Jeff Cary

Human Resources

The situation I am analyzing is an incident with Starbucks Coffee company in 2018 in a

Philadelphia store. There were two African American males that were removed from the store by

the police for loitering. The two gentlemen were there waiting peacefully for another business

associate to arrive but had not made a purchase. Due to a local policy in place to deal with the

homeless population causing disruptions to the store, they kicked out anyone not making

purchases. The store manager used the no purchase policy to kick the two out due to the color of

their skin and nothing else.

The issues arouse due to several issues that could be directly linked back to human resources

within the company. A lack of HR strategy and support in the field can be directly linked back to

the root cause of this situation. Field leaders making policies specific for districts rather than a

fully thought out approach on a larger scale caused stores in cities to create homeless policies. I

think Starbucks figured this out a date late and dollar short and had to clean up the mess in the

weeks following the incident.

In the months following the incident Starbucks started training their teams across the

organization on unconscious bias. Had the teams been trained on dealing with bias prior then this

incident of racism could very well have been avoided and not created a situation where the two

men were removed and arrested by police.

 If I was able to use human resources for an alternative course of action to affect the situation

in Philadelphia, I would have focused on hiring the right people. I would hire additional team

members to ensure that the district managers covering this area could focus more on their teams

of store managers. The managers dealing with the issues that arose to create policies should have

had someone there supporting them to ensure they would be prepared to handle the situations.

Thinking through what I would do differently based on the learning is I would have ensured

policies were in place and my teams were fully trained. If there had been training on how to deal

with customers loitering and not allow for a policy to be twisted and used to discriminate. “Many

organizations are reluctant to invest in developing human capital. The costs of training are

immediate and easy to measure; the benefits are long term and less certain.(2017) Training the

teams on de-escalation would be worth the investment and not needing to involve outside

agencies to forcefully remove people would go a long way in ensuring situations don’t get out of

hand like they did.

I would also focus on promoting diversity with the team with the team members who are

working on the front line with customers. Starbucks did these trainings after this incident in a

very public manner to try and bounce back in the media spotlight. Had the employees involved

been trained on not treating people differently based on race, religious beliefs, gender, or even

orientation. Talking about the things that can be uncomfortable to face should not be reactive and

should be something a good leader can communicate properly and educate their team on.
 Reference or References

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing Organizations. In Reframing organizations

artistry, choice, and leadership 6th ED (p. 145). Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass.