Instigating grassroots culture change at the world’s largest companies
Steve Garguilo sparked change within Johnson & Johnson, the fifth largest company in the world. Today, he supercharges transformation across other organizations.
This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.
If you enjoyed this interview, you can learn more about our services and reach out here. We’ve also published a community-building handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. Order your copy here, and subscribe to our podcast “Get Together” for more of the inspiring stories behind today’s thriving communities.
“There’s strategic value in giving up some control when you’re a leader at a company if you do want new ideas to emerge.” — Steve Garguilo
Early in his career, Steve Garguilo did the seemingly impossible — he led a grassroots transformation of the culture of Johnson & Johnson, the fifth largest company in the world.
Frustrated by the pace and challenges of big company culture, Steve decided to host something he’d loved in college: a TEDx.
He put on a casual TEDx event at a bar and invited employees within Johnson & Johnson to share their research, wild ideas, and learn from one another. Within an hour and a half of sharing the idea, 90 coworkers had signed up. Soon employees at other offices around the world wanted to host their own. By the time Steve was done, 23,000 people at Johnson & Johnson had engaged in a TEDx and Steve had a new title: “Head of Instigation at Johnson & Johnson.”
Today, Steve continues this work. As a partner at Cultivate, he brings the transformative work he did at Johnson & Johnson to more organizations. He co-authored Surge: Your Guide to Put Any Idea into Action, which captures two-decade of insights on the quest to find better ways to take action on our ideas.
We talk with Steve on the “Get Together” podcast about how he pinpointed fellow changemakers within Johnson & Johnson and supercharged their ideas using the TEDx format.
You can listen to the full episode here:
While you’re listening, keep an ear out for insights on sparking change within your own company culture:
1. People want to connect to a greater purpose.
At Johnson & Johnson, Steve was tasked with creating products for emerging markets and was told by leaders that they wanted “new ideas and fresh perspectives of how we might do things differently.” Yet he found it was a challenge to actually break through with those new ideas.
Knowing the power the TEDx format had to amplify voices who have powerful ideas, Steve asked, “What might it look like to try to do something like a TEDx program inside of a big company? Would it have a similar impact?”
It did. More than 23,000 employees had participated by the time Steve left J&J.
Why did the TEDx format resonate so much? Sharing prepared ideas and research with one another was so exciting for employees like Steve because it was a way to live out Johnson & Johnson’s mission, which had attracted them to the company in the first place. And it allowed them to do so on their own terms.
2. Give people the chance to participate.
As a frustrated, passionate young employee, Steve could have focused on getting his ideas through to coworkers. Instead, he channeled his energy into building a stage for others to stand on. That decision to all others to participate made his efforts far more impactful than if he’d focused only on himself.
For example, one coworker who spoke at the first Johnson & Johnson TEDx shared an idea for how the company might diagnose depression through video game play. After the talk, people from different disciplines came up to her–clinical, supply chain, finance–and she was able to form a team to put this idea into action.
3. Changing a culture requires rallying changemakers.
Crucial to Steve’s efforts to scale TEDx to 23,000 fellow Johnson & Johnson employees was his instinct to find and empower fellow hand-raisers at the company–folks he calls “cultivators.” These are the people who, like Steve, “get up every day feeling committed to the purpose of the big company they work at.”
When Steve works with big companies today, he hunts for changemakers at the organization. As he says: “These people are the key to all the locks.” If you can find your company’s purpose-driven employees, support them to realize their ideas and connect them to other changemakers around the organization, it’s what “unlocks” culture change. As Steve said, “Everything that people talk about — culture, employee engagement, retention and all these big buzzwords — can be unlocked through cultivators.”
So how do you find your fellow changemakers?
Put out an invite, see who responds and who offers to help.
“If you want to get more people to come out of the woodwork, the best thing that you can do is just be one yourself,” Steve shared with us. At J&J, Steve communicated who he was and what he cared about, then hosted events around that passion that attracted people like himself.
Thank you, Steve, for your time!
If you want to find Steve online and get in touch with him, head over to his website and learn more about Cultivate.
This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into exceptional communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments. Learn more about what we do and how we work with organizations.
To hear more of our interviews with people organizers, subscribe to our newsletter and podcast, “Get Together.”
We’ve also written a handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. You can order your copy here.
