The Scorecard That's Transforming Starbucks

Starbucks didn’t get its best quarter in three years by adding more initiatives. It got there by getting clearer. When Brian Niccol steps in after years of CEO churn and brand drift, he makes a move that sounds simple but hits like a reset button: he rolls out a focused operating system called the Grow Scorecard.

We walk through what Starbucks chose to measure and why it matters for any leader trying to drive execution, improve customer experience, and build a culture that performs under pressure. The scorecard ranks every store on a 1 to 5 “shot” scale across five priorities: customer experience, peak hour performance, employee scheduling, product availability, and food safety. We dig into the details that make it real, including the five key moments Starbucks trains in every interaction: greet, take the order, make the drink, hand off, and say goodbye. That’s what operational clarity looks like when it’s designed to be coached, observed, and repeated.

Then we bring it back to your team. If your dashboard has dozens of KPIs, you may have activity but not alignment. We challenge you to pressure test your own “team key results” and tighten them to the few measures that actually drive outcomes, then reinforce them in every meeting, every time. If you lead a function, a business unit, or an HR and L and D team, this is a practical playbook for turning leadership development into measurable ROI. Subscribe, share this with a leader who needs focus, and leave a review with the top 3 to 5 priorities you’d put on your own scorecard.

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Transcript

Starbucks Momentum And Leadership Shift

SPEAKER_02 0:00

They just had their best quarter in three years. The change that the new CEO of Starbucks rolled out through the leadership ranks and why you should be doing the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

This is the Lead in 30 podcast with Russell. You cannot be serious. Strengthen your ability to lead in less than 30 minutes.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

They are the four skills critical for delivering results. It's the Lone Rock Core 4 Masterclass. Sign up for the next free two-hour virtual session at LoneRock.io.

Episode Welcome and Upgrading You

Why Starbucks Needed A Turnaround

The Grow Scorecard Creates Clarity

Customer Experience And Five Moments

Peak Hours Scheduling And Stock

Making Clarity Repeatable Every Meeting

Tower Report AI And Daily Focus

ROI Of Clarity And Final Challenge

SPEAKER_02 0:36

Yeah, you are absolutely welcome to attend the Core 4 Masterclass. We do it every two, three, four weeks, something like that. It really is for the head of HR or for your LD or HR team to go in. Anybody that's really responsible for developing leaders inside your organization, they are who you really want to send to the Core 4 masterclass to get an overview of what those four skills are. But absolutely every time we do it, we've got hundreds of people that register every two or three weeks for whatever the cadence is. And amongst those several hundred that register are a bunch of just executives and VPs and directors and frontline managers who want to learn for themselves as well. So you don't have to be an HR leader to go to that. But certainly if you have a leader of HR, you would want to send them to the Core 4 masterclass, you register for free at LoneRock.io. Welcome in to the Leadin30 podcast. In less than 30 minutes, we give you a framework, a model, a best practice, an example, a story, something that we think you've got to listen to, you've got to hear, you've got to consider in your effort to constantly upgrade, improve, strengthen your ability to lead others. My name is Russ Hill. I make my living coaching consulting senior executive teams at some of the world's biggest companies. I am one of the co-founders of an executive train consulting company as well as a leadership training company. We call it Lone Rock Leadership. Those two business units exist in our company. So we do a lot of work with CEOs and with business unit leaders. And then we do a lot of work with HR and L and D leaders. And it just kind of depends who finds out about us first. And most of our business comes from referrals. So those of you that have been clients, our clients, considering me clients and refer people to us, we're so grateful for it. We're looking at another phenomenal year of growth. We did in some parts of our business more in Q1 of 2026 than we did in all of 2025 in some categories, which is stunning. And we love growth. Growth attracts talent. Stagnant. When the results go stagnant or even backward, people start jumping off the ship. First thing is lack of engagement, then lack of retention, and then the best talent goes quick. Okay. All right. Today, what I want to share with you, by the way, if you want to find out more about our firm, LoneRock.io. Okay, um, let me tell you what we're going to talk about in this episode of the pod. We're going to talk about Starbucks. Now, I'm not a Starbucks consumer, but um I am a fan, an observer, a student of great leadership. And honestly, sucky leadership. I've certainly worked with plenty of those leaders and uh mediocre, I guess, is maybe a bad, well, some of them have been really bad. Really bad. And uh, and so you study, well, what causes that? And then if they're a client, you're trying to fix that, right? Often it's not the client, our main point of contact that hires us that is really um struggling that bad, but maybe it's one of his or her direct reports or somebody in the organization. And so we find ourselves working with that business unit or that team or that department and trying to develop those leaders. Hey, listen, I'm not making fun of anybody because you all know my story, right? You know my first job as a manager ranked the lowest, the worst, the most toxic culture in the whole company. That was me. And so you can't do worse than I did. Like people did not want to be on my team. The results were good, but I couldn't sustain them. And the first employee engagement survey that our company did revealed it. It exposed the fact that I was a horrible leader. And not that I figured it all out, but at that point, I just became obsessed with development as a leader. And for decades, it was just about me. It wasn't about anybody else. It was about improving me. And then after a while, as the story goes, then I had started having friends and then colleagues and then other people say, Rush, you ought to get into the leadership development space. I was like, what are you talking about? And uh four books later, by the way, we are big news. We're working on our fifth. It will come out this year. I cannot wait, you all, to tell you more about it. We're releasing a book a year. That's the basic plan. It's basically what we've done over the the the long haul. If you haven't read our last one, Deliver, why some leaders get results and most don't, I'm telling you, in fact, um I you you just you gotta get it, you gotta get it. If you want to listen to the audio version, it's available on Spotify. Amazon or uh what what the credits audible. It's dragging their feet, freaking driving me nuts, but um, but you can listen to it on uh on um Spotify or buy the Kindle, the electronic version, or the uh the uh 400-page hardcover, um which we are so proud of. You can buy it at Amazon or any book outlet. We just had I we we just shipped uh was it last week, the week before, 800, and uh just over 850 copies of the book to a uh to a company that's doing a leadership uh like summit, you know, for all the leaders in their company. They've got well, up to you know, certain the top like two or three levels, and uh they're they're putting uh a book on each one of their chairs on a session that we are facilitating for them. So um if you need 20 copies, you need 40, you need 800 of uh deliver, let us know. We can get it to you, and way cheaper than the uh the Amazon price. Okay, let's get into Starbucks. So, Brian Nickel. Brian Nickel is somebody that we met when he was at Chipotle. In fact, when he was a new CEO of Chipotle, it was in, I believe, if memory serves me right, Vegas. And he was having a meeting with all the GMs of Chipotle, and we were as a firm in the realm, and and it was there's some things that happened in that meeting that I'm not gonna talk about today, but that that really cemented Brian in our minds as this very different kind of leader. And um, and so Brian um transformed Chipotle. In fact, the time that he took over it, they were rebounding. He's really good at takeovers um at turnarounds at fix her up, uh, fixer up, so like get get it back from you know a uh maybe a low point to to it's uh to to set it up for the future. So if you remember Chipotle's track record, they had that whole health scare. People were getting sick because the lettuce was whatever, and they were having issues, and so they're all kinds of bad publicity. Brian comes in, transform results. Chipotle is doing incredible. Then a year or two, what's it been now? Two years now? Time flies. Brian got recruited over by um Starbucks, and so he left Chipotle and went over to Starbucks. And let's just give it a little background, and then I'm gonna tell you what change Brian recently made, and all this is public, so we can share it. Every single thing I'm gonna share is public information. And I'm not gonna share anything else but uh what you could literally read in any like Wall Street Journal or any kind of business um report, right? And and so um Brian takes over, and there had been four CEOs in three years. Howard Schultz himself had cycled in and out, basically at a revolving door at the CEO suite. Some of you can relate to this. We go into a decent number of organizations where that's been the case. Or you've had a long time CEO and the company's just become stagnant because the CEO just hasn't kept up. And sometimes it's really negatively affect the organization because he or she held on for way too long, or the board let him hold on. So three quarters when Brian gets in, three consecutive quarters declining same sales, uh, same store sales, right? That's when he takes over. You got three quarters in a row. Schultz saying that the shine, his direct quote was the shine was off the brand. That's the founder. So the brand had drifted. And and if you if those that are frequent uh consumers of Starbucks would tell you, and all the business articles said that the stores were chaotic. The mobile orders had taken over, and and basically the the the kind of the aura of Starbucks is this place where you go in and you hang out, the comfortable couches, and you know, that your name on the cup and all the friendly service. Yeah, all that's gone. And and the menu had just exploded into all kinds of options, looked like a Chinese menu, you know, with all kinds of things and and and long lines and the drive-thru, customers getting frustrated and disruptor or disrupting uh competitors coming in, all these you know coffee shops that that that that that you know pop up all over the place. So so they announced Brian Nichols coming up from um Chipotle. On the day that he announced, stock goes up 24% before he did anything, right? The market just knows a good leader. We talk all the time about the power of one. It's absolutely a thing. And so I want you constantly thinking about when we give you a new department, when we give you a new functional area, when we give you a business area or business unit, or we make you the CEO or put you into the whatever role in the C-suite or whatever level, do we notice a difference? When we announce you're the new leader, does the stock jump 24%, or is it kind of mediocre? Because you're just a maintainer, right? We don't want to be that. It's one of the reasons you're listening to this podcast, is so that you produce different results than every other leader. When I took over uh here in Phoenix, the media brands that um that our company had purchased, and that's why we moved our family to Phoenix, I knew I had to produce different outcomes than the last leader that ran those media properties. And it wasn't that they were an idiot. In fact, the longer, the more that I dug in, the more I realized actually the gal that ran it before me was really smart. She was really capable. But the company had a lot of challenges that we bought it from. And there were some things that were done that just weren't great. And so I needed to produce different outcomes. Well, how do you produce different outcomes? You lead differently than every other leader. You don't make it up. You have frameworks and systems and you develop them. And what one of the things I try to do in this podcast, we're over 400 episodes in at this point, and we're writing books. There's four books already out. We're right in the fifth. I'm producing podcasts teaching you this stuff that we see works. I'm doing webinars. If you're on Lone Rock, the website, and you sign up for our newsletter, you're getting notifications of the webinars and the events we're doing and all the cities that we're going to. We just made a decision in our leadership team meeting in the last few days that we're we're going to Minneapolis in the next few months. I think the next, like in four or six weeks. Then we're going to Philly or New Jersey or somewhere in that area. We signed up Dallas, Atlanta. We're coming your way at the end of the summer in August. We we I was in uh Texas. We were in both San Antonio and Houston. We were in San Diego. We were in Nashville. We were in Scottsdale. We were in Chicago. Like we're coming all over the place. Anyway, we're, and it costs nothing. And we're not doing a sales pitch. Sure. We get clients out of these events. People come and they go, wow, we'd really like to implement this. And some people come and go, this is really educational, but we don't have the budget, or we've got, you know, already things already allocated or whatever else. And uh we don't, that's all good. But we're so my point is we're putting out all this content to try to help you develop systems. You don't have to use everything we put out. It works, it's proven. We're not making it up. We discover it. It's what we wrote about in and deliver. The the framework of clarity, alignment, and movement that we wrote about in that book at length is uh is not something we made up. We discovered it. It was the difference between the executives who were getting and sustaining incredible results and those that were producing mediocre outcomes. What did the leaders that were producing great outcomes and growing their careers and growing results and growing market share and growing the the the price of the stock and everything else? What were they doing? They were creating clarity, building alignment, generating movement. Period, done. Great leaders take the complex and make it simple. Yeah, they're doing 80 things, but we boil it down to three. And then with, you know, there's some sub things under there. What does it mean to create clarity? Well, we've got a financial institution that's got us going all over. I've been in a different city every week with uh one of the three biggest financial institutions in the world and uh and or in the U.S. And uh and they're a global entity and they're teaching clarity alignment, and we're digging into movement and leading through change. Anyway, so Brian Nickel, he gets in. So what what the big biggest change he made. Now, yes, there are some changes, he's simplifying the menu, and he's doing some different things on the store layouts and whatever else, but from a leadership standpoint, what he's doing, the very first area, and I'm so proud of Brian, because he knows it works. He saw work at Chipotle, he saw the results at other restaurant companies that we worked with, like Chili's, Darden, these others, and and he saw it work in in his industry. So he goes into Starbucks and he creates what does it create? What do you think it creates? Clarity. And I know you're sick and tired of me talking about clarity. Russ, like it's yeah, well, I'm gonna keep beating the same drum because you think you have it and you don't. I was in Nashville recently with an executive team. They think they have clarity, they don't have clarity. They're great leaders, phenomenal leaders. And and but they they don't have the level of clarity that they need. Anyway, so let's talk about what Starbucks said. You're gonna be so interested in this. They call it the uh grow scorecard. So Brian created the grow scorecard. I love the name. Simple. Two words grow. That sends a message that it's named at the grow scorecard. Five categories. Now we wished it was three, but there are five, which is way more than the dozens of metrics that were on the balance scorecard before it. So Brian goes in, it creates clarity, and on each one of these categories, every store is ranked one to five, and they call it a shot, a five-shot score. Get it like an espresso shot. So one to five. So one shot, two shot, three shot, four shot, five shots. Five shots is the highest score. That's top tier. So he creates the gross scorecard, and you get ranked every restaurant, every store gets ranked one to five shots, and these are the categories. Number one, what do you think it is? What do you think the first category that the CEO of Starbucks, who's leading a turnaround, he wants to get it back to its you know, heyday and then even grow it to a more formidable presence than it's ever been, what does he build as or decide is the first category that matters most in clarity? Of course it's customer experience, right? And so they measure it two different ways. The first is customer satisfaction survey. And and Brian develops what he calls the five key moments. You ready for this? The five key moments of a of a um you know, an employee, a barista inside of Starbucks. What do they need to do? These are the five areas of ranking you. Greeting the customer, taking the order, making the drink, handing off the cup with the customer's name written on it, the handoff, and saying, This is crazy, you guys. It's so detail-oriented. The fifth one, what do you think it is? Saying goodbye. I'm telling you, that makes such a difference. I noticed, I I did an episode a hundred episodes ago, maybe fifty, about the gym that I go to and how it's a chain, mostly in the Western U.S. And that I noticed a massive difference. I've been going there forever, ten years, eight years, six years, I don't know what it is. Pre-COVID, so it's at least like seven or eight years. Our family goes. Everybody's got a membership. And um, and I noticed when they started saying goodbye to me every time I walked out, hey, thanks for coming in. Hey, thank you so much. And at first I thought it was a friendly employee. The first I'm like, wow, they hired somebody friendly. And then because before that they never even like looked up at the check-in desk. I did a whole episode about this. And and then suddenly I thought, oh, they hired someone friendly. And then I realized, oh no, they hired two friendly people. And then after three or four business, I'm like, oh no, the culture shifted. The the the expectation, the training shifted. They've determined that part of the customer satisfaction experience is saying goodbye when someone walks out. Have a great day. Hope you enjoyed your workout. Hey man, have a great one. It's Starbucks, same thing, saying goodbye. So the five key moments greeting the customer, taking the order, making the drink, handing the cup off, saying goodbye. We're monitoring each one of those five things. Every employee is trained on those five things. These are the five elements, they call them the five key elements or five key moments. Five key moments. All this is public. I'm not sharing anything that's not public. So they they rank customer experience one to five shots on based off of customer surveys, as well as unannounced district manager coffee house walks. So they pop in and they what they're watching, monitoring those five areas. And then you get a score. One to five shots. Second category. So first category, customer experience. Second category, peak hour performance. How the store handles the morning rush when the vast majority of the volume hits, they track speed of service, order accuracy, and order completion rates during two hours. And so Brian said a four-minute target from the moment you you make the order to when the handoff takes place. So four minutes is what they're going for. And stores either hit the mark based on speed, accuracy, completion, or they don't. So peak hour performance. So that that's the second ranking. So first is customer experience overall. Number two, we gotta hit it in the peak hour performance. So you're gonna get ranked. That's the second most important metric. The third, employee scheduling. Do we have the right amount of staffing at the right time? Are all the shifts covered? Is overtime uh uh under control? Did the manager schedule based on the store's traffic patterns? You're graded on employee scheduling. Super interesting that that's number three. Can you see the problems that Brian inherited that he was solving simply through his choice of which metrics he elevated to be the most important? Clarity. The fourth, product availability. So out-of-stock rates on top-selling items are tracked. In Starbucks, that's heavily dependent on the GM because the general manager owns the ordering, the inventory counts, making sure that the syrups, the milks, the cold foam, the bread, all that stuff is in stock. So Brian in one of the GM conferences said out of stock is unacceptable. And so GMs who can't keep the restaurant, the stores stock, they get crushed in that category. Last category, food safety. No, it's not just not negotiable. You pass or fail based on health and safety standards. So the five categories, five key results on the grow scorecard. There's not 25. There's not 80. Are they measuring a million other things beyond these five? Of course they are. At the Starbucks headquarters, you know, in Seattle, and and they recently announced another one, but but they're monitoring all these different things. But what they elevate five, customer experience, peak hour performance, employee scheduling, product availability, food safety. Do you see the power of clarity? So you become a GM at a Starbucks. What are the things that matter most? I've got to get the customer experience right. I've got to make sure our peak hours that are performance, and it comes down to speed of service, order accuracy, and order completion, employee. Scheduling, got to make sure I got that hit. Product availability, we got to nail that and food safety. Those are the five things. Not 50, not 500, not a million different things. Five. I can handle five. You don't have to send me another email. You don't have to give me another deck. You don't have to anything. There's not 14 PowerPoint slides in the annual meeting going through all of the pillars and the strategic priorities and all the no, it's five. And you get ranked one to five. Clarity. That is what's at work here. So why am I sharing this with you again? Because I need to share with you examples, high profile and lesser public examples, which I do, of where this impacts performance. So Brian Nichol, when he's asked, hey, why did we just have such strong quarterly performance? He said, In fact, let me here's a quote. Yep, I looked it up. I looked up what he said publicly. So he's this is what he said. Quote, it's hard to put a price tag on clarity throughout the organization. Thanks, Brian. First did it at Chipotle, we saw it happen. We were in the room. Awesome. Transformed the results. Now you go in to a huge behemoth of Starbucks. And one of your first things after the listening tour and traveling to all the locations and working behind the counter and creating all the right experiences, you roll out Clarity, the growth scorecard, five things, one to five shot rankings. Beautiful. Love it. So the question for you is now that we're a little bit through, now you all, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you're like, Ross, I've been doing this. Okay, well, I need to pressure test that for you. Is it, we would tell you three to four is the magic number. We're okay with five, maybe, but no more. And not 15 sub bullets under each one. And then you pound the message over and over. How often do you think Brian's talking about the gross scorecard? All the time. Corporate headquarters is putting it out. Everybody understands what's most important. Do you think they've seen impact in those five areas? Huge. Huge. I can't get into the results, but but yeah, massive. So create clarity. So you should have rolled out at the beginning of this year. Clarity. If you didn't, do it now. It's okay. And and then what I need you to do is now that we're over a quarter into the year or however your fiscal year goes, you're either a quarter or two quarters or three, whatever it is. I need you to analyze and say, did you pick the right three? Did you pick the right five? Do you need to make an adjustment in one of them? How often are you hitting that drum? Have you have you backed off of it a little bit? Every meeting, every time, we talk about in lead in 30, the course, right? And in the book, deliver. We teach this. Every meeting, every time. So the first thing you do is you create the TKRs, team key results. And there's a category and a metric, right? Category product availability. Then a metric, one to five shot ranking. Okay, perfect. Based off what? Well, these different categories. Great. Okay. And that's creating TKRs, team key results. Second thing you do is you make it repeatable. Grow scorecard, one to five shot ranking. That makes it repeatable. We look at it, you know, some of you have heard us talk about 95-5-100. You talk about these different categories, 3, 2, 1, whatever they might be, whatever the categories are, uh you make it repeatable so people remember it. That's RPM. The third thing you deal, do, or the third third skill we teach, is every meeting, every time, you hit this over and over and over and over again. And um, and so we recently in uh started this uh this new thing using AI that in Slack it posts what we call the um the tower report. And it's a bot that's looking at all this data in our firm. And the reason we call it the tower report is it's the the view from the air traffic control tower um of Lone Rock leadership. So this bot lives figuratively in the air traffic control tower of Lone Rock, and it's serving all the activity and all the things that are going on. So it's telling you what cities our team is in today, what what virtual sessions are going on, what cohorts just launched today. Um it's talking about what marketing events are coming up, when's our next core four masterclass, what's the next city we're in, what's the next public webinar we're in, what industries are we um uh affecting this week? What big transactions or deals or ring the bell type of stuff happened yesterday that we need to celebrate? It's it's tracking all these things, and then AI is putting all assembling all that together from our systems, and it produces what it calls the tower report every morning. And before anybody wakes up on the East Coast on our team, it's it's delivered. And so um the first thing in the tower report every day are the four key res or the three key results for our organization. And it's made the it the AI agent says something to the effect of, hey, you all don't forget, today it's all about delivering on, and then it gives our key results. Over and over. You're using AI agents, you're using your PowerPoint decks, you're talking about in your market visits, every meeting, every time. It's just second nature over and over again. Everyone's focused on it. That's how you create clarity. All right, good job, Brian. Great job. Proud of Starbucks and the results. Everything I just talked about, the results that the quarterly results happened within the last few days. They announced that. It's all public, so I'm I'm free now to talk about it and to do this episode and to share it with you. And super excited about um what they're seeing there. The power of clarity. It's so funny. Sometimes we get HR leaders, L and D leaders, like, I don't know, we got the budget for leading 30 to put managers through leading 30, or I don't know if we should do it in this business unit over here. I don't know if we should buy the book, deliver, or if we should do the course, or if we should get certified on it. Like, what's the return? What's the ROI on clarity in your organization? Starbucks. Just that what we don't even talked about alignment, we haven't talked about movement, just clarity transforms the quarterly result of a global restaurant chain, a coffee chain. What's the ROI on that? Like, can we stop just teaching trust and how to have hard conversations and how to do these things or whatever, like all these little training nuances and courses? Yes, they're important, but let's impact the business outcomes. Let's spend some time in learning and development of leaders. Let's allocate time in our monthly meetings or in our quarterly offsites and our sales sessions or whatever. Let's do a keynote, let's do a workshop, let's just let's implement it into onboarding and new manager training and high potential and mentorship. Let's like, what's the return on that? The rest of that crap's all nice to have. I want to discover my why too. That's awesome. I'll do it after I crush the quarter. I'll learn how to build trust after I crush the quarter. I'll teach. Well, you know what I mean? I'm I'm being a little bit, I'm exaggerating a little, but I got energy around this because we we deal in this world and we'll get some low-level folk that's like, yeah, I don't know. I'm like, well, 10,000, like, spend$10,000. Do you know what the return on that is? Spend$20,000. Just get going. Watch the impact on those leaders. Watch their competence and watch their competence. Clarity. It's where you start. All right, that's what's on my mind on this episode of the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

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