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Preserving the Starbucks Counter Culture
Starbucks' competitive wages and generous benefits have made frontline recruiting as smooth as a latte. But with explosive worldwide growth, the Seattle coffee giant faces a tremendous challenge: Can it find enough quality employees to keep customers coming back for more?
By Gretchen Weber
seven mornings a week, Starbucks CEO-designate Jim Donald makes eight important phone calls.
As president of Starbucks North America, he contacts five of the 550 Starbucks district managers in North America, each of whom oversees 10 stores, to check in for a minute or two. Then he dials three Starbucks stores at random to say thank you to employees and ask for feedback.
But as the Seattle-based coffee giant grows globally by more than four stores and 200 employees every day, the surprise phone calls from the top brass are also a calculated strategy for maintaining the small-company atmosphere that Starbucks hopes to retain despite its explosive rate of expansion.
Donald, who will replace outgoing CEO Orin Smith on March 31, says that keeping the feel of the company small while it mushrooms in size requires a mindset that must start at the highest levels.
"We (are) going 100 miles an hour," says Donald, the former head of supermarket giant Pathmark Stores Inc. who joined Starbucks in 2002. "We're growing at 20 percent a year. We've got to be able to reach into this organization and say, ?How's it going?' and ?Good job!' If any company doesn't have the time to talk to people on the front lines, then you might as well close it up, because it's not going anywhere."
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