It's all about the spirit E-Book

Gerhard Drexel

• Herausgeber: edition a
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 271

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Gerhard Drexel, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Spar Austria, tells the story of how the company became the number 1 Austrian food retailer after years of catching up to the competition. In doing so, he designs a modern counter-model to the spirit-free, technocratic-sterile leadership style. He shows how, with the right spirit, employees can be motivated on the path to market leadership. In Drexel's model, companies are there for the people again instead of the other way around, and that's exactly what makes them successful.

Leseprobe

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SPIRIT

Gerhard Drexel:

It’s all about the spirit

All rights reserved

© 2022 edition a, Vienna

www.edition-a.at

Cover: Bastian Welzer

Typesetting: Bastian Welzer

Images: Andrea Schwarz

Set in Premiera

Printed in Europe

23456—25242322

ISBN 978-3-99001-597-1

eISBN 978-3-99001-713-5

GERHARD DREXEL

IT’S ALL ABOUT THESPIRIT

MAKING IT TO THE TOP WITH HEART AND SOUL

edition a

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword “The spiritual market leader” by Father Dr. Johannes Pausch

What to expect/My thanks

1 The spirit: A decisive factor in competition

1.1 It is the spirit behind success or failure

1.2 A focus on values and value-based management

1.3 Being open to the phenomenon of spirituality

2 Trust/self-confidence/courage: Developing the winning spirit

2.1 The power of confidence

2.2 From trust to self-confidence and courage

2.3 Public trust and brand management

2.4 Developing the winning spirit

3 Leading with heart and mind – the spiritual manager and the spiritual leadership style

3.1 Winning customers with heart and mind – how everything is connected

3.2 How the inner bond holds everything together

3.3 The Spirit of SPAR is soaring

3.4 The spiritual manager

3.5 The spiritual management style

4 There is a champion in every one of us – achieving market leadership by engaging the potential of every single employee

4.1 There is a champion in every one of us!

4.2 Market leadership through the potential of each and every employee

4.3 Overtaking the competition with humanity and kindness

4.4 The magic of appreciation

5 Making the ordinary extraordinary – the added value of spirituality

5.1 In pursuit of the good

5.2 Breaking away from the ordinary

5.3 Making the ordinary extraordinary

5.4 Doing extraordinary things

6 The art of change – becoming the market leader through spirituality

6.1 Change is an art form

6.2 Change and evolution

6.3 Becoming the market leader through spirituality – the spiritual market leader

List of sources

The spiritual market leader

Foreword by Father Dr. Johannes Pausch, European Monastery Gut Aich

Looking back, I can still remember the comments I received – both from outsiders and those close to me – about my cooperation with Dr. Gerhard Drexel and SPAR Austria:

“Are you mad? Do you really want to work with them?”

“They’re all cutthroats. All they do is ruin the little people and rival the big.”

“You should think hard about the kind of questionable values you’re putting your name to by advertising for SPAR.”

“How much is that paying you? Would you really do anything for money?”

Those are just some of the many comments I was treated to when we started working with SPAR and the ones people made behind my back are sure to have been a lot harsher. SPAR embodied it all: A source of friction and a place of hope, the baddie just as much as the perfect partner.

If you’re looking to work with SPAR, you have to be careful not to imagine big money and some kind of land of milk and honey just waiting for you to come by and take your pick. You’d be sorely disappointed, even if the excellently designed SPAR stores of every category do seem to suggest just that to the casual observer.

My contact with SPAR used to be very limited. For the most part, I knew them from when I popped in quickly for a bite to eat when my hectic workdays meant I’d missed a meal at the monastery.

In life, things only become serious, sustainable and binding once we’ve had concrete experiences, which is best achieved through relationships with people and things in every area of life.

Throughout my relationship with SPAR, I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with competent, persistent, attentive, convincing, cheerful and thoughtful people who not only attempt to do good business, but also want to be credible and authentic in their lives and in what they do. There are so many of them I could name. Each of those people and every experience provided me with an enriching opportunity and another one of life’s little secrets. Dr. Drexel was one of the most convincing people I met because, with him, heart and voice, what he said and how he acted were always in harmony (see RB 19:7b). This went hand in hand not just with the appreciation he showed me, but everybody else as well, even when this was really challenging, simply because people and the realities of life are frequently very different or perceived as very different from what we’d like.

These were particularly meaningful moments of learning for me. I often wondered what SPAR’S secret to success was that allowed them to become the market leaders. It is, of course, the competent employees together with the highly qualified management and technology. But that in and of itself wouldn’t be enough. ‘The fish stinks from the head’ and ‘The rot starts at the top’ are both common phrases, while we at the monastery believe in “As above, so below! As below, so above!” A company can only function through the totality of the connections and relationships at every level – and SPAR is the perfect example. I experienced it working with employees at every level, from buyers and store managers to shop assistants, marketing specialists and the PR department. Then there are always those who actively promote such communication, cooperation and community spirit – those who have made it their life’s mission. A CEO needs to live by and impart these principles. They need to be at the top, think ahead and lead the way – and also join in (with those) at the bottom. They need the ability to communicate, cooperate and share their community spirit. In short: They need to be authentic. It’s not enough to talk the talk, they need to walk the walk, be a living example for others to emulate.

A company like SPAR doesn’t just become market leader because it offers good, affordable and reliable products, but because the company as a whole is considered credible and convincing. The people and, above all, the human relationships that are expressed in basic ethical decisions are decisive for success. In the long term, you don’t do good business with groceries that have unethical and deceptive packaging and baseless and questionable content, but rather with products that are clearly trustworthy and made and sold by people who come across as trustworthy. I’m sober and realistic enough to know that not everything in a company like SPAR always meets high ethical standards and that, like in every area where people live and work, there will always be black, white and shades of grey, that not everybody is perfect. Nevertheless, knowing and experiencing that does not take away from the company’s fundamental purpose and spirit.

So, what does spiritual or spirituality mean in this context? And what role does spirituality play in the success of a retail group like SPAR?

I’m a Benedictine monk and live by the spiritual principles of the Rule of St Benedict (around 480–547 AD). This epochal spiritual work can confidently be regarded as a guideline for a contemporary company as well. All it lacks is a smart translation of the many terms that were specific to their time.

To put it simply, Benedictine spirituality is a relationship encompassing every dimension: People with themselves, with others, with their environment, with nature and with the transcendental reality that we monks call God.

It’s reflected in the Benedictine principle “Ora et labora”. The most important of these three words is the “et”, the “and”. It unites all the realities of human relationships and fills them with spirit – the spirit without which there can be no life, development, happiness or success. Spirit isn’t an empty bubble, but rather a way of life.

At SPAR, it’s evident throughout, from corporate management to product range management and HR and how the stores are designed. The Spirit of SPAR is about relationships – and that makes SPAR’S market leadership spiritual. I’m actually convinced that market leadership, which of course is also expressed in material success and business results, was only possible because of this spirit.

The spiritual market leader is by no means the final product or success that can simply be ticked off or give cause to consider the work all done. It’s a perpetual construction site and challenge involving many people.

In working with SPAR, I’ve had the opportunity to experience and learn all these things. And it’s the company, its employees and, above all, Dr. Gerhard Drexel I have to thank for it. He was the one ultimately responsible for the good cooperation.

In this book, he has put together essential themes and experiences of this spiritual market leadership and explained them with practical examples. This book, therefore, is a narrative of SPAR’S success and part of a spiritual form of market leadership. It includes critical reflection coupled with an ability to clearly portray what has succeeded.

I may just be a little bit “mad”, but this cooperation is one I wouldn’t have wanted to let pass me by. I’ll continue to stick my neck out for this cooperation (and appear before cameras as well) and stand in solidarity with this company, because the values it builds are my values too. I’m aware that the reduction in sugar content or the discussion about palm oil in SPAR’S own-brand products, for example, is about more than just the environment or cutting down on certain ingredients. Rather, it’s about every single action we take serving life itself, healing broken relationships and making new life possible.

I can in good conscience put the logo of our monastery on SPAR’S “Klosterbrot” bread. After all, we all need to share this daily bread and we can do so again and again thanks to SPAR. This way, we’re not merely sharing bread with each other, but also an ethical attitude towards life.

With this succeeding again and again, I’d like to thank Gerhard Drexel personally for his friendship based on great appreciation, and I wish every reader the same experience. After all, this book is yet another building block in the relationshipbuilding and success story that is SPAR.

Father Dr. Johannes Pausch

What to expect

Nearly all companies pursue the same goal. They want to achieve an important position in their relevant market; they want to climb into top 10, top 5, top 3. And once they’ve become one of the largest and most important companies – whether openly or not –, they begin to see themselves or even formulate the specific goal of making it to #1 in their market, of becoming the market leader.

What’s interesting is that this striving – indeed, this longing – for market leadership affects companies in every industry, no matter how large or small they actually are. The family-run, family-friendly hotel in resort X wants to be the #1 in the area, the local estate agent wants to make it to #1 in its home region, the grocery store with stores all over the country wants to become the #1 in Austria, the pan-European pasta producer has the vision of taking the top position in the EU, while the car manufacturer that does business on several continents strives to become #1 in the world.

I firmly believe that it’s the spirit that’s the decisive factor for making it to the top, and that it inspires and motivates everyone involved. It’s all about the spirit! The spirit makes all the difference. And if, over time and with the right people in place, that spirit develops into a winning spirit, then you’ve already set course for success and market leadership – the company has already flipped the switch. There’s no stopping it as it ploughs its way forward. It rises in the rankings until – in the best case scenario – it becomes market leader. The company becomes the market leader through spirituality, becoming the spiritual market leader.

I’m aware that companies can also become market leaders through diametrically opposed methods such as ruthless, brutal striving for power, greed, bullying, Manchester Liberalism or – in non-democratic countries – dirigism. The only question is how long market leadership achieved by such methods can exist and what the collateral damage might be.

In my experience, the spirit – and in particular the winning spirit – is more important and stronger than any of the traditional factors in production like work, capital, land, knowledge, and technical progress. Spirit inspires and motivates managers and employees alike and has the advantage of ensuring that they feel there is purpose in their work, that they find it fulfilling and frequently perform extraordinarily, ideally achieving above and beyond what they were initially capable of doing. With the right spirit as an almost inexhaustible source of energy, the company cannot but become ever stronger and more resilient.

This is also a counter-thesis to the technocratic and sterile management style we see in more and more companies which lacks any spirit at all. I know a lot of such companies and my impression is that the lack of spirit tends to be replaced by more bureaucracy and excessive reporting.

Nevertheless, real spirit that inspires and motivates a company shouldn’t be confused with charity. At least in the Western world, we all live in a market economy often characterized by exceptionally fierce competition. Therefore, the spirit that paves the way to market leadership – or at least has the ability to do so – has to always be considered in a competitive context. It has to lead to competitive advantages that are relevant and decisive for success in the relevant market. The causal duo for success is made up of spirit and competitiveness.

As the CEO of SPAR Austria for many years, I came to the realization and firm conviction that our company became the market leader in 2020 for the first time in the history of Austrian retail, first and foremost due to our spirit and competitive attitude. In this book, I seek to explore the question of how companies can succeed in becoming market leaders by having the right spirit – as well as with heart and mind – in an abstract way and across industry boundaries. The objective is to develop a basis for spiritual management or for spirit management – explained and supported by means of a variety of narratives from everyday business life.

My thanks

That this book was able to come into being is due first and foremost to my spiritual companion and friend Father Dr. Johannes Pausch, founder and long-time prior of the European Monastery Gut Aich in St. Gilgen on Lake Wolfgang. He encouraged me to write a book that examined the important question of the connection between spirit and market leadership. I’d like to express my deepest gratitude to Father Johannes for the countless times he shared eye-opening wisdom with me over our many years of cooperation and friendship.

I’d also like to thank all those people who helped shape my concepts of management throughout my studies and years of work, in particular Professors Hans H. Hinterhuber and Fredmund Malik, as well as my dear father, Luis Drexel.

I am particularly grateful to all my colleagues and employees at SPAR Austria who I had the opportunity to share such a good spirit in our many years of working together. Without the lively experiences I was able to share with them, this book would never have been possible.

I’d like to give my special thanks to Bernhard Salomon, the CEO of my publisher, edition a. It was evident from our very first contact that it would be fantastic to work with him and his team. I would also like to thank him for always taking the time to listen to my opinions, which can, at times, be rather unorthodox. Thank you also to Britta Dubilier for her careful and precise editing and Andrea Schwarz from the agency Steinkellner & Schwarz for the graphic design of the illustrations as well as Carmen Wieser for the valuable feedback she provided in our conversations.

In particular, I’d like to thank my wife, Andrea! As my sparring partner and adviser, she supported me and also took on all the office work surrounding this project. Her support was extraordinary, and it was her spirit that allowed me to soar. I’d also like to thank my children, Martin, Thomas, Anna, Lukas, and Stefan. They were my first “test audience” and they made me feel that my message would be of interest to the next generation too.

Gerhard DrexelSalzburg, February 2022

1

The spirit: A decisive factor in competition

1.1It is the spirit behind success or failure

Friday, 13th – a day I am sure to remember for the rest of my life. It is Friday, March 13, 2020. The Austrian federal government announces a nationwide total lockdown for the first time in history due to the spread of COVID-19. Only few industries – those considered essential, including all grocery stores – are exempt from the lockdown measures. And so, SPAR Austria is part of the critical infrastructure and in my twentieth year as CEO of this wonderful company, I am suddenly faced with the greatest professional challenges in my career.

That Friday, 13th sees one meeting after another. Some of them (still) actually take place in person, while others are already video conferences with fellow members of the board, managing directors, product-range managers, and other management staff. What did I tell all the people I was speaking with in the meetings back then? I encouraged them and told them with deep conviction: “We’ll emerge stronger than we were before this crisis!” Meanwhile, the product-range and product managers were tasked with “[developing] especially at this time of lockdown many attractive new SPAR own-brand products and [bringing] them to market as quickly as possible!”

Back on that Friday, March 13, 2020, not one of us knew whether the lockdown would last several weeks or months, whether there would be more closures throughout the year, whether hundreds or even thousands of our staff at our 1,500 supermarkets and hypermarkets in Austria and another 1,400 grocery stores in neighboring countries would fall ill with COVID-19, whether we would have sufficient employees to maintain food supplies. Neither did we know whether we would be receiving sufficient goods from our suppliers to ensure our shelves were well-stocked.

But we all pulled together and showed empathy when faced with our customers’ and suppliers’ – and especially our employees’ – needs and concerns. What particularly set us apart from all the competition back then was that special spirit – that legendary SPAR spirit, the founding spirit that motivated and inspired us. What is interesting is that we all refer to that special kind of spirit as the same thing throughout the company: The SPAR spirit – or the Spirit of SPAR – has a deep meaning with us. Over the years, we have managed to impart that Spirit of SPAR to such an extent that virtually all our employees feel a part of it and consider it part of their professional identity. I would even go so far as to say that our employees – some 50,000 in Austria and around 90,000 overall – consider themselves part of the big SPAR family. After all, they are all working in a family-owned company that has never gone public.

So, how did the story end? Very well! In the first weeks and months of lockdown, we recorded lower sickness rates than usual among our staff. I am incredibly proud of our staff, especially the store assistants. They absolutely deserved to be called everyday heroes and to be celebrated the way they were. All of a sudden, they were on par with medical staff, standing shoulder to shoulder with doctors, surgeons, and nurses.

But our SPAR spirit is far from just a familiar and caring spirit, it is also competitive! We have reached top form in our communication with customers, in the sum of all market-oriented measures. Some market observers even go so far as to claim that we have surpassed ourselves.

Here are the results: By April 2020, a dramatic shift in market share sees us become the market leader in Austria and we manage to maintain this successful run over the months that follow, making SPAR Austria the market leader for the first time in the history of Austrian retail over 2020 as a whole. 2020 saw us increase our market share from 32.8 percent (2019) to 34.6 percent, while the long-time number one –REWE – lost market share, dropping from 34.3 percent (2019) to 33.3 percent in 20201, relegating it to second place for the first time in 25 years. Twelve years previously, in 2008, REWE had enjoyed a 6.5 percentage point lead in market share over SPAR2 – a figure that is considered near unassailable in our industry.

In each of these last twelve years, we have been able to narrow the gap in market share between us and REWE. And the ultimate victory in terms of our market share in 2020 came about as a result of our brilliant 16-percent growth in sales in Austria, while our competitors saw a total growth of six to seven percent that year.

What became of my request to all our product-range and product managers on that Friday, March 13, 2020, to develop and launch as many attractive new SPAR own-brand products as possible? I was delighted to see that a total of 650 new SPAR own-brand products were developed and added to the range at our group headquarters in Salzburg over the whole of 2020. It is all the more remarkable when you consider that many food and consumer-goods manufacturers found themselves caught in a kind of shock-induced paralysis, showing little to no ability to take any initiative.

There must be something that never appears on any balance sheet or income statement, something outside of the traditional business-management doctrine, something outside of what is immediately perceptible: It is the spirit – and that it what matters!

1.1.1Companies only ever become truly valuable with inner values

So it is the spirit that is the difference between success and failure, i.e., the prevailing spirit3 – although it cannot be allowed to rule entirely! Spirit is meant in the sense of a way of thinking, a mindset, a mental approach and drive, a value system, and a structure of a company and its representatives.

The spirit manifests itself within a company by way of values, an attitude, and a unique corporate culture.

The spirit is also evident in a company’s attitude and expectation

➝

to never stand still,

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to consistently seek to develop further and

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to adjust to evolving environments as proactively as possible.

A company’s spirit depends very much on the role a company sees itself playing.

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Is it a passenger or a pilot?

4

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An extra or a director?

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A ball in a game or a key player?

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A victim or a shaper?

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Subject to competition or a company that redefines the rules of the game in the industry?

Companies with inner values and the spirit that works for them meet their staff’s need for spiritual moments and experiences that they yearn for in their company.

Staff yearn

➝

for the company as a whole to play a meaningful role in the economy and society,

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for the specific function that the individual member of staff performs to be meaningful and

➝

for the company to offer opportunities for the individual member of staff to identify with it.

Intuition is strong among employees, and they can sense whether the spirit that is prevalent – that is not to say rules – in a company comes from the heart or is merely an instrumentalized pretext. Even Johan Wolfgang von Goethe said: “What is uttered from the heart alone, will win the hearts of others to your own.”

The common values are what is decisive for a company. A company should not subscribe to what interest groups or political parties expect. Rather, it should stick to its own devices, ploughing straight ahead in line with its own values that it stands by in an authentic way – both inwardly and outwardly.

For employees, it makes all the difference how colleagues treat and speak to each other. As Arnold Mettnitzer explains, humans long for nothing as much as a language that soothes, comes from the heart and reaches the heart.5

Father Dr. Johannes Pausch, founder and long-time prior of the European Monastery Gut Aich in St. Gilgen on Lake Wolfgang, my spiritual teacher and friend, considers companies to be on a path to success precisely when they are credible and convincing as a whole – in their entirety. “Humans, and human relationships more than anything else, that are expressed in basic ethical decisions are key to success.”6

1.1.2The causal chain: Leading the market through spirit

Over the last ten to twelve years, prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, journalists often asked me when it would be that SPAR Austria, as a good and dynamic number two in the Austrian grocery trade, would overtake the longstanding number one – REWE – to become the market leader. They asked me that question because we had grown faster than the market leader in Austria in terms of turnover every year since 2010, so that the gap between us and market leader REWE was narrowing year on year. Knowing that the annual changes in market share in grocery retail are usually in decimal points and that our gap to REWE was still considerable, I always answered with deep conviction as follows:7

“For us, annual growth is much more important than our position (in the market).” And then I would draw an analogy to employee management and explain that an employee’s personal development – i.e., their personal growth – was also much more important than their status, i.e., their position in the hierarchy.

To this day, I absolutely stand by that. That said, there is no denying that the idea of one day leading the market as the new #1 was something that enticed me and all my colleagues. Though we never actually put pen to paper setting out a plan, deep inside, the idea appealed to all of us.

1.1.3The idea becomes a reality

2020 finally saw the idea become a reality!8 Clearly, it was all about the spirit. The nature of the spirit is that it materializes sooner or later.

Over the years, our entrepreneurial spirit has always been to optimize customer value, even when it meant higher costs and lower returns. By contrast, our main competitors – though admittedly from our own point of view – had a different focus. While we very deliberately optimized customer value, REWE primarily optimized revenue, and the discount stores Hofer/Aldi (number three) and Lidl (number four) primarily optimized costs. At least, that was how we perceived and interpreted it. SPAR’S success proved us right: Success followed!

Based on the above case, the following causal chain results:

How is the causal chain to be understood? The right spirit for a company – in terms of its vision, strategy and value orientation – leads to commercial success. Success is what succeeds, so to speak. Spirit is the cause, success the effect. Years of sustained success improve the company’s market position in the medium to long term and, ideally, can lead to market leadership. Success is the cause and market leadership can be the resulting effect.

Figure 1:

The causal chain: Leading the market through spirit

A company does not remain market leader forever, though. The pioneering spirit that permeates the entire company must be maintained at all times, the fire of the spirit must be kept burning. If the fighting spirit is lost9, if signs of wear and tear become more and more prevalent, it is only a matter of time before the affected company loses its position as market leader again.

To ensure that does not happen, companies must ensure that this mindset is lived and constantly communicated by senior management, so that it permeates through to the workforce.

1.1.4Spirit is contagious

When it comes to living the spirit, the question is whether employees are “on fire”. The old adage, “Only those who burn themselves, can ignite the fire in others,” certainly applies. If employees are inspired by the spirit of the company, then they are dedicated and passionate about it. The spirit becomes something elemental and contagious.

In companies, it is often the case that only the senior management and the most important executives are on fire for the cause. Making sure that the spirit with its central message spreads at every level of the hierarchy and reaches the entire workforce is an art in itself.

Very fitting is an encounter I had with Mirko10, an employee at one of our stores. Mirko has been with SPAR for some years and works at one of the highest-turnover sales outlets at one of our shopping centers. He is responsible for collecting the many shopping carts that customers use and taking them back to where they belong in front of the store. Mirko is autistic, very introverted and incredibly conscientious. I only know him in passing from when we give each other a friendly “hello” without it turning into a conversation. Mirko doesn’t talk a lot. But in early 2021, when it was announced that SPAR had become the market leader for the first time in the history of Austrian retail in 2020, I was privileged to experience the following personal moment of magic: On my way to the store entrance, I saw Mirko from a distance standing in the mall of our shopping center with the shopping carts he had collected. As I got closer, he spotted me, left the carts where they were and ran over to me cheering, full of pride and happiness: “We’re the number one!” You would never have known he was usually such an introvert, the spirit had simply taken over! Then, with a broad, beaming smile on his face, he turned around and went back to work.

The encounter left me unbelievably happy! Mirko was proud that his company – his employer – had made it to #1. And he deliberately said that we were the #1 in grocery retail. Mirko identifies with his company – with heart and soul! Those are the sorts of enthusiastic and motivated employees one can only wish for.

1.1.5Bringing together business and humanity

The spirit has the best chance of permeating an entire company if humanity and kindness towards people are modeled by the company’s senior management. Above all, this includes appreciative interactions between managers and employees, but also among all employees themselves.

A young SPAR store manager noted very aptly at an internal meeting a few years back that we were all forever racking our brains about how to do this and that even better and more efficiently. And that was obviously a good thing. But beyond that, he said, he had started asking himself every evening, “What have I done for my employees today?” This is about seemingly small things, but from the individual employee’s point of view, they are highly significant, e.g., being accommodating with weekly workforce scheduling for a single parent working as a supermarket cashier, the in-depth briefing session with a new employee, the open ear for an apprentice’s idea for improvement.

Employees have a keen sense of whether their manager is genuinely interested in them and their particular concerns, whether the manager is really in it with heart and soul or whether they are merely taking on the role of an impersonal link in an operational chain of command. The employees are a company’s most important stakeholders.

If a company is inspired by the spirit of humanity and kindness towards people, that spark spreads to all the other stakeholder groups and especially to all the customers. I therefore took up our young SPAR store manager’s idea and put the following request to our managers and employees at an internal meeting: “Think about this every evening: What have I done for our customers today that was good?” There are countless possible examples: A friendly smile from the shop assistant, a recipe tip from the butcher in a direct conversation with the customer, or a warm farewell to the customer from the supermarket cashier.