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Roberto Mercadé is the ambassador you want in leadership. Mercadé has spent over thirty years working across the Coca-Cola Company, and in that time he’s had thirteen different jobs in Mexico, Colombia, Australia, South Africa, Venezuela, El Salvador, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the US. The current president of the McDonald’s Division is only a year into his current role leading a global organization responsible for Coca-Cola’s key relationship with McDonald’s in more than one hundred markets, but given his previous achievements, that’s more than enough time for Mercadé to get comfortable.
By that, he means consciously uncomfortable.
Mercadé was just having this conversation with his North American unit of his global team the week prior to his Hispanic Executive interview. It’s not about feeling restless or unsatisfied, and it’s much more about feeling curious. The president is keyed in on helping those at Coca-Cola find their way to “the learning zone,” where his people are comfortable taking risks because they know the organization has their back. But they’re also entirely accountable for the work that they do.
“If we can get all of our people there consistently, and we have great talent with great capability and diversity, then just make sure you let them work and the magic will happen,” he explains. “We need to create the conditions for that which means our teams feel highly accountable, psychologically safe, and they can pivot quickly when they need to.”
Be Curious
Mercadé is emboldened by his own organization. The Coca-Cola Company publicly shares the very behaviors it wants its people to embody: curious, empowered, inclusive, and agile. The president understands each of these and how they interact and feed off each other, and he has a long history of helping drive those behaviors.
But he also hasn’t always been the ideal leader, and Mercadé is the first one to point this out. His evolution throughout his thirty-two years at the organization came with a realization as he began rising in the company that he needed to be more of an inspirational leader.
“Earlier in my career, it was much more about the drive, the resiliency, and the impetus to get things done,” Mercadé explains. “Eventually, you realize that you can do more good for the organization and your people by helping them become their best selves. I knew I needed to be more empathetic, more inspirational, and more self-aware about my default behaviors and how to modify them.”
In company terms, this is the kind of curiosity the organization thrives on.
One of Mercadé’s most lasting inspirational leadership moments comes from his time as president of Coca-Cola’s South Pacific Business Unit in Australia. A new Coke Zero ad campaign had just launched—“Say yes to the taste you love”—while there was a postal survey on marriage equality in Australia.
His marketing team came to him with an idea: cross out “the taste” so the slogan would be “Say Yes to Love.” The Coke team would ultimately roll out limited edition cans with the slogan and be the only time the iconic Spenserian script was used for any other use than the Coca-Cola logo on its packaging. The campaign would be promoted widely via a newly updated massive electronic billboard at Kings Cross in Sydney. The billboard had been on site since 1974 and is touted as the largest billboard in the Southern Hemisphere.
Three months later in 2017, Australians voted to legalize same-sex marriage.
“I don’t take any credit other than just being lucky enough to be there and supporting the team as they went through the process of getting this logo approved,” Mercadé reflects. “I felt it was right in my heart, and that made it very easy for me to support. I was there to enable it, but so many incredible people brought it to life.”
An Enterprise-First Mindset
The four behaviors serve a greater purpose when combined. Mercadé recalls Chairman and CEO James Quincey and President and CFO James Murphy proposing the cultivation of an enterprise-first mindset. Immediately, he felt they were on to something big.
“Enterprise-first means you are more concerned about the organization moving forward than getting that individual spotlight,” Mercadé explains. “It requires a level of maturity, self-awareness, and the idea that you need to leave a place better than when you took over.”
“I think it’s probably been one of the most powerful elements in our winning formula recently, and I should know. I’ve been here a long time,” he adds with a laugh.
Mercadé may have been ready for this mindset because it’s one he’s employed, maybe subconsciously, for so much of his career. His milestones are the messages he still gets from his former teams all over the world. Even if he’s no longer there, the president says the mere knowledge that his former teammates want to include him on their own celebrations lets him know that he’s been able to drive success in a way that fundamentally makes his people’s lives better.
Coca-Cola’s leadership model emphasizes employees should “Be the Role Model,” “Set the Agenda,” and “Help People Be Their Best Selves.” Mercadé lives out the model, and it’s evident by how he talks about each.
“The genius in those three phrases is they start with a verb, which leads to an action,” the president explains. “At the end of those headlines, it’s my job to help provide the vision and North Star for us to get where we want to go and a reminder of what we’re here to do. It creates this incredible virtuous cycle. Again, I just find it so helpful to my own leadership that I can’t help but want to lead by it.”
Mercadé initially came to Coca-Cola inspired by former CEO Roberto Goizueta, a leader of an iconic brand with whom Mercadé shared a first name. Though Mercadé traveled extensively as a youth and had the opportunity to see so much of the world, he still found solace in the fact that someone who looked like him was leading a company that is immediately recognizable to most people on Earth.
At this point in his career, Mercadé is hoping to become more engrained in his new home city of Atlanta, exploring partnering with his alma mater Georgia Tech, and helping to increase access to educational opportunities in his community. It’s fitting that, after living all over the world with his family, Mercadé is in the hometown of Coca-Cola.
