8
PARTNER TO ADVANCE TOGETHER
Once you’ve made frontline leadership the norm, you’ll have an agile, innovative, aligned company, composed of purposeful and inclusive leaders at every level. This presents a new and exciting opportunity. You can leverage all of those empowered employees to enter into even greater, mutually rewarding partnerships, especially with two of the key partners introduced in Chapter 2, your customers and your community. I’ve reserved this last chapter to take a deeper dive into partnering with these groups because the strength of your partnerships with them will determine both your competitive advantage and the overall impact your company can make. Managed correctly, these partnerships can become your company’s greatest competitive advantage. If neglected, they can prove ruinous.
Partner with Customers
The true indicator of sustainable success in the turbulent twenty-first century is not how well a company navigates change but how well it helps its customers navigate change. Customers don’t need vendors—they need partners. Consider that the uncertainty and discomfort evolving technology creates for your internal operations also causes the same uncertainty and discomfort for your customers. And one of the greatest fears behind uncertainty is the idea of having to face it alone.
Imagine what would be possible if you begin to think of your customers as partners. What would be possible if, together, you survey the landscape, collaborate to identify their key needs, and then move forward in lockstep. Not only can you close any gaps in service, you can prevent new gaps from opening—gaps that otherwise could be exploited by a lithe and lean startup.
A good example of this is, while leading Aviall, I attended an industry air show where customers, suppliers, and other industry partners met to discuss current and future concerns and opportunities. We had just completed a major IT systems upgrade, and we were still transitioning to a new set of processes. I had a couple of meetings with customers to discuss their current needs and future opportunities, but the only thing everyone wanted to talk about was how much of a headache Aviall’s new processes had become. While the IT upgrade was essential, we hadn’t leveraged our existing partnerships with our customers well enough to ensure that our change didn’t impact their operations. Had we put in place a stronger, more proactive partnership, we could have collaborated with our customers, refining processes and testing with them throughout the design and implementation of the new system, minimizing their inconvenience. That was a long year. Although our business declined somewhat, we didn’t lose any customers in the long run and recovered the next year. We managed, but it was the exact kind of gap that an opportunistic competitor could have used to lure out customers away.
Strong partnerships with customers depend on two keys:
• Connecting customer insights to action
• Adapting to change together
Connecting Customer Insights to Action
In the first seven or eight years of my career, at Pratt & Whitney and at Honeywell, I experienced firsthand how difficult it can be for a frontline employee to foster an open and ongoing dialogue with customers. When I worked in back-office operations, I was rarely exposed to customers. Those of us in the back office relied on the front-facing departments, like sales and customer service, for feedback. But it took months to get information from customers through the sales team to us, and even then, it wasn’t a dialogue. We received survey results or anecdotal information filtered through a single person’s lens, which meant we never had a chance to ask follow-up questions or gain a deeper understanding firsthand.
To be able to innovate, solve problems, and provide better solutions to the customers identified, I needed to actually know what they thought. We all did. Of course, connecting each employee to each customer is a complicated, if not impossible, task. The best way to do this efficiently is to simplify communication as much as possible by looking for any overlap in customer concerns that may point to a process issue that you can address by sharing insights with teams engaged in that process. The next step is to encourage deeper employee-customer connections.
Look for Overlap in Customer Concerns
At Honeywell, many of our customers expressed concern over the same key issues. A major one was that they struggled to keep track of the shifting international regulatory environment. Armed with this knowledge, we created a group to monitor new regulations that would affect the industry. Whenever we detected a shift, we informed our customers and offered a well-thought-out solution to any issues the new regulation might cause. In doing so, we saved our customers resources that would have gone toward looking for a solution we had already identified. This also served to further communication with all our customers, which we used as a foundation to obtain greater one-on-one engagement and create specialized initiatives.
It is important to note that in my experience, the vast majority of customer complaints can be traced, not to a failure from one specific employee but to a gap or breakdown in processes. This was obviously the case in this example, as we didn’t have a mechanism in place to track regulatory changes. Even so, in the old top-down model, some managers might have had the inclination to find someone to blame for this lack of communication, maybe getting frustrated that their customer-facing employees weren’t taking the initiative to research the regulations and share the findings with our customers. Those managers might believe that demanding such a degree of foresight raises expectations and performance from employees.
While this logic seems compelling, it often does more harm than good. High performance comes from a combination of high expectations and support, not high expectations and blame. Fault-finding prevents an open, inclusive, and trusting environment. For this reason, I always first look for a process improvement that can resolve a customer issue, before blaming a team member, even in situations where it seems like someone clearly dropped the ball. Often, that localized mistake is a symptom of a larger operational disease.
Encourage Deeper Employee–Customer Connections
For a large company to respond to the voice of the customer, it must cover as many gaps in customer relationships as possible. The best people to fill those gaps are the ones who are in the best position to see them: frontline leaders. Encourage every employee to connect with customers, and lead by example, by making sure you spend time with customers every week. Then support your employees’ efforts with a robust baseline program that connects employees at each level of the organization to the customer, using tools like customer spotlights—during which a customer comes to speak with the executive team and tour a facility—and pointed, topic-specific surveys to shed light on why a customer chooses you over a competitor. That said, even the best customer relationship management system will have gaps. But if you have a cohort of frontline leaders who hold the expectation that everyone will focus on the voice of the customer, they will find novel ways to engage without guidance from above.
One powerful example comes from my time at Aviall. A role model for fronline leadership named J.R. Hoffman noticed that the employees on his team responsible for quality assurance had never seen a customer in action. So Hoffman booked a bus to take 20 employees to an aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul shop. There, the employees met the people who worked on the planes and helicopters that used Aviall’s parts. They got to see the aircraft in action. They heard about times these aircraft had been used to evacuate people during a hurricane and to deliver relief during floods. One aircraft out of commission could mean lives lost. That meeting did more than open a dialogue between the people who use our products and the people who supply them, as each employee left inspired to improve his or her performance and find new ways to innovate.
A key note that underscores the importance of empowering your employees, Hoffman didn’t bring this program up with the executive team until after the first test. When he did, we loved it, and gave all the support we could to expand it. Hoffman now runs Customer Connect, a large, companywide project that brings employees to the field to interact with customers. His initiative changed how the entire company operates, and it only happened because he had the freedom to execute it. In the old model of top-down leadership, Hoffman might have been punished for executing his plan without prior approval, or may have lost time trying (and even failing) to sell it to upper management before implementation. He only felt comfortable doing what he did because he knew that even if he failed, we would have appreciated his effort because it aligned directly with our purpose and values—focusing on customers and investing in our employees.
To help programs like this be effective, make sure your employees know how to communicate and engage. Two pillars foundational to successful partnerships that employees can build their communication strategies on are:
• Practicing empathy
• Aligning expectations
Practicing Empathy
The most advanced customer relations processes are useless if you fail to listen to what customers say and to empathize with their experience. On the other hand, doing so will help you respond to their needs and allow you to build meaningful partnerships. For instance, at Honeywell, a recently hired senior leader at one of our customers stopped by to establish a relationship. He skipped the pleasantries and launched into a list of problems that his company had with us. Rather than become defensive, I sat and listened, for nearly an hour. When he finished, I told him that I needed to go into the back office to get some data and gain some perspective on what he was talking about. He was so agitated that he followed me, repeating his complaints the whole time.
I finally helped him calm down enough to take a couple of steps back and establish a dialogue. I saw right away that he was operating under immense pressure. During our dialogue it became clear that his stress was compounded by the fact that his boss had sent him to Honeywell without a specific goal in mind, only to get some sort of general improvement from us. Initially, he’d responded to all of this uncertainty by attacking perceived issues, but as we talked, we were able to identify a couple of specific areas where we could improve, and I promised him results. This was the start of a fruitful partnership, but it never would have happened if I hadn’t taken the time to ask questions, listen deeply to his replies, and empathize with his situation.
Listening and empathy should be the guiding principles of all communication with customers, and if company leadership sets that expectation and models that behavior, then everyone else will follow. A good place to start is with an exercise popularized by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who includes an empty chair in each meeting to represent the customer. Here are a few other ideas: start or end meetings with a quote from a customer, post pictures or videos of customers in action at your facilities, and bring customers in to share at your town hall meetings. The more you can help your employees see customers and listen to their real experiences, needs, and concerns, the easier it will be to build empathy and connection and reinforce your purpose as a company.
Aligning Expectations
Trust and transparency buttress any successful dialogue, and one of the best ways to develop both is to make sure that your customers’ expectations are aligned with the services you provide. This came up frequently during my time at Honeywell. For example, we had an instance when our customers had a different definition of success than we did regarding delivery of our products to their warehouses. We measured an order being fulfilled when it shipped from our dock, but customers measured order fulfillment based on when it arrived at their docks. That disconnect caused customers to believe that we’d failed to fulfill their orders on time, while we saw the same information and thought the opposite. When we looked at the numbers, it appeared to us that we’d filled 99 percent of our orders on time, while customers looked at the same numbers and thought only 60 percent had been fulfilled on time.
The solution was to develop an understanding of the disconnect, agree on a scorecard we both would use to track and share performance, and plan a transition to the new process that required change from both teams. Once we did this, we shared information monthly to validate our performance and address any issues. As we closed the performance gap, we used those monthly meetings to discuss other improvements we could make in our service. This is a great example of how collaborating with a customer on one issue can spill over to other process improvements and open new growth opportunities.
Sometimes, a company’s track record of excellence can set the bar so impossibly high that it throws all expectations out of alignment. For example, at Aviall, we went through a period of relatively slow business. As a result, during that period we filled our orders in half the usual time required. When business picked up, our deliveries returned to the previous turnaround times.
Some customers perceived this as a drop in performance, even though we’d met the terms of the contract. Since customers had become accustomed to the faster speed, they had adjusted their expectations accordingly and started to rebuild their own processes around them. This, obviously, upset some of our customers and jeopardized our partnership and our ability to work together. Once we explained to them that the elevated service that they’d received was the result of doing our best to overdeliver whenever possible, but that their expectations should remain at the standard of service we’d agreed to in our terms, we were able to reset expectations and rebuild the relationships. It is this sort of communication that provides the degree of trust necessary to create an open, fruitful dialogue and partnership with your customers.
Adapt to Change Together
Once you’ve established a strong dialogue with your customers and empowered your frontline leaders, you can enter into a deeper level of partnership by codeveloping innovation with your customers. In the traditional, or “waterfall,” method of developing new products or technology, a company gathers information, takes the requirements into a backroom, and unilaterally develops a solution over several months or years. Although that may have worked in the past, the pace of change today renders that process irrelevant. With customer codevelopment, you work with your customers from the outset to develop new solutions and improved responses to the issues that they face.
At Aviall, we did this by creating a codevelopment lab called Innovation Applied. We invited our customers to come, share their concerns, and then give us input on the best way to solve these issues. We then developed a proof of concept and brought our early work back to the customers for feedback. By incorporating the customers into the iterative process, we were able to deliver more value while minimizing rework and ensuring that whatever solution we landed on would still serve their needs.
To expand upon an earlier example, the software we developed at Aviall to track the storage and handling information for the chemicals involved in airplane maintenance (discussed in Chapter 6) went through our Innovation Applied Lab. We asked several airlines to explain how they used and tracked chemicals, what their biggest pain points were, and what sort of software solution would help them the most. Then we used the expertise of our frontline employees to populate the software with all the relevant information about the chemicals and shape a solution that met our customers’ most important needs. This is customer codevelopment—combining our frontline workers’ knowledge with our customers’ know-how to develop an elegant, simple solution to a complex problem.
A remarkable aspect of this project was that it brought together direct competitors in the industry. They all had the same problem—handling chemicals—and we encouraged them to work together and brainstorm solutions with us. They were willing to do so because none of these airlines differentiated themselves in the market by how they handled chemicals. Of course, there are still many conversations that are best managed one-on-one with a customer. But when you can get multiple perspectives from the same industry, then you can develop truly comprehensive, collaborative solutions.
Communicating directly with customers in this way can help you develop better, smarter products and stay ahead of market shifts. But it offers other benefits: because we went to such lengths to provide more value to our customers, they returned the favor. The customers who participated in the Innovation Applied Lab became advocates for our company and our approach to serving them. They told their peers about their experience with us and the work we’d done to tailor our offerings to their needs. We’d acted as an extension of their organization, and, in turn, they acted as an extension of ours. Through this, we both grew, despite changes and challenges within our industries. That’s the power of partnership.
Partner with Communities
I grew up in the small, blue-collar town of Brockport, New York. My mom worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s office, and my dad was a union electrical worker. We knew everybody in my neighborhood. Many came to the doctor my mom worked for, had kids I went to school with, and shopped at the same stores. Every weekend, my parents helped neighbors with whatever project they were working on, whether it was cutting down trees or repairing a light in their house. The kids would run around the neighborhood, more or less given free rein, because every other parent in the community knew who we were and were looking out for us.
Yet in the twenty-first century, those tight-knit communities are fewer and harder to find. While a myriad of factors have contributed to the dissolution of American communities, most companies can address one major factor: the tilt toward a myopic focus on shareholder value. This focus has led companies to strip community engagement programs from their budgets. But those programs provide vital support to almost everyone who comes into contact with the company. They make communities stronger and more resilient, and, more often than not, those community engagement programs even pay dividends.
Beyond that, everyone (including every organization) has a moral obligation to make our world a better place. I wrote this book in the summer of 2020, a transformative time for me. I took a voluntary furlough during the COVID-19 crisis. That furlough gave me something I don’t think I’ve had since college, if ever: two uninterrupted weeks to just think, read, and reflect. During those two weeks, the protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd started, and that year’s great reckoning with racism in America broke out.
It was a turbulent time, but also a hopeful one. The country engaged in a lot of amazing, constructive dialogue. It inspired me to reflect on what I love most about this America—the promise that people have the freedom to improve their situation. Yet, in many ways, we have failed to live up to that golden promise, especially to the Black community, but also to many others. Several communities, and the people within them, face unfair and often insurmountable barriers. Contemplating all this, I thought back to the community I grew up in, with its powerful and wide-ranging support system. I searched for ways to make a tangible, positive impact in the world. And that’s how I landed on this idea: we must partner with and invest in our communities as the fundamental building block of a strong society. It is the only way to truly build a culture of inclusion and to confront the challenges we face. In short, companies need to leverage their resources—their money, their influence, and especially their frontline leaders—to become community leaders.
A community leader is a person or an organization that recognizes that the strength of our country comes from its diversity. A community leader doesn’t operate through hierarchies or dicta, but lets the needs and voices of the community lead the way. Thus, to foster effective partnerships with communities, your company needs to focus on two priorities:
• Be transparent about what you stand for beyond the walls of your company.
• Invest in communities to promote the common good.
Be Transparent About What Your Company Stands For
Millennials and “zoomers” (members of Generation Z) care far more than previous generations did about making an impact on issues that matter to them. This might have something to do with the fact that they grew up with the internet and had access to boundless information about the inequalities in the world. This also might be because so many of the problems we face—climate change, lack of sustainability, deteriorating infrastructure—will affect them the most. These generations know well the ills of the world, and they want to do their part to fix them. Even though we’ve made significant improvements in many areas, such as reducing poverty and improving health, there’s more information and visibility than ever before on the significant opportunity in front of us to do more. Because of all this, if a company wants to attract and retain top young talent, it must emphasize what it stands for by operating in complete alignment with its values. It must prioritize working to make a positive impact, not just to its bottom line but to the world.
The days where the ends (even the best-intentioned ones) justified the means are over. To demonstrate what you stand for through action, you must:
• Put social issues on the agenda.
• Empower your employees to partner with communities.
• Organize companywide engagement to take meaningful, measurable action.
Put Social Issues on the Agenda
In the aftermath of the 2020 wave of Black Lives Matter protests, several large companies released statements and ads touting their commitment to social justice. While these statements represented a great first step, raised awareness, and showed solidarity, they alone do little to change the material reality of disadvantaged populations. To publish an ad and not back it up with action will only hurt a company’s image over time. For a company to truly align with its values, it needs to work toward real change. Not only will this make a positive impact, it will also foster goodwill and trust—with customers and the general public. On the other hand, the public will hold companies accountable for any failure to live up to their stated ideals.
One simple, yet profound, change that you can make to ensure that your company puts its values into action and strives toward real progress is to add social impact to whatever scorecard or framework you use to evaluate success. I did that when I founded SUMMi7, by adding social impact to a framework we use called the balanced scorecard. This is the method that guides our entire agenda. It’s how we set goals, how we develop our long-term strategy, and how we decide what our next move will be. With social impact now on our scorecard, we consider every potential decision through the lens of how it will impact the community. We can avoid choices that might do harm, and steer toward partnerships, decisions, and investments that will improve overall quality of life. And, because we discuss our scorecard in nearly every meeting, our social impact is now part of our daily conversations. This constant focus has a multiplier effect on the amount of good we can do, as we continuously think of new ways to make a difference.
Empower Employees to Build Community Partnerships
The engaged, passionate workers of the twenty-first century can act as potent agents of change. All the company has to do is support them. One of the most effective ways to do this is to provide the infrastructure and funding to affinity/interest groups that employees can use to coordinate action, both internally and externally. At Aviall, we had affinity groups for Black, Asian American, and LGBTQ+ communities, among others. Many of my colleagues cited these groups as their most cherished sources of support and as the conduits that helped them contribute the most to society. This makes sense—each affinity group celebrates a specific part of an employee’s identity, and gives that employee an outlet to engage in meaningful work within those communities. With this support, people feel comfortable showing up in a more authentic way. They don’t feel like they need to hide aspects of their identity. They understand that the company they work for cares about the same communities they do. Few things fuel performance as much as a sense of belonging and the freedom to show up authentically, and there are few motivators more powerful than a deep connection to purpose and meaning.
These affinity groups also support an inclusive atmosphere. The Black affinity group isn’t just open to Black employees, nor is the LGBTQ+ group open only to LGBTQ+ employees. Each of these groups welcomes members from any background. This fosters deeper understanding among an entire workforce. People come together to learn about the unique challenges facing specific groups and support their coworkers with their advocacy. Simple engagement on this level has tremendous power. The most virulent prejudice comes from an inability to empathize with other people. Programs like these break down the barriers that keep people ignorant of other cultures’ perspectives and challenges.
It might seem like a small thing—having lunches with employees from different backgrounds or a few community service projects—but it adds up. Millions of people work for Fortune 1000 companies. If we can turn our workplaces into spaces that promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and understanding, it will go a long way toward building a society that lives up to the promise of freedom for all.
The positive impact of affinity groups within your organization can be multiplied when you bring these diverse perspectives together to work on a specific issue. In my opinion, the best way to solve the major problems in the twenty-first century is through intercommunity coalitions. The most pressing problems are also the most complex—requiring more imaginative and large-scale solutions and coordinated efforts across many different countries. For example, global warming cannot be tackled without a coalition of major international stakeholders. That sort of macro-level coalition building is the final frontier of leadership, and it’s dizzyingly complicated. But it will also never be successful without micro-level efforts to foster understanding among diverse groups so that we can attack problems together.
Not only do these affinity groups improve the net social impact of the company, they do it in the most effective way possible. Employees and frontline workers are embedded in their communities, so they often have a direct connection to the problems they’re trying to solve, and they’re the best people to empower to develop a solution.
During my time at Aviall, this sort of frontline engagement made up the vast majority of our community programs. Many of our frontline managers regularly coordinated half days on Fridays, when everyone pushed to finish their work in the morning so that the team could volunteer at a food shelter or some other organization in the afternoon. One of my favorite parts about that company was just how prevalent these community initiatives were and how little I knew about what was happening. Because frontline managers had the power to undertake initiatives on their own, they rarely asked for permission. I take great satisfaction in knowing that I never heard about 90 percent of the community service that Aviall employees organized. To me, this demonstrates frontline leadership at its best.
Of course, we had this large organization, and all employees faced their own unique challenges in life. They often enlisted their coworkers to make a difference in an area that impacted them or their loved ones. One powerful example was our commitment to the juvenile diabetes walks at Aviall. Beyond that, we participated in fundraisers for the American Cancer Society and for organizations that support people with Down syndrome, ALS, heart disease, and others. This helped us make a big impact. We raised a lot of money for important causes and improved the lives of thousands of people. But it also helped us foster a strong community within our company. It allowed employees who struggled with a specific challenge to show up authentically, to not feel like they needed to hide a major aspect of their lives, and to feel the love and support of all of their teammates when they needed it most.
Organize Companywide Engagement in the Community
A self-organizing workforce does not exempt organizations from developing their own community engagement initiatives. Not doing so would be an abdication of leadership. Organizations are members of a community, too, and they should invest in those communities with their own macro-level initiatives. That said, as a senior leader, you can take community engagement cues from your employees. At Aviall, I was part of a legacy of leaders that made sure to organize large companywide events, and if I felt like we needed to branch out, I would ask other leaders in the organization what they were doing to make a difference and then look for ways to scale that.
I also took inspiration for these projects from our company’s values. For example, since the founder of Aviall had served in the military, one of our values was supporting our veterans. These people have made tremendous sacrifices to serve our nation, and all too often, either because of physical or psychiatric injuries, they often struggle to support themselves. We wanted to help, so we partnered with the Adaptive Training Foundation, which provides free physical training to veterans and others with life-altering physical injuries. The programs go beyond functional rehabilitation, helping participants train for specific sports. This enables people to rediscover a connection with their body as a powerful, amazing, and special aspect of who they are. It might seem inconsequential, but this kind of intense, disciplined training also can facilitate the healing of the mental scars that accompany life-altering injuries.
No one who works for Aviall has expertise in how to offer this kind of training, but we wanted to help as many people as possible, so we offered financial support to this organization. Then to foster a deeper level of partnership, several of us regularly went to the gym and worked out with the veterans. We got to know them, hear their stories, and empathize. We never focused on their disabilities, pitied them, or went on these tours to congratulate ourselves for our financial contributions. We were just a group of athletes, sweating through our workouts, together.
Invest in Communities
The partnerships I’ve described are great for targeted action to respond to a specific problem. But companies also can have a lasting impact at scale, by partnering with and investing in major community pillars, such as education and small businesses. These kinds of investments help develop individuals and entities that will pay it forward and strengthen communities and economies for generations to come.
Invest in Education
Any company serious about making a positive change in its communities must support the schools in those communities at multiple levels of education. Several large companies, especially those in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, already do this. For example, Amazon partners with schools in the Pacific Northwest, providing equipment and expertise to make computer science classes available to youth from disadvantaged backgrounds.
These programs, while expensive, always pay dividends in the long run. Most school teachers and university professors don’t get exposed to the latest research and technology and how it’s being applied in the business world. But companies like Amazon can help bring this knowledge along with supporting tools and techniques into the classroom to help prepare the next generation to successfully engage in the workforce.
As companies grow, they will need to hire new employees. Yet most students entering the workforce will have been trained by people without knowledge of recent industry trends, a problem that will only get worse as technological innovation accelerates. When those students enter the workforce, they might only know how to use four- or five-year-old technology, which means their knowledge will be outdated, and they will have to be taught how to use contemporary systems on the job, if they can get jobs at all. By partnering with schools to codevelop curricula, companies can ensure that graduating students will be competitive applicants, which provides a better labor pool from which to recruit.
This is only a secondary benefit. The primary benefit of these partnerships runs much deeper—raising the bar for what children believe they can accomplish. This alone fosters a profound shift. If you grow up in an area where most people work minimum-wage jobs, generally, that’s what you’ll expect from life. But programs, like the ones run by Amazon, not only introduce kids to new career opportunities, they also show that someone believes in their ability to achieve. To really hammer home this belief, both companies go out of their way to connect directly with the students. Jeff Bezos has made visits to classrooms that received support from Amazon.
In the twenty-first century, supporting people in a way that raises the bar is more important than ever. Since outcomes in the contemporary American economy can often be underwhelming, especially for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, the tendency is to lower expectations. With more people carrying minimum-wage jobs into later stages in life, we talk about raising the minimum wage. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t raise the minimum wage. We absolutely should. But the focus can’t just be on that one solution. We need to invest in communities in a way that ensures that people won’t have to rely on minimum-wage jobs to support their families.
Invest in Small Businesses
Entrepreneurs and small businesses are integral parts of the fabric of any community. Beyond providing jobs, they give each small town, neighborhood, and street corner its unique flavor. Small coffee shops and restaurants provide places for people to gather and connect around local topics and events. Small business owners and entrepreneurs become role models and leaders in a community, especially in disadvantaged areas. They have the opportunity to expand the image of what is possible for children, become powerful voices on policy, and help their neighbors grow and succeed.
After I left Boeing, I transitioned to working full-time at SUMMi7. Our mission is to support small and medium-sized businesses, especially those owned by women, people of color, and veterans, by leveraging our experience to help them grow In order to live up to this purpose, we need to include voices from the communities we want to serve. I also wanted to build a team that is diverse in every sense of the word, from race and gender to experience, size of company, and functional expertise. Our goal is to bring our diverse experiences together and combine them into a program to help others. We want to move the needle, to foster economic opportunity and equality. To do that, we had to make a major commitment. In an early meeting with the founding team, we decided that at least half of the companies we work with will be owned by women, people of color, and veterans, and that the people we hire will reflect the businesses we’re committed to supporting. Having a diverse team that is actively inclusive will enable us to benefit from the varied perspectives our team can bring to the issues these businesses face.
This journey has enabled me to meet many business leaders who partner with entrepreneurs to make a positive impact in their communities. Foremost among them are Jenny Poon and Odeen Domingo, cofounders of a Phoenix, Arizona, coworking space called CO+HOOTS. This is a purpose-driven organization focused on creating a flexible, supportive, inclusive ecosystem for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Independent from her work with CO+HOOTS, Jenny does creative design, and she joined the founding SUMMi7 team as our product design lead. As we worked together, we connected over our shared purpose and passion—supporting new companies, improving racial equality, and providing economic opportunity. At CO+HOOTS she had this workspace and this community of businesses, and I had a program designed for the same community that she served, so we decided to collaborate. CO+HOOTS partners with several local organizations, including the City of Mesa, Arizona. In 2020, the city launched the Mesa CARES program to support the community in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Through this program, CO+HOOTS received funding to host a series of free webinars for local small business owners, and Jenny brought me in as one of the speakers. I delivered a presentation on how businesses can adapt to the new normal, and also donated several coaching calls to help small business owners stay focused on their purpose and survive the economic downturn.
I did this because I know how important small businesses are to the strength of a community. But it also helps me understand the unique problems that entrepreneurs face, which, in turn, helps inform the programs we offer at SUMMi7.
You don’t have to step outside of the corporate culture to support small businesses in your community. Large companies can and should do this as well. The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) is a great example of this sort of partnership. This plan, with a core aim to create a sustainable business, encompasses several initiatives and goals that target a few key areas of growth. One of the most important is a massive effort to support small businesses in underserved parts of the world to help them grow and scale. Unilever leverages its technology, product, marketing, and financial expertise to help 1.8 million entrepreneurs in their network (mom-and-pop shops, micro-retailers, street vendors, etc.) around the world who sell Unilever products. One of their simplest and most successful programs focuses on helping small and rural retailers digitize their systems. Simply switching from cash-only sales and analog inventory to digital sales and bookkeeping helps retailers obtain data on which products sell best and at what price, enabling those retailers to better manage inventory. Beyond that, having verifiable, digital records improves their access to small business loans, as they are able to prove their ability to repay, and greater capital to spur further growth.
Through this program and others like it, Unilever not only provides economic opportunity to their partners, reducing income inequality and empowering women and other marginalized groups, it also creates partnerships that help Unilever brands reach the more than 3 billion people living in rural areas in emerging markets.
For large companies, investments like this might appear as no more than a blip on their balance sheets. But they can make a world of difference for local businesses, and breathe new life into a community.
All of these transformations must start with one individual making a choice. As I’ve written this book, I’ve noticed my own personal purpose changing and growing. Having arrived at the end of these pages, I’ve landed on a new articulation: my purpose is to help create opportunities for others. To me, this is one of the most fundamental and vital goals of leadership. But it isn’t the only way to define leadership, or the only way you can serve.
As we bring this conversation to a close, I invite you to reflect and consider: What’s your purpose right now? How can you leverage your strengths to make a difference in the world? In your community? In your family? Once you have the answer, pursue it with your whole being.