Diversity MBA Magazine – Managing Diversity, Executive Leadership Development, Diversity Jobs & Hiring

From his modest executive office, the Stillwater, MN-based corporate headquarters of CUB Foods Inc., Keith Wyche oversees the $3 billion SUPERVALU Inc. division. He is responsible for 69 stores and more than 8,000 employees.

Since January 2010, Wyche has been president and CEO of CUB, bringing his track record of success in customer acquisition, satisfaction and retention, along with his change management skills to the retail grocery industry”. Skills honed in the previous thirty years, helping to sustain divisions of some the nation’s largest corporations – including AT&T, IBM and Pitney Bowes, duirng a series of industry booms and transformations.

Wyche’s title puts him in a lofty and fairly exclusive echelon of African-American corporate executives. He’s one of the highest ranking executives in the country. And, his business experience throughout his career makes him a leader with a menu of abilities that don’t pigeonhole him to a specific industry. He also includes mentor, author and motivational speaker in his portfolio of accomplishments

The Cleveland native began his career after receiving his undergraduate degree from Cleveland State University. After the dismantling of the Bell telecommunications giant in the 1980s, and as cellular technology went viral in the ’90s – before “viral” was all the rage — Wyche was becoming known not only as a can-do but a go-to guy for weathering storms of industry change.

Wyche furthered his education with an MBA in systems technology from Baldwin Wallace College. His penchant for leading change came by default and several lemons-to-lemonade challenges. “Early in my career, many of the opportunities I got were things that weren’t working,” he recalls. “I got the worst territories handed to me and I’ve been in the worst business units. And when you go through a number of years of being given broken things to fix, you kind of create a talent for it. I didn’t set out 30 years ago to be this change-management leader; it’s just that I was given things that were broken that needed fixing. As a result, I built a reputation and a process for handling change.”

At the time, it seemed logical that Wyche’s career path would take him to a leadership role within a technology firm, emerging dot-com, or any of the buffet of top communications corporations. Instead, a grocery-store chain sought him out.

It’s safe to say that Wyche had little knowledge of the grocery industry, but, he explains, SUPERVALU wasn’t looking for someone who did. Rather, it was after a leader to help the corporation deal with the burgeoning competition and the diversity of its competitors. As growth, technology, and economics would have it, change had arrived at the front door of the grocery industry with the rise of such things as open to-the-public wholesale clubs and supercenters where discount  and big-box retailers began to offer groceries in addition to their normal non-food merchandise, creating one-stop-shopping markets. Hit with this onslaught, Wyche says, “SUPERVALU needed someone who had a change-management, customer-focus point of view. It wasn’t looking for someone to be a grocer; it had all the grocery knowledge in the world. I was not hired because of a grocery background; I was hired for a change management background.”.

Today, CUB. captures one-third of the Minneapolis/St. Paul market share, with Target and Walmart as two of its main competitors. There are 58 CUB Foods stores in the market.

It didn’t matter whether the change was from mainframe to PC, traditional wires to fiber optics and cellular technology, or a leap to the grocery industry.Wyche found some commutable fundamentals. “Change management is the process whereby a company has to transform itself because of factors either inside or outside the industry,” he says. “It’s really the process of changing and transforming the company from what it was to what it needs to be to compete in this new reality.”

In many ways, his previous experience of focus on client retention became interchangeable with his customer retention duties at CUB. Taking the helm of a business in an industry he hadn’t previously worked in, Wyche said part of getting acclimated and establishing his leadership presence meant turning to any company’s most prized possession: its human capital. He realized that much of the success of doing that lay in connecting with the 8,000 employees he would lead and the customer base he was responsible for retaining and growing.

“At the end of the day, at my level, it was more about my ability as a leader, as opposed to having hands-on grocery experience.” he says. “I did roll up my sleeves. I worked in the bakery department, I worked in the produce department, and I’ve been a cashier, because I wanted to understand what they felt,”

For the man whose life lessons included his father telling him as a boy, “You have no excuse not to be successful,” Wyche found that to be successful as a leader meant helping to create new leaders. In fact, that process is how he defines leadership. “A corporate leader is someone who can take the resources of the company — the human capital and buildings – and bring it all together to get the most value out of that,” he notes. “I always say that the job of a leader, above all else, is to create other leaders and to get the best out of people.” In selecting the members of his team, he made sure he surrounded himself with “the best and the brightest.”

Wyche has heard the stories of racial and ethnic disparities in corporate leadership roles and has been fortunate enough to be on the positive side of the statistics. This, he says, inspires him to reach back and offer advice to others climbing the ladder, especially minorities.While he understands that some groups have one (sometimes two) up on other groups, he still adheres to the  “no excuses” philosophy. “From any level, the demands and qualities of leadership are the same,” he says, adding that, there can often be splinters and grease on the corporate and leadership ladder some minorities climb. And minority representation at the top is still an evolving event: in 1995 there were no African-American CEOs at Fortune 500 companies. Today, there are at least 11. “Many times, we didn’t have the role models growing up to help us navigate corporate America,” Wyche says. “As we’ve not been in leadership roles as long, the scrutiny can be a lot greater, the margin of error a lot slimmer. I feel an immense amount of pressure to be successful because we don’t have a lot of African-American leaders in the grocery industry. I’m measured on the same yardstick as my peers, but I think the reality of it is, when you’re a person of color, you do have the added challenge of making sure that you can’t fail.”

He gives thanks to his employer for adding to his success. “SUPERVALU has allowed me to be stretched in areas I’ve never been stretched in,” he says. “ It has given me an opportunity to learn a new industry, to reinvent myself, and that’s a big win for Keith Wyche.”

He also believes SUPERVALU scored a win, too: “It brought someone from the outside who has a unique view of the business, who looks at it from a customer-centric focus as opposed to a grocery-centric focus, someone who is not afraid to ask questions.”

Wyche says he learned early on that in managing your career, there are three things to keep a bird’s eye on: your performance, your exposure, and your perceptions. “Too often, people really only manage the performance piece and they don’t realize that the exposure and the perception are equally important because in this business, no one breaks through the glass ceiling by themselves,” he notes. “Someone on the other side has to see you, recognize you, and pull you through.”

Once he embraced that idea, Wyche says, “My career took off.” This was after

several frustrating career events in which he thought he should and would have been promoted, only to find that he wasn’t and wouldn’t be. A business associate showed him some of the errors of his professional ways; chief among them was not branding himself. “I had to have a brand so that people knew what to expect and what not to expect from me,” he says.

His brand is all over the pages of his book, Good Is Not Good Enough: And Other Unwritten Rules For Minority Professionals, and prominent on his speaking circuit. Most importantly, it has been a boon for his role at SUPERVALU. Even when he’s vacationing, Wyche says,  he’s thinking of ways to further lead his division.

“Good is the enemy of great,” he says. “If you focus on the good, you’ll miss out on the better. and you’ll never get to your best.”

Click to Read the 2012 Leadership Issue

The latest issue of DiversityMBA Magazine, our 2012 Leadership Issue, is available online. Take advantage of our unique online edition to read anywhere and share information quickly.

Some highlights from this issue:

• We talk with Keith Wyche about his CEO role at Cub Foods
• Valerie Porfano talks with succesful women executives about balance
• Tips on communicating with a diverse team

Each issue of DiversityMBA Magazine brings together thought leadership and real world expertise about what it takes to succeed. Our online edition is a free service to our readers and gives you access to all the content found in the print edition.

It’s no secret that our workplace, an increasingly global workscape, is transforming faster than our ability to deal effectively with the changes. We are experiencing, to reference the five megatrends outlined in Andres Tapia’s recent book The Inclusion Paradox, political and economic volatility, a multilayered globalization, rapidly evolving game-changing technology, fewer government and corporate guarantees, and a multifaceted unprecedented diversity. Within this environment, Tapia says, the emerging workforce is increasingly “diverse, smaller and less skilled, autonomous and empowered, both global and virtual, with multilayered responsibilities. The competencies of problem-solving, adaptability, learning agility, and innovation are more critical than ever. Unfortunately, these competencies are in short supply.”

Tapia’s comments echo Robert Kegan’s 1994 book, In Over Our Heads, which also noted that our environment was evolving faster than our ability to manage it. Interestingly both Kegan and Tapia arrived at similar conclusions. The answer to the challenge of ever greater complexity is to increase the developmental level of the workforce. But what kind of development? How do we measure it, and how can it be achieved?

The core is captured in the concept of intercultural competence, along with competing terms such as  “cultural intelligence” and “global mindset.” A competence is usually defined behaviorally; how we do things. However, our complex actions in the world such as problem solving, decision-making, or managing multicultural workgroups, arise from how we interpret our environment. Such competence comes from the inside out, with internal and external components, which include attitude, knowledge, and behavior. We first need an attitude of openness in order to pay attention to new things and decide how to deal with them, vs. just ignoring/rejecting them. Openness and the curiosity that comes with it leads us to new information and the organization of it into applicable knowledge. The knowledge, in turn, guides us to new, more competent behavior within our workscape. It allows us to process more complexity, take more things into account in our decision making, hold contradictory tendencies side by side, and process their negotiation. This represents a developmental change, beyond the mere acquisition of new information or learning.

Developmental change happens in discreet stages, each of which can be considered a level of competence. To measure it, we use the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI,) based on a theoretical scale called the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS). The model has five stages, from least to most developed:

1. Denial, not very common in our contemporary corporations, government, or educational systems, assumes all humans to be the same. Encounter with significant human difference causes fear, the denial of humanity to members of the different group, and possible violent behavior against perceived threats. We see this daily in the news, but thankfully we don’t encounter it often in the workplace.

2. Polarization, the next level, is much milder but still involves prejudicial attitudes toward human difference, polarizing it in terms of us and them. Most frequently, the polarization is positive for us and negative for them, and supports formal or informal practices to exclude “them” from the majority’s groups and activities. This is also what 40-plus years of diversity practice has worked successfully to help eliminate.

3. Minimization, is the result of successful diversity work. We accept differences, we work side by side with otherness, and we focus on our similarities in a politically correct environment where there are penalties for discussing most differences and for outright exclusion. This tolerance has been a great step forward in our human development and has created considerable opportunity for formally disadvantaged groups. But in today’s competitive workplace, this is no longer sufficient. The question, as Tapia puts it, is no longer “What’s your mix?” but “How’s your mix working.”  Often, it’s not working as well as it needs to.

4. Acceptance takes us into the inclusion space where we are comfortable enough with difference to ask among our different selves, “Why isn’t this mix working better?” And this question requires us to look at how we are different in significant cultural ways, in our values and how we enact them in action and communication. We can then begin to ask the follow- up questions of how to deal with them, how to select the behaviors we need in order to interact and communicate more effectively and to create a more collaborative and productive workplace culture in which all groups and individuals contribute more equally. We must solve the twin problems of how to minimize the differences that cause dissonance while simultaneously leveraging those that allow us all to contribute from our individual and sub-group uniqueness.

5. Adaptation arises as we begin to solve the challenges of the acceptance stage by mutually discovering and implementing the processes that produce increasingly effective collaboration and communication. Adaptation requires internal development in each of us, which is then expressed and slowly refined experimentally in our daily workplace interactions.

Proceeding through these stages is a requirement of today’s workplace. We do not develop automatically, but only through the often uncomfortable experience of learning to operate in new ways in changing situations. We all have a natural resistance to this, but our environment requires that we evolve in order to compete successfully in the global marketplace.

We can measure where we are as individuals and groups using the IDI, and we can devise effective interventions to help us progress from our current developmental stage to the next one, with each transition requiring a different modality. While this is difficult and cannot be accomplished through simple one-time training interventions, a number of organizations have developed successful programs, generally focusing on the transition from minimization to acceptance, crucial for moving from diverse to inclusive. The work can be demanding, but the rewards can be substantial for our organization, our personal relations with family and friends, and our individual selves.

To see this all from a more comprehensive perspective, consider part of Kegan’s five-stage model of human development. Stage three is the good community member who accepts the organization’s values and contributes within the established parameters. We need these people. Lots of them. But they can’t take us forward as a society or an organization. They are comfortable with the status quo, which is precisely what has to change.

In Kegan’s stage four, we incorporate our own set of values that differ somewhat from those of the community, and we operate from those without too much concern for how our decisions and actions are received by the group. We can manage ourselves, so we are also capable of managing others. While not particularly open to feedback, we are professionals and capable of leading change movements. This is the IDI’s acceptance stage, and we need a lot more people at this level.

Finally, in Kegan’s stage five, we recognize that, for our own continued development, we need others at least as developed as we are to reflect us back to ourselves. They help illuminate the dark corners of self and environment so that we can continue to grow personally and contribute strongly to our community and organizations. This is the leadership and adaptation level of IDI.

Not all of us need to become leaders, but we can all strive to develop into the acceptance stage to take our organizations. In a changing environment, all the inhabitants must change with it. This is the challenge of human development today, and measurement is the first step.

“Corporate social responsibility means taking action to further sustainable communities, the environment, and employees. Conscience is from the heart; responsibility is the action you take afterwards.”

– Sandra Taylor, Starbucks senior vice president of corporate social responsibility

Like it or not, the days are gone when business operates strictly by the Milton Friedman philosophy, essentially declaring that a corporation works only for its shareholders, with the bottom line as top priority.

Today, shareholders and stakeholders alike demand more of corporations. They expect conscience to play a part in running the businesses in which they invest and from which they purchase consumer goods. And, increasingly, they reward companies for good corporate social responsibility.

While it’s too soon to look for executives actively spreading the word about corporate social responsibility, successful organizations realize that they must be able to meet expectations about accountability — from the community as well as from customers who buy their goods and services — at the same time they face the usual expectations of price and quality. Regulatory agencies, legislative pressures, media scrutiny: all are among the sources of potential pressure.

A corporation’s basic responsibility is to provide goods and services needed by the community, at the same time providing people with employment. These days, however, as Peter Drucker has said, “we must think about the external side of the firm, of reaching out beyond simply what they’re doing internally, to what’s happening to the community as well.”

Getting a fix on this discussion starts with defining two key terms: corporate social conscience and corporate social responsibility (CSR). “Corporate [social] conscience drives your actions,” explains Sandra Taylor, senior vice president of corporate social responsibility for Starbucks. “It’s recognition that the corporation has a commitment to social stakeholders and the community. With CSR, we take action to further the sustainability of communities, the environment, and employees.”

“CSR is about conducting business in a responsible manner that serves all constituencies. That means being a responsible, ethical, and transparent company,” says Kenneth Frazier, executive vice president and general counsel of Merck & Co.

Bill Pollard, President of ServiceMaster, focuses on CSR as it relates to employment and people in the firm. “CSR extends beyond providing a job for people, it also addresses the questions: ‘What is that person becoming as an individual? How is that person growing and developing as a parent and a contributor to the community?’”, Pollard says. “The firm has the responsibility to ask the question not just about what people are doing, but why are they doing it, who are they, and how is the job contributing to that person’s development? Henry Ford once said, ‘Why is it that I always get the whole person, when all I really wanted is a pair of hands?’ When you look at people as only a pair of hands, they become the object of work.”

Starbucks’ mission statement and guiding principles include respect and dignity for employees, a commitment to employee diversity, and a commitment to communities. From Sandra Taylor’s perspective, this truly defines corporate responsibility.

“It’s a commitment to live by the mission statement and guiding principles, while being responsible and committed to improving the world we live in,” Taylor says. “Starbucks has a passion to improve the world and to responsibly live by that commitment to all stakeholders and communities where they conduct business.”

Starbucks famously offers health benefits even to part-time employees, and discount stock options are also available to employees. Conscientious of the source as well, Starbucks pays coffee farmers in developing countries premium prices for their beans.

“We’ve always paid premium above the commodities exchange price because we want to create equity for coffee farmers and treat them like partners,” Taylor explains. “Farmers who do business with Starbucks tend to remain in business; they’re able to send their kids to school, and invest in social projects in their communities.”

That’s the kind of perspective socially conscious investors and the public alike are seeking, more and more, in determining the degree to which a company is perceived as a good citizen. A Hill & Knowlton study found in 2001 that 79 percent of respondents considered “good citizenship” factors in buying goods or services, and 71 percent considered that factor in buying a company’s stock.

Integration of CSR into a company varies by industry and the tone at the top. ServiceMaster, for example, has chosen to help employees work with children in the Chicago Public Schools. Those who do so are allowed two hours over the normal lunch hour to mentor these inner-city elementary-grade students. Internationally, ServiceMaster’s corporate foundation helps meet education and health-care needs, as well as funding enterprise initiatives, in underdeveloped parts of the world. Employees travel to Africa, South America and Pakistan to work on projects to improve water availability, improve health care, and otherwise serve local needs.

Merck, as a pharmaceutical company, focuses its efforts on getting medicines to the people who need them internationally. “Our business is discovering and producing medicines and vaccines that can make a difference in people’s lives,” Frazier says. “As a publicly held, research-based pharmaceutical company, our core value is to act responsibly, to serve in the best interests of the patients who use our products, and our shareholders. By doing the right thing we enhance our reputation, our ability to play a role in advancing good public policy, foster customer trust, and that helps us achieve our business goals.”

Starbucks’ approach is to integrate CSR from the top down. Taylor, who runs a department of 30 people, is a senior vice president and sits on the company’s senior management team. She is involved in all business decision-making, and thus has the opportunity to bring a socially responsible perspective to the process, rather than casting decisions already made in a socially responsible light.

Taylor says she thinks through the big questions by posing them that way: How would a socially responsible company make this acquisition? What kind of joint-venture partners would a socially responsible company undertake? How do they incorporate CSR into business decisions?

“I’ve just returned from East Africa with my CEO,” Taylor says. “We’re investigating how to make a difference in the life of coffee farmers there, because the company is growing and needs more coffee.”

Starbucks has implemented a governance structure for CSR. “Our CSR Executive Committee is composed of six senior executives who meet on a monthly basis to review the company CSR strategies and discuss how this relates to our business,” Taylor says. “The committee reports what it’s doing to our board of directors.”

Taylor rotates people from her team through the business units to allow an exchange of ideas and perspectives. The store development team has staffer whose responsibility is to assure use of environmentally sound, “green” materials: the wood is not virgin, lighting is kept at lower levels to conserve energy, and water-sparing conservation systems are used.

Developing partnerships with established entities can confer instant social responsibility on a mainstream corporation. It worked for Sears, whose project benefiting the Gilda’s Club centers for cancer patients resulted in sales increases – in some cases, of more than 50 percent — in communities where Gilda’s Club is active.

What’s driving CSR?

The move to corporate social responsibility has its roots in the environmental movement of the 1970s, but the corporate excesses and scandals of the ‘80s and ‘90s certainly have contributed to demand for corporations to behave more like citizens. Consumers want to know that the dollars they spend are being utilized in an ethical and responsible manner – especially among young people, who often are aware from an early age of social issues and feel a greater responsibility to address them in innovative ways.

Globalization is another driving force of CSR. Companies differentiate themselves with customers, investors and employees by being responsible and authentic. For a company doing business worldwide, like Merck, globalization also means competing for the brightest and the best scientists everywhere.

“We are trying to cure cancer; we exist to cure Alzheimer’s disease and HIV/AIDS,” Frazier says. “Many of these scientists enter medicine because saving mankind is their core value. To attract them, Merck must use more than just money,” and corporate values can make the difference, he says.

Corporate social responsibility covers a wide range of internal and external issues, from environmental responsibility and community involvement to policy development and employee training. Yet implementation of CSR throughout operations can be carried out according to the most simple guidelines. “Touchstone” values pose the important questions: what’s best for future generations, or perhaps what a mentor or beloved elder would do in a given situation. The answer, as every business person knows in his or her heart, is the right thing to do.

Asking the question is corporate social conscience. Acting on the answer is corporate social responsibility: the way of the future for corporations.

Yvonne F. Brown is the founder of Ball of Gold Corporation and president of JAD Communications International a firm that helps companies improve communications and relationships, manage change and expectations, improve interpersonal skills and promote respectful communications.

image courtesy of Adonis Construction (UK)

Next to marriage, family and homeownership, the decision to start a business is one of the most demanding undertakings an individual is likely to encounter. The path is littered with obstacles, challenges and ever-evolving goals – the most and least of which is success. Still, if you are able to persevere through difficulties, cyclical changes and lulls in the economy, you will reap the benefits and the rewards not only of building your business, but establishing a brand that can thrive for generations to come.

For minority-owned businesses, in particular, creating a viable position in the marketplace is critical to economic empowerment. The much-discussed rise of black- and other minority-owned businesses is adding significantly to the U.S. economy and creating a base of power from the inside out. Read the full story

When you are in a leadership position, vision, integrity & compassion are infinitely more important than the words you say. These three traits are as important to your survival as air, food, and water.

A critical necessity for these competencies is the tone at the top. What is the character of the leadership team? Once this is determined, expect the organization’s culture to follow suit.

Often leaders don’t realize how closely they are being watched by their staff, customers and suppliers. Just about every organization sets out information on its mission, vision, and values – perhaps on its Website, perhaps in its marketing materials. These tenets drive the company’s culture and set expectations that, if not followed, create an ethical gap which can cause the company to fail. Read the full story

There is a way to effectively manage conflict, survive office politics, and keep your sanity; you’ve just got to be willing to turn to a technology that works. A shift of paradigm will be needed, too – from conflict to harmony as the way of the world.

The Japanese martial art of aikido is built upon the idea that the power of harmony can be harnessed for nonviolent conflict resolution, not just the forceful self-defense typically associated with martial arts. Aikido, which literally means the way of harmonizing your energy with that of your opponents, teaches students how to deal with opponents by becoming one with their intent and redirecting their energy. This philosophy minimizes conflict and creates the circumstances for win-win solutions. Read the full story

Having a certain title, an army of underlings, or a fat salary doesn’t make you a leader. It’s a bit more complicated than those external markers. “Leaders take people where they ordinarily wouldn’t go by themselves,” says Lynda Ford, president of The Ford Group, a management and human resources consulting firm in Rome, N.Y.

Furthermore, leaders are able to meet people where they are, instead of where they think they should be, adds Trudy Bourgeois, founder of the Center for Workforce Excellence in Dallas, and author of  The Hybrid Leader: Blending the Best of the Male & Female Leadership Styles.

True leaders have patience, flexibility, vision; they inspire, listen, teach, coach, mentor, build relationships. And that’s just for starters. What it takes to lead, particularly in this global, diverse economy, is not for the faint of heart. Read the full story