Starbucks and a Missed Communication Opportunity
I was in North Carolina last week, a fantastic week working with a team at Lowe’s amazing campus in Mooresville, NC. En route each morning my partner and I stopped at Starbucks for a coffee…and we waited about ten minutes for our coffee. I’ve stopped at plenty of Starbucks with lines out the door, well walked by them really, and this was not one of those. There were almost as many baristas (about six) as there were customers. But still, ten minutes. In my pacing about the store, I did notice they had updated their menu, something that was well past overdue as we’ve all been seeing the same unappetizing sandwiches sitting in the case in any Starbucks you enter for the past ten years.
I train teams on communications, internal and external communications, based on the decades of work and research I did on this with the FBI where every day of my life was an exercise in difficult communication. I knew Starbucks had set on a path to revitalize itself, but my NC experience made me think perhaps Starbuck’s plan wasn’t quite working, and made me wonder how the Starbucks executive team was communicating that plan.
Credibility
So I started researching. Brian Niccol was named the CEO of Starbucks in August 2024 (officially leaving Chipotle on August 31) and started as Starbucks CEO on September 9. On September 10, he unveiled his “Back to Starbucks” plan. It apparently took him one day to generate a new plan to turn the company around. Even if we assume he conducted extensive research during his transition period, announcing a comprehensive turnaround plan on day one signals to employees that their input wasn't truly valued, or really even solicited, in its development.
Imagine you are a Starbucks employee, and you receive a letter from the new CEO, one day into his new job, and he tells you about all the conversations he has had:
“Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent time in our stores, speaking with partners and customers, and talking with teams across operations, store design, marketing and product development.”
You are going to have an immediate, subconscious response to this (a System 1 response in Daniel Kahneman’s vernacular) and that immediate response is going to guide all future assessments of corporate actions.
In this case, I assess that response is going to be negative, because he has been on the job one day and is now telling you all the things you are doing wrong. As an example, he later writes:
“People start their day with us, and we need to meet their expectations. This means delivering outstanding drinks and food, on time, every time.”
As an employee, you hear, “you have not been doing your job well.”
So now we have a credibility problem and a judgment problem. Judgement being a violation of most of the fundamental principles of rapport. which leads us to rapport or making an effective connection with your audience.
Rapport and Connection
In his inaugural letter, Niccol has this way too long paragraph:
“Starbucks was founded on a love for high quality coffee — handcrafted by our outstanding green apron partners and enjoyed with intention. Coffee is our heart. We own and operate Hacienda Alsacia, our coffee farm on the slopes of Costa Rica’s Volcano Poás, which serves as the heart of our research and innovation efforts. From our network of Farmer Support Centers, Starbucks agronomists share research, education and best practices with local farmers. We invest in the finest quality beans. Our skilled team of roasters carefully prepare these beans in five Starbucks roasting facilities across the U.S., in Amsterdam to serve EMEA markets, in Kunshan for China, and in Karnataka, India, for that growing market. We also operate Starbucks Reserve Roasteries in Milan, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York City, Chicago and Seattle, where we roast small batch Reserve coffees. We design the best equipment for our stores and invest in training for our baristas to ensure every cup reflects our commitment to excellence. Each cup is more than a drink; it’s a handcrafted moment, made with care.”
The first part seems alright, about our “outstanding green apron partners” and ends okay with “made with care.” However, in between we have 135 words that send the exact opposite message, which is “I care about the operational side of the business, not the people side.” 135 words about process and 29 words about the people, though I’m arguing with myself that the latter is probably really just 19 words. Regardless, the message that is heard is he cares about facilities, EMEA markets and efficiency, and not people.
We communicate at any given time on one of three channels: Identity (this is who I am and who you are, positively or negatively), instrumental (these are the processes and problems and this is how we improve them), or relational (bolstering or diminishing the relationship between the speaker and the listener).
In this case, Niccol is communicating almost entirely through the instrumental channel, with only a passing glance at identity and relational. The problem is, the latter two are what the audience needs and wants to hear. They do not care about where roasting facilities are located (and they probably already know that), they care about the new CEO’s intentions toward them.
In short, Niccol has absolutely failed here to generate any rapport, despite his passing attempts at doing so, because he is fundamentally misaligned with the message his audience wants and needs to hear.
The result is, employees will subtly resist everything he tries to impose on them, regardless of whether it is good, because they have judged the intent and competence of the sender (negatively) and have had impressed upon them that they are not what matters.
Transparency
A significant component of my BASE Model of Rapport is transparency. Transparency helps to generate a feeling of security, the “S” in BASE. In February 2025, Niccol sent another letter, announcing the layoff of 1,100 employees, that I believe was intended as an attempt at transparency, but that I see as a failed attempt. Let’s have a look at this sentence:
“The leadership team has finished that work, and this week, we will communicate the changes we’re making. This includes the hard decision to eliminate 1,100 current support partner roles and several hundred additional open and unfilled positions.”
From a transparency perspective, he is not actually telling you what specifically is going to happen, he is telling you that he is going to tell you sometime in the future…and there are five more instances of this in the letter. This is not transparency and serves only to generate uncertainty and mistrust. That sense of mistrust will linger among those who were not let go and will diminish the effectiveness of the “Back to Starbucks” plan.
He continues with:
“We are simplifying our structure, removing layers and duplication and creating smaller, more nimble teams. Our intent is to operate more efficiently, increase accountability, reduce complexity and drive better integration. All with the goal of being more focused and able to drive greater impact on our priorities.”
I challenge anyone to tell me what that really means, in concrete terms. If I were a Starbucks employee, I would hear “you want me to work harder, with less support, and achieve more.” Admittedly, that was every day in the FBI, but that does not mean I loved hearing it. Nor would any employee.
Conclusion
Communication is not the ability to create sentences, to put buzz words together, or to create bullet points. Effective communication is about recognizing what will be heard and why it will be heard that way, and crafting a message that will achieve the desired outcome.
I am a coffee and a coffee house aficionado, and at a point in my life was a Starbucks fan, though now am part of the cause of their rapidly dropping sales. Only do I visit when it is the only option. Still, I had high hopes for the “Back to Starbucks” plan. Until I actually read the letters.
With this type of communication (and I’ve kept my critique as brief as I possibly could, because there are so many other issues) you do not create an atmosphere in the company that will help you to succeed. You create resistance, a resistance that will linger in the back of people’s minds for years to come and diminish the effectiveness of the even the best plans.
I work with teams to improve communication in all of its various forms, and I genuinely wish I’d worked with Starbucks on this. The intention is not wrong – Starbucks has lost its way, as their earnings show, and needs to get back to Starbucks – but the execution was so far off the mark as to be painful to read.
