#Ep 76: Kelly McCulloch on Building Inclusive Cultures and Prioritizing People for Growth!

Thank you so much, Glenn, for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Why am I excited? Oh gosh, because I could talk about business and people and strategy all day long. I think it's super exciting. You know, we spend so much time at work, why not think about how to make the most of the time that we spend doing our jobs? And so it's just what I love to do.

Look, I think that people are just people. It doesn't matter how much money you make or how much you don't make. It doesn't matter where you come from. It doesn't matter if you come from nothing. People are people at the end of the day. Everyone wants to be loved, everyone wants to be accepted. I don't enjoy working in an elitist environment. I don't enjoy spending my time with leaders who think they're better than others. I think, again, people are just people. So my preference is to work in an environment where the ego is checked at the door. Don't even bring it in. And then you kind of move past that into the more productive conversation. So that's kind of where that comes from.

This one I really like because I think people are struggling with it. I totally agree. I was just having a conversation with my eight-year-old son about this this morning. I could overhear him last night—he's playing video games with a friend and they got into an argument about something. But we were surprised eight-year-olds were talking about, and he stood up for what he believed in. And we just talked about how important it is to stand up for what you believe in, but to keep an open mind, listen to others' points of view, and then to be kind about it, right? So, you know, we're not all going to see eye to eye. And the things that I learned back when I was younger, I may have challenged some of those beliefs as I've gotten older. I think that's what evolution is, and learning and growing and questioning—maybe that's not exactly what I believe anymore or think anymore. I think when you can diversify the people that are in your lives and that you spend quite a bit of time with, you can understand more about how different their lived experience might be from your own, and vice versa. And you can just say, 'Gosh, I never thought about it that way,' or 'I never experienced that before I met you.' And again, it just opens your mind, opens your eyes.

Well, I think if—it's here's what I've done, right? And I can share what I've done and kind of how effective it's been. I think you need to have a natural curiosity first of all. So you don't want to change? Well, good luck with that, right? So I do think you have to have a natural curiosity. I think you have to be able to recognize things have changed, and maybe you feel like you're in the minority now. Maybe you feel like, gosh, this is the way that I used to think. What happened to all the people that thought this way, and why are things now changing so fast? And so what I've done is I've talked to and listened to people who are much, much younger than me, right? But who are in the workforce, because this Gen Z group—they are big and getting bigger, and they're about to be the workforce, and they grew up very differently than I grew up. So I think it's really important to listen to what it is that they care about, to understand what's important to them, and then figure out as an employer or as a leader how you can help deliver some of those needs that they may have.

To me, the denial is fear. It's fear. People are afraid that if I sit down and have that conversation, somebody's going to say something to me and I'm not going to be able to go do that, or it's going to be such a wild idea that my executive team is going to whack me out of the route, right? It's all fear-based. I think change and the fear of change is a big deal. So I do think that you've got to listen with an open mind, and you can't just dismiss something. We had an idea come up here from someone on my team here at Taco Bell, and as it relates to coming back into the office, and we had a very traditional perspective from our executive team. I've noticed—tell people this is when you're coming in—and I had somebody courageous on my team who came and said, 'Let's look at it a little bit differently.' And I said, 'Well, 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, and I think both our executive team and our employees are happy about where we've landed. So it takes a lot of courage.

I think that things have shifted so dramatically, right? There has been this accelerated pace for change over the last few years, and if you started from a place where a very traditional place, and then you have that acceleration come in, you know, 2020 and 2021 and even 2022, you could find yourself even further behind, right? In terms of being a leading organization or creating a culture or an experience that is a leading culture or a leading experience. So I do think that if you're—we all are busy, we're busy with our day-to-day—but if you're not picking your head up to read and absorb and to listen and to understand what's happening in the world around you, you can't be planning for the future. So, to me, that's one of the biggest challenges. It's kind of coming back to that—how do you run the business as it is today, but think about what's coming in the future, and how do we start to get ready for that? Because if you're not intentional about getting ready for it, it'll pass you by. It'll take you over.

I mean, I think it's a good point. You know, if I think about how I do this—one, I think I'm just a little crazy about planning. I just am. My husband will be the first to tell you that, right? I tend to look ahead a lot. And look, I've done a ton of self-reflection on that. There's probably some control freak in there somewhere about needing to know what's coming. But I do think that, again, coming back to kind of having the natural curiosity, having the ability to step back and say, where am I? Am I at zero? Am I at negative 55? How do I get an honest assessment of where I am, where our organization is? Where do I want to be? Like, where do I want to go? Because if I just want incremental change, then reflect on whether or not the organization you're working in—if that's what they really want. I don't want to work somewhere where I have incremental change. I want transformation. I want to make a difference, and I want to figure out how we create environments where others can make a difference. And so I think surrounding yourself with people who want to do more, who want to go bigger, who want to push harder—that, to me, is something that's really important to me.

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, historically HR, of course, was referred to as 'personnel,' and nothing makes my skin crawl more, right? It's just not what HR, in my opinion, should be. So, you know, HR, people, culture, talent—again, I think when the pandemic first hit, particularly in our industry, you know, kind of the natural response is to treat it similar to like a food safety response or food safety crisis. That's not what it was. This was a people crisis on all fronts. And so I do think that there were probably a lot of organizations that recognize, 'Oh gosh, this is the role that HR needs to be playing.' And there was a lot of connecting, and there was a lot of reading, and there was a lot of anticipating that needed to come from the human resources function to help businesses survive. I think I'm fortunate to have worked for so long at a company where HR has a seat at the table. That's great. But if you want to keep the seat, if you want to have any credibility whatsoever, you better be two steps ahead of what's currently happening in your business and kind of have that ability to see around corners. Any big HR leaders, big business leaders in general, have to anticipate what's going to happen. So if I make this decision, what are the four things that are going to happen, and how am I going to manage those should one of them pop up? So that ability to see around corners is huge.

Yeah, I do, because I think if you can't—I think that your employees know exactly how you feel about them, right? Let's not pretend. The employees will have an opinion, and they will know whether or not you actually care, whether or not you actually listen, whether or not you actually try to help make their lives better. And so if you are starting from a place where you haven't yet figured out, or you're not prioritizing how to figure out, 'How do I hear from my employees?'—yeah, you're behind. And look, you may be behind with several other organizations, but I don't think that's where anybody wants to be. People want to be the winner. They want to be out front. They want to lead. And that's what we try to do here. What I've tried to lead at Taco Bell is lead from the front. Get out in front of this stuff. There's a huge connection between the team member experience and the brand and the way that the brand shows up to the consumer. And we have to be working in our human resources and people department very, very closely with our marketing teams, because the pride that an employee feels in working for a brand comes from the actions that the brand takes. So yeah, I just think there's such a connection there. And if your brand is pushing the envelope, it makes it a lot easier for you to push the envelope on employee experience as well.

Yeah, well, you said the word that I was thinking, which is 'safe.' We play from a place of 'don't lose' because it's safe. Yeah, it's also boring. If you think about it, kind of comes back to what you were saying earlier—we only have so much time on this earth. Like, how do you want to spend it? How do you want to impact? What do you want your legacy to be? What do you want people to say about you when you're retired and no longer working? And I think if you have that lens, then you can get to a place where you're thinking about transformation, and you're thinking about change, thinking about the future. You're thinking about winning—not just winning for yourself, but winning as a team, winning for your franchisees, winning for your team members all over the world. Like, that is fun and exciting. And that's why—I don't, you know what you don't watch Sunday night football? You know, when I think about, 'Oh God, here we go again, Monday morning'—if you're living your life that way, if you're working that way and spending your time that way, it's so much more exciting.

Yeah, you know, look, again, I'm fortunate because we have the CPO position at the organization I work at, and the broader org is a pretty broad role that we're given. A lot of encouragement even to step into the business. So something that I'm working on at the moment that's pretty significant is kind of just the evolution of Taco Bell globally. We are a powerhouse in the U.S. We know that, right? We have 7,700-plus restaurants in the U.S. We're enormous, huge business. It's a mature market. We're turning 61 years young next week, I believe, for the brand, which is great. Outside the U.S., we have a thousand restaurants, and credit to the team that just crossed that threshold late last year. It's a huge undertaking. You think about Mexican-inspired brand, tacos—how do you get people to understand outside of the U.S. and other parts of the world what a taco is, right? So it's a different challenge outside the U.S. So you have this huge machine in the U.S., there's a mature market, still some growth opportunity to give it maturity, and then you have this high-growth opportunity outside the U.S. How do you lead all of that? It requires different skills, it requires different soft skills, capabilities. And then thinking about as the international business continues to grow, how does that change the structure of our teams to make sure that we are structured in a way that we've got the capabilities we need from a digital perspective, for example, a brand perspective. How do we have the right leaders who might be able to swallow their pride to take on what feels like a smaller opportunity, but knowing that it's going to grow so quickly, and got to have a strong enough leader that can handle the growth and be ready for it? So it's just managing that whole transformation around growth, and growth looks different in different parts of the world.

Well, I mean, I really hope that if people think back on the time that they spent with me—whether we worked directly together, indirectly—at the end of the day, I hope they say that I was a kind person. We may not agree on everything, we may not have been best friends, but I do hope that they can say she was kind, she was caring, she was professional, she gave it her all, and she cared about our people and our business and did the best that she could. So, you know, that's easier said than done. There are certainly, especially working in HR, situations where people are going to feel that way. Can't win them all. Do the best you can, and make sure that you feel good about putting your head on your pillow at night knowing that you did everything that you could, and you learned from your mistakes, and you keep going forward.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Glenn. I appreciate you and your friendship and your leadership and the opportunity to come on today. I just really appreciate it. So thank you.

Thank you.