Focus on Leadership: Benjamin Liebert listens to lead – May 2024

Interview by Kemp Harr

Benjamin Liebert became the leader of Shaw Industries’ roughly $4 billion residential business in December 2023. While his most recent experience was at Electrolux, Shaw represents Liebert’s second experience within the flooring market, having worked for HD Supply from 2008 to 2010. He started his career at General Electric.

Liebert grew up in rural Indiana, the youngest of three boys, and attended Purdue for his undergraduate studies. He then pursued an MBA at Emory. Currently, Benjamin and his wife Ellen are building a house in Ooltewah, Tennessee. The pair have two children: Graham, 14, and Katherine, 12.

Q: What was it like to grow up in Floyds Knobs, Indiana?
A: It shaped me to be the person I am today. I grew up on a 40-acre farm in rural southern Indiana, where I spent most of my evenings and weekends riding ATVs, fishing, mowing grass, driving tractors, splitting wood and playing basketball. My parents married very young, and my father worked third shift at General Electric while attending college at the University of Louisville on a full-ride track and basketball scholarship.

I am the youngest of three highly driven and competitive boys, which means I got my butt kicked regularly. This environment taught me the importance of a positive attitude, an honest hard day’s work, the value of hustle and competing to win.

Q: Why did you choose psychology and economics as your undergrad majors?
A: Honestly, by trial and error. I began my college studies with the ambition to be a surgeon, so I had a heavy dose of microbiology, biochemistry, organic chemistry and psychology. I spent my summers volunteering in medical research labs and hospital operating rooms. Somewhere around my junior year, the idea of another ten years of school before reaching my profession of choice lost its luster. I had essentially completed all of my requirements for a psychology degree but felt like I needed to add something else to my bag. Economics had been my favorite non-science elective, so I loaded up with 18 to 21 credit hours each of my last three semesters of college to get it done (which I don’t recommend, by the way).

Q: What led you to get your MBA at Emory?
A: Plain and simple, I am a curious lifetime learner. I get great personal enjoyment in learning from others and learning new things. At an early age, I planned to pursue a degree of higher learning at some point in my life, but the question was which one, when and where. In 2006, my wife and I were living in Woodstock, Georgia. She was an elementary school teacher for Marietta City Schools, and I was a retail territory manager at General Electric. I was determined to go to a Top 20 MBA program in the Southeast and had been leaning toward Duke (Fuqua) or North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler) when Emory’s Goizueta Business School broke onto the scene with a Top 10 rating in its executive MBA program. I visited the campus, and it all fell into place, especially the ability to get my degree in the same city where we were living.

Q: Why did you make the career move from Electrolux to Shaw?
A: I had an incredible 13 years-ish at Electrolux. It’s an amazing global company that taught me to begin everything you do with purpose, mission, values and people. The opportunity to join Shaw was all about timing and fit. I was initially drawn to the company’s values and human-centered culture, and the opportunity to lead the residential division as a full business unit P&L was exciting. It essentially allowed me to combine all three of my previous leadership roles at Electrolux into one at Shaw. It felt right on all levels: head, heart and gut!

Q: What are the similarities between Electrolux’s marketing/channel/brand strategy and Shaw’s?
A: You may be surprised to hear that there are more similarities than differences. This seems to surprise most people when I make this comparison, due to the obvious physical product and industry differences. The common thread is our focus to build brands, products and services in partnership with our customers in order to remove friction from the consumer purchase journey and create outstanding experiences. Flooring is a more complex purchase and doesn’t come with the luxury of a visible brand badge, but, similar to the appliance industry, the consumer is in the driver’s seat. They are more informed and opinionated about the brands, designs, styles and products they want to purchase than ever before. Because of this, we need to consider all of the touch points in the journey of creating brand experiences for anyone who buys, sells, specifies, influences, installs or uses our product. In the dynamic marketplace, we must engage all of these stakeholders in the journey so we can be the best flooring supplier for our retailers, distributors, builders, etc.

Q: How do you balance the demands of your national account customers with the needs of the independent retailers?
A: It begins with listening and asking the right questions. The best win-win partnerships involve a mutual understanding of goals, ambitions, needs and success metrics. Once we understand this, we can develop the right programs, support, resources and solutions for each customer. We need to clearly understand the role each customer segment plays in the marketplace and in our internal portfolio. As we get more advanced in our segmentation, our use of brands and marketing tactics will also be aligned to the needs of these two channels and the consumer segments they reach.

Q: What is Shaw’s philosophy on trying to be all things to all people?
A: I would say it’s not efficient. It means we don’t have the appropriate level of focus and/or understanding of what truly makes our customers successful. Not all customers have the same goals; therefore, we shouldn’t be serving up the same products, brands, programs, support and solutions in the exact same way to all customers. As we continue to refine the identity of our brands and target them to specific consumer segments, I fully expect this will ensure we are not trying to be everything to all people.

Q: When you compare Shaw to the other Berkshire Hathaway companies, do you want to be more like Benjamin Moore (upscale) or Fruit of the Loom (value brand)?
A: That is a difficult question to answer using only those two reference points. If pressed, I would say neither. Our goal is to be a full-line supplier of flooring solutions for our customers and consumers alike. We also believe it’s our role to lead this industry in elevating the flooring category as a whole. It’s a lofty goal for sure. When you look at the flooring category over the last 25 years, or even the last five years, and compare it to all other similar building product categories, it’s abundantly clear we are not delivering as much value. Our research shows that around 40% of consumers who begin the flooring purchase journey decide to “bail out” before transacting. This is a call to action for us to elevate our category and create more value through innovation, brands, consumer experience and partnership with our customers.

Q: Where does sustainability play in the mix as you build the next generation of products for the next generation of consumers?
A: It is a major priority for us and an important topic for our industry. It extends beyond Millennials and the next generation of consumers. We all want homes that are healthy and safe for our families. Our research shows that, across the board, consumers are increasingly seeking sustainable solutions for their home. What that means varies from person to person, from ease of cleaning without using harsh chemicals and indoor air quality to carbon footprint. It’s about a healthy home and a healthy planet.

The vast majority-more than 90%-of our residential carpets are Cradle to Cradle Certified, which means our products and processes have been assessed for material health, climate change, social fairness and more. Our Shaw commercial business unit is a leader in this space, so we’re leaning into them and what they’ve learned around sharing these stories in compelling ways for the customer and consumer. And lastly, for the planet, it’s about our use of clean, renewable energy in our journey to net zero operations and lowering the embodied carbon footprint of our products.

Q: How does Shaw become more of a business partner within the channel versus just another sourcing option?
A: “Business partnering” is a buzz word that is easy to say and more difficult to actually do. I believe it begins with listening to our customers and understanding their strategy so that we can be working on the right things for them. I mentioned earlier that our goals need to be transparent, and our tactics need to be aligned. I often hear our customers reference our company or our local sales team as “the best” in the industry. This is great and certainly a compliment to us. It’s also something we’re going to continue to prioritize from a relationship standpoint. What I would really like to hear from our customers is “Shaw helps me and makes me a better company.” That’s the next chapter of the book for us.

Q: Who were your mentors, and what did they teach you?
A: As we spoke about in our very first question, it starts at home for me. I jokingly reference that I grew up in a family of driven overachievers. My father is one of my role models, and we lost him much too early in life. He passed away 15 years ago at the age of 61, so my older brothers became some of my closest friends and mentors in my life.

Beyond the home, I was blessed to work for three incredible bosses, mentors and friends in Johnny Cope, Alan Shaw and Nolan Pike. They bet on me and put me into roles that I probably wasn’t quite ready for at the time. This forced an exponential learning curve across a diverse set of functional disciplines: innovation, product and brand development, research and development, design, sales, marketing, category management, and general management. Above all, they taught me how to put people and process first. I am fortunate and grateful to have had the opportunity to work for these incredible leaders.

Q: What character traits do you look for in people as you decide about who is on your team?
A: I look for people who understand what it means to put team before self. I am a firm believer that team beats talent, and perfect alignment always beats a perfect strategy. I always reference the phrase “humble, hungry and smart” because I like the underdog mentality and the idea that you need to show up every day and earn it. Additionally, I look for leaders who understand how to push themselves and their team forward but do it in a way where the organization is inspired to follow.

In a world that is increasingly dynamic, complex and frustrating, we need people who focus on the controllable: a positive attitude, hustle and a bias for action. I also like a tightly run ship, which means team members who operate with a structured approach, using process and data instead of reactionary emotion. Lastly, we work tirelessly to create a working environment of psychological safety so all of our team members feel comfortable contributing their perspective. It is this diversity in thought that will allow us to create a high-performing residential business.

Q: What is your advice to your core team about balancing meeting time with execution time?
A: In steady state, we will be laser focused on agile and empowered decision-making as close to the customer as possible but built on a foundation of controls, data and accountability. Right now, we are taking time to invest in our team dynamics, build trust, establish standard work, build operating rhythms and the repeatable data-driven processes that will eventually make us much faster. But at this moment, we are probably leaning a little heavier toward meeting time versus execution, but it’s in the spirit of creating great alignment in the organization, top to bottom. We’ll be moving deeper into execution during this next 90-day chapter of the book.

Q: What do you, Ellen and the kids do for fun when you aren’t focused on work?
A: We are a very close family, and we do just about everything together as a team. This is evolving slightly due to my current travel schedule and as we work to transition to our new home, but we are settling into a nice rhythm. We commonly refer to ourselves as hermits on the weekend, which means, by choice, we don’t have a robust social life. We love to travel, so that typically consists of our annual adventures for spring break, summer vacations in our go-to spot in Siesta Key, Florida, or weekend getaways in Asheville, North Carolina or Bluffton, South Carolina.

This past year, I was finally able to get my daughter fully converted as a Purdue Boilermaker fan, which led to a father/daughter trip back to West Lafayette, Indiana for a basketball game and a trip to the National Championship in Phoenix, Arizona, where our beloved Boilermakers unfortunately lost to Connecticut. Beyond that, we’re also trying to work in an annual ski trip out west to get the kids more comfortable on skis.

Q: What advice do you give your children about balancing work with the other important elements of life?
A: To be totally honest, I won’t be writing any books on this topic anytime soon. I am not proud of it, but work-life balance is not a strength of mine. I work early, late and often on the weekends, mostly because I really enjoy it. The older I get, the more I realize this is probably a flawed approach, but I am blessed to have an incredible “teammate” in my wife, Ellen, who makes this work for our family.

She’s the CEO of our house, and her job is much harder than mine. It’s also why this move to Shaw is a very big deal for our family. Whatever we do as a family, we are always 100% all-in, so it’s important to be working for a company with purpose and with people who are considered part of our extended family. Beyond this, we teach the golden rule and kindness to others as guiding principles in our household.

Q: How do you make sure you are keeping your insights sharp, along with keeping the team on task and getting your family moved from Charlotte to the Dalton/Chattanooga area?
A: My first 90 days were divided into three parts: listen, learn, lead. Often the most basic way to keep your insights sharp is to listen and ask questions. I still have a lot to learn, but in the meantime, it’s my job to provide a clear vision on where we are going as a company and a division. It’s also my role to help create processes and operating rhythms that foster transparent organizational alignment on priorities and actions. We are using variations of OKRs (objectives & key results) and lean standard work principles to help keep us on task and moving forward. We have divided much of our work into “perform or transform” ambitions to help us sequence and prioritize the work we need to be doing right now.

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Related Topics:Shaw Industries Group, Inc.