Over the last several years, Barry-Wehmiller has been involved in an effort to bring Truly Human Leadership to universities.
Our own Brian Wellinghoff has spearheaded this outreach effort and it has led to partnerships with several colleges around the country. One of which is Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.
Last October we were honored when Gonzaga instituted Chapman Leadership Week to bring a spotlight to people-centric leadership in business on campus, in honor of our late Chairman Bob Chapman. His son, Kyle Chapman, our current Chairman and CEO, was the inaugural keynote speaker at that event.
This year, Chapman Leadership Week continued and the featured speaker was our friend Steve Gund of the Gund Company in St. Louis, a leader whose philosophy was greatly influenced by Bob Chapman and Barry-Wehmiller. In fact, Steve was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal discussing the impact that has had on his company.
On this episode of the podcast, Brian Wellinghoff sat down for a discussion with Steve Gund, as well as Brian Steverson, Gonzaga's Chair of Business Ethics in the School of Business Administration. The three talk about Barry-Wehmiller’s work at Gonzaga, what it has meant to their curriculum and their students and they also talk about the why behind Chapman Leadership Week.
It’s a fascinating and exciting conversation on how Truly Human Leadership is making inroads in the education of future leaders. You can listen through your favorite podcast provider or through the link in the header above.
Transcript
Brian Wellinghoff: We want to welcome everybody to our Truly Human Leadership podcast, and we have Bob Chapman specially in our mind today. We're at the campus of Gonzaga University as part of Chapman Leadership Week. I'm Brian Wellinghoff, a 23-year veteran of Barry-Wehmiller. I'm excited to engage in this conversation with two great colleagues, Brian Steverson and Steve Gund, out here on the campus of Gonzaga.
Brian, it's really your commitment to Barry-Wehmiller and Truly Human Leadership that has forged this relationship with Gonzaga. Can you give us a little context to how that relationship began and how it grew into this Chapman Leadership Week?
Brian Steverson: It began with you, Brian. We've got two Brian's on the podcast. I'm Brian Steverson. I'm a Professor of Business Ethics here in the School of Business at Gonzaga University. I'm starting my 35th year.
Steve Gund: Congratulations.
Brian S.: Thank you. It's a career. I've made a career out of it.
Four years ago, it was actually April of 2022. Brian, you were in town visiting at a Barry-Wehmiller facility. A former colleague of mine, Paul Buller, who was in our management discipline brought you to campus to have lunch. Professor Adriane Leithauser and myself had lunch with Brian, and he taught us the basics of Truly Human Leadership.
What was going on out there? It was one of those moments. I tell people I've had three callings in my life. The first was to study philosophy, and that may sound weird as a calling, but I felt called to that life. That was the kind of life I needed to live.
The second was to marry my lovely wife, Adriane. The third happened when I walked out of that room, here in Jepson, after experiencing you describe what your work was and the mission of Barry-Wehmiller. Both Professor Leithauser and I looked at each other right outside the door and said, that's it.
There is a distinct Jesuit tradition of business education. Not many people know that. Not many professors of business in Jesuit schools of business know that, unfortunately. The Jesuit tradition of business education meshes so well with Truly Human Leadership and what Bob Chapman was doing at Barry-Wehmiller and what Steve is doing now at The Gund Company that this was, as they say, a marriage made in heaven to do this work.
We've been so happy over the past two years to host the Chapman Lecture — Steve was our Chapman lecturer this year — and have a week of activities getting people like Steve, Brian, David and others in front of our students. They have the opportunity to see what the Jesuit tradition looks like in practice.
Steve, you do a wonderful job of bridging that gap. Jesuit schools of business don't always do a good job of bridging that gap. We get them up to the theory that business leadership is a noble vocation, promotion to common good, all of that. Our students will raise their hands, and say, well, how do you do that?
That's what we scratch our head a little bit as academics. Partnering with you, partnering with Barry-Wehmiller has provided us an example of and a method for how you do it — the how as you talk about. We're good at supplying the why, but the how comes from people like you.
Brian W.: Thanks for providing that, Brian. Bob Chapman was the one who had the conversation with me to say we really need to change the way that we educate people broadly, but especially educate people in business, because we need to develop leaders that can truly care and provide for performance along the way.
I've had the honor of knowing Steve for about a decade now. He is one of those leaders but also had his own transformational relationship with Bob Chapman. Can you give us a little of that background, Steve?
Steve Gund: I had the amazing blessing to meet Bob and hear him speak for the first time at a university setting. He was invited to speak at Washington University in St. Louis. That's where I first heard him talking about culture. It provided me an opportunity to learn that at the time, Barry-Wehmiller was just starting their outreach.
Bob felt so strongly about this gift that he had been given to learning about leadership, and that leadership could be all about taking care of others. Bob started to invite companies around the St. Louis area to these seminars, and one of them was called Beyond Benchmarking (held by Chapman & Co.) At the time, I was engaged in a lot of benchmarking of different organizations.
When I showed up at that seminar, I thought I was going to learn more about how to benchmark other companies. In fact, what I learned about was their culture of leadership, their culture of care. Ultimately, what I came to know to be Truly Human Leadership. During a three-day seminar, I had the opportunity to get to know Bob personally and ask him a lot of questions about how he thought about leadership. One of the most important sentences that he said to me that I'll never forget is, Steve, business is the conduit that provides opportunity for people to become who they're meant to be.
I had to think about that for a while, but it really resonated. To your point, Brian, it really aligns with Jesuit education and the Jesuit mission to develop men and women for others. What Bob was saying is that the role of leadership was to provide opportunities for people to become who they're meant to be.
Bob and I had this discussion. I had a lot of others who had been raised in homes that valued Catholic education. In fact, my dad was Jesuit-educated. We were raised to be very active in community service. I always had thought that community service is very important.
I was doing a lot of it on the weekends. What Bob really awakened me to is that business is a form of community service. It is a way to take care of others. It's a way to serve others. On the weekends, we may be working at a soup kitchen, or we may be helping others transition from homelessness.
In fact, if we provide through great leadership jobs for folks that are good paying jobs and a business with a strong business model that's safe and secure for the long term, then we can really address the root cause of poverty and create these companies that provide great careers for folks for the long term.
Brian: Steve, I’ve just got to jump in with a little challenge there, because I bet there's some people listening right now who would say, wait a second, business is community service. That doesn't make any sense. I thought it was the opposite. I thought we work in business and that we make up for that by being philanthropic or providing community service. Can you say more about that?
Steve: It's really fascinating because if you went to business school in the 80s and 90s, there's a very good chance that you were taught about, Milton Friedman, a very famous economist from the University of Chicago, and his mantra that the primary social responsibility of business was to maximize profits for the shareholders. Of course, that spun out movies.
Brian S.: Like Gordon Gekko, Wall Street.
Steve: Yeah, Gordon Gekko, Wall Street.
Brian S.: Read this book.
Steve: It doesn't matter what the ramifications of our actions are. As long as we're making money for the shareholders, anything can be rationalized or justified. We use the example of dumping PCBs into the Hudson River and killing the river or laying off 10,000 people at a time, destroying lives with very little regard to anything other than maybe a couple of incremental points of operating margin.
Bob had spent the last half of his life really awakened to the power of caring for people and promoting individual flourishing as a way to drive organizational flourishing. If we start with taking care of people, if we start with helping people realize their potential, if we listen to people to understand their life dreams and we offer developmental plans based on knowledge and education, skills development, behavioral leadership development opportunities, then we can help people reach and live their dreams.
We can unleash human potential. We can help people climb Maslow's hierarchy towards self-actualization. As these folks flourish and become who they're meant to be, the organization absolutely flourishes. Performance and people in harmony creates a safe and secure business model for the long term. I think that's what Bob was after. He was trying to promote universities to teach people-first leadership. That is, as you said, very consistent with the Jesuit mission.
Brian S.: If I may, Brian. One of the things we teach our students is that not only is the profit maximization ideal, shirking of ethical responsibility of how we should be treating one another, it's also a logical mistake, because business is an artifact. It’s a system of exchange we have to create. Businesses like the Gund Company have to be created.
There are the products that they make. Practices like employment have to be created. Being a consumer, you have to create that. It's an artifact. The only reason you would create or invent an artifact is because it makes us better off. The common good benefits from having that artifact around. We know the common good does not benefit from the profit maximization ideal because that's not the proper perfect purpose of business.
Using Jesuit speech, the purpose of business is to engage in a noble vocation. This may be the only time you'll hear noble used in that place of business leadership. From a Jesuit perspective, we think of it as one of the more noble vocations in the world because you have the power. You are a conduit to serving and promoting and preserving the common good. At the end of the day, that's the purpose of business.
Brian W.: At Barry-Wehmiller, we talk about building a better world through business. A key aspect of that that Kyle Chapman shared in his message last year when he was the lecture speaker was that we really need to change the game. We need to look for game changers. That's a reference to, Steve, what you're talking about with Milton Friedman.
If that is or was the game, when do you change that game and change how we think about playing that? Steve, I know, you have been and are an athlete and love competition. I wonder how you think about that idea of changing the game and bringing maybe the best of athletic competitions and things that we learned to the business area of competition.
Steve: Brian, you're absolutely right. I'm a huge fan of athletics. We think, in our family, in terms of mind, body and spirit. Let's develop in mind, body and spirit. The great thing that athleticism and competition teach us is that constant, continuous improvement. We're constantly preparing ourselves for high levels of performance.
It's really quite important if you want a sustainable business that you have some guiding principles. In our company, we have three guiding principles. Number one is we take care of each other. We believe very strongly that if we do a great job taking care of each other, if we unleash human potential, if we help people become who they're meant to be, they will do an awesome job of taking care of our customers.
We use data to track our performance, not only taking care of each other, but taking care of our customers. We know that if we add value to our customers, differentiated value based on performance, because we have wonderful people that are self-actualized, they're doing a great job of taking care of our customers. If we do a great job taking care of our customers, if we add value, then our customers will take care of our business.
If our business is safe and secure for the long term, then we'll be able to take care of our people. For us, that's that cycle of continuous improvement, taking care of each other so that we can take care of our customers, and our customers can take care of our business. We can reinvest in our people for the long term.
It is a competitive world. The great thing I love about athleticism is it teaches us to keep sharpening that sword. We have to be more competitive every day. We have to get better every day. Continuous improvement, if you're an athlete, is the only way to compete. I think we experienced the same thing in the business world. This is all about continuous improvement, so we can keep getting better for each other for the long term.
Brian S.: If I might pick up with that, Brian. Staying within the business as a game sort of space, another false belief that a lot of people have about business is that it's a zero-sum game. They're winners and losers, and the winners win at the expense of the losers. There are things like that. Poker is an example of that.
The game of business is actually structured such that it can be a winner, winner game. Steve, your company and you, Bob Chapman, Brian, David, all the people at Barry-Wehmiller, you're an example of that. Everyone there is a winner. You're not a winner as a company at the expense of your employee, of your people, right? You're making them winner as well. Again, this feeds into what came out of the 80s and 90s, right? It's just a false narrative about the purpose and the status of business.
Brian W.: I was just speaking to some Gonzaga students today about us knowing that the people in our company want to win. They want to be part of a thriving team that is winning in the marketplace. By that, I mean growing in terms of revenue and profitability and quality products for our customers and removing issues and frustrations for our business.
People want to be part of that winning team and they desire to do that. Part of a flourishing or fulfilling experience for them is the opportunity to win at whatever objectives we set along the way. This is a great job for me to brag about, Steve, for just a second because he's too humble, I think, to do it for himself.
Brian, we've heard a couple of the stats more recently in the last couple of days. I think, Steve, roughly 15% or more compound annual growth for The Gund Company in both profitability and share price and revenue over a number of years, more than 15 successful acquisitions and lots of great safety performance for team members and lots of great development plans completed and other things along the way.
I wonder, Steve, maybe you just talk a little bit about why it's important to set goals and then measure them as you think about this idea of improvement.
Brian S.: I would just say this, feel free to chime in, Steve, you and your team have proven that the impossible is not impossible.
Steve: We've created a dream culture. I credit Connie Deulley for helping us think about what a dream culture looks like? I think that's a great question that each of us could ask ourselves, you know, how would we characterize a work environment of our dreams? If we were to list that out on a piece of paper, how could we make that true?
I give Connie all the credit in the world as the architect of our culture today. When we found Connie, so to speak, as a leader, it was based on what we learned to Barry-Wehmiller. Barry-Wehmiller said leaders are everywhere. They're not always the formal leaders. They're not always the executives. At all levels of the organization, there are leaders.
Connie was one of those cultural leaders in our organization. She led the customer service team for one of our most important markets. One of the great parts of discovering Connie's leadership capabilities came from listening. We learned the skill of empathetic listening from Barry-Wehmiller. I like to say now that the good Lord gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason.
By listening to Connie, I learned that on the weekends she was facilitating retreats for her local parish and congregations, and she was starting to ask for Fridays off. She was so valuable. I said, where's this going? You're asking for Fridays off. Why? She explained how meaningful these retreat facilitations were in her life.
I said, you know, Connie, as we talk about this dream culture that we'd like to build here, as you think about the dream cultures you're building at parishes and congregations, what if we built that dream culture here? What if you could facilitate Monday through Thursday, the creation of this culture within The Gund Company? What if we could have retreat-like experiences for our people where they dig deep inside themselves introspectively to think about what they want to be in life?
What if our job as leaders is to facilitate people becoming what they dream about? That was really meaningful for her and I. We started, with several other leaders, my brother Rich and some great people in our organization, to build out this culture of our dreams. The funny thing about it is, it's not only impactful for the business and our business performance.
As Brian said, we've grown 15% compounded for 30 years now, which is beyond my wildest dreams when I started in this business. More importantly, the impact that we've had on people's lives has been really humbling and really meaningful. Part of that culture creation, and Connie's a genius, but she facilitated our team members determining our organizational why.
That why is to recognize and serve others so that lives are transformed. You might ask yourself, what does that have to do with manufacturing the products that The Gund Company makes? And I would say, generally it has nothing to do with the products that we make unless you adopt what Bob said, which was our product is our people, and that is truly it for us.
Our purpose is to recognize and serve others so that lives are transformed. Indeed, our product is our people, and our business is simply a conduit to provide people to become who they're meant to be. I could make office furniture, I could make TVs, and I could build buildings. We would run it the same way, with the same purpose, to recognize and serve others so that lives are transformed. No matter what we did, our product would be our people.
Brian W.: Steve, I love how you referenced a couple of different industries or possibilities there because one of the messages that I know we hope people take away from this week is it's not just Barry-Wehmiller or just The Gund Company. There are lots of businesses out there trying to lead this way, actually leading the way in a variety of different industries.
I wonder, Brian, how some of this is resonating with your students, because students don't all want to go into manufacturing or professional services. I hope that as this movement continues to expand, there are many businesses and all kinds of sectors that today's students can find a great job at.
Brian S.: I'll give you an example of one of our practices in our business ethics seminar capstone course. I’ll give you an example first. One of my colleagues in accounting, Casey McNellis is his name. A couple of years ago, he developed a course called the Art of Accounting. It is grounded thoroughly in Jesuit educational tradition, both business and educational in general.
The primary thesis of that course, which he wants his students to understand, is exactly what you said, Steve. Accounting is part of promoting the common good. Here's what the art of accounting looks like. If you think about the purpose of accounting as being more than just debits and credits, and I can never remember which side of the ledger which goes on.
It's a good thing I'm not an accountant. I don't keep a checkbook. There's an example where even in accounting, you can have these conversations. It's possible to practice accounting as a profession and to have an accounting firm that does exactly what you're trying to do, Steve. That's a good example, I think, of how you could do that.
One of the things we do with all of our senior students here is we ask them to imagine their future career as a noble vocation. What would it look like for you to be lead marketer or something like that at a company, if you were to practice it as a noble vocation? If we were to recognize that the ultimate purpose of your work is to promote the common good, what do we look like? We ask our students to tell us about that.
This is that dream future. For a moment, they get to pause and say, if I think about my future career ten years from now, I want it to be meaningful and I want to flourish, which is a word you used earlier, Brian. I want to flourish and everybody can flourish, not just winners in the narrow sense. What we're asking them to do is imagine their dream future, and then we just try to get them engaged in the short time we have with them. How are you going to make that happen? What would that look like?
Brian W.: Could you maybe speak a little bit to impacted students here? There were, I think, more than 250 students at Steve’s speech that night.
Brian S.: We ran out of seats, by the way.
Brian W.: We kept dragged more seats out, and we ran out of all of them. Maybe also talk about how it is for professors and staff. It can be a trying time and higher education, right now, as in many industries, manufacturing included. What is it like as you look at your colleagues and yourself, as you think about trying to live out this Truly Human Leadership.
Brian S.: I’ll borrow some language you’ve used, Steve, caring for one another. Higher ed, maybe we're in a state of crisis. I don't know when the crisis meter kicks in, but we are in a period of rapid change that we haven't seen in higher ed in a long, long time. It's not just higher ed having to justify its existence, there are other things going on there. Higher ed, as we know it, won't exist five years from now or ten years from now. I think it will be an entirely different ballgame at that point in time.
One of the things we started four years ago in partnering with Barry-Wehmiller, we actually started with faculty and staff. We had this idea that if we are going to transmit this message, if we accompany our students in line with Truly Human Leadership, and, Steve, what you have going on at The Gund Company, we need to be able to model it ourselves as a community and especially in the current times for higher ed, where a lot of tough decisions are going to have to be made. We talked about this morning, in our core group, that either we’re able to have that 8% of conversation that really cuts the chase where we’re honest about what we're doing here, and conflict, collective thinking and commitment can emerge. If we're not able to do that, then decisions will get made for us.
We don't want that to happen. What we have found this week, Steve, with you, and over the past four years with Brian and the Barry-Wehmiller team, is you folks have a game plan for how to execute that. We have been trying to model that and instill that here at Gonzaga. Across all the schools, all our administrators have done it university wide. Again, thank you, Steve. Bob, thank you for putting us on this path.
Brian W.: Steve, I want to give you a chance to talk about students. You've it interacted with quite a few. We’ve actually literally just hosted students in this room. In my opinion, they were quite impressive. You also have students who are your children. If you think about a critical message or thought for students, or maybe those who are parents of students or leading and hiring students, what is resonating with you this week?
Steve: You know, first of all, I am really humbled to be able to come to a place like Gonzaga and have so much time, in front of students, both in terms of the lecture and then, teaching a number of classes the last couple of days. One of the things that gives me great hope is these kids are inquisitive. They are hard working.
They are so impressive in terms of not only the schoolwork that they're doing, but the volunteer work that they're doing, their contributions to the community that they're already making. This Jesuit mission to be men and women for others is ingrained into their heads, and they're already living it. In many ways, there is a lot to be hopeful for in regard to this next generation of students.
I think what we have to do as leaders, as adults who are developing these young minds, is give them hope about the future. Part of that hopeful message in my mind when I spoke to them the other night is, you know, I asked them to do that deep introspection and that Ignatian discernment about what they really want in life.
A lot of the messages in our society today are about accumulating great personal wealth or having material goods or products. Ultimately, there is no meaning in materialism. We have to find a way to continue to send that message of what professional success looks like. It doesn't always look like having a fancy car in the driveway or a big house.
It often looks like a role in which you can find meaning. What Bob really taught me was that the meaning of life in business, of course, is serving and loving one another. There's a specific how to do that called Truly Human Leadership. If we can develop leaders who are pursuing, as opposed to just individual wealth, if they are pursuing meaning in their life, we hope to educate them that that meaning in life comes from serving others, caring for others, loving one another as we were commanded to do.
I think this generation is seeking meaning. I think what I have learned this week is just how thirsty and hungry for meaning they are. We have a responsibility as leaders to show them not only the why of humanistic leadership, not only the why of loving one another, but the specific mechanics, the how of loving one another at work.
Brian: I think that’s just a beautiful place to end. I'll offer to everybody that is listening: There are additional materials on the Barry-Wehmiller website. There are also great materials on the Gonzaga website and The Gund Company website in alignment with the many of these different things. There are great YouTube videos to watch if you want to learn more about this.
I encourage everybody, the one word we haven't used is mentorship, that if you are in a place that you can mentor someone else, maybe a young mind, maybe it's a student at Gonzaga or a school closer to you wherever you're listening from, take that opportunity to mentor because both people grow and get fulfillment out of that.
Thank you everybody for listening today. Thank you to Brian Steverson for being such an avid part of this relationship.
Brian S.: Go Zags!
Brian W.: Go Zags!
Brian S.: Thanks, Brian.