Make business a team sport

REID HOFFMAN:
Hi listener, welcome back. It's Day 28 of the Mindset of Scale. I hope you've learned a lot – and maybe made some connections. Because business is a team sport.

I often say that entrepreneurship is a lonely road – and it can be. There's so much that falls on your shoulders: you're the decider, the ultimate arbitrator, the call-maker. You will carry the full weight of success, or failure. And most people will never truly understand what it took. That is, except for your team.

I believe that entrepreneurship can be, should be, a team sport. Make it so. It is one of the great joys – you spend countless hours honing a mission, a vision, telling a story, finding and assembling your dream team... so let them join you on this journey. When you start thinking of business as a team sport, everything will get a lot easier. And more fun.

But to make business a team sport, you first have to make sure you have a team. And no one is better at making a team than Angela Ahrendts. Angela is the former CEO of Burberry and the former Head of Retail at Apple. And at both companies, Angela managed sprawling teams that she needed to bring together under a common mission, vision, and goal. Here, Angela shares the story of landing at Apple. And what happened next. Let's listen.

ANGELA AHRENDTS:
It'd been a couple of months and somebody came up to me and said, "We think you should send an email out to all 70,000 employees and if you give it to us by Friday, we'll translate it into 36 la-..."

I picture my three teens in these stores and they don't read email. And no, that's not going to work. I said, "I'm going to do a video."

"We don't do videos."

"I'm going to do a video."

"We don't do videos."

I said, "I'm going to do a video, and I don't want a studio and I don't want hair and makeup. We have a phone. I'm going to do it like my kids do YouTube videos. It's going to be three thoughts in three minutes or less, no editing, nothing."

HOFFMAN:
So Angela recorded her first video memo to Apple employees from her desk, using an iPhone.

AHRENDTS:
I just said, "Hi, sorry I haven't reached out before, but we're going to do these videos. I'm going to talk to you once a week, three thoughts in three minutes or less, because I want you to be aware of what our plan is, where we're going, I want us to connect. I want you to trust me." I just was very open and honest.

HOFFMAN:
As Angela was speaking, something happened.

AHRENDTS:
One minute in, my phone rings. I look down and it's my baby, it's my daughter. And I said, "Don't stop." I said, "Excuse me." I picked it up and I said, "Angelina, Mommy will call you back in like two minutes," laid it down, and just kept going.

And so of course they want to edit it. Apple's got to be perfect. And I said, "Not in this world." It does not have to be perfect. They have to see that I am authentic. They also have to see that I put my kids first.

HOFFMAN:
Yes.

AHRENDTS:
The next day I must have gotten 500 emails of people thanking me for taking my daughter's call.

HOFFMAN:
Angela taking a quick phone call from her daughter – that set the stage for what she really wanted to communicate.

AHRENDTS:
I'm not a king or a queen or a dictator. I'm here to do my life's greatest work. Will you help me? Can we do it together?

HOFFMAN:
Angela knew she needed to connect with every employee in every store, at a human level, in order to transform the business. Even at an iconic company like Apple, the icon alone won't do the work for you. Whether your staff is 70,000 – or only seven – a leader has to get everyone pulling in the same direction. She recorded these videos every week for four years, from wherever she was in the world.

AHRENDTS:
But then I didn't want it all about me. Then it was every other week, then I would have all the senior executives. So we'd rotate. Because it's important that they do it too and that everybody understands who they are and their function in the business.

HOFFMAN:
Angela made these weekly messages a top priority because she understood a fundamental truth about team-building: You have to be intentional about fostering cohesion and common purpose. It won't happen just because everyone is wearing the same color t-shirt and a picture of the same partially munched fruit. You need to build in events, rituals, and good old-fashioned human-to-human contact.

AHRENDTS:
There is nothing more powerful in driving a vision or turning a company around than just clear, consistent communication. That drives connection, and collaboration, that builds trust. And when you build that kind of trust then people feel empowered.

HOFFMAN:
One innovation Angela encouraged was built specifically to achieve this kind of empowerment across teams. How? Human-to-human contact between retail stores.

AHRENDTS:
We ended up creating all types of apps and things so that they could talk to each other and solve problems together. We created an app called Loop, that they had to close the loop if there was a problem. You can't just complain about it, how fast can you fix it? How fast are you going to close that Loop?

And so while we're in bed, et cetera, problems come up, they could all talk to each other. One store could say, "We just do this or do this." Yeah, so we put a lot of other platforms in place for them to communicate with each other and for us to communicate with them.

HOFFMAN:
Giving store managers and employees a way to talk to each other brought a new level of human contact into Apple retail teams. It also empowered them to solve each others' problems. A store manager in Mexico City might have already solved a problem vexing a store manager in Brussels. Solving the language problem was fairly easy once a tool was in place.

The bigger language problem played out at Apple HQ.

AHRENDTS:
You know it's funny, I had to learn to talk their language, right? Because there really were not any retailers at all in the company.

HOFFMAN:
To be fair, there were plenty of retailers at the company in the literal sense. Retail actually made up 70% of Apple's 100,000 employees. But not on the senior leadership team, the level at which a company's driving mission gets set. Apple executives, like most of us in Silicon Valley, speak the language of tech. If Angela was going to succeed in rallying her troops, she had to speak the language of the generals.

AHRENDTS:
I used to talk about how the architecture was the hardware and the experience that took place inside was the software. So basically what was the OS of the store? And we didn't have one.

HOFFMAN:
"The OS of the store." I hadn't heard that before. But it doesn't surprise me that Angela came up with it. Because Angela understands that people use metaphors to organize their thoughts, and to communicate as a group. So she came to Apple, and she was like "Okay, what language do they use? They talk in 'platforms' and 'apps.' So if I use that language to talk about what we're doing in the store, then all of a sudden, they'll say 'Oh! We understand that language! We understand that this is a critical thing to invest in. What do you need? How can we help?'"

And this points to another thing Angela knows about building teams. You have to know what you're working for and WHY. You need an elevated mission, one that rallies the troops and the generals too.

As she sharpened her vision for Apple retail – and the O.S. of the Apple store – Angela kept using a phrase we talked about on Day One, with Sir RIchard Branson. She kept asking "What if?"

AHRENDTS:
Tim used to always say, "Apple Retail has always been about so much more than just selling." So then, what if I could be a part of re-imagining that retail experience? And if it's not just about selling, then what's it about?
There's educators in every community, there's entrepreneurs in every community. There's people that need help. We're going to all live longer. There's a lot of older people who need support. There's a lot of kids where public schools don't teach them to code, right?

And so all of a sudden I thought, "Oh, maybe I can dream and maybe I can help reimagine what that experience should be, could be. How many lives can we touch and transform by the power of our performance?" And I thought, "Wow, what if?"

HOFFMAN:
There were a couple of different programs that were created by you and your whole team while you were there. What was the program that you're most like, "Ah! This felt like a great step forward."?

AHRENDTS:
Yeah. Tim said he thinks it's one of the greatest launches. The program's called "Today at Apple."

HOFFMAN:
"Today at Apple." It was Angela's O.S. for the store, a program of free daily lessons offered in all Apple stores worldwide. It's a way to bring Apple products to life, by unlocking their creative potential. It's also something bigger.

AHRENDTS:
It's not a coincidence that "Today at Apple's" number one mission is to encourage connection just with people in communities.

"Today at Apple" is really, just think of it as the operating system in a store. We used to say that if you go to apple.com you get this incredible 2D experience. And it's deep product knowledge, deep learning, et cetera, right? And if you go into a store, you should have the most incredible 3D experience. And that's about humans. This is about human interaction. Because you can buy it faster, cheaper, anywhere else. You couldn't go to Apple Support and get great service. So what is the purpose of this box that 500 million people walk into every single... right?

HOFFMAN:
When Angela asked: "What is the purpose of this box?" what she really meant was "What is the elevated mission that every store manager can get behind?" "Today at Apple" gave the stores that sense of purpose and it also gave store managers a lot of autonomy to decide what "Today at Apple" would look like in their store.

AHRENDTS:
We told the teams that "you are the beating heart in your community." More people are walking into you than walking into any other establishment in your community. So I used to tell the store managers, "Whether you like it or not, you're the de facto mayor of your community."

HOFFMAN:
Angela's ability to make that human-to-human connection is in large part what made her and her teams so successful – it's also how and why she loved her job. I'm not sure we talk enough about the all encompassing journey that entrepreneurship is, how powerful it is on many levels, for you AND your team.

Most entrepreneurs everywhere worry about the people they've brought along with them – you've convinced a group to follow you off the cliff, what if you can't actually build the plane? I get that, I do.

But there are a lot of wonderful moments in entrepreneurship, moments of camaraderie, of a shared mission successfully accomplished. The fact is that no entrepreneur can accomplish anything alone. So make your business a team sport. Take a look around, right now. Who can you invite into this process? How can you make the people around you feel like one team?

Today's exercise will help you do just that. I want you to open your calendar, and schedule a time in the next week for one team-building exercise. It could be a company-wide activity at the next all-hands, or a coffee chat with team members or a Zoom breakout group with team members who interact with you frequently, but have been siloed from each other.

If you can, encourage yourself to think outside the office context. You could create a standing trivia contest or fantasy sports league. If you and your team members are all in the same place, maybe book an outdoor walking tour.

As you plan your team-building exercise, here are two things to keep in mind. First, the time burden shouldn't be too great. Team activities start feeling a bit less fun when they put too much stress on employee schedules.

Second, keep the size of your team in mind. The right ritual for an Apple-sized group is probably not the same as for a team of six or seven.

Remember, I don't know your team like you do. So when making your plan, trust your gut, and keep the focus on human-to-human connection. Business is a team sport. So take care of your teammates.

Again, don't worry if you didn't quite catch that full exercise. We'll include it in our email with a summary of today's Daily Practice. It's also here in the app too.

Tomorrow on the Mindset of Scale: do good and do good business. Yes, you can do both. See you then.