Navigating a Crisis ...
continued from page 17 pandemic, the best of Amway has been unleashed.
This surprised me. We did an employee engagement survey in the middle of the pandemic. Almost 10,000 of our employees responded. We usually don’t get a response that high from an employee engagement survey. [About] 91% of our colleagues across the world said they were highly engaged with Amway, and 94% said they were proud of working at Amway.
[Those were] numbers that we’ve never had in the past. So this pandemic has been an opportunity to go through the decades of culture that have been built into Amway, and decades of nurturing a purpose in helping people live better, healthier lives. My challenge is to sustain this beyond the pandemic — a number of markets have already moved on to the new normal.
Coping During the Pandemic Knowledge@Wharton:
We have a number of good questions from our audience, and we’ll try to get through as many of them as we can. What is the biggest challenge you faced during this crisis, and how have you worked to overcome that?
The biggest challenge we have faced in addition to keeping all our colleagues safe has been essentially around supply chain. Our core portfolio has to do with nutrition, health and
Pant:
hygiene, with long-term immunity and long-term health products. The demand for some of these products has spiked.
The other big challenge is in in managing supply disruptions, and keeping our manufacturing locations open [amid] city lockdowns and changing regulations.
The third challenge for all of us was just a personal challenge. How do we sustain our mental stamina through weeks of uncertainty around friends and families and communities? What personal habits do each of us adopt so that we can get through this in a way that gives us an opportunity to be better, and be able to support our families and friends, and our own communities?
Early in the pandemic here in West Michigan, I got a call from the CEO of one of the largest hospital networks here asking if we make hand sanitizers. This was the middle of March. I said, “No, we don’t.” And then I checked with my team and they said, “Yeah, we don’t, but you know what? Maybe we can figure it out.”
In five days from that call we had made hand sanitizers, gotten all the approvals, and then shipped it to hospital networks across West Michigan…. Instances like that of our teams coming together to solve problems during this crisis have been a true blessing.
Knowledge@Wharton:
What changes in your business approach are your field representatives asking for from Amway as a result of the pandemic? Are they asking for different ways to engage with customers, for example?
Our one million entrepreneurs across the world have pivoted to new ways of doing business. Essentially their mantra is that online is the new offline. So, they’re building their business on social [platforms].
We have partnerships with social networks. [For example], we have a partnership with Tencent on the WeChat platform in China. We have activated that for our Amway business owners and entrepreneurs to reach customers and do social selling. We’ve just [struck] a similar partnership with KakaoTalk in Korea. We are also investing in our own abilities to have our easy frictionless shopping for Amway Business Owners and their customers.
Pant: Knowledge@Wharton:
You talked about leading from the heart. How does a company with such a distributed workforce reinforce corporate values all the way down the chain? What are the challenges there, and how do you go about doing that?
Pant:
That still remains a challenge. What we’ve dipped into is the reservoir of a culture in goodwill that has been built over the years. We are a family company, and our values — and in some sense our purpose — have been a part of the business for 60 years.
That has come in good stead for us. We’ve harnessed that, and empowered people. The other thing that’s happened is management has become democratized through this process. Every person on a Microsoft Teams [meeting] or a Zoom call has an equal voice. In some sense, because control and compliance is more difficult to do, that has led to empowering especially those who are in the markets, and those who are closest to our Amway Business Owners, to do the right thing.
We have three cultural principles: Live to serve, love to learn, and lead from the heart. While these cultural principles are always good on a piece of paper, in some senses during this pandemic, people have gotten an opportunity to walk the talk.
Knowledge@Wharton:
What is the single most important leadership quality that you think is needed in this time, and maybe in the near future?
Bill Gates had a recommendation on [having] a growth mindset. It’s something that for me is a work-inprogress…. That’s something in which our founders, Rich [DeVos] and Jay [Van Andel], were pioneers. At Amway, we encourage everyone to have a founder’s growth mindset. That is perhaps is the most important quality that I personally value. The other one is to lead from the heart. For all of us, at times, and especially during times of stress, and in the kinds of conflict that are taking place
Pant:
now, we can’t go into pride or fear. We’ve got to remind ourselves to continue to be on a journey to lead with love and humility.
Leadership Takeaways Useem:
Here are my three takeaways from our discussion. Number one, don’t forget to lead with the heart along with the head. We’re dealing with people, not automatons or robots. It’s vital for leading at any level, maybe especially from the very top.
Number two, I like the phrase “listen and learn.” We learn so much if we’re in touch with the entrepreneurs who work with us, and from the customers who buy from us. It’s amazing – if you’ve got a good ear – what you can acquire and bring in. Number three, relevant to especially the last several months, employee safety is everything. And if we do that well, they will never forget, and their loyalty will be there for years to come. Milind, what would you add?
Pant:
I would just add a couple of ones. I’m reminded of one of your books that I read before I took on this role, which is that long-term strategy is the best short-term strategy. I think during times like this, we’ve just got to remind ourselves of that mantra, Mike, which you had very well captured in that book.
The other thing is that I consider myself to continue to be a work-in-progress. As I grew up in India, during my teenage years, my father used to encourage me to listen to BBC Radio to learn English — which is not my first language — or to read the morning newspaper, which used to be the Times of India.
That stayed with me in the back of my head. Today I read five to seven newspapers online every single day. I read as many books as I can. My wife believes that makes me a very boring person, but I just love to learn. And this conversation today has been another opportunity for me to do that.