Bob Fox: Describe Steelcase and what you’re experiencing in your industry.
Jim Keane: Steelcase is 105 years old and I’m the ninth CEO. I’ve been with the company for 21 years. We’re the number one office furniture manufacturer in the US and in the world. Our mission is to unlock human promise by selling furniture and partnering with our customers to help them use space to achieve their business objectives, enhance their culture and help them grow. We do more than support people at work — we help people at work reach their full potential.
Can you give us a sense of the demographic of Steelcase and tell us a little about your culture?
We have about 13,000 employees in 45 locations all over the world, and we’re the market leader in many of those locations. Our organization is very global and we have people from various countries working in each of the local markets, some who move from their starting location to another part of the world. Here in the US we have several members of the leadership team who began their careers in Europe, for example. We think this helps us build cultural agility amongst our leadership team, and I believe that will continue to be very important for global companies in the future.
What I appreciate about our culture is that we celebrate curiosity. I think we have fascinating people who work at Steelcase. We want people to bring their whole brain to work — not just do creative things at home. This helps keep the workplace exciting and enriching but also helps solve problems in new ways. It’s one of the reasons we move people around globally and also functionally. In some ways, they start all over with a new learning curve. Over many years they accumulate many broad and diverse experiences, and that makes them better problem solvers. Because of that, we have very low turnover. People join and stay for a long time, and that has a cyclical effect on the culture. When you hire someone, you expect they’re going to be here for 15 -20 years, so you invest in them. People feel the genuine interest we have for them as individuals.
You mentioned the ‘bring your brain to work’ idea. How do you create an environment for that? Is there anything unique that you’re doing?
First of all, we celebrate it when people do it. It’s the idea that you are a whole person, and that we didn’t just hire you because you’re good at accounting or something, although skills certainly matter. We hired you because you are interesting and we want you to bring that to work.
Sometimes we will also provoke each other. For example, I have a Chief of Staff that likes painting with water colors. You would think that has nothing to do with work, but we were doing a presentation together recently, and I challenged her to subtly bring color into it to integrate and communicate another layer of information. In the presentation, she brought in that layer of color as a kind of “code” to guide the audience’s understanding. Afterwards, people commented that they’d never seen us use color that way before. Sometimes by just asking people to reach a little deeper, you’ll see how they can bring in their other life skills to work.
You’re in the business of creating the physical environment. The way you think about space is probably very different from a traditional CEO. Is there a way you set up your space to attract that brain power?
Thanks to resources like your publication, CEOs are far more equipped today than they were five years ago to be able to think about how space connects to their strategies and culture. For a lot of leaders in general, their current view is about the symbolic power of space. Let’s say you used to work in a corner office and decide to get rid of that and move into an open plan. People in the company will see you sitting at a bench rather than in the corner office. This concept is better than five years ago, but it’s also a bit cliché. In some ways it dismisses what you were trying to do.
A few CEOs are seeing the authentic power of space as a scalable tool to help advance their culture and business, and one of the ways to start is by talking about it with their boards. CEOs are all interested in growth right now, and many are realizing that if you want to sustain growth, you have to figure out how to innovate. If they study innovation, they start to realize culture is super important, because it’s shaped by experiences employees have day in and day out. If you don’t get the culture part right, you won’t amplify your growth.