Also, show some emotion when talking to your people. No need to be a cold fish. Revealing your true self makes you more real to everyone around you. And the more real you are, the more they’ll trust you. Of course, you can show your joy and your pleasure too, but, when appropriate, openly show your weakness, frustration, and pain.
As more and more leaders work remotely or with teams scattered around the nation or the globe, as well as with consultants and freelancers, you’ll have to give them more autonomy. The more trust you bestow, the more others trust you. I am convinced that there is a direct correlation between job satisfaction and how empowered people are to fully execute their job without someone shadowing them every step of the way.
Giving away responsibility to those you trust can not only make your organization run more smoothly but also free up more of your time so you can focus on larger issues. This means avoiding micromanagement. Involve yourself actively only at the beginning and end of a project, giving others the freedom and creativity to guide it along the way. When you micromanage, you’re effectively telling people that you don’t trust their judgment and that, unless you’re personally involved in every detail, the project won’t get done right. That attitude hardly inspires confidence.
A perfect example of following this advice involves Jonathan, our first intern, who came to us straight out of graduate school with zero experience in handling logistics or production—but it was clear that he was smart and trustworthy and that he would excel at whatever task we assigned him. Today, Jonathan has a senior role in TOMS’ logistics, making sure that thousands of shoes get where they need to go every day, and he does a great job.
TRUST INTERNS
Interns are people too. Trust them. If you hire the right interns, you can treat them as responsible employees rather than coffee runners. At most companies, interns spend their time fetching coffee and making photocopies. At TOMS, interns work on the front lines and have real job responsibilities. When you put faith in people, you’re often rewarded with a work ethic and passion that will blow away your expectations.
Sometimes when I talk about our employees, people respond that TOMS can get away with this kind of trust because we have such great people, while they don’t. But that goes back to the issue of focusing your time on hiring the right staff. Spending extra time to find good people allows for more trust once you hire them, which frees up tremendous time (and anxiety) down the road. In their early days, many companies focus on getting people to fill up all the positions they’ve created and then spend too much time trying to manage them. If hiring excellent people becomes one of your top priorities, and the whole company pitches in together to make it a great process, you will wind up with excellent employees and a more trusting environment.
To gain trust outside your organization:
The heart of great proactive customer service is empathy. If you ever enter into a dispute with a customer, treat him or her as you would like to be treated. And when customers have special needs, make them feel as special as you would want to feel.
For instance, not long ago, a woman called the TOMS general customer-service line asking if she could purchase two different-sized shoes as a pair (one in size 6, another in size 9.5). She was told that we don’t make custom pairs and that she would have to order two pairs of shoes if she wanted to purchase two different-sized shoes. Two days later we received a long email from the woman, describing a medical condition known as clubfoot which had left her with different-sized feet. She explained that she’d had a tough time because other shoe companies had quoted her similar policies. Although she understood the issue, this was a special case: The TOMS wrap boot had just been introduced and she had to have a pair. She explained that the shoes she normally purchased were around fifty dollars a pair, meaning she could afford to buy two pairs if necessary, but at ninety-eight dollars the wrap boots were too expensive.
That’s all we needed to hear. We contacted the warehouse, had them put together a custom pair of wrap boots, and even threw in a pair of custom-paired classics to make sure she had TOMS for all occasions. She was, she wrote back, thrilled—and so were we. We’d done the right thing and, in the process, we’d turned a simple customer into a potential evangelist for the brand.
To further trust if you’re the founder of a nonprofit, follow the lead of Scott Harrison and charity: water.
Once again, openness is important no matter what your business or venture. The charity: water website includes a Google Map with location coordinates and photographs of every well it has built. When you look at the site, you see that there’s no question that charity: water is doing what it says it’s doing.
Many people are hesitant to give to nonprofits, because they don’t know where or how their money is actually going to be used. This is why it can be a good idea to get individuals or an organization to underwrite your operational costs. This way, all the donations you collect go straight to the people you’re working to help—making your donors feel confident their dollars are doing good things—and that only creates more generosity on their part.
Being open also encourages you to be frugal and responsible with the money you take in. If people are aware of where their money goes, you’ll be less likely to spend it on a fancy office or high salaries.
Finally, here’s one more way to foster trust in your own organization. You can’t truly tout your product or service to others unless you have a good sense of it yourself. Trust springs from knowledge. At TOMS, we work to fulfill this dictum however we can.
For example, when we launched TOMS wedges in the summer of 2010, after making a speech I was chatting with a woman who asked me if the wedges were comfortable. I said, “Yes.” She then replied, “Well, how do you know that?”
The truth was that I didn’t actually know, because I had never worn a pair of three-inch wedges before. The next time I was in the office, I did exactly that, much to the amusement of the TOMS staff. I wore them for two days straight; and I found out that the wedges really are comfortable—though pretty high for someone not accustomed to wearing heels.
The more you give, the more you live.
—BOB DEDMAN
While still in college, Lauren Bush enjoyed a career as a model and a volunteer. She was selected as an honorary spokesperson for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), a post that sent her to countries such as Guatemala, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania to see firsthand the effects of malnutrition and hunger on the world.
But the more countries she visited, the more disempowered she felt. “I came back from these trips wanting to help, but I didn’t know what to do. Of course you want to lend a hand—but what can one person accomplish?”
Lauren began to study the issues surrounding global hunger, eventually realizing that giving kids something as simple as a free lunch could change their lives—and that it costs comparatively little to feed a child in school for a year: The world average ranges from twenty to fifty dollars.
At the same time that Lauren was traveling, she was also noticing that the reusable-bag movement was taking off. Providing a relatively easy way to become eco-friendly while shopping, reusable bags meant less strain on the environment. Lauren began looking into that too.
Then, in 2004, when she was twenty, Lauren had her epiphany: She could join the two ideas together by designing a fashion item that stood for more than fashion—namely, she would create a non-gender-specific, eco-friendly bag that would guarantee a child in a developing country a free year of school lunches for every bag sold.
The idea developed slowly, and by 2007, Lauren and her friend Elle Gustafson, who was working at the WFP at the time, partnered to create FEED Projects, which is what they call their “charitable company.” They started to sell their bags exclusively on Amazon.com. As promised, for every one sold, a child received a year of school lunches. This was an idea I absolutely loved the first time I heard of it—a new variation of the TOMS model!
Lauren then started
to reinvent the original bag, tagging each with different numbers to signify different giving levels: The FEED 2 bag feeds two children for one year, for example, and the FEED 100 bag provides one hundred school meals to a child in need in Rwanda. The company later diversified its philanthropy, giving to nutrition programs through UNICEF, to local literacy programs like Room to Read, and to FEED USA, a platform they created to support providing healthier school meals to kids in America as well. They’ve also created a “health backpack” to support community health workers in Millennium Villages in Africa.
To date, the company has sold more than 500,000 bags and donated enough money to provide more than 60 million school lunches around the world through the World Food Programme.
Nevertheless, FEED Projects is a for-profit company. Lauren is proud that the company makes enough money to sustain its ongoing operation while also providing her with a viable, profitable business that isn’t dependent on charity. “Even though the project is all about feeding kids, we’re able to do more than that. By giving kids a lunch meal in school, we’re supporting their education also. For many kids, this is the only meal they’ll get each day. So often we see kids take a portion of their lunch and put it in their pocket to bring it home for dinner, or perhaps to give it to another sibling not yet ready for school.
“I remember once, in Rwanda, asking a little girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. Sometimes you’re afraid to ask this question, because the answer can be sad. But in this case, the little girl, who was now attending school and eating well, was confident and happy. ‘I want to be president of Rwanda,’ she said.”
When Lauren told me this story, I melted. If a single FEED bag can help a child dream this big, then Lauren’s company must be doing something right. And Lauren loves her work more than just about anyone I know. “Every day I wake up feeling lucky to be able to do this,” she says.
As FEED Projects demonstrates, giving is good business—in both senses of the word “good.” It’s good because it helps people; it’s good because it makes money. It’s a way to address two essential needs with an action that unifies them both. More and more people are finding this out and are creating businesses that make giving an essential component of their model.
I originally started TOMS as a spontaneous response to help those kids in Argentina obtain shoes in a sustainable way—and when the company started to work, when I went on that first Shoe Drop to give away the shoes, it was a life-changing experience. Giving felt good. But over the last few years, I’ve also experienced how giving is truly good for business as well.
If you incorporate giving into your business and life, you will see greater returns and rewards than you ever imagined. So many good things happen to you when giving is integrated into your business—and I’m not even talking about the wonderful results of the giving itself: the people across the world whose lives are improved because you have helped them. I’m talking about the business.
For one, when giving is incorporated into your model, your customers become your partners in marketing your product. Remember that story about the woman at the airport who sold me on the TOMS story? TOMS has hundreds of similar anecdotes. For example, a young woman at Ohio State University loves TOMS so much that she organized a large SYS (Style Your Soul) event in the fall of 2009—all on her own, reaching out to local high schools to educate them about TOMS and busing in high school students to be part of OSU’s One Day Without Shoes barefoot walk.
Or, at University High School in Orlando, Florida, a teenager set up an assembly to show our documentary and asked the administration to help him share the TOMS movement. As a result of his efforts, the school volleyball team took a lap barefoot around the gym to raise awareness, and now the other teams go barefoot before their games to spread the TOMS message.
And at Ravenwood High School in Brentwood, Tennessee, several young students created “Operation TOMS Prom,” getting more than 3,200 students from high schools across the country to wear TOMS to their prom.
Here is what the Ravenwood boys wrote about their experience: “A few of us here at Ravenwood High have been pretty passionate about what TOMS is doing for a while now, and with the up-and-coming prom season—a time usually marked by drama and expensive shopping sprees—we thought it would be really awesome if it turned into something bigger than ourselves. Something with which we could give instead of receive. Not many students in our area knew about TOMS and their mission, but those of us already involved decided to make the ‘One for One’ project school-wide while utilizing the prom as a catalyst to promote the cause and give what we thought would be a few hundred kids shoes. The idea has taken off quicker than any of us expected, not only in our school, but in schools spanning from the East Coast to the Midwest, with 35 participating schools already confirmed.”
TOMS for PROM is now a nationwide campaign, giving tens of thousands of kids a new pair of desperately needed shoes each year.
SEAN THE SHOE DOG
Sean was one of the first people to join me on this journey. He is a Shoe Dog, someone who works in the shoe business. Before that, he was a dedicated triathlete, and the only jobs that would support his athletic habit were those in athletic-goods stores, so that’s where he worked, part-time.
He eventually started to work full-time with Nike; in fact, Sean held several jobs in the corporate footwear world before he and a friend created a skate-shoe company: 2•fish shoe works. However, that company eventually folded, and Sean decided to become an independent shoe consultant.
Sean and I met for the first time in 2006, just after the Los Angeles Times article about TOMS had come out and we needed help, fast.
Here’s what Sean has to say:
I met with Blake, liked him, and thought, OK, here’s a job just like the others. The One for One idea seemed cute. I didn’t have a clue if it was viable, but Blake convinced me to help him. That was in July of 2006. In October, TOMS had sold 10,000 pairs of shoes and was planning its first Shoe Drop. This also happened to be my ninth wedding anniversary, so I thought a trip would make a great anniversary present.
By the end of the Shoe Drop, I knew it wasn’t just a nice present. It was a life-changing event. At the first stop, a wonderful woman who ran an orphanage told me that more than anything else, shoes were what she needed; otherwise, the kids couldn’t get an education. I cried. In fact, I must have burst into tears at least three times on that trip.
This caught both me and my wife, Shannon, off guard. We were changing the lives of many people. This is why Blake tries to get so many employees to go on the Shoe Drops. No one comes back the same. And that’s what makes working at TOMS different. No matter how tough the day, or no matter how difficult a customer, you get to pick your head up, take a deep breath, and say, “I don’t care, I am making a difference. I went there. I put shoes on their feet. I saw the tears on their faces. I saw the smiles on their mothers’ faces. I made a difference.”
My wife and I decided that we had to get our two kids to see this, too, to understand that materialism isn’t everything and that big houses and big cars aren’t all that matters. So in January of 2008 the whole Scott family went down to Argentina on another Shoe Drop. My kids were not just impressed—I can honestly say they are proud of me. They want to wear my shoes. That’s never been the case before. It makes me feel good.
The rewards of giving are enormous—not just for the recipients, but for you too. It helps you get through a bad day. You love talking about your job. You love your job. When I first came to TOMS, I was jaded. I had met too many business leaders who created an inspiring message but didn’t practice it. I thought I’d never be inspired again by my career. Now I am.
If you are doing good, customers have a greater reason to care about your work. That is why Pepsi made a surprise move at the 2010 Super Bowl. Normally, Pepsi and Coke compete to show the best commercials on the air, spending a great deal of money to do so. But Pepsi opted out of advertising and instead took the $2
0 million it would have spent and set up the Pepsi Refresh Project online, giving the money away to people who could come up with the best idea for a better tomorrow.
As part of our collaboration with Element, we made a limited-edition line of shoes and One for One skateboards. This picture was taken at the Indigo Skate Camp outside Durban.
For Pepsi, not only does the campaign help nourish hundreds of ideas that could become the next big business or philanthropic movement, but it also establishes Pepsi as an intrinsic part of that new company’s formation and history, creating a strong bond between it and the new company’s customers.
And it goes beyond creating loyal customers; you also attract and retain the most amazing employees when you incorporate giving into your business. People often tell us that TOMS has remarkable people working for us—and we do. We are able to find terrific people who want to be a part of the TOMS story. And our employees stay. Over the years, TOMS has lost only a handful, and at the same time we have been able to get extraordinary people to step away from corporate America and forgo the typical perks of working for Fortune 500 companies. Instead, they’ve come on board to make a difference with us.
According to a new survey on corporate community involvement released by auditing and consulting firm Deloitte, 72 percent of employed Americans say they would prefer to work for a company that supports charitable causes when they are deciding between two jobs with the same location, responsibilities, pay, and benefits. Similarly, in its own 2002 study, the communications agency Cone found that 77 percent of respondents said that a company’s commitment to social issues was a major factor when deciding where to work.
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