Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz speaks while photos of coffee cups with #RaceTogether written on them are projected behind him, Wednesday, March 18, 2015, at the coffee company's annual shareholders meeting in Seattle. Schultz said baristas in U.S. stores will be writing the words on cups served to customers in an effort to improve awareness of race relations.Ted S. Warren)
Coffee giant Starbucks this week stepped in to the volatile terrain that is race relations in the U.S. and quickly saw its attempt to start a national conversation to change hearts and minds fail at the first hurdle: social media.
The reaction was swift and – as is so often the case in the social media space – harsh. Its Twitter hashtag campaign #RaceTogether was inundated with criticism and ridicule.
In a nutshell, the criticism went: what business did the coffee giant have encouraging its baristas to engage customers on the complex and fraught subject of race relations by scribbling "Race Together" on their cups – and was it even the appropriate place to do so?
Others questioned their Starbucks experience being interrupted by race and politics, or as one Twitter user put it: "If you want to be political run for office. I just want a peaceful cup of coffee in the AM not debates & lectures #RaceTogether"
So intense was the backlash that a company executive deleted his Twitter account on Tuesday after a deluge of angry tweets. On Wednesday, the company was standing by its campaign and chairman and CEO Howard Schultz's belief that the company could no longer stay silent on the subject of race.
But was the CEO right to push the company into a conversation about race?
"The fact that he has the courage to say: 'We've got to chat, we've got to talk about this, we've got to make it an issue, we're going to lead as a company around it,' I think that needs to be applauded and I think that's going to be the direction of the future," said Vince Molinaro, managing director of talent and leadership development at Knightsbridge Human Capital Solutions.
The Starbucks CEO's move is unconventional and not typical of most CEOs – but he is not alone.
Canadian companies like Bell and TD Canada Trust are weighing in on issues of mental health and LGBT rights and using the weight of their brands to spotlight important causes.
"At the end it's really that corporations are dominant institutions on our planet and the more enlightened CEOs understand that and are saying: it's good for us to drive earnings per share and do what's right by our shareholders. But we can go beyond that…and put a spotlight on social issues that need attention," said Mr. Molinaro.
The attention to social issues also sends a message to new workers.
"With millennials they want to work in companies knowing that their CEO and senior leaders are plugged in to what's happening in society as a whole," he said.
Starbucks has an estimated 200,000 workers and 40 per cent belong to a racial minority.
"It might feel good to Howard Schultz's employees that at least he's not acting like there's this whole national fear over [talking about race]. He's not doing the colour blind thing – and let's act as if there's no problem and that race doesn't matter," said associate professor Tamara Buckley of the City University of New York and co-author of The Color Bind: Talking (and Not) Talking About Race at Work.
But Prof. Buckley cautions about the quality of the conversation around race and the danger of trivializing a complex issue. For some the race conversation may be cathartic while for others it may be inflammatory, she explained.
Race remains a taboo and painful subject in American society.
For Prof. Buckley, the Starbucks CEO's belief that a dialogue about race over a coffee exchange is going to make a real difference to race relations gets at a bigger issue: "I'm not clear how this initiative is tied to goals and outcomes," she said.
The argument she and her co-author make in their book is that there needs to be a context that allows people to dig in to the taboo topic of race in the workplace.
"In a way what [Howard Schultz is] doing is saying you don't have to create the context – we can just do it at coffee shop, we can do it wherever. It's just about starting the conversion…," she said.
Creating an environment where meaningful discussion about race can take place in the workplace is more complicated. Prof Buckley's book traces the experience of a U.S. child welfare agency where childcare workers seldom talked about race.
"We were surprised that very few child welfare workers were talking in any real way about race – even in their work. And they were almost all working with families that had racial and cultural backgrounds different from their own," she said.
"I think it sort of exemplifies that we are in this colour bind…where people think that race may matter but they don't know how to talk about in ways that are acceptable and palatable," she added.
Her research shows that there are key elements in creating a workplace context to talk about race. The first is that workers have "colour cognizance" – or that race matters in how they view their work, tackle problems and that it impacts how they view the world, she said.
The other element is that workplaces that are more experimental, risk-taking and have a "learning orientation" are often more capable in having meaningful conversations about race. "Learning orientation means everyone can throw out different points of view – and those different points of view will be taken in and integrated in to the work," she said.