Getting "Souped Up"

I loved this story on the new CEO of Campbell Soup working on making his workers happier! Seemed somehow an appropriate story for a cold, wet, windy Melbourne day where soup would be great on the menu!

Douglas Conant, chief executive of Campbell Soup, has spent the past seven years figuring out how to make his employees happy. He arrived in January 2001 to revive the fortunes of a legendary, 140-year-old corporate icon that had lost its way. Soup sales were stagnant and the stock was in a two-year slump when Conant's predecessor Dale Morrison abruptly quit in early 2000, prompting former chief David Johnson to come back temporarily from retirement while the Camden company searched for a new leader.

When he brought Gallup in to survey his top 350 executives, "I couldn't even get them to fill out the questionnaire, which was anonymous. They were concerned that I'd know who they were." And when Gallup finally did get the survey done, "They told me it was the worst level of employee engagement they had ever seen."

Here's some of what Conant says he had to do, to fix that situation...

CONANT: I think you have to lead from in front on this. We had inherited a situation where we had a group of employees that were not actively engaged in what we were trying to do and the first hour of the first day I met with the employees, I said "our commitment to them was that we were going to tangibly demonstrate that we were going to be valuing their personal agendas, and hope that in time we would inspire them to value . . . the plans that we had for Campbell. And we have worked hard to demonstrate in a tangible way that we value what they're doing and over time we have lifted the engagement from what was one of the poorest levels of engagement that the Gallup organization who measures this for us had ever seen to one of the best; and it's just by consistently demonstrating that we value the people.

CONANT: A low engagement score says you have lost connections with the employees and you can't be a high-performance company without a high-performance orientation and level of engagement with your employees so it says you're in trouble . . . and we were clearly in trouble . . . and our employees know that we are going to do anything and everything we can to advance their situation and trust that they will do anything they can to help us improve our performance in the marketplace. And it's worked very well. We have gone, as I've said, from poor engagement to top quartile engagement. We have got a spring in the step around here that is absolutely unmistakable when you walk the halls, and it is a totally different place. We're starting to look like winners again!

CONANT: The key is you've got to do what you say you're going to do; so you have to walk that talk. And we have declared ourselves . . . we have something we call the Campbell Promise: Campbell valuing people . . . hopefully, inspiring people to value Campbell. We have a lofty mission. We have a set of core values; but we hold ourselves accountable to living those values and walking that talk and the employees can tell within a nano-second whether you're genuine about this or not.

So, what would your employees say about your company? Are they inspired to be their best? If not, what are you doing about it?

Stay juicy!

Helen :)