“Back to Starbucks” Is Working. Here’s the Leadership Lesson Behind It.

How One Brand’s Comeback Reveals the Answer to Modeling the Behaviors You Want to See

I’ll Be Honest With You About Starbucks

I have a complicated relationship with the Starbucks story right now. On one hand, I’ve spent 25 years holding them up as one of the greatest customer experience organizations ever built. I helped create their Customer Experience Action Statement. I’ve written about them, spoken about them, and used them as the gold standard in nearly every keynote I’ve ever given.

On the other hand, watching what happened to Starbucks over the past several years was genuinely painful for me. Not because I enjoy watching a great brand stumble — but because I could see exactly why it was happening, and it was entirely preventable.

The short version: Starbucks spent years optimizing for efficiency and scale at the direct expense of the human experience that made it iconic. Mobile ordering exploded. Wait times ballooned. The barista who used to know your name became a person desperately fulfilling a queue. The cozy “third place” between home and work became a chaotic pickup counter. As I wrote in The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience, the focus on rapid mobile fulfillment shifted the entire atmosphere away from what had made Starbucks irreplaceable.

Customers noticed. Same-store sales dropped. Traffic declined for seven consecutive quarters. A 65-year-old loyal customer named Tony Dennis, who had gone to Starbucks every single day at 4:30 a.m. for twenty years, described his experience in a CNBC profile of the turnaround: “The customer experience he used to love had disappeared. Baristas didn’t engage with him, despite his daily visits.” That sentence should haunt every leader reading this.

Now, enter Brian Niccol.

What “Back to Starbucks” Is Really About

When Starbucks’ board brought in Brian Niccol as CEO in September 2024, they weren’t just hiring an operator. They were hiring someone to do the hardest thing in business: remind an organization of who it was always supposed to be.

His “Back to Starbucks” strategy — which Fortune reported in January 2026 is showing early signs of working, with comparable store transactions growing for the first time in two years — is built on something I’ve believed my entire career: you cannot out-innovate a broken culture. You have to fix the foundation first.

Niccol simplified store metrics down to just five: customer experience, performance during peak hours, employee scheduling, product availability, and health and safety. He reintroduced handwritten names on cups. He restored seating that had been removed to make room for mobile order staging. He said publicly, “If you don’t like customer service, you’re probably not going to like working at Starbucks.” And according to Starbucks’ own investor communications, customers are describing stores as “places of comfort, familiarity and joy” again.

Niccol isn’t just managing a turnaround. He’s modeling the behaviors he wants to see. And that is exactly what I want to talk about.

The Question Every Leader Has to Answer

Here’s the question I get asked more than almost any other: “How do I get my team to actually deliver the experience I want?”

The answer is uncomfortable for a lot of leaders: you go first.

In my Customer Service Revolution framework, I say it directly: excellent customer experience must start at the very top of the hierarchy. Not with training. Not with policy. With the leader. Because your team is not watching what you say. They are watching what you do, what you prioritize, what you celebrate, and what you let slide.

The Starbucks story is a perfect case study in this. For years, the organization’s leadership signaled — through their decisions about mobile ordering volume, throughput targets, and operational efficiency — that speed was the priority. They never said “stop caring about customers.” But the signals they sent shaped the culture at 17,000 stores. Baristas optimized for the metrics that mattered to leadership. And those metrics weren’t connection. They were speed.

Niccol’s first move wasn’t to launch a campaign. It was to visit stores. Dozens of them. Talking to baristas and customers. Making himself visible. Signaling through his own behavior what actually mattered. That is modeling.

What Got Starbucks Here — and What Gets You There

I want to be careful not to make this sound simple, because it isn’t. The Starbucks decline didn’t happen because of one bad decision. It happened because of dozens of individually reasonable decisions that collectively drifted the organization away from its core identity. Mobile ordering made sense. Operational efficiency made sense. Menu expansion made sense. But nobody was asking the most important question: what is all of this doing to the experience we promised our customers?

That’s the trap I see leaders fall into constantly. They’re making good business decisions while slowly eroding the thing that made their business worth choosing in the first place.

Howard Schultz saw this coming back in 2007, when he wrote an internal memo about the commoditization of the Starbucks experience — warning that the drive for efficiency was stripping away the soul of the brand. And when I worked with Starbucks in 2010 to rebuild their Customer Experience Action Statement, the entire exercise was grounded in this:

“We are not in the coffee business serving people. We are in the people business serving coffee.”  — Howard Schultz, Starbucks

That’s a Customer Experience Action Statement in its purest form. It tells every single employee — from the barista making your drink to the VP running operations — what the North Star is. Not throughput. Not mobile order volume. People. When Starbucks drifted from that, they lost their way. When Niccol brought it back, the brand started recovering.

Three Ways Leaders Model the Behaviors They Want to See

So what does this look like practically? Whether you’re running a coffee chain or a law firm, the principle is the same. Here’s how I advise leaders to model the experience they want their teams to deliver.

1. Be Visibly Present in the Experience

Niccol didn’t announce a new customer experience strategy from a boardroom. He went to the stores. He sat with baristas. He watched the experience firsthand and let his team see him caring about it in person. That visibility is everything.

What does this look like in your business? It means you interact with customers personally — not just when there’s a problem, but regularly. It means your team sees you asking the same questions you’re asking them to ask. It means you’re not exempt from the standards you’ve set. When leaders disappear behind closed doors and delegate experience delivery entirely to the front line, they send a signal: this isn’t important enough for my attention.

2. Simplify What You’re Measuring

One of the most powerful things Niccol did was reduce Starbucks’ performance metrics to five. Five. Not 25, not a quarterly dashboard no one reads. Five things that actually connect to the customer experience, measured consistently, held accountable across 17,000 locations.

I’ve said for years that what gets measured gets done — and what leaders measure signals what they actually value. If your metrics are all about speed, volume, and revenue, that’s the culture you’ll build. If you add customer experience as a real, tracked, held-accountable metric, you signal that it matters as much as the financial outcomes. Because it does. As I write about in the correlation between customer satisfaction and financial performance, these are not separate things.

3. Define and Live Your Customer Experience Action Statement

The CXAS is not a poster on the break room wall. It is a daily leadership tool. When your team sees you make a decision that honors the CXAS — even when the easier, cheaper, or faster choice would have been to ignore it — that is modeling.

Niccol brought back handwritten names on cups. It’s slow. It doesn’t improve throughput. But it signals something enormous: we are still in the people business. That one decision, repeated 17,000 times a day across every location, is how culture changes. Not from the top down through commands, but from the top down through example.

What Starbucks Is Reminding the Business World

I want to say something that might be controversial, because I think it needs to be said: Starbucks didn’t have a product problem. They didn’t have a pricing problem. They had a culture problem. And culture problems start and end with leadership.

The “Back to Starbucks” turnaround is working — not because they invented something new, but because they returned to something true. They remembered who they were. They rebuilt the experience from the inside out, starting with leaders who were willing to be personally accountable for the culture they’d allowed to erode.

Every business I’ve ever worked with that struggled with inconsistent service, high turnover, or declining customer loyalty had one thing in common: a gap between what leadership said they valued and what leadership actually modeled. Closing that gap is not a training initiative. It’s a personal commitment.

The question isn’t whether you have a Customer Experience Action Statement. The question is whether your team sees you living it every single day — and whether your decisions, your metrics, and your presence make it unmistakably clear that it’s not optional.

“Excellent customer experience must start at the very top of the hierarchy. And so, if you want to ignite a customer service revolution in your organization, it begins with you as a leader.”  — John DiJulius

Ready to Build a Culture Your Team Actually Believes In?

If the Starbucks story resonates with you — if you’re honest enough to admit there’s a gap between the experience you want to deliver and what’s actually happening on the front line — let’s talk. I’ve helped organizations find their way back to what made them great, and build the systems to keep them there.

→  Schedule a Complimentary Strategy Call  — Start the conversation about your culture and experience gap

→  Read: The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience  — My full analysis of what went wrong — and what Niccol is getting right

→  Read: Can Starbucks Come Back?  — My earlier look at the brand’s drift and what a real comeback requires

→  Read: How to Create a Customer Experience Action Statement  — The tool that anchors every great service culture

→  Explore the X-Commandment Methodology  — The full framework I use to build world-class cultures

→  Book John as a Keynote Speaker  — Bring the Customer Service Revolution to your next leadership event