Читать книгу Corporations Compassion Culture - Keesa C. Schreane - Страница 21

Corporations can still build sprawling societies, deliver innovation, empower capital markets, and generate revenues without sacrificing the well-being of employees. Making inclusion and equality foundational components of compassionate business enables us to create, innovate, and increase profits while improving the lives of people inside and outside our corporations.

When leaders are passionate about improving the well-being of their workers, it shows. They deliver pay parity, and commit to an inclusive environment, even during challenging moments.

Leaders are humans and they have their own lenses through which they see the world. The goal in redefining business and leadership is not to make everyone cookie cutter. The goal is not to stifle business growth. The goal is to ensure leaders continue to act decisively and move deliberately with confidence while remaining conscious of the ways in which their cultures, actions, and policies affect everyone in the business landscape, from employees to partners to communities to shareholders.

Carnegie and Frick are considered “mainstream” corporate leaders because they were White men of great economic wealth. They had influence in business circles. Their names were synonymous with success and philanthropy. Their stories of industry are the stories known to the masses, but mainstream stories reflecting successes born from fair treatment of employees exist in a more modern context, too.

Howard Schultz's work to build and evolve Starbucks is considered one of the greatest modern stories of a company that made compassion part of its business model. During his time at the helm, Schultz valued creating a culture of trust and partnership with employees. As he wrote in his 1997 book, Pour Your Heart into It, “There is no more precious commodity than the relationship of trust and confidence a company has with its employees.”³¹

In particular, Starbucks is a brand known for taking action on racial injustice in communities. Some may criticize the effectiveness, swiftness, or strategy, but even most critics do credit Starbucks with action. One specific case was an incident in 2018 at a Starbucks in Philadelphia when a manager called police officers on two Black men because they didn't order anything while seated for a few moments waiting on a business partner's arrival.³²

The CEO at the time, Kevin Johnson, was quick to offer an official apology to the men.³³ More broadly, Starbucks made the decision to close 8,000 locations for a one-day racial bias training for employees, which ultimately had 175,000 staff participants.³⁴ This was a fairly remarkable move for such a large company, even though some employees questioned the ultimate effectiveness of the training. But the fact that Starbucks surrendered roughly $12 million in potential profit as a result of closing down the stores for the training speaks to how strongly they feel about educating employees and improving community relationships.³⁵

Whole Foods Market cofounder John Mackey is another example of a leader who values a high degree of compassion. In his 2013 book Conscious Capitalism, he talks about the prevalent environment most employees contend with daily. In one example, he references the frequency of heart attacks occurring on Monday, which some experts attribute to the dread of returning to work. Mackey contends that work doesn't have to equal drudgery. When Mackey led Whole Foods Market (before Amazon acquired it in 2017), one element he focused on was improving health insurance for employees.