Lake Como, Italy
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Define the impact you want to have
I grew up with a mindset that it’s important to fulfill your sense of duty. Working on the farm instilled the importance of delivering on time, respecting your work, and fulfilling your promises—even when the weather has other plans. That mindset has been critical in helping me solve big challenges in my career. The promise we make to deliver for Amazon customers is what makes me excited to get up and go to work every morning.
One of the most important things you can do as a leader is to define your purpose. Identify the upstream and downstream impact you want your team to have, then figure out how you and each of your employees will contribute to achieve that goal. Once you have it figured out, help your team understand that desired impact to keep everyone working toward the same vision.
I made the transition from work that was purely rooted in engineering to take on a management role in operations in the early 2000s. I walked into the warehouse with a suit, a tie, and shiny shoes, and I had about 50 people laughing at me and whispering that I wouldn’t last a week. That was my “aha moment.” Operations was a whole new world for me, so I decided to take a very pragmatic approach to get familiar with it. I worked two shifts from 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. in the warehouse alongside my workforce, then from 2:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. I would manage the place. I learned the steps required for my team’s work, and that helped me learn how to be an effective manager for them.
The biggest lesson I learned here was the importance of stepping out of your shell to better understand what your team needs from you. It’s much easier to make important decisions and provide helpful guidance when you listen to your employees and have a true understanding of their work.
One week before the pandemic hit, I got a call from my leadership saying they’d like me to run our European operations. I had just started thinking about how I would approach this new responsibility when the pandemic started impacting communities around the world. Demand grew rapidly and some of our work went remote, which presented unique challenges for communication. The resiliency of our organization during this period was mind blowing. Our ability to quickly reinvent our communication networks and communicate clearly with employees was critical as we continued to deliver for customers.
Global pandemics aside, communication is one of the most important things to get right as a leader. It’s something I continue to evolve and improve upon every day. Think through how you’ll keep an open line of communication with your employees, and how you’ll approach things like big news, changes, and critical feedback.
I started playing soccer when I was a kid, and I’m still playing 45 years later. One of the things that has always fascinated me about the sport is how you can win with any team. It’s not about the number of superstar players, but the collective effort of the entire team and how it’s coached. I think soccer is a bit of a metaphor for life in that way. As a leader, it’s important to evaluate your team and develop a path to grow leveraging the individual and collective strengths of your employees.
Amazon offers a variety of career development and growth opportunities for all employees, from leadership development programs to skills training and apprenticeship programs. Managers can help identify the right growth plan and opportunities for their team that can enable further career advancement through programs like Career Choice, on-the-job training or certification programs. Having an effective game plan based on your team’s existing skills will help guide your decisions and strategy as a leader.
When we launched the first fulfillment center in Italy, we had about 200 employees, and we were picking 100 items an hour by hand. Now, we have roughly 20,000 employees, and we are able to pick 100 items in 20 minutes with help from our robotics systems. These systems also help make employees’ work safer and leave more time for them to work on high-level tasks.
Technology has played a big role in helping my teams achieve our goals at Amazon. That’s why one of my final pieces of advice is to think through how you will connect your people and technology to scale your team’s efforts. The two need to work together—it can’t just be one and not the other.
