Page 37 - MS Year in Review 2020

read the third edition of our book, Growing Pains, and fell that Starbucks was a

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classic of what we described in that book.
Over the next few years, I worked with Starbucks and this leadership team to help
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position them for sustainable successful growth. And then I moved on to
working with other companies facing similar issues. One of my strong impressions

was how well the Big 3 at Starbucks ended up working together. They became a
true team, not merely a team in the nominal sense of the word. Each had his own

defined sphere of responsibility but they worked together formally and informally.
They had, for example, a weekly dinner at McCormick and Schmick’s, a Seattle
seafood restaurant, where they met without agenda and as equals to discuss the

business very openly. They had gelled into a true leadership unit.

THE FLASH OF RECOGNITION

A few years later as I was working with another company in a different market

space (financial services) I observed that they had a very strong core senior
leadership team that (like Starbucks) seemed to work very well as a true leadership

team. They seemed also like a “molecule,” or compound that was a unit.

That moment of recognition led me to think about various companies with which I
had worked in Organizational Development. It seemed to me that where this
leadership unit existed the there was also high performance, and where it did not

exist performance was not so good or even great problems.

THE CONSTRUCT AND HYPOTHESIS

That flash of recognition led me to formulate what I now term a “Leadership
Molecule”™ construct and related hypothesis. This construct has now been

11 Eric Flamholtz, and Yvonne Randle, Growing Pains, Jossey-Bass publishers, Inc., 2007.
12 For a description of my work at SBUX, see Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang, Pour Your Heart
into it: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, Hyperion, 1997.

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