Build a message
To reawaken an innovative mindset in his employees, Myers needed to tweak their collective thought process.
Over time, the company had rested into a comfortable groove of going through the same motions each day. Employees had been coached to concentrate on their own tasks and leave the big-picture thinking to the administrators further up the ladder.
That type of thinking can make for an efficient organization but fails to stimulate ideas. With that in mind, Myers says he needed to build interest in innovation by showing employees how their ideas and their work could impact the company as a whole.
“We started really encouraging individuals to view their jobs as not just work but that they are each an integral part of what we do as an organization,” he says “They make it easier for our customers to take care of their pets.”
With a work force of approximately 22,000 in nearly 1,000 locations, communicating that message was more complicated than bringing everyone together for a company meeting. Myers and the company’s leadership team needed to cascade their messages across both geographic distance and administrative levels. And they needed to figure out a way to prevent the message from losing steam as it cascaded away from its corporate-management source.
The first step was to engage the company’s top managers. To get all of the primary decision-makers on the same page, Myers instituted a monthly conference call for the top 250 managers and executives at PETCO.
“Every month, we review how we did as a company and the near-term objectives for the upcoming period,” he says. “We consistently use this forum to talk about the dimension of each of our leadership principles and providing solutions for the customer.”
From that central meeting, communication needed to reach all the way down to the associates who work on the sales floor at each PETCO store — and the associates on the lowest rungs of the company needed to take the message of innovation and new ideas to heart.
The large-scale communication strategy focused on two principles: Keep it simple and grab employees’ attention.
“In today’s business world, sound bites are really important,” Myers says. “That is why we promote each of our basic organizational elements in a way that they can be easily remembered as concepts by themselves.
“We hold a leadership summit where we bring all the general managers in charge of every store together in one place, and spend a couple of days together. We go through some in-depth discussion on our basic principles, some tactics and training on how you bring these things to life for your associates. From there, they bring it back to their stores and have your own store huddle and relate the short-form version of what you worked on at the summit.”
Depending on the size of your company, it can take some time for a philosophy change to take root with every person. But if you can involve management at each level, you can help the message cascade more quickly and efficiently.
“If you can do it this way, the whole company feels like they’re touched at some level with the message,” Myers says. “There is no silver bullet, and no easy way to do it. The way to do it is to be consistent, be regular in your communication and ensure that you have a plan as for how that information will filter down through the organization.”
