There’s an interesting leadership lesson unfolding at Starbucks that has very little to do with coffee.
When Brian Niccol took over as CEO, he inherited a company that had drifted from some of what made Starbucks distinctive. Service had become inconsistent. Stores felt less inviting. Employees needed more support. And customers had fewer reasons to stick around.
Niccol’s answer wasn’t some complicated management strategy. It was getting back to what made Starbucks Starbucks.
Two years into his “Back to Starbucks” strategy, Niccol says the company has focused on making coffeehouses warmer, service more consistent, operations simpler, and frontline employees—whom Starbucks calls partners—better supported.
There are signs the approach is working. Starbucks has reported four consecutive quarters of positive global comparable-store sales growth, including strong gains in U.S. sales and transactions.
Being that I write on leadership, I believe the bigger lesson isn’t found in the numbers. It’s in how Starbucks got there.
Getting back to the basics
When companies struggle, leaders often add more initiatives and strategies. Niccol went the other direction. His early assessment was that Starbucks had “drifted from our core.” The turnaround centered on a few fundamentals: better coffee, faster service, more welcoming stores, and a stronger experience for employees and customers.
That sounds obvious. But obvious things are often the first things organizations stop doing well. I’ve seen this happen with leadership teams. When performance drops, managers assume they need another system or program. Sometimes what they really need is to return to basic leadership behaviors. For example, listen to your people, remove obstacles, make expectations clear, give employees what they need to succeed.
Now, simple doesn’t mean easy. But simple often works.
The employee experience drives the customer experience
One part of Starbucks’s strategy is what I’ve been preaching for over a decade. Customers are important but the company didn’t focus only on customers. It invested heavily in the people who serve the customers: the employees.
Starbucks says it has invested more than $500 million in additional employee hours, larger staffing rosters, and better coverage during busy periods. It also expanded benefits and created more coaching and career-development opportunities.
That gets at something leaders often miss. You can’t consistently create an exceptional customer experience through employees having a lousy employee experience. If people are understaffed, overwhelmed, poorly trained, or unsupported by management, customers eventually feel it.
All that to say, supporting employees should always, unequivocally, be a business strategy.
Starbucks’s turnaround is still a work in progress, and the company continues to face labor challenges. But its approach offers a useful reminder: When a business loses its way, the answer isn’t always to invent something new. It’s to identify what made the organization valuable in the first place—and give its people the support and trust to deliver it again.
—Marcel Schwantes
This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com.
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