Covering the World… a lesson in failed leadership
This story broke yesterday: (Take the 3 minutes to watch it… I’ll wait)
First, let’s acknowledge there is something incredibly satisfying about watching paint mixing videos. I don’t know what it is or why, but they are… I don’t know, soothing?
Second, this story, while having a wonderful outcome, is a tragic lesson in fear based leadership, disenfranchising a passionate employee and an inability to adapt to emerging brand opportunities like TikTok or social channels in general.
In case you didn’t have time to watch the video, let me briefly break it down for you. A 22 year old Sherwin Williams employee began posting videos of creative ways he mixed paint on TikTok. As I mentioned above, they are fascinating to watch. He went viral. He created a presentation and took it to a marketing VP to discuss how TikTok could be a big boost for the Sherwin Williams brand. The VP wouldn’t meet with him and a short time later he was fired for “gross misconduct.” The story blew up and he wound up being hired by Florida Paints and is moving to Florida to join them. Great outcome for the young man, missed opportunity for Sherwin Williams.
This is a multi-faceted failure in leadership by the Sherwin team and if I were in their C suite I would immediately begin evaluating why it happened and taking steps to create an environment more open to fresh ideas.
In 2017 I was lucky enough to attend Linkage’s Global Institute for Leadership Development and one of the keynotes was the founder of Manchester Bidwell, Bill Strickland. If you aren’t familiar with him, I HIGHLY recommend his book. During his speech, he pointedly told the audience, “The problems in your organization can be solved by the people in your organization.”
This is a lesson that’s lost on a lot of leaders because their decision making paradigms are based in fear, ignorance or both. Is Sherwin Williams suffering meaningful brand damage because of this story? In the macro, probably not, but if I were a young potential employee of the coverings giant I would think twice about working there.
As leaders it is critical we consciously remind ourselves that rigidity in our mindsets will lead us to make poor decisions. Also, it is imperative that we embrace passion in our team, nurture it and grow it. Employee engagement is the responsibility of EVERY leader in the company. Sherwin Williams had a young man in their employ that turned a job that most of us would consider menial into art. The VP that wouldn’t meet with the kid would probably tell us he was too busy and what does an inexperienced 22 year old have to offer anyway, never considering the skill, commitment and creativity required to build a following of 1.5 million people.
Being open to new ideas from anyone in our organization creates a culture of psychological safety and if your team feels safe, they will be engaged and perform. Period, full stop.
As someone who has led teams for over 15 years it is a lesson I remind myself about over and over again. A few years back, during my tenure at SAP, one of my youngest team members came into my office on a Monday morning with an idea. I invited him to sit down and unpack it for me. He basically wanted to incorporate a feature from a dating app into our lead generation product. It was creative and had the potential for us to generate a meaningful amount of net new revenue if applied properly. I cancelled my next two meetings, we had an impromptu whiteboard session and mapped out the workflow and I delivered the requirement and some speculation on how much it could make us to the product team that very day. I also made sure to give credit to the young man and make sure any accolades that came from his idea went to him. He eventually graduated out of my organization and is now a successful solutions manager for SAP National Security Services. I could not be more proud of him. Even though it’s been a number of years, he remains at SAP, engaged and passionate.
Imagine a hypothetical where the marketing leader at Sherwin Williams didn’t dismiss the meeting out of hand. We are all busy, but imagine he took the time to learn about the 1.5 million followers, the potential brand impact, and the opportunity to put the Sherwin Williams logo on videos that were viewed literally millions of times. Should that young man be working at Florida Paints or should he be on the social media team at Sherwin Williams driving edge level value and bringing the brand to the next generation of renters, home and business owners that are going to have to paint stuff?
Imagine a hypothetical where Sherwin’s HR recognized an employees passion and instead of firing him for creating so much buzz about Sherwin Williams it was impacting their phone support, they embraced him and helped channel that passion in a productive way that benefitted the company while at the same time making him feel valued.
Wouldn’t that have been a better outcome?
