I attended a great presentation by Jodee Kozlak, the Head of HR for Target Corporation. She was speaking at the First Tuesday series sponsored by the Carlson School, Wells Fargo, Twin Cities Business, and Northmarq. The speaker series, open to the public, is held the first Tuesday of each month at the University of Minnesota’s McNamara Center (my first time there–a phenomenal space, by the way!).
Fast, fun and friendly.
Jodee spoke about the core values at Target Corporation, and how they are integral to the business. One of the values stood out to me as particularly evident to the average guest at Target: Fast, Fun, and Friendly. While she described several other core Target values around leadership, diversity, inclusiveness and caring for the corporate legacy, this one struck me as especially powerful. And, nice to see “Fun” called out as a corporate value!
Can you imagine what life would be like if all of our work environments could be described this way? Target has created an impressive organization since its founding in 1962–from $0 to over $65 Billion in 47 years. To have done it in a way that breeds enthusiasm, fun and friendliness is an impressive feat.
This value reminded me of my experience working with an incredible IT leader, Charlie Feld. I worked with him at Delta Air Lines. He was the CIO tasked with getting the air line ready for Y2K (remember that?), while simulataneously trying to transform the organization into a high performance culture. One of Charlie’s favorite questions was, “are you having fun?” In the midst of the challenging task, which he compared to the Apollo 13 recovery effort (failure is not an option), Charlie was always positive, optimistic, and wanted to create an environment where others were too. This was another way of saying, are you fully engaged? Charlie insisted that one of the core competencies for an effective IT leader was passion for the job, and what he called being “fun to be around.”
He created an incredible culture, and went on to a senior executive role at EDS.
Filed under: corporate values, Executive Education, Talent Management
