Alumni Profiles - Leadership and High-Performance Teams

A dynamic leader's week away from the job reaps benefits for his back-home team.

Starbucks Coffee Co.'s Morgan Schafer approached Leadership and High-Performance Teams with a perspective that anyone who knows him would say was unorthodox for this takecharge leader. "I consciously went into the program not being the head guy," he said. "I wanted to be a team member versus a team leader, to observe others in this role."

Schafer's strategy meshed well with the agenda of this fastpaced program, built around a realistic simulation where peers recreate the life of an actual team from beginning to end. The intensive activity culminates with an orienteering exercise amid the beauty of the Rocky Mountains. "Right from day one we started building the team and understanding team norms," he said. "In five days, we were able to extract understandings and knowledge that normally would take months."

There is considerable opportunity for participants to contribute their existing team knowledge and skills to influence their learning, and Schafer was open to building on his already considerable strengths. "People have always given me high grades on my ability to promote teamwork and accomplish things through a team effort," he said, "but I knew I could do a better job of managing relationships among my team members.

"I lead a fairly diverse team in age and lifestyle and process of thought and that's a bit of a challenge because people tend to focus on different things," he explained. "Leadership and High-Performance Teams showed me how to bridge those differences by fostering mutual respect and making everyone understand the value of diversity."

The individual feedback each participant receives in the program and from people back at work gave Schafer a new awareness of his leadership style. "My natural tendencies are very, very strong," he said. "I want to get to the end before I see the whole picture. The feedback prompted me to see how my actions might look through the eyes of others."

Beyond that, he wanted to learn how to use feedback with his back-home team, to become more of a teacher and mentor to them. "The feedback mechanism modeled in the program was a huge takeaway," he said. "I'm more cognizant of how I give feedback, of how it comes across to different personality types."

Schafer, who came to Starbucks seven years ago after a variety of positions in the restaurant and quick-service industry, was a regional director of his company when he went to CCL^®. Several months later he was promoted to regional vice president, and he knew it was important to get off to a good start with his new team. "I had taken away a lot of practical materials from CCL, and for that all-important first meeting, I went back and pulled out my notes."

Download the PDF. (Adobe Acrobat pdf, 209 KB)