Good morning.
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins is the guest on this week’s Leadership Next podcast, out this morning. (You can listen on Apple or Spotify.) The interview was recorded at our CEO Initiative dinner last month, and I shared some of his comments in this newsletter at the time. (You can read them here.)
But this morning, I want to call attention to the last question I asked. Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list comes out Thursday, and while I don’t want to be a spoiler, I can assure you Cisco will be near the top. It always is. It’s a company that people want to work for. And in an economy where attracting top talent is often the differentiator, that’s no small thing. So I asked: How do you do it?
“When I was competing for the job, I had to write a strategic thesis for the board, and I wrote a line that said: ‘I want Cisco to be the best place to work in the world.’ It was kind of a throw away line, but then, five or six years later, there we were.
“And so I thought, okay, what did we do?...Look, work and life is so blended today. When I was growing up, I had a work dad and a home dad. My dad would get up in the morning, he put on a suit, and you could just see—he would just transform into work dad. And then he'd come home and he'd get undressed, and then he’d become dad dad again….Our employees don’t want me to be something I’m not. So I’m super transparent. I tell them: ‘I’ll answer any question you ask me if it doesn’t put me in jail or the company at risk.’ We communicate so frequently. We do an all-employees video call once a month. During the pandemic, we were doing them once a week. And we are just honest, authentic…"
“And the other thing we did…is empower our employees to do things in the community. We give them time to go volunteer…I tell them openly, if it’s 3:00 in the afternoon and your child has a soccer game, you better be at the soccer game. Because I’m sure at 9:00 that night, you are going to be responding to all the emails you missed.
“It’s really just [about treating] all your employees the way you want to be treated. Even when you have to make tough, hard decisions, like we just did with our 5% reduction. The way you do it and the way you treat them, they will remember even in the toughest times.”
Check back Thursday for the full 100 Best Companies to Work For list. Other news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
