Engaging Employees in Growth and Innovation

Bob Stiller founded Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in Waterbury, Vermont, in 1981, serving as CEO and president until 2007 and chairman until 2012. Nasdaq named the company’s stock its top performer of the decade in 2009 even as the firm won first place on Business Ethics magazine’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens lists in 2006 and 2007. Green Mountain Coffee also became the world’s largest supplier of fair trade coffee, a story Stiller tells in his new book, Better & Better: Creating a Culture of Purpose, Engagement, and Transformative Human Engagement (McGraw Hill, 2025). Stiller is a strong proponent of Appreciative Inquiry, an approach to problem-solving that essentially identifies what’s working and maximizes it. It engages people at all levels of an organization in a four-step process to discover strengths, imagine a better future, and then design and execute plans for achieving. MIT Sloan Management Review spoke with Stiller to learn more about how the approach helped drive the company’s growth. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

MIT Sloan Management Review: What spurred your interest in using Appreciative Inquiry broadly?

Bob Stiller: The first time we used it, we asked employees for new thoughts to improve our ability to execute. We took a group of about 20 people and taught them some very basic interviewing techniques. Then we paired them up and gave them a set of questions to ask their partner, some personal and some related to execution.

What I didn’t expect was the connection that it brought. Not only were we getting information and ideas to act on, but we were creating a community. People learned new things about each other. And then these people went out and each interviewed 20 other people. You can talk about how dialoguing builds community, but when you see it and understand it, it’s a different thing. You realize how powerful it is. Appreciative Inquiry also structured people’s thinking, making the process much more effective than traditional brainstorming.

How did this approach change your strategic planning, and whom did you involve?

Stiller: I think the output was definitely more creative with the Appreciative Inquiry approach. There was much more energy and buy-in. We involved outside stakeholders often. When we had a summit or a planning meeting, we invited a broad cross-section of employees, from front-line workers to managers, along with a diverse range of stakeholders — our ERP supplier, vendors, coffee farmers, consumers, stockholders, board members, and even environmental groups.

If you want to get different perspectives, you need people with different perspectives. Diversity works. All the pushback on the DEI stuff is sad, when the research shows it’s more effective. People who are against it are really hurting themselves. They just don’t have the data and they don’t care — and it’s a shame.

How did the practice change you as a leader?

Stiller: It increased my faith in working with more people to find solutions and helped me realize that it’s more than having a solution — it’s also getting people to execute and be excited about the solution. I was always a very big believer in cocreation: If I had an idea, I would always share it with somebody else. I used to think I was so creative, but there isn’t a time when I shared an idea and didn’t come up with a much better solution by working with others. Appreciative Inquiry did that cocreation on steroids, in a sense. It really engaged people and created energy and motivation to make it happen. That can be a lot more important than a good idea.