It’s the early 1980s. Milan. Howard Schultz is in town for a housewares show. The city’s espresso bars stop him cold. They are community gathering spots, a “third place” between home and work. This is the seed of the Howard Schultz leadership style. Baristas knew customers by name. Coffee wasn’t a transaction. It was a daily ritual. Schultz wanted to bring that ritual to America.
No one had scaled it. He wanted Americans to gather, read, work, and talk over espresso. Not everyone agreed with him. He needed conviction. Especially when people thought he was crazy. That’s where the lesson from Onward begins.
“One man with conviction will overwhelm a hundred who have only opinions.” – Winston Churchill
Howard Schultz Leadership Style: Conviction Against Consensus
Howard Schultz believes leadership sometimes means going against the grain. Sometimes leaders must trudge forward past objections from those they trust most. Leaders rely on conviction and intuition when the data lags behind belief.
In 2008, during the financial crisis, Schultz closed every store for three hours to retrain baristas. Wall Street winced. Operators panicked. He did it anyway. The customer experience came first.
He emphasizes this decision in Onward. He chose the long-term vision over short-term profit. That’s emotional endurance in the Howard Schultz leadership style.
There’s a quote in Onward that sums up Schultz’s position to shut down stores: “There are moments in our lives when we must summon the courage to make choices that go against reason, against common sense, and the wise counsel we trust. We refuse to be bystanders.”
The lesson: Go against conventional wisdom when needed. Take risks without certainty. Lean forward. Trust your intuition. Refuse to be a bystander.
Emotional Endurance in the Howard Schultz Leadership Style
The entrepreneurial journey isn’t for everyone. It’s hard, sometimes painfully public. The highs feel euphoric. The lows feel personal. You have to love it enough that the sacrifice is worth the pain. Doing anything else would be unimaginable.
For Schultz, it started in Milan. He wanted Starbucks to serve espresso, not just beans, and sell an experience America didn’t yet have.
Il Giornale was Schultz’s first attempt. Investors rejected him. He kept going. Eventually, he bought Starbucks. Those early rejections became a training ground.
In Onward, Schultz describes offering stock options and healthcare to part-time employees. It was unheard of at the time. People over profits wasn’t a slogan. It was policy.
The trust he built with partners helped him pursue one goal: the “third place,” a sanctuary between home and work. People could come for coffee, work, interviews, socialize, and read. Schultz wanted the third place to be community first.
Building this third place was difficult. Then the financial crisis hit. Schultz returned as CEO to steady the company.
Schultz chose to save the brand by focusing on its customers. That’s why he shut down every store to retrain baristas. He knew the only way out was to get customers back.
The lesson: Entrepreneurship is hard. Expect rejection. Put people first. Win on experience. Customers decide survival.
Risk Tolerance in the Howard Schultz Leadership Style
Howard Schultz didn’t romanticize failure. He accepted it as tuition. He didn’t obsess over whether Starbucks would survive a setback. Whatever had to be done had to be done well.
To Schultz, risk-taking is necessary for innovation. He advises leaders to ignore the doubters, get comfortable with uncertainty, and trust their gut. Schultz wants partners to make calculated, high-stakes decisions. He wants partners to be driven by conviction, not fear of failure. Amazon and Jeff Bezos operate the same way.
High-stakes risks are the only path to industry-changing results. If you won’t take them, competitors will.
Doubters will surface. They’ll say your vision is too big. Schultz believed the bigger risk is not taking one.
Schultz chose to follow his own path over profits. He refused to sacrifice the customer experience in exchange for speed. He’d rather move slower with quality than move fast with something average.
Having conviction is important. But you also need to be resilient. For Schultz, resilience meant not taking a salary for two years after starting Il Giornale. He had a long-term vision for building a coffee brand. It required immense personal and financial sacrifice.
You have to have resilience to build anything important. To take calculated risks, you have to know your market cold. Schultz saw coffee as a third place, not a commodity.
The lesson: Don’t fear failure. Have courage. Be resilient. Know your market.
Leadership Definition
Ask Howard Schultz to define leadership, and he won’t give you a slogan. You’ll get two traits: confidence and hiring well. Confidence means you know what you’re doing. Hiring means people trust you to bring them along. Add in risk-taking, and you have Schultz.
Empathy, transparency, and trust matter as much as confidence. Empower partners, and they’ll elevate the customer experience.
Empowering partners means putting them first. Schultz treats them with respect. He backed it with benefits for part-time partners, including healthcare and education.
It’s not enough to prioritize partners. There will be tough times. This is when leadership is tested. The financial crisis is an example of this. Uncertainty was everywhere. It forced leadership to be more transparent and show vulnerability. In turn, leaders built trust with their teams.
Tough times test your leadership skills. Ownership mattered. Empowered partners improve service. Customers returned.
When employees take ownership, leaders are freed to think bigger instead of making every decision. Starbucks’ partners didn’t have to constantly hound Schultz to make decisions for them.
Gut instinct, layered with data, allowed Schultz to innovate without losing Starbucks’ essence. It could focus on what it’s good at.
The lesson: Put your people first. Lead during tough times. Create a culture of ownership. Use your gut to make decisions. Constantly innovate.
Managing Through Humanity
Starbucks isn’t perfect. It makes mistakes. The difference is the standard. Schultz led through a lens of humanity.
The lens of humanity means Schultz focused on the people. He prioritized people alongside customers over short-term profit. Empathy and shared values built the third place.
Prioritizing people means putting them first and profit second. Schultz focused on partners. Take care of the partner, and they take care of customers.
He was relentless about taking care of his people while building a warm, community-driven third place. It didn’t matter why you were there. Schultz wanted to build a place that was best-suited for a variety of customers’ needs.
It’s hard to take care of your people while building something unique like the third place. It’s even harder to do this during a financial crisis. But Schultz led anyway. He pushed for transparency and information sharing. He wanted to build trust, rather than just telling people where to go.
Schultz calls it servant leadership: take care of partners, build trust, create the third place, even in a crisis.
The lesson: People first, profit second. Build something unique. Lead even during tough times. Empower your employees.
Onward Takeaways
Conviction over consensus. Emotional endurance under pressure. Risk tolerance when others hesitate. People first, profit second. That’s the Howard Schultz leadership style and why Starbucks survived.
