What a Conversation I'll Never Forget Taught Me About Leading

Fellow steward,

One of the highlights of my life recently happened, and I'm honored to share it with you.

 For over three years now, I've been showing up every single week to write a journal entry. Most of the time, I'm learning from the all-time greats through the pages of a book (a one-way conversation, if you will).

 But recently, something incredible happened.

 One of my weekly journal entries summarizing Howard Behar's book, It’s Not About The Coffee, was forwarded to Howard directly.

 And I got to have a call with the man himself. 

 Howard Behar was the former president of Starbucks who helped lead the company alongside Howard Schultz from 28 stores to 16,000 stores. That's a heck of a resume. The dude knows what he's talking about.

 Here are my key takeaways for those of us in family business who can truly play the long game with long term people. (Howard's wisdom doesn't work at companies that are financial instruments for a couple of people to win.)

 “What made your leadership team so special together?” 

 (When Starbucks was on its meteoric rise, it had three leaders at the helm: Howard Schultz, Howard Behar, and Orin Smith. They were nicknamed “H2O.”)

 1.  No such thing as overcommunication.

Communication. No surprises. We supported each other in all aspects. The better our families did, the better we all did. We would do informal and formal meetings all the time. No surprises.

“How did you frame your approach to experience such incredible growth at Starbucks?”

2.  Keep the main thing the main thing.

First, grow people as human beings.
Second, grow to be better professionals.
Third, help people achieve their dreams.

 The rest will take care of itself. Howard is talking about building the gathering hall where we can have all the forms of wealth that we talk about, not just financial. Creating a place for mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

 (I’ll be sharing more of how we are trying to live into this at Century.)

"How did your role evolve as the organization grew?”

 3.  Focus changed for leadership.

I went from operating, operating, operating to values, values, values.

 As a company grows, it doesn't change. The company only changes if the leader changes the motives and intent. If the leaders change as the company grows, then absolutely the company changes. As Starbucks grew, Howard put his effort into the values to ensure the intent didn't change as more and more people were getting involved in helping lay the brick for the organization. More people. More reminders.

“How did you balance or approach the needs of your family as you grew Starbucks?”

4.  Integrate family and business more.

Work-life balance is fiction. It’s all about integration. Matt, bring your five-year-old daughter to work every once in a while and ask her what she thinks…

 If you want to build things that are great, it requires great effort and great amounts of time. I believe we all struggle with this. As family businesses, we can get really creative in how we integrate family and business. Howard's challenge around integration is making me think differently about how we can create more opportunities for this in our very seasonal construction business. (More to come on this...I yearn for us to integrate our kids into understanding the meaningful work we do in construction.)

 “How did you handle people and company growth?”

 5.  People and companies MUST grow together.

Love them coming in, and you love them coming out… Reviewing all the time if people are in the right seats…I didn’t want there to be surprises, but the company and the people must all be growing. I had to work really hard to keep growing with the company. All of us had to grow. 

 When a company is growing, so must the leaders. Howard stressed providing resources for leadership development. That's something I'm very excited about that we're starting to do at Century. We're in the early stages of building meaningful resources for professional development.

 Thank you for joining me on this journey of building enduring great companies where humans can gather to be the best versions of themselves. That can only happen at companies that are building for the long-term. That can only happen at companies that exist beyond making a pile of money.

Let's build great things with great people that are worth passing on.

 Onward,
Matt

 P.S. I'm grateful to you, Jayson, for sharing my note about one of my favorite books, It’s Not About The Coffee, that ultimately led to this incredible conversation with Howard! 🙂