Blogocentric Formulations

Getting to the top by starting at the bottom

There was an article in Fortune Magazine's website today titled, "Starbucks new CEO reveals his favorite coffee order after spending 6 months working side by side with baristas  " that caught my attention. Not because I particularly care what Starbucks' new CEO Laxman Narasimhan's favorite drink off the Starbucks menu is (spoiler alert: it's a Doppio Espresso Macchiato with hot skim milk on the side), but because the other part of that title caught my attention. He's allegedly spent six months working side-by-side with Starbucks baristas at their stores.

Apparently, this was the deal:

Narasimhan honed his varied taste through the 40 hours he spent training—and six months he spent working—as a barista alongside Starbucks partners while gearing up for the CEO gig.

And while some Starbucks employees pointed out on social media that they don't need the CEO of a coffee chain with just under 500,000 employees across nearly 36,000 locations to learn how to make lattes as much as learn how to solve grander-scale corporate issues like paying a living wage, unionization efforts, etc., I can't help but think while that may be true, spending a substantive amount of time in the trenches with employees is actually a great use of a C-suite executive's time when he's first starting the job, to better understand the good and bad elements of the public-facing aspect of the company. Of course, if it's just a PR stunt or a token amount of time (a lot of CEOs will spend, like, one day every so often with the rank-and-file for a photo op or bragging rights), that's different... but 40 hours of training followed by six months working in stores (although no word if it was full-time or not) is a real effort to get to know your employees' day-to-day successes, struggles, and concerns.

I kind of wish this practice was required of all mid-to-senior level executives. Before starting a job, you should spent a significant amount of time learning about the rungs in the ladder below you and how they contribute to your job. I'm in a position now where I'm volunteering in a fairly high-level position at our small church (President of the Board of its nonprofit community development organization, and Director of Operations for the church itself), and I couldn't imagine hiring someone beneath me to do a job that I wasn't familiar with. Obviously there's a certain amount of tradeoff (it's hard to, say, learn an entire accounting system just so you can process payroll for a few weeks... or to learn how to send all-organization emails and maintain the organization's social media presence if that's not a core bit of knowledge that will be useful later), but actually getting to know what your employees' day-to-day experience is like is critical.

At my day job, it's incredibly stratified. Within my own business unit of Marvel, which is much better than Disney as a whole, there are still situations where direct supervisors don't actually know what their direct reports do, and wouldn't be able to cover for even a day if something happened and someone was out. At Disney, there are some departments where supervisors only speak to their direct reports once a year (for their annual performance reviews), and go years without speaking to someone two levels below them. To me, that's a less than ideal way to run an organization, so I'm always happy to see articles like this where some new CEO or other higher up is taking the time to get to know their business on the ground level. That feels like time well spent and relationships well cultivated.