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Welcome to Changemaker Stories from LOCAL - an ongoing series of personal interviews with leaders driving change across every industry and discipline. Because change shouldn’t mean going it alone.
This week, we spent time with Vince Sanudo, a leader at Republic Services with experience across almost every role in the waste management industry. Vince’s current focus is on Customer Zeal, encouraging Republic Services employees to take ownership of their role to create a great customer experience. Here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Vince on leadership, passion, and consistency in driving change:
Your experiences shape your understanding. I’ve been in the field for 29 years as a truck driver, sales manager, ops manager, supervisor, dispatch manager, and VP. This range of experience helps me better understand the field, our employees, and our customers.
Change starts with leadership. You can have any plan you want, but if leadership isn't pushing it forward, it will fail.To make change happen, you need the right people in place to drive it.
Change plans need to be intentional and actionable. You can’t just throw a few slides together and call it good.
Make change part of the daily routine. For change to stick, embed it everywhere—in meetings, field work, huddles, and one-on-ones.
Connect people who have the same challenges. We host a Customer Summit to better understand our customers’ needs. From that, we’ve developed new indexes and processes to serve them better. These improvements then feed into our employee development programs.
Anchor success in metrics. We use Net Promoter Scores, onboarding surveys, purchasing surveys, and issue resolution data to gauge success.
Customers understand that we're human. The key is how we react to mistakes. If we miss a pickup but proactively communicate that we’ll complete it the following day, customers are willing to forgive us.
Consistency drives change. We have educational meetings on the first and the 15th of every month. When we follow that consistent process, we see the results.
Accountability matters. During training, every driver watches the same video and completes an assessment to ensure they’re ready to represent Republic Services.
Company culture can be a barrier to change. When we acquire other companies, the new companies may have different ways of working from Republic. Getting them up to speed on our priorities and culture is key.
Make priorities clear. When employees are consistently reminded of your key cultural pillars, they know they’re important. They’re not just something in an email that will come and go in two years. They’re who we are.
Meet people where they are. It’s essential to understand your team’s preferences—whether they want to communicate via email, meet for regular check-ins, or have more space to operate. You learn these preferences through relationship-building.
Leaders must have passion. If you don't have passion for what you're doing, people won't follow you. When leaders do have passion for the customer and their employees, it makes all the difference. People can see when you’re thinking about what's best for them.
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