Barry-Wehmiller's Chief People Officer, Rhonda Spencer, was recently recognized by the St. Louis Business Journal in their 2025 HR Awards for Innovation in HR. This was a long overdue recognition of Rhonda’s leadership, but also the work of the BW Global People Team and everthing they've done to help all of our people, all over the world, feel like they matter.
Rhonda has been with Barry-Wehmiller since before the development of our Guiding Principles of Leadership and was one of the major voices in its creation. She was our first Chief People Officer and it’s her primary responsibility to be the steward of our values and make sure that light shines to the furthest reaches of our organization.
Recently, Rhonda took part in a webinar discussion with Mike Budden, one of the partners in our Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute, Barry-Wehmiller’s consulting arm that specializes in helping other organizations unleash the extraordinary in their businesses and their people. They do this by helping those organizations identify, develop and equip their leaders.
On this podcast, we want to showcase an edited version of that discussion. It’s an interesting conversation as Mike and Rhonda discuss what it means to scale a Truly Human Leadership culture globally. They talk about the processes and systems we’ve developed to try to make that happen and there's a lot of insight to apply to your own organization.
Listen through your favorite podcast provider or through the link above.
Transcript
Mike Budden: Just a quick introduction to myself. I am a leader in Chapman and Co. Leadership based in South Africa, working globally as well. One of the incredible things that attracted me into Chapman and Co. And just, we are a daughter company of Barry-Wehmiller, and apart from the purpose that's so aligned with mine, and the sense of calling that I have to help create more inspiring workplaces through leadership. The other thing that attracted me into this business was that what we often deliver and share with our client organizations is not theory. We're not a bunch of consultants that have dreamt up a couple of cool things, but it's based on real practice and things that have happened, and that real practice has happened in Barry-Wehmiler, and that's what I'm really excited about to explore with you, Rhonda, a little bit more today. So, Rhonda is our Chief People Officer at Barry-Wehmiller. She joined us in 1991 as a Mechanical Engineer, and so interesting how our roots and our careers can also evolve in time to becoming a sales leader, the Vice President of Sales in 1999, and then on to become our Chief People Officer in 2014. Rhonda has focused on integrating culture, our people development and HR across 28 countries. And today she leads a global team ensuring that we live up to our purpose of measuring the way we touch the lives of people, nurturing leaders at every level and ensuring that caring and performance remain in harmony as a group continues to unleash its growth and continues to steadily acquire other companies to help fuel that. So, with that, Rhonda, as we step in today, I'd like us to start off at a place just a little bit about you, and that is what makes this work deeply meaningful for you, both personally and professionally.
Rhonda Spencer: So, I think it's interesting. If you're at an organization for 34 years, you literally have grown up at an organization. So, I am a product of the experiences of Barry-Wehmiller. And so when I started here, it was a decent place to work. It was kind of a work hard, play hard organization, you know. Everybody grew through the organization the way I did, the engineer sales, and then other opportunities would present themselves. And it certainly wasn't an intentional growth organization. It was sort of, I think, I always tell people that if you had a brain, a pulse and ambition, not necessarily in that order, you could get promoted. And so for me, there's a real passion in taking the discoveries that have come to us along the way, and to ensuring that those are replicable and scalable and expandable as we grow this organization, but also to be an inspiration to other organizations about the impact that business can have on people's lives, because that's something that we discovered along the way through the stories of individual people and what they experienced as we figured it out as a business, and as we transformed and watched the impact it had on people. So, that's a very personal experience for me. So, to think that I don't want my time here to be the good old days. I want people 50 years from now to understand what we stood for. It's a challenge every day to live up to the promise that we make to people. And that takes discipline and systems and structure. So, that's kind of where we are now. It's just that energy and challenge of scaling what we believe in and what we've experienced so that it's real for people across the organization.
Mike: Yeah, sure, you know what stands out for me is so often we say values or culture is a reflection of the values, beliefs, behaviors of leadership, past and present and how often that culture is rooted in the leader. And we know we have transition in leadership in our business right now, in many ways, and so love to hear your thinking about both scale and embedding this culture into Barry-Wehmiller over the longer term. What are some of the things that you've been thinking of and/or doing to ensure that lives beyond the leadership we've had, and even maybe your leadership one day.
Rhonda: Yeah. So, just for people who don't know the Barry-Wehmiller story, which it was written about in Everybody Matters. And we're actually about to publish the 10-year anniversary of that book, the 10th anniversary edition of Everybody Matters will come out this fall. But so, Barry-Wehmiller went through a leadership transition that started about 20 years ago, where, through kind of a series of what our CEO Bob Chapman considers sort of revelations, things that occurred to him, we recognized that every single person in the organization deserved to be treated with dignity and respect, and how that came to him is that he was sitting at a wedding and watching his friend walk his beautiful daughter down the aisle, and when he got to the top of the aisle, the officiant said, who gives this young woman to be wed? And the father of the bride said her mother and I do. And Bob said, what he was thinking is, that's not what he's thinking. He's thinking, listen, young man, we've done everything we can to raise this young woman to be everything she’s meant to be in this world, and we are trusting you to take it from here. And he said, what if every single person who arrived at our organization was presented in the same way and what if whoever's important to them, you know, was present to like, brought them to our front door and said, we trust you to take it from here to help this person become whatever it is that they're meant to be in this world and so that really kind of shaped the way we thought about the organization, that every person deserves to be treated as someone's precious child with dignity and respect. And so, we started a 20-year journey to transform how people think about leadership and business, and because it was so different. And the leadership team that was here at that time certainly wasn't hired to lead in that way, it was very much of a ground-up approach. We called it feed the hungry and to start to drive that change by going to the people who are most receptive to the change, not the ones who are the most resistant, and to sort of drive this through new learning and new learning systems and high touch and a lot of things, but we didn’t. That system wasn’t build for the scale of Barry-Wehmiller today, as you presented on the first slide, that this is an organization that’s global. It wasn’t build to be global. It wasn’t built to scale, to now 14,000 people And we deliver all of our communication in 12 or 13 languages, right? So, it wasn't built for that. We always, as you said, measured our success by our revenue growth and our share price growth. And that was, we thought we were really healthy. Unexpectedly, Bob Chapman's son Kyle got engaged in our business. About 12 years ago, we started BW Forsyth Partners, which was an investment arm to Barry-Wehmiller that was pretty separate at the start. And then, about 5 years ago, Kyle started to get more engaged in the business. We realized that Bob had built a job for himself for whom there was no successor. As 40 years of the CEO of the organization, there was no possible way that someone could come in and succeed Bob in the way the job was designed. So, Bob started to invite more people to sort of broaden the leadership base. And one of those people was Kyle Chapman. He was running Forsyth Partners, and in that role, it gave Kyle the opportunity to start to challenge us about, you know, the way we measured our performance was great, but maybe if we did kind of a biometric screening of the company, we weren't as healthy as we thought we were. And so, we started to challenge ourselves to measure our performance in different ways and challenge ourselves to kind of the next level of performance in the organization. And what happened is that someone said to me, one of the Presidents at the time, he said. Oh, I see, feels like the pendulum has swung too far towards people, and it needs to swing back towards performance. I thought, oh, that's not it at all, right? It's not people in performance in balance, which implies that you trade one for the other, that it's a zero-sum game, but it's people and performance in harmony. And this is an idea that Bob's co-author Raj Sisodia shared with me, this idea that people in performance, when we do it right, they amplify each other, that we know that people are the most fulfilled when they know they're on a winning team. They understand how they contribute to that. They feel recognized and valued for that role, and they feel like they can grow as part of that team. And so, people are the most fulfilled when we perform, you know, if we do this well. So, that's really the modern journey of where we are today is to help every single person to be much more explicit about what was implicit before, that we expect every person to care for people and perform with excellence, and then to sort of build the processes and systems that make that real. As you said, it's sort of our culture is the behaviors. And so, do people understand what they're supposed to be doing every day to live up to this storied culture that we built? So, that's a long answer to your question, Mike.
Mike: Yeah, that's incredible. And I just to, for us all to appreciate the roots of where this comes at. And you know, Bob speaks of the poverty of dignity that we have in our world and that realization that the pendulum did swing to the other way for a long time, where it was all about shareholder growth and aligning executives and leaders with shareholders’ interests. And then, like, I want to explore that a little bit more with you a little bit later in our conversation about the pendulum swing. Because that's certainly something that I come across in our practice as well. And you mentioned about like, hey, nobody really signed up for this. It was pretty ground up. When you look at today's business landscape, how do you frame the role of leadership?
Rhonda: So, we make this promise that we're going to be an organization that measures success by the way we touch the lives of people, meaning that every decision that we make as a leader, we can reflect on the impact it will have on team members, their families, our communities, ultimately our customers and shareholders. And there is a right decision that we can make that fits within that. And it doesn't mean that we can always be nice, and that there's never challenging things to do, but that there are decisions that we can make that are good for the entire shareholder base or stakeholder base of Barry-Wehmiller. And so, for leaders, I think it's a challenging role. It's for leaders there. We know their frontline leader is actually the culture for people. We can say anything we want, but how they're treated by their frontline leader is their culture and then, if you go all the way up to the senior level leader, the strategic decisions that they make, and the strategy that they set create security for people in terms of, are they going to have a job tomorrow? They adopt the policies that create the conditions for those frontline leaders to be able to actually lead successfully. So, I think about, we always say leadership is an awesome responsibility. And so, when I think about leaders of Barry-Wehmiller, and we've hired some amazing leaders from companies like GE and Rexnord and some high performing organizations, and they're attracted to the cultural promise of Barry-Wehmiller, because they don't want to do some of the brutal things that they've done in their other organization, and what I tell them is to take all that amazing strategy that you've learned, and then apply it within the guardrails of our culture, where you're not going to have all those tools in the toolbox, such as laying people off to get your share price to go up. You're not going to have those tools in the toolbox. You're going to have to work harder, be smarter to be able to create a long-term future for people. But that's also a bit of a luxury, is that you're not living and dying by every quarterly report.
Mike: Two things that really speaks to me about is this sense that leaders need to create the environment for the people to experience that meaningful work you spoke about earlier, and most people do want to just show up and do a good day's work and feel like it was meaningful and they were valued. But how do we create the right environment with the right processes around them to support them in that, which I think is so important. As we consider that and the role of leadership today, I’d love to just go a little bit more back to the origin story. And you shared this definining moment that Bob had, and I know he had a couple of others, but that key defining moment and realizing that somebody else’s precious child that’s been given into his stewardship responsibility. As you sort of started thinking about that and the leadership you would need as you were going into the future from that point, what are some of the early markers of impact you still remember from those times?
Rhonda: I mean, I think that a lot of my own personal experience and the experience of a lot of leaders is that when you realize that there's a different way to lead, it's actually very freeing. I think about some of our early classes and people learning that there's a way to listen to people and care for people and have challenging conversations in different ways. It's very freeing because I think there's a way that we know we're supposed to treat people, and we treat people, most of us, in our everyday life. And there was a point in time where people felt that that didn't apply in business when you walked in the door in business, and maybe especially in a manufacturing environment, in the manufacturing assembly or machining area, that there was just a different way that people spoke to each other, and hierarchy and those kind of things, and so I remember a lot of tears, and one of my personal experiences early days, and how I kind of wandered over to the people side was working to reinvent sales with Bob Chapman, and we were going from centralized sales to a distributed sales model, but trying to figure out what would cause people to behave in a way to retain the best things that we had with centralized selling. And as we're creating this communication leadership incentive program, I said, oh, well, here we need to put in some guardrails in case people cheat, and he said, what if we assume no one's going to cheat? He said, maybe they will, and we'll have to do some of the things you're saying. But let's just assume no one’s gonna break the rules and see what happens. And so that's just, so you think about things that are turning points in your own career. It's very freeing to assume the best in people every day, and just assume everyone's trying to do their best, everyone wants to do a good job, no one's going to cheat, right? And it's just like, and so you think, as a leader, those moments that a lot of our leadership teams went through. It's very free to just say I can take all those burdens off my back and just do the best to create the environment for these people to be whatever it is that they're meant to be.
Mike: Sure. And you know what's striking for me on that is, it's not us having to do things differently as much as it's our mindsets and assumptions being challenged and just framing up a different way of us showing up and then treating people in those ways. And how often we put rules and guardrails around because of two or three people maybe that did not follow the process, and rather than having the courage to go and deal with that, we just put blanket rules on everybody, and then never, ever went back and questioned those assumptions. I'm curious to know, like, how's your thinking and the company's approach shifted over the years?
Rhonda: One of the things I talked about, this concept of people and performance in harmony, I think we were trying so hard to change the way people think about leadership and business, we expected performance, but we didn't really help leaders understand how to do both things at the same time, and so kind of in the current focus with people and performance in harmony, we're much more explicit about how leaders are supposed to do both those things at the same time. So, we took over time, you know, we had, as you mentioned, Bob had a lot of what he calls revelations, ideas that came to him that shaped some of the things that we were doing, and we brought people together and talked about our vision for safety and customer service and different things. So, we had layers and layers of sort of cultural lore. And I would say, if you showed up in the organization, and maybe you experience that because you're much newer than I am. It was a little bit difficult to absorb all of it and say, OK, what am I supposed to do? And so, we step back from that, and we articulated a simple set of team member and leader expectations and commitments. And those are the view of if you are living up to people and performance in harmony, care for people and perform with excellence, these are the things that you will be doing. And so, those are the basis for our talent development programs, our learning programs and even our performance assessment. So, starting with Kyle Chapman's leadership, I'm assessed on what I do, my goals and how I do it, living up to leadership expectations. And it's been fantastic because I know that Kyle has given me feedback, based on looking at the descriptions and those leadership commitments and being prompted to give me feedback. I'm 100 percent sure he's giving me feedback that he never would have given me. And so, to me, it's just that sort of the evolution of something that is scalable and much more vivid for people in terms of this is what good leadership looks like when you are actually caring for people and performing with excellence.
Mike: So, you know, what I’m hearing in that is you become very intentional about being able to articulate what does a great team member look like, and how they show up, and how a great leader shows up. What is more encouraging to me about what you've just shared is that we have this phrase in Chapman and Co., let's do us to us, and as you, as leaders, are doing us to us, in that. You know, I face this often as we help organizations think about their own journeys of performance, management and growth conversations. How often I get to the executive team, and they never do it and say I've never had that conversation that I need to be giving to others. And so, how's that experience for you as you get feedback? And how's it helped you in your own leadership?
Rhonda: Well, the thing that's exciting is that I learned as much my 30th year here as I have any year. So, you think about, I have a very low tolerance for boredom. So, you think, how can you stay at the same company for 34 years? And it's it's fueled a learning experience, right, of things that you know, getting feedback on your style, and especially how that style plays in pretty much an entirely new leadership team. And, you know, what works and doesn't work. And, you know, so for me, it's valuable. And it's valuable also with my leadership team and having the right conversations and also it fosters a great point for recognition. So, you know, we use those commitments also in our recognition program. So, those are the things that you know, we want to hold up things that we want more of. And so that's the basis for our recognition programs and peer-to-peer recognition. And we launched a program. And our goal was to have a thousand recognitions over the first three years, and we almost hit that mark in the first year of peer-to-peer recognition going across the organization to people all over the world, and from, you know, within manufacturing, and from manufacturing to sales and sales to manufacturing. And so, and those commitments are the basis of that. So, it is sort of something that's alive in the organization in terms of what the culture looks like.
Mike: Yeah, it’s often we think of feedback, is just, oh, well, it’s hard to do the difficult feedback. But how do we use those tools to give the positive feedback of what we want to have more of? But what I’m also inspired by is your own mindset, that we’ve never arrived, we’re continuously growing, and I can still get feedback to be better as a leader. And I think in the world we're living and working in today, the expectations are changing all the time of what our own team members are expecting of us as leaders, and we have to evolve and lift our lids at the same time, otherwise we'll be capped for them and their growth. So, really inspired by that. You shared a little bit around the commitments, and one of the things that's helped you with is scaling. I'd like to just dig in a little bit more about how you've scaled across 12,000 people or more now over 28 countries, with team members spread across many continents. How do you build leaders and culture in a way that feels consistent, yet also context sensitive?
Rhonda: That's probably a muscle that we're still building. So, we do have best in class people systems. And so, we do deploy things through systems. So, even though I said, we don't wanna have rules and try to catch people doing things wrong, we do know that we need discipline and structures. And we need data in today's world. And if we want people to be at the forefront of the organization, our people data has to be at the forefront of the organization. And so, leaders need reminders to do the things that they intend to do, especially when we're asking them to do new things that are hard. So, it is supported by global systems where we can see who is following through and giving people these conversations that they deserve to have in those kind of things. In terms of cultural sensitivity, that’s a growth for us. We do have an inclusion initiative that is kind of in its infancy, and a big part of it is that cultural understanding. And one of the challenges that we've always had is that some of the things that, even our approach to recognition, some of the things that people say, oh, I don't think that's going to work here, and it's more because it's the new and different and figuring out like, is it just the resistance to the new and different? Or are we being culturally insensitive? Because it’s like, well, they also said it wouldn't work in Wisconsin, but it turned out it did work in Wisconsin, right? So, that's kind of a fine line to walk is figuring out what is real and what is natural resistance to change. And some lessons you learn the hard way. So, we’re definitely on a journey to figure out what the right touch is between having one organizational culture and accommodating what is unique about the many, many places where we are.
Mike: Yeah. You hit on an important point, I think. I wonder how often we just actually are more change resistant. And we dream up this piece of we’re so culturally different. All over the world, we ask that question, we actually get the same thing. And as we talk about culture and leadership, certainly the work that I've done globally around values, what we often find is that our belief systems may separate us, but our values actually are the things that end up uniting us, because we all pretty much want the same things in life, doesn't matter where you are in the world. And you know, yeah, so sometimes the way that context sensitivity is an overthought thing, which is maybe not as real. And if we can break through on that and find those commonalities that all that inclusion work that starts really happening. You know, when I started in this work some 25 odd years ago, maybe 30, similar time to you started, I just sell hard the need for culture. And it was like we had to show how it impacted the bottom line. And there was a role for it today. We don't have to do that. And Bob will tell us when he's doing keynotes like everybody nods their heads. This makes so much sense. The big question is the how, and you've shared with us a lot on this call already about this concept of people and performance in harmony, love to hear some thoughts about how do you keep that in harmony? Particularly in life, that, there are these leaders that say there are these pendulum swings, and too much focus on people will dull performance. And yeah, how do you navigate that one with leaders? And two, how do you keep that in harmony?
Rhonda: Yeah, I think it's something that we're definitely in the midst of figuring out, and I think that we have, you know, I was on a panel once with someone from Southwest Airlines, and she said, storied culture can create a sense of entitlement. And so, there is, you know, there are times when people will use the culture as sort of a bat, you know, to bet, well, that's not, I shouldn't have to do that, right, and so, we just talked about natural resistance to change, and those kinds of things, so I would say, we're in the midst of figuring out how you really bring to life people and performance in harmony, and what it looks like and when, you know, how we navigate the difficult decisions. And so, I would say, we're definitely in the midst of figuring it out. We are working on giving certain skills to our leaders that are much needed. You talked about recognition versus giving difficult feedback. We're not that good at giving difficult feedback, right? I think that leaders think that they delivered it, but what we see kind of in the people organization when things kind of come to a head is that the person did not receive what the leader intended to deliver, right? And, as Brené Brown says, clear as kind. So, we're not clear, right? So, leaders have to get better at, and they're so angry or frustrated, and they go into the conversation, and they sugarcoat what they intended to say. So, I think there's things like that we recognize that we can get better at. Some of the other things are decision-making tools. So, we're really focused on, can you build problem-solving and decision making deeper in the organization, right? So, those are kind of things that if you really want an organization that's poised to perform, you need people who have enough information about how the organization works and the impact of what they do on the people upstream and downstream of them. And then they need the skills and the courage to be able to make decisions and solve problems. And so, that's another big skill that we're building, that we see that there's gaps, and especially where we've had, we talked about a little bit before the call started, hero mindset, and a few people who got recognized over and over again for heroically solving problems, as opposed to the discipline of building structures where those problems don't happen. So, those are a few skills that we see, that our leadership team sees, our gaps. Another one would be holding people accountable. So, just kind of, what does that look like in an environment where you do want to encourage and grow people. A piece of that is ensuring accountability. And so, do people understand what's expected of them? And do they have the right leadership connections along the way to help them stay accountable to kind of their piece of things. And so, those are some of the things that we think are skills we need to build, strengths that we need to build in people across the organization to get better at it.
Mike: And so, recognizing some of those limitations or challenges that your leaders have, how are you going to go about thinking about building those skills?
Rhonda: Well, we're fortunate that we do have a robust learning organization called BWU, and so we have. Also, we do a lot of work, not just through Chapman and Co., but also in the business, MBA, kind of learning space. So, we have things that we can pull from there, and also content that you know, we share content back and forth between our charitable outreach between Chapman and Co. and stuff that we can develop inside Barry-Wehmiller. So, through BWU we'll be delivering content. We do webinars, you know, several a week on key topics, and executive leaders are delivering that content for team members who want to opt in. So, it's kind of, for us, it'll be a lot through robust learning systems. Another thing that we do is, you know, learning the 70/20/10 model, where 70 percent of your learning actually comes from your experiences. And so, 20 percent is from coaching and your experience with others, and only 10 percent from learning. And I think most companies and us historically have over-indexed on the value of that learning. And so, what we've developed is a cohort where we bring people in, and they experience the 70/20/10 model together. And it's called Realize. And so, they have a major strategic project that will have a significant impact. And we're talking, most of the projects are multimillion-dollar impact on the organization, and they have a coach and also exposure to executive leadership, including myself and the President, Kyle Chapman. And then they go through learning throughout the experience. And so, that's what we see as one of the most robust ways to accelerate development for people. And they're kind of in a years-long project making a big impact in the organization, but also getting this exposure to senior leadership and to a lot of learning that will kind of help them structure the project, present on the project, drive it to completion, and then they just learn a lot about the organization, and then they have a cohort group of about 25 people that are peers around the organization that they've gone through the experience with. So, that's one of the things that we see right now is sort of helping people quickly accelerate their development.
Mike: Yeah, in our development leadership, we often all say, when people come into the class, like the real classroom is out there. This only giving you a little bit of skilles and mindset and tools to go and do that. And so, it’s encouraging to hear that we’re thinking of how to give people real-life learning and contributing at the same time in that. And that’s really encouraging. And I’d like to shift a little bit to the other way we’ve scaled is through acquisitions. We, I know, like to call our acquisitions adoptions in that we adopt you for the long term. And I mentioned at the beginning of the call how difficult that is. I was only engaging with a leader this morning coaching, and their business was acquired some four years back, and they still wrestling with that transition and the culture and the fit, and how we navigate that. I'd love to hear, like, when you do acquire and onboard the new acquired leaders, what's the first conversation you have with them when you acquire their businesses.
Rhonda: Well, I think a lot of the conversations happen way before that. So, if I think about the history of the acquisition model and Barry-Wehmiller early days, Bob's model was to acquire failing businesses. Barry-Wehmiller had gone through a very traumatic time, got out of that traumatic time, and he felt like where he had the most value to add to an acquisition was in struggling companies, and it was also at the time there wasn't anybody else in the space who wanted to buy those kinds of companies. And so most times, what we were building long-term, and this is true today, too, building long-term relationships with family owners of companies. And when the time was right, unfortunately, in a lot of cases the time was right, because the company was in severe distress, we would come in and take the ownership stake in the business, and so in a lot of those businesses, especially where people understood the situation, the cultural adoption was a lot different because people welcomed us to join the organization and kind of stabilize it and create a future. And so, you know, those conversations were very different. In the early days, we were building the cultural model with those teams, and a lot of the learning experiences came inside those organizations as we worked through the transformation. Today, our culture is a reason why companies want to join Barry-Wehmiller. And so, we have one example of a company called STAX that we acquired in Serbia, and the guy who was structuring the deal said, this is the first time we've ever sold a company to the lowest bidder, because the owner of this company wanted to be part of our organization. So those, again, it was relationship building over time and cultural conversations. But today, I think our culture is the strength of our acquisitions, and people look at what's going on in the private equity world, and they say I don't want to be part of that, and I don't want this company that I built, and these people that I care for to be in the hands of some of these private equity folks who do not measure success by the way they touch the lives of people. And so, a lot of those conversations have already happened at the outset. That said, when we step into organizations, one of the lessons that we've learned is that we have to go slow. It's a lot, right? And in early days, we're just trying to figure out benefits and how we're going to pay people. And so, I think that ramping up to their inclusion and all of our people processes is definitely the right way to go, because it is, even though they might have welcomed the opportunity to join together, it's still a lot in the transition. And so, I think a lot of it is just going slow and figuring out where they are and letting them pull some things that they're most excited about when they're ready, as opposed to giving them the fire hose and saying, you know, welcome to Barry-Wehmiller. Here's a cultural dump of everything that's available to you.
Mike: Yeah, that's such a great learning, I think, is the temptation to just smash the organization in and say, hey, you're part of us now, and not allow the time to assimilate, and for people to, I think, orient themselves to this new world and what that looks like. Even if it's better it's still change for people and allowing them the space and grace to do that. I think also, you've turned the tables of like, hey, this is a culture we want as opposed to please don't come and foster your culture on us. And I recall it's eventually 10 years, 10 years and two weeks to the day that I was in the very first beyond benchmarking course in St. Louis which Bob addressed us, and he shared, and Bob had tears in his eyes because he shared how a 60-year-old man in France said, after we justified the business, and he went to visit, and he said, I've been waiting for you for all my life. But just that signal of like, how this aspect of making people feel valued and cared for has such a deep impact for people, too, and the the other the other important, I think, message you've shared there with us is the structural alignment and just also going slow with that, and not trying to turn their world upside down too fast, too quickly. Yeah. I'd love to just explore a little bit about your current programs and a little bit about how you're thinking of scaling that into the future. So, you mentioned the Elevate program and there and that you also have a Realize program. Could you spotlight just some of the those and any other cornerstone programs you have and how you're thinking about scaling them globally?
Rhonda: Yeah. So we we have over the past few years built out the Elevate performance and development program. And so, we do for the first time have a closed loop where we can see because we are assessing everyone on goals and commitments. And so, we have this closed loop, where we can see how team members and leaders assessed on how they're doing in the commitments, and then they can be assigned learning that should help them get better or developmental assignments that should help them get better. And then we can see if that makes any difference, right? So, we sort of have this talent and performance, learning and compensation system that's a closed loop now. And so, the system’s there. I think the keys for us now are building the muscles and getting leaders really good at that. So, when I think about scale, it's there and it's available to everyone, and it's in all the languages. And so, now it's about making sure that we're getting the value out of the process. Because the value is whether or not we're building a pipeline of talent to meet the future needs of the organization, right? Not whether we're checking the boxes on all this, you know. Are we living up to the culture that we say you're supposed to have when you work at Barry-Wehmiller? It's a very high bar, right? And so to me, it's really, we built a lot of stuff. And now it's just making sure that leaders, that those processes are valuable to them, and that we’re actually getting the back, and that we’re actually delivering that value for people in the organization. So, yeah. So, we're excited.
Mike: Yeah, that's very exciting. What I've heard in this big shift to thinking about this more holistically, how we tie commitments to our learning development to our awards, to how we do performance. And you know, we would often talk about, we need both behavioral alignment and structural alignment, and how our structures speak also to the culture we're trying to create, not just the leadership behaviors and reinforce that. And so that you're hearing how your team is thinking about building that together, because I think that's an important part of being able to scale it at the end of the day as well, and that don't speak to each other, then it will be very difficult to scale that. Rhonda, as we think about the times we're living in right now, a huge amount of uncertainty, volatility, all sorts of things right across our world that is creating, I think, perhaps fearful people at times, and leaders having to navigate this unprecedented uncertainty. How are you equipping them to steady their span of care right now?
Rhonda: You know, one of the things that I hope we can insulate people from what’s going on in the world. I think that one of the fortunate things that we have at Barry-Wehmiller, and being a privately held company, is that we do things for the long term, and that we don’t overreact in any given political or economic situation. And so, I think that if it's whether it's DEI or caring for people. I just read an article about how a lot of companies are like, you know, you need to leave pity city. And you know, just like, like all of a sudden, the tone of how people are treating people now that the shift in terms of the, you know, I think things have really shifted to the worker. And now, it's maybe shifting back to the organization with layoffs and things like that, and how quickly the tone shifts. And I think for us, it's hopefully our people feel protected in an organization that is consistently, we do things because they are aligned to our culture, that they're real, and that we intend for them to be here for the long term. And we're not kind of blowing with the latest political or cultural wind. So hopefully, people feel that here, and we also, the business model is intentionally designed for us to be able to be good to people. So, even when we're analyzing tariffs, for example, we're local for local. We're all over the world. It's not that we won't be affected, but we can manage the effect, right? It'll be minimal because we tend to make our products in the regions. Now, we may need to make some adjustments in that. But we make our products mostly in the regions where the customer’s going to use them, right? So I think, luckily, we have a business model that also allows us to insulate things for people. And I think it's just, you know, we teach a class on listening and a big part of that is about empathy for the other person. So, I think if there's any skill that we need right now, it's empathy. Everybody's a product of the experiences that brought them to this point. And so, whatever they're going through is to be able to listen with empathy, I think, is a skill that all of our leaders need right now.
Mike: Yeah. And such a deep skill you have been teaching your leaders right from the start of this journey, which is just a base foundation to this trillium and leadership journey, I think what you've just shared. Luckily, you've got an organization that is weatherproof. I think it's by design and intentional, and you know I remember one listening to Bob before I even joined Chapman and Co. And listening to one of his talks, and he said, hey, we don't build great people to build great machinery. We build great machinery so that we can grow great people. And so, the intention of building a organization that's weatherproof is so that our people can know they're safe as well, particularly when the weather does get a little bit rough and stormy, and it reminds me of Simon Sinek’s concept of Circle of Safety. And that’s the only thing we really can control as leaders is to create that Circle of Safety for our people internally, so we can better weather and manage these storms that come across us. If you could leave leaders here on our call with a single piece of guidance for developing others, what would it be?
Rhonda: So, we have these leader commitments and they paint this picture of a very well-rounded individual that's firing on all cylinders of people in performance and harmony. And I have a very ambitious and high-performing leadership team, and if they get feedback on any of them that they're not, they're just like, and I'm like, but you know, you're not going to be great in all of them. We're a team that's built of a combination of people's strengths. And so, you need to know yourself and know where your gaps are and who's gonna fill in that gap for you. And so to me, it's really to think about we spend, I learned from somebody at McKinsey once, and he talked about how they go out, and they hire the best and the brightest in the world, and then they focus on their weaknesses, and how they can make them better as opposed to focusing on their strengths. So, to me, it's kind of looking for where people are strong and building a role for them where they're working in that area of strength most of the time, and then build a team that balances each other out, because what's really hard for one person is super fulfilling for another person. So, to me, that's just, is not not to focus too hard on trying to fix because that's going to be very difficult. To try to close that gap of someone who’s not analytical, or, you know, whatever it is.
Mike: One question: you've spoken about how leadership have evolved to now. What do you see for the future of leadership?
Rhonda: So, one of the interesting things that's happening at Barry-Wehmiller, is that we are resetting on our strategic plan, and we picked a time horizon of seven years. We plan for three years out, we're a privately held company, and our share price is valued on a methodology that values year three. So, we're always planning for three years. And so, we picked seven years to go out. And so one of the interesting things is to look at, right now the people organization is being asked to look at all, what the business presented as kind of their seven-year strategic plan and ask ourselves, what will the people organization look like in seven years? So that's an interesting challenge just to kind of talk about where are the investments that we need to make? Where do we think we can gain efficiencies? What will be different? And so, I think for us, Mike and I talked a little bit before the call started about the need for agility in the future. And so, I think it's really for us asking ourselves, will the needs and skills of leaders and team members be different in the future? And how can we enable that? And what can we be doing to kind of get people ready for the future of Barry-Wehmiller, but also kind of maybe the evolving future of the world. And so, I think it's a super interesting question. And we'll be answering that question for ourselves in terms of looking out seven years from now and, you know, in the near term it's finishing what we started and actually getting the value out of it, as I said. But in the further term. It's really looking at, in an AI world, what will our team members be doing? And how do we future-proof, Barry-Wehmiller? Future proof their jobs? What does creating that sense of safety and security look like in our organization in the future? And how can we help people be more resilient and agile?
Mike: I think, you know, one of the things that I noticed in Barry-Wehmiller is the intense focus on Truly Human Leadership. And I believe that as we go into the future, that's going to become a stronger need and a higher value will place on leaders who can lead Truly Humanly, much of technology may replace a lot of the smarts that we used to value in leaders. One other interesting question: you have built a sustained, strong culture. What was your strategy to develop and embed it so holistically without it being seen as an HR project?
Rhonda: Well, it certainly helps that we have Bob Chapman as our chief cheerleader, and when I started this journey, I wasn't in HR. And so, I always joke that when the Board asked me to take over HR, in addition, I had a team called organizational empowerment that was outside of HR at the beginning of building this and and I think, coming out of a role as a VP of Sales and having worked for virtually every President in the organization at that time, I think it kind of, there were different connections and credibility and ability to sort of connect with the organization when we started this journey. But I think people join this organization because they believe in what we're doing. And so, it's not an HR Project, because that's why they're here. So, our senior leadership team, one of the biggest benefits that we have as the People Team in Barry-Wehmiller is that the Senior Leadership Team passionately believes in the culture we’re trying to create, and they look to us to help enable them in doing that, but it’s not something they have to be convinced of, or they wouldn’t be here. It’s why they joined, or why they’re still here.
Mike: One more important question, which it links to the one you've just said, and how important leadership is, interesting one, what can team members do to support and uplift their leader, helping them continue to shine and lead effectively?
Rhonda: Oh, that's a nice question. I mean, I think we talk about all culture is local, but the culture is the sum of all the behaviors in the organization. Every single person creates the culture. So, I think about early days when we first articulated this vision for culture, which is called the Guiding Principles of Leadership, a lot of people were like, well, no one's doing that to me. It's like, well, you should start doing it, then someone will be doing it. And so, I do think that people, every single person has an obligation to behave within the culture. And so, I think that that's the same true of your leader and like you as a as a person in the organization, can create the culture for the people around you and your leader by, your leader needs recognition and celebration, like, and they need challenging feedback, right? So, give them feedback, recognize them, recognize your peers, give your peers constructive feedback when they need it. So, kind of be the culture that you want to be part of.