the top five qualities that create successful teams were the ability to do work that is meaningful and the knowledge that that work has an impact. Meaning matters. Of course, not all work is meaningful, and not every form of meaningful work has a clear path to impact in the world. But combining those two is a powerful cocktail that inspires real team performance.
The number-one finding from Project Aristotle was particularly fascinating. The most important attribute of team performance was “psychological safety.” By that they meant a team culture in which people feel they can be vulnerable, take risks, ask questions, ask for help, bring up difficult issues, even make mistakes, and generally trust that the other members of the team will have their best interests at heart. That environment of real trust and mutual care is delicate, but it’s the fount of great performance. A leader’s job is to nurture that environment of trust and model it themselves—by being willing to take risks, ask tough questions, acknowledge mistakes, and put the wellbeing of the team above their own.
Provide clear goals and reviews. It’s critical to respect people’s ambition and desire to develop. What do they need to learn? What do they need to do to be promoted? If they are promoted, what would that next role be? What skills and attributes do they need to improve to better perform at that next level as the marketplace changes and evolves? Providing clearly defined career paths gives people something to strive for and an outlet for their ambitions and goals. If we don’t show our teams that we are invested in their professional development, we run the risk of losing our best people because they will become frustrated and see no future, ultimately leaving us with a pool of less talented people.
Job reviews are extremely important, yet many smaller organizations don’t do them. People need to receive consistent and candid feedback to know where they stand, where they are excelling, and which areas they need to further develop to become more successful. If we don’t have constructive and direct dialogue with our teams as part of job reviews, then we are doing members of the team and the organization a disservice. There’s frequently a disconnect between how a person perceives his or her work, leadership, and contribution and how colleagues and other leaders view those same things—hence the value of 360 reviews (which include feedback from their team, their peers, and their team leaders). Thanks to the holistic feedback loop these create, leaders conducting a 360 review are less likely to overlook issues and challenges, because consistent themes and feedback will become apparent.
360 reviews are also valuable in helping underperformers see that their struggles are often not with their leader but with the larger team. In other words, let’s say a team leader is providing candid, constructive feedback to a team member. That person might just rationalize it away: “I’m doing okay. They just don’t like me. It’s personal.” People begin to create a victim narrative about how they’re being misunderstood and unfairly treated. The 360 review can be a very powerful way to wake underperformers up, because the feedback comes from many directions. It can’t simply be rationalized away as one person’s prejudice. Over the years we’ve seen 360 reviews wake up many people who otherwise were content to stay asleep.
One of the best ways to create clear goals and inspire people to meet them is to use other successful organizations as benchmarks for excellence. Tom Gardner, CEO of The Motley Fool investment firm, a company that prides itself on having a lively, fun, and healthy culture, is a firm believer in “cultural benchmarking.” The Motley Fool employs a full-time team member whose job is to reach out to other companies to ask them what they’ve learned that they’d be willing to share. And as it turns out, leaders from other organizations are often eager to share their insights and best practices. Motley Fool is not hesitant to implement those ideas that fit.
Instigate a coaching culture. Hiring external coaches for the highest potential leaders in an organization is a growing trend, particularly in the tech industry. It can be an expensive investment, but in a large organization where the quality of the leadership can make a huge economic difference, it can be a worthwhile investment. Whole Foods only discovered the value of external leadership development programs in the past few years, and we have seen great success using the Stagen Leadership Academy, founded by Rand Stagen in Dallas. For some of our leaders who have struggled in specific areas, such as self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and communication skills, the improvement has been outstanding.
Anyone who wants to hear firsthand accounts of the power of this kind of coaching, involving some of the most respected leaders and companies of our time, should consider reading Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell. A legendary executive coach who passed away in 2016, Campbell counseled some of the most brilliant minds in business, including Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Sundar Pichai at Google; Steve Jobs at Apple; Brad Smith at Intuit; John Donahoe at eBay; Marissa Mayer at Yahoo; Dick Costolo at Twitter; Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook; and other well-known tech leaders. Even at the pinnacles of their careers, these legends were mentored and guided by Campbell, who built trusting relationships, helped inspire courage, and fostered personal growth in the best and most challenging times.
While external coaches can be invaluable, the focus on coaching need not be limited to that format. In fact, conscious leaders recognize that it is part of their own role to be a coach, and they work to encourage that recognition in every leader and team member within the organization. As executive coach and founder of Bluepoint Leadership Development Gregg Thompson writes in his insightful book The Master Coach, “Coaching is everyone’s business. The beauty of coaching is that it is not a role that is reserved for those with specialist knowledge or in positions of power . . . Any person in the organization can sit with another person and challenge them to lift their game, encourage them to see new possibilities, confront them with their own potential, affirm their many talents and remind them of how great it feels to do extraordinary work.”4 Thompson makes the crucial point that coaching is not about solving problems for other people; it is about creating a context in which people can solve their own problems. He advocates the creation of a “coaching culture” that transcends scheduled sessions and becomes an everyday feature of organizational life.
Value mentorship. Beyond any team leader’s responsibility to be a coach, there’s also tremendous value in formal mentorship programs. Amazon’s Technical Advisor (TA) program is a great example. Essentially, senior leaders in the company each take on a TA, who shadows them in everything they do for a year or more. Given an unprecedented amount of exposure to the day-to-day responsibilities of Amazon’s current executive leaders, TAs are Amazonians who are identified as having high potential as future leaders within the company. After their stint as a TA is completed, they are usually placed in an important leadership role somewhere else in the company.
At Whole Foods, I had an incredible mentor from age twenty-four to forty: my father, Bill Mackey. When I co-founded the company back in 1978, I had almost no experience in business, and I’d taken zero business classes in college. Fortunately for me, my father was a former professor of accounting at Rice University and had left teaching to work in business. He eventually became CEO of a public hospital management company, Lifemark, until it was sold in 1984 to a larger corporation. There is no doubt in my mind that Whole Foods would have failed in its earliest days if not for the mentorship of my father. For sixteen years, I never made an important business decision without consulting with him first. However, by the time I turned forty, I was ready to end the close mentorship with him and lead the company on my own. It was a difficult separation, and there was pain on both sides. However, it has ultimately proven to be a win-win-win solution—good for me, good for him, and good for Whole Foods. Mentorship from an older and more knowledgeable leader can prove to be an invaluable experience, but there also comes a point when it is time to move past the mentorship and step fully into one’s own power as a leader.
Former Campbell Soup Company CEO Denise Morrison credits her early success to finding the right mentors. Working at Nestlé in the 1980s, she sought out the company’s CEO, Alan MacDonald, to share the direct customer feedback she was hearing every day. And as she helped MacDonald connect with Nestlé’s customers, she also sought his advice on how she could excel. Cultivating this mentor relationship eventually resulted in MacDonald’s recommending Morrison for the promotion that transformed her career. Grateful for the mentors who had helped her along the way, when she became CEO Morrison “paid it forward” by regularly meeting with her female colleagues to help them manage their careers. As she explains, “I started the Camp Campbell program to mentor the next generation of female leaders and entrepreneurs to inspire thought leadership and foster creative collaboration . . . Everyone needs mentors and sponsors to achieve their goals and advance their careers.”5
Manage underperformers. No matter how well we hire, no matter how well we coach, no matter how much we invest in leadership development, every team is going to have people who underperform. The question is: What are we going to do about it?
First, it’s essential that clear and candid feedback be provided, both when people are doing well and when they’re challenged. People do far better with positive feedback, praise, and appreciation, so that should be the emphasis, but if we’re not also giving the necessary tough but constructive feedback, then we’ll be doing a disservice to our team and to the team members. People need to know if they are falling short and receive guidance on how to do better. Rand Stagen says it well: “When you withhold feedback, you are sabotaging the other person’s ability to succeed.”6 One of the mistakes that many leaders make is to sit on such feedback, avoiding a potentially unpleasant conversation while making silent judgments. Too often, they wait until the grievances and dissatisfaction grow to a breaking point and then they lose their temper.
After giving clear feedback, the second thing we need to do is give opportunities for the person to course-correct and help him or her to learn and grow. Some patience is required in these situations, because we need to give people a chance to act on what we’ve discussed. However, while patience is a virtue, such situations should never be an excuse for the leader to simply procrastinate in making a difficult decision about the team member’s future. Setting a deadline can be helpful. While it’s never easy, part of constantly evolving our team is removing people who are underperforming and holding the collective team back.
Removing someone from the team doesn’t necessarily mean firing them from the company. There can be other alternatives, depending on the reasons for the underperformance. A conscious leader takes the time to figure out what went wrong. Frequently, a person is underperforming because they’ve been promoted to a position that is simply beyond their abilities. They were successful and performing well in their previous role, which is why they were promoted in the first place. It is a terrible waste to terminate hardworking and loyal team members just because they were unsuccessfully promoted. It is far better to recycle them back to their previous position or a different one that’s a horizontal move. Give them a new opportunity to start fresh under a different leader and they may just flourish. One story illustrating this really stands out in my mind.
Way back in 1988, Mark Dixon was store team leader when we opened our Richardson store in Dallas—our seventh location. We knew that this new market was going to be a stretch for the company. Richardson was an affluent suburban location, but one with very little consciousness of natural or organic foods. The store started at an incredibly low sales volume—the lowest of any store we had ever opened—and it looked as though it was going to be a big mistake. Mark was really struggling. We gave him a couple of years to grow the store sales, but ultimately he was unsuccessful as store team leader, and the morale of the team members was poor. After two years of frustration, we made the decision to bring in a new leader with fresh ideas and high energy. However, we did not fire Mark from the company. Instead, he was demoted back to the same role he had occupied prior to his promotion. He took his demotion with the right attitude, which was “I understand that I wasn’t ready. What do I need to learn to get back to that next level?” He listened carefully to the feedback we gave him and learned from his failure.
The person who replaced Mark did a tremendous job, and sales at the Richardson store grew by more than 25 percent for ten consecutive years. It went from having the lowest sales in the company to becoming one of our top performers.
Mark, meanwhile, took all the necessary steps to grow as a leader. Not only did he become a store team leader again, but he became one of the very best that the company has ever had, and eventually successfully led three other stores. Within just a few years he was promoted to regional vice president and eventually president of our Southwest Region. Mark served in that role for more than ten years and was an incredibly valuable member of Whole Foods Market’s leadership team before he retired in 2017. He was inducted into the Whole Foods Hall of Fame in 2020, which is a very rare and greatly coveted honor within the company.
Of course, not every story has such a happy ending. Not everyone has the strength and humility to be demoted, learn from their mistakes, and go on to greater success in the future. Sometimes we need to remove people not only from their team but from the company.
Tough personnel decisions are a part of leadership that can’t be avoided. We must constantly evolve our team through how we hire, how we coach, how we develop our team, and also through how we remove people who cannot perform to our high standards. If we’re unwilling to do that, then we’re probably not going to reach our potential as leaders.
So how do we let people go? First, it should never be a surprise. If somebody is surprised they’re getting fired, then the leader has done a bad job giving feedback. Second, it should never come suddenly (unless there’s been some type of integrity breach or ethics violation).* Third, it should be done with compassion and encouragement for the future. In my personal experience, hardly anyone who has been failing and been given candid feedback is ever surprised. They knew it was coming. They are grateful for the opportunity, and we wish them well in their next job, wherever it is. It may be too much to hope that we’ll remain friends, but I’ve fired a number of people over the years with whom I have been able to stay on good terms. Panera founder and CEO Ron Shaich says he’s received thank-you notes over the years from people he’s fired. It may have been tough at the time, but in hindsight they learned from the hard truths and became better for it.
Build community. Humans thrive in community. We are tribal creatures, and there is nothing that soothes our souls like healthy connection. In today’s world, for better or worse, the organizations in which we work are a huge part of what passes for community. So let’s make them the best that we can! Of course, we can’t meet every human emotional need in a corporate or nonprofit setting, but we can create real forms of community. And to help facilitate the creation of closer bonds between colleagues, sometimes we need to get outside of our normal work settings. Perhaps it’s an outdoor activity, a leadership retreat, an off-site gathering, volunteering as a team to do community service, or even just spending time cooking and sharing a meal together. There’s something about being out in the world, away from the workplace—for example, sleeping in the same hotel, waking up, hiking, and then having breakfast together—that helps knit the bonds of community.
Brett Hurt, founder of the fast-growing Data.world, a B-Corp, encourages his team members to form interest groups within the company. These groups, which Data.world team members create spontaneously, without official permission, are known as “tribes.” Data.world’s “wakeboarding tribe” meets in the morning before work, their “cooking tribe” meets at lunch, and their “yoga tribe” gets together after work. There is a reason why the company has been rated one of the top places to work in the local region: the experience of community.
The most important thing to remember about building community is that it doesn’t have to take a lot of intensive control or effort. Humans have been doing it naturally for thousands of years! Just provide the right nudges and opportunities, and watch it begin to happen all by itself.