Trailblazer

by Marc Benioff

  These missteps have taught me that I have to be more conscious of how I interact with women employees, even when I’m trying to be helpful and more inclusive. Because I’m a man who came up in a male-dominated business, I’m vulnerable to many of the subtle perceptions and expectations that men apply only to women and, to some extent, that women project on men in positions of authority.

  Recognizing that I was likely not alone in this, I decided we needed to take measures to proactively address unconscious bias and provide all employees—including top leadership—with the tools needed to drive inclusion in the workforce. So in 2016, we launched a workshop called Cultivating Equality, available at our offices around the world, as well as a Trailhead online learning course on unconscious bias, which was simultaneously open to the general public. We also introduced inclusive hiring procedures aimed at ensuring that our candidate pool reflects our communities to remove bias from the hiring process.

  In the end, the most important thing leaders can do to promote equality is to open themselves up, take an honest inventory, listen to people, and never be too proud or defensive to make corrections. There are three mistakes to avoid. First, never convince yourself that you know everything. Second, never refuse to search for the truth. And third, never conclude (no matter how hard you’ve worked) that the job is finished.

  I’ve learned something else about equality, too. There’s often a strong correlation between your ability to make progress and your willingness to ask others for help.

  Shepherds Do Not Beget Sheep

  On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling, an unarmed thirty-seven-year-old black man, was fatally shot at close range by two white police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The following day, another black man, thirty-two-year-old Philando Castile, was pulled over in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and shot and killed in front of his girlfriend and four-year-old daughter by a white police officer. Unfortunately, neither of these tragic incidents was the first time that an innocent black man had been killed at the hands of a white police officer, and they wouldn’t be the last. The two crimes (for which one of the officers would be acquitted and the other never charged) occurring in the span of under forty-eight hours, and the widespread outrage, peaceful demonstrations, and violent protests they ignited, put the issue of racial injustice in America at top of mind.

  Later that week, our headquarters lobby screens shared a message of peace in the form of two quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and we sent an email reminding employees that support services were available. I was glad we did those things, but I knew they weren’t nearly enough.

  On July 9, a photo of Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson on his knees being arrested during a protest in Baton Rouge went viral on social media. He wore a T-shirt that said #STAYWOKE, with a black version of the Twitter bird logo on the front. I’d always admired Twitter’s employee resource group for African American employees, which they call Black Birds (the company’s equivalent of our company’s BOLDforce). So the next day I tweeted. “Yes that is a @Twitter @Blackbirds logo,” I wrote. “Amazing to see tech as a vehicle for social change. Respect.”

  It took me about fifteen seconds to realize I’d made a huge mistake. Replies poured in, slamming me for hypocrisy and worse. The general view was that someone like me, a CEO in an industry plagued by a terrible record of hiring black employees, had no right to wrap himself around a movement aimed at combating racism. And my comment touting tech as a vehicle for social change, as many people rightly pointed out, was completely tone-deaf in that moment.

  One especially devastating comment contained only three statistics:

  Facebook 2% Black

  Twitter 2% Black

  Salesforce 2% Black

  The criticism was absolutely fair. Black employees made up just over 2 percent of our workforce in the United States, and fewer than 4 percent were Hispanic or Latinx. That’s not nearly representative of the communities where we live and work.

  “That anyone could see a picture of a black man being arrested for protesting against the wrongful killing of another black man and respond ‘Hey look at the Twitter logo,’ would be mind-boggling if it happened anywhere else. In the tech industry though, it’s par for the course,” Erica Joy Baker, then a senior engineer at Slack and a founding member of Project Include, told the Guardian.

  This experience was gutting. I apologized individually to nearly every person who commented on the post, but I was seriously rattled. How could I have thought, even for a second, that this was a reasonable way to show support for racial justice? I’d made the mistake of picking up a megaphone to champion a cause, when I should have been focusing on getting my own house in order.

  In that humbling moment, I knew it was a sign. It was clear we needed to make huge changes when it came to racial equality and inclusion at Salesforce. But I had no idea where to start. So I reached out to Molly Ford, a frank and trusted member of our public-relations team. “What is your experience as a black woman working at Salesforce?” I asked her.

  She told me it was lonely. There were so few people of color and even fewer leaders of color to serve as role models. She also said she didn’t believe there was enough effort being made at Salesforce to help others understand the struggles of underrepresented minorities. Molly quoted an old saying to me: “Shepherds do not beget sheep. Sheep beget sheep,” meaning if we were serious about becoming a welcoming place, we had to bring more racial diversity into our ranks, and we needed to give our employees from underrepresented groups a better way to broach issues that impacted them. We’d have to start all over by looking in the mirror again. To do this, I needed help. I asked Molly to take a leave from her day job to help me work on this issue, and she agreed.

  At our annual midyear meeting for Salesforce’s executive leadership in Hawaii, we held a panel on culture. One manager asked how serious the company was about achieving diversity. This time, I didn’t wait for someone else to answer. “Equality will be our priority going forward,” I said decisively. “Equality is now a core value.”

  I was committed to do whatever it took to uphold it. That meant accelerating our efforts to promote gender equality, LGBTQ equality, racial equality, and equal pay. Given the long road that stretched ahead, I decided it was time to hire someone to lead all of the company’s equality initiatives. I remembered my friend Tony Prophet, whom I got to know when he was a senior executive at Hewlett Packard in the Bay Area. He had since moved to Microsoft as a marketing executive, where he’d launched BlackLight at Microsoft, the company’s black-empowerment platform.

  Impressed with his work on equality issues, as well as his tech background, we offered him a new position at Salesforce as Chief Equality Officer. It was important that Tony would report directly to me, and that his new department would get all the resources and support needed to champion and advocate for equality within the company and among our stakeholders.

  Over the last several years we’ve established partnerships with workforce development and education organizations such as College Track, which is dedicated to helping students from underserved communities graduate from college. And we partner with college campus organizations and nonprofits like Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), which provides African Americans, Latinxs, and Native Americans with the skills, coaching, and connections to succeed in the world of work.

  We’ve also committed to help close the opportunity divide, giving young people facing barriers to success a path to meaningful careers by donating funds and employee time to underserved local schools and working with organizations such as Code.org, CoderDojo, Hidden Genius Project, and Mission Bit to expand access and participation in computer science in schools. We work with PepUp Tech, a nonprofit built by a group of Salesforce trailblazers that provides underserved students access, skills, and mentorship to begin careers in tech. We have also partnered with organizations, su
ch as Year Up, that provide young adults with high-demand vocational job skills, experience, and support. Our Futureforce global recruiting program, which we introduced in 2014, is focused on attracting a diverse pool of university graduates and urban youth, as well as veterans and their spouses, to Salesforce. Over the past year, 43 percent of Futureforce’s new hires in the United States were women or underrepresented minorities.

  Our ultimate mission when it comes to equality at Salesforce sounds deceptively simple: for our offices all over the world to look like the larger populations they serve. I’m not just laying this off on our human resources department, however. The Office of Equality provides every senior executive at the company with a monthly tally of the employees they’ve hired, fired, or lost to attrition and how many of them are women or members of underrepresented minority groups.

  As I said, the data is out there and it doesn’t lie. We continue to lean into it, and every year we are looking at new slices in order to spot areas where diversity is lacking, expose—and close—pay gaps, and surface problems around hiring, promotion, and retention. The results dictate our strategy going forward.

  That Black Birds tweet I’d sent was so profoundly insensitive that I’d deleted it. In a backwards way, though, I was grateful for the backlash it created. It reminded me how important it is for leaders to align their words and behavior. You can make all the empathetic statements you want, but until you figure out how to open doors for people of color and build a welcoming environment for them, you’ll never create lasting change. We have miles to go, but I know we will never stop working to make our culture more compassionate, creative, and diverse.

  * * *

  At the 2018 World Economic Forum, my co-CEO Keith Block met with Carolyn Tastad, Procter & Gamble’s group president for North America. A trailblazer if there ever was one, Carolyn is a fierce advocate for women in business, and Keith left their meeting armed with a better understanding of the issues holding women back in the workplace, on display at P&G’s special Davos exhibit. In return, Keith invited her to visit Salesforce’s headquarters in San Francisco.

  Carolyn’s chief focus at the time was reigniting revenue growth in the consumer giant’s $30 billion North America business, and naturally, we wanted to be the ones to help her do it. Keith tapped Salesforce’s Eric Eyken-Sluyters, our senior executive for retail and consumer packaged goods, to come up with an innovative solution that could help P&G sell more through its channels—everywhere from Walmart to neighborhood convenience stores. When Keith met with Eric and his team the night before the big meeting with Carolyn, however, Keith discovered a serious problem.

  There were once again no women on the sales team.

  “Eric, seriously?” Keith recalls asking. That’s when Eric broke the unfortunate news that the women on Eric’s team who were slated to participate had experienced flight delays to San Francisco.

  Before P&G and Salesforce executives gathered the next day, Keith asked our head of trailblazer marketing, Cristina Jones, to join the meeting. His goal wasn’t to change the gender ratio simply for the sake of appearances, but to bring in a smart, experienced female voice who could add value to the meeting with the P&G president.

  Eric made a compelling pitch for how we could leverage data to improve in-store retail execution. But Keith knew we weren’t going to win Carolyn’s business by sticking to the practical matters at hand. We also needed to show that our companies were aligned around values. He began telling her about Salesforce’s values-based culture, then threw it to Cristina to describe the Salesforce trailblazer community and the efforts we’d undertaken to prioritize equality inside our own company. By the time the presentation wrapped up, it was clear to everyone in the room that the discussion had made an impression on Carolyn. “Our brand was elevated in her eyes,” Eric told me later.

  Shortly thereafter, P&G signed up with us for a major data-analytics project. It was, once again, a valuable piece of business obtained largely, if not primarily, by the force of our four core values.

  * * *

  In Part I, I described the events that forced me to step back and think more deeply about my company and the broader future of business. In the space of a few eventful years, I faced a series of challenges I’d never anticipated. Navigating them taught me some transformative lessons that upended much of what I thought I knew about why Salesforce was a successful business, and how I should lead it. First, the culture we’d built, and the core values underpinning it, are not ancillary to our success over the past two decades. They are in fact the mighty engine under the hood, powering everything. And when I opened that hood, it became clear that our four core values not only created value in their own different ways, they were also intertwined. They worked together to create the momentum that keeps our flywheel spinning.

  Building trust, for example, requires creating a culture that always puts the customer first, and making choices that improve the state of the world, not just the bottom line. It requires hiring people who genuinely care about their colleagues, customers, and the broader community, and that’s best accomplished by a workforce that is diverse, inclusive, and equal. That’s the kind of base you need to stand up for the rights of people both inside the company and across the planet we inhabit.

  We also know now that to attract and retain women and minorities in the company, equality needs to be embedded not only in our stated values but in our actions: in our hiring practices, in our retention practices, in how we promote employees up the chain and eventually into leadership roles. Put simply, people want to work at companies where they can trust their employer: to create a safe place for them to work, to pay them fairly, and to give them the same opportunities to advance as everyone else, regardless of gender, race, skin color, or anything else. If these aren’t your company’s priorities, why would women—or anyone—want to work there?

  The bottom line is that building a diverse workforce makes good business sense. Success in the rapidly changing digital age requires an ecosystem that supports continuous innovation. And that demands diversity in every sense of the word. Can you imagine trying to drive innovation and transformation inside your company when everyone looks and thinks the same? That doesn’t produce the creative solutions we need to help our customers be successful.

  Whether you run a company, lead a small team, or aren’t in a management or leadership role yet but aspire to be, success will require you to widen your field of vision to the world while also narrowing it to the organization around you. There’s no map for the frontier you are entering. You have to seek out those who can help you blaze that trail into the unfamiliar terrain.

  Here’s the thing about values: You have to use words to identify them, but they won’t create true value for you unless they turn into consistent behaviors. Making values a bedrock of your culture is far more wise and sustainable than applying them selectively or intermittently, or scrambling to put them in place in reaction to a crisis.

  All of this might sound like a minefield, but I firmly believe that in the future, equality will be the key to unlocking a company’s full and sustainable value. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to achieve. But those who fail to try will be on the wrong side of history.

  SHARED KNOWLEDGE

  Whenever I venture out in public, which is pretty often, I rarely think of myself as the Salesforce CEO. Truth be told, I feel more like the CAQ.

  Chief Answerer of Questions.

  When you make it known publicly that you intend to create a different kind of business—in our case a business that’s equally committed to doing well and doing good—people are going to be curious. They want to know how you operate, what keeps you awake at night, and how well it’s all going. You’ll be cornered at parties, conferences, charity events, and, in my case, even halftime breaks at Golden State Warriors games.

  For nearly two decades, the nature of these quest
ions has evolved dramatically. People who admired our business model wanted to emulate it. Others came from folks who could barely mask their skepticism and were clearly probing for signs of weakness. As Salesforce gained market traction and more public notice, we were asked about practical things, like how we innovate, recruit talent, or decide which charities to support. Lately, however, one question in particular has started elbowing the others aside:

  “Tell me about your culture.”

  That word, “culture,” has become the hottest term in the corporate lexicon, not just in the United States but all over the world. Yet the way it’s often used has always seemed problematic to me. Some business leaders seem to consign it to a glossy brochure under a photo of a carefully curated group of smiling people gathered in a well-appointed office. Others seem to think they’ve developed a culture by providing gourmet meals and installing Ping-Pong tables.

  The truth is that culture is about so much more than just perks and freebies. Culture, at its core, is about how you define and express your values.

  Increasingly, people want to work at companies that share their values. Millennial employees, who now make up more than half of our workforce, are teaching us what they believe about the future of work. Younger generations of employees want their work to have a higher purpose. They want to make sure their company is committed to improving the state of the world. If business leaders think it’s hard to navigate this now, just wait until the next generational wave enters the workforce. I believe they’ll be two or three times more mission-driven.

  As companies meet this employee demand, they’re realizing this culture needs to be authentic. There’s no longer a generic, off-the-rack set of principles anyone can adopt to underpin a culture. It needs to be as distinct as a fingerprint.