Kelly McCulloch on playing to win instead of playing it safe

What this conversation is about

Kelly McCulloch leads the people function at Taco Bell, a brand with a workforce spread across a mature home market and a fast-growing international one. Glenn Llopis opens the episode by saying she may sit in the chief people officer chair but is built for a chief executive role, which turns out to be the argument of the whole conversation: what the function becomes when it stops administering and starts anticipating.

She arrives with two mantras. The first is be approachable, get over yourself. The second is keep an open mind: you do not have to agree, but you do need to respect.

"So my, my preference is to work in an environment where the ego is checked at the door, don't even bring it in." — Kelly McCulloch · 00:02:26

People are people, she says, whatever they earn or wherever they come from, and once the ego is out of the room you can get to the productive conversation.

Denial is fear wearing a different coat

Glenn asked how you move someone who is stuck in an old way of thinking. Her answer starts with curiosity, because you cannot force change on anyone, and with listening to people much younger than you who are about to become the workforce. Then he pushed harder: why is there so much denial? Her answer is one word. The denial, she says, is fear.

And the fear is specific. It is the worry that if you have the conversation, someone will say something you cannot act on, or the idea will be wild enough that the executive team laughs you out of the room. Her own example is the decision every company argued about that year, returning to the office. The first instinct was simply to set the rule and tell people when to come in:

"I had somebody courageous on my team who came and said, let's look at it a little bit differently. And I said, Ooh, that makes me a little bit nervous, but you're right, because we do need to look at this differently. We ended up looking at it differently. We ended up in a really great place." — Kelly McCulloch · 00:06:22

Note what she admits: the nervousness was hers. The team member supplied the courage, and the room was open enough to let the idea in.

Personnel, and the word that makes her skin crawl

Glenn put the uncomfortable question to her directly, that human resources has been treated as a cost center and has waited to be told it is something more. McCulloch agrees, and says the historical name for the function, personnel, is the thing that makes her skin crawl.

The pandemic exposed the difference. In her industry the reflex was to treat it like a food safety crisis, with the playbook that implies:

"This was a people crisis on all fronts." — Kelly McCulloch · 00:11:25

What the business needed was conducting, leading and anticipating from the people function. Her standard for keeping a seat at the table is blunt: be two steps ahead of what is happening in the business, and be able to see around corners. If you make this decision, what are the four things that will happen next, and how will you manage them?

Employees already know how you feel about them

Asked whether leaders out of touch with what employees expect are already losing, she says yes, and explains why pretending does not work. Your employees know exactly how you feel about them. They know whether you actually listen and whether you are actually trying to make their lives better. A leader who has not yet worked out how to hear from them is behind, even if plenty of peers are behind too.

Then she connects that to something a marketer would recognize:

"There's a huge connection between the team member experience and the brand, and the way that the brand shows up to the consumer... the pride that an employee feels and working for a brand comes from the actions that the brand takes." — Kelly McCulloch · 00:13:17

Which is why her people team works closely with marketing. A brand pushing the envelope outward makes it easier to push it inward, on the experience of the people who carry it.

Safe is also boring

Glenn named the pattern he sees in leaders: playing not to lose rather than playing to win. McCulloch finished the thought with the word he was reaching for:

"We play from a place that don't lose because it's safe... it's also boring" — Kelly McCulloch · 00:15:33

Her argument against safety is not bravado, it is arithmetic about time. We spend so much of our lives at work that the question becomes what you want your impact to be, and what people will say about you when you are no longer working. With that lens you start thinking about transformation, and about winning as a team rather than for yourself.

Glenn drew the wider conclusion:

"I know we have traditionally been put in boxes, but we live in a world now where there are no boxes anymore. And if we're not acting like that, that's when we can't evolve." — Glenn Llopis · 00:16:38

The work she describes next makes the point concrete. Leading a mature market and a high-growth one at the same time takes different skills, different team structures, and leaders secure enough to take on what looks like the smaller opportunity because they can see how fast it will grow.

"legacies aren't defined at the end. They're actually shaped at the beginning." — Glenn Llopis · 00:19:25

Asked what hers would be, McCulloch does not reach for strategy. She hopes people say she was kind, that she cared about the people and the business, and that she gave it everything she had.