This Truly Human Leadership Podcast is a discussion between Mike Budden and Barry Kirk of Chapman & Co Leadership Institute on Barry-Wehmiller's late Chairman and CEO, Bob Chapman.
Mike and Barry talk about how Bob impacted each of their lives, how he transformed contemporary ideas about leadership and how Chapman & Co Leadership Institute is carrying on Bob’s legacy.
One of the more prominent public offerings of Chapman & Co is called the Truly Human Leader Program, which is specifically built around many of the principles Bob articulated in his writings and speeches, to introduce individual leaders to the ideas of Truly Human Leadership. You can find out more about that on Chapman & Co.’s website.
You can watch the video version of this podcast through the link in the header above.
Transcript
Mike Budden: There's a certain gentleman that had an incredible impact in my life, in your life, but way more than that — in many, many people's lives. That is our recently passed, Chairman who was the CEO of our company, Bob Chapman. I’d love to hear the story. How did you come across Bob?
Barry Kirk: It's interesting. I've been part of Chapman and Co. and part of Bob's organization for about six years now, but I actually heard Bob's name more than ten years before I became part of the organization. Bob had started participating in an event that he hosted — a gathering of thought leaders from around the country. I think maybe from around the world.
It was an event called Massive, connected to Simon Sinek, about this idea of Truly Human Leadership. A mentor of mine in the company I was working for at the time, was very invested in the idea of a more human-centered approach to business, and she actually had a chance to participate in one of Bob's events and came back and talked to us about it at our company.
I think was struck me at the time was the work we were trying to do at the business I was part of at that time was very theoretical: This idea that you could have a more human-centered business, and by doing that, business would actually flourish at the same way that people would. Yet, here I'm hearing a story about this gentleman, Bob Chapman, who's not talking about it.
He's doing it. His company is doing it. They're putting it into practice, and he's telling other leaders that this is the future of how businesses need to be run. I remember being struck by that a good decade before I would actually meet Bob Chapman. I was hearing about him and sort of putting that note away that this isn't just an idea.
It can actually be something that real business leaders who are just as concerned about profitability as they're about people are adopting. I'm curious. I think maybe you learned about Bob some time before you first met him and became part of the organization as well.
Mike Budden: Very similar in many ways. I’ve been with Chapman and Co. for nine years, and that takes me to 2017. I think was when I learned about Bob. I've been doing this work for a long time. I've loved working with teams, cohesion and trying to awaken people to the possibility of what culture can be and do for their business.
I always used to love showing video clips of some thought leaders. Simon Sinek would be one of them. Raj Sisodia would be another. Incidentally, both became really good friends of Bob. I came across this video of a Ted Talk of this gentleman, Bob, speaking at the Scott Airforce base.
It was a grainy video. It wasn’t really very good. I remember showing it to my team and them saying, wow, this is authentic. Raj is polished. Simon is off the chart. This guy's just real, authentic, genuine. There's a story behind this. I worked with a lot of construction companies, engineering companies, very left-brained people, very nuts and bolts.
This was a story. It wasn't the Googles of the world, or Zappos with all these cultures they're talking about. It was a nuts and bolts business that was creating something special. I just started using it to start trying to wake them to the possibility of what this means. Good fortune would lead to me meeting Bob, before Chapman and Co., and hearing Bob share a story.
For context to that, I brought a team from South Africa to the USA to go and visit companies that had inspiring cultures. Raj put us into connection with Barry-Wehmiller. Our first stop was at Barry-Wehmiller, and we attended a "Beyond Benchmarking" course, and Bob arrives.
I'll never forget Bob himself in tears talking about a business they had acquired in France. When Bob went to visit them, an elderly gentleman in his 60s was in tears saying he’d been waiting for him all his life because he’d been working in a miserable place. Just hearing the impact that could have. Organizations were starting to respond to that message.
Barry: The interesting thing about Bob is for all the lives he touched in person, the majority of people that I think are aware of Bob Chapman and Truly Human Leadership, where he was trying to take the world, know Bob mostly through videos and podcasts. The question you might have, because I had it before the first time I had a chance to meet him in person: Is he really this person that we see in the videos? In the podcast? Is that real? How much of that is a performance?
When you tell a story like that, Bob's probably having some tears. The gentleman is. My first meeting with Bob, I came away saying he's actually way more than what he comes across as in a video.
He was so convicted of these ideas and the necessity of business to change to this new approach of Truly Human Leadership. Any time you talked with Bob in person, you walked away feeling energized first and challenged second because he would remind you this work is about changing the world.
It was not a small journey he was asking you to go on with him. It was a big one. That was going to be challenging. I think what's important is that work continues, as Bob knew he was a mortal[KA3]. He had no illusions that he was going to be around forever.
I think the last few years of his life was setting up the continuation of this work, both at Chapman and Co. and his company Barry-Wehmiller, but also this cohort of leaders around the world who had embraced these ideas.
I think it's the important work that we have in front of us today that we spend most of our time, as practitioners of leadership work, helping other leaders think about, is it's not enough for this to be a great idea or something an interesting person once thought this was great.
How do we carry this work forward? What does that require and why is that? I think it’s maybe more critical now than ten years ago, when Bob was really first starting to talk about all that.
Mike: There are many well documented stories of the epiphanies Bob had along that journey, and I think his lifework was realizing that our world has a poverty of dignity, and particularly in the workplace. People were treated as just cogs in a machine, and they weren't seen as humans first. Just shifting our mindsets and helping us to capture that.
I think that's been a little bit of my lifework as it has evolved. I got attracted to Conscious Capitalism and Raj's work of Firms of Endearment and just realizing, having worked in some toxic spaces myself, there’s just got to be some better ways. This actually led me to leave corporate because I didn't want to play that corporate political game. I was getting frustrated.
I'm very fortunate I experienced that because I can now connect with that in the work we do. That took me out into a different space. I think that leads me to, why did Bob start almost overindexing on this message of people first. We know there's performance. What do you think he started seeing in the world to go with that message?
Barry: It's interesting you mentioned poverty of dignity. I think that definitely was a thing he saw. He probably experienced it himself in the workforce before he became a leader. I think he saw that as a thing that was happening. Not just being able observe it in companies, but there was plenty of data about the impact of working in unhealthy work environments on people's mental health, on their physical health, on their relationships, their marriages, all of that.
He saw that as something that leaders needed to take up and do something about. I often paraphrase that Bob would sometimes get in front of a group of leaders, and he'd say, the world is broken and you broke it. That was the responsibility put in front of them. At the same time, as we’re talking about a poverty of dignity, I think Bob was ahead of his time on also seeing a wave coming that is here now that I would call an abundance of expectation.
We have people in the workforce today, particularly Gen Z and millennials that come with expectations that previous generations I think had but never voiced. They have an expectation of a leader who cares about them as a whole person. They have an expectation of meaning in the work they do. They have expectations of having a voice in what happens, and many things like that.
I do think previous generations — I'm a Gen Xer, and I think Gen Xers wanted that. We just didn't believe it was possible, so we didn't ask for it. At the same time, you and I are very well aware, there are some really troubling statistics about the numbers of team members globally who don't feel fulfilled in their work.
They don't feel engaged. The number I think is like 53% of workers at any given time are considering exiting the business they're in because they don't feel fulfilled. The one I find most challenging, though, is with the Gen Z cohort. About 30% of them say that the number one source of their mental health challenges that they experience come from who? Their leader at work.
Along with these expectations, they are being more vocal in what the impact of stress is and what is the impact of not being led well. I think Bob saw that coming. He saw that expectation as something that people were going to increasingly voice and want to see fulfilled at work. The only way we find balance in that, again, is through the work of leadership.
Mike: It reminds you how often Bob would tell us that the person with the biggest impact on your health and well-being is not your doctor; it's your leader. There’s so much truth in that, I think, because so much of the stress in our world that we all experience is often in that place of work.
Both you and I started work probably longer back than we'd like to admit. Remember, what was the workplace that we entered into in those days? I remember, if I needed to go and see my leader, I had to put my jacket on and make sure I had my tie straight.
I do remember walking into boardrooms or meeting rooms filled with a haze of smoke. We don't do that anymore. There were ashtrays on the table. If you didn't smoke , you weren't part of the crowd. We don't do that anymore. That's an interesting concept if you think about it.
Barry: Why did we take those ashtrays out of our conference rooms? Why did we stop people smoking?
Mike: Because we didn't think it was healthy for us anymore.
Barry: It wasn't healthy. It's interesting. Recently, you and I were looking at a photo of a 1960s boardroom with ashtrays neatly lined down the table. We removed those because we eventually realized this wasn't healthy. It wasn't healthy for our teams. It wasn't something we wanted to encourage. We wanted people to be physically healthy at work and have an environment.
The ironic thing is, though, that, well, I think what you and I would call the playbook that was being used by leadership in that same period, the boomer generation, the Gen X generation, the 60s through easily into the early 2000s, 2010s was a playbook that wasn't healthy for people either. The basic tenets of that playbook were your compliance for our control.
You give us your work; we give you compensation. We decide what the rules are, and then you just come and master those rules. If you play the game, we'll give you some measure of loyalty back, some security. Arguably, that system, that playbook, did work for some people in the business world.
But for most people, it was just a thing they put up with. It was that playbook that I think started us on the road of those negative impacts that Bob started to see in the culture. Not just in the workplace, but in the culture. The challenge is that businesses have been slow to figure out what the next playbook is.
I do think that's arguably the work we do. The work of Truly Human Leadership is rewriting that playbook, which, frankly, even if you wanted to use it today, I don't think you can use it anymore.
Not that somebody's going to tell you you're not allowed to; it simply won't work anymore. The world has changed. The culture has changed. People have changed. But business has been slow to replace that old playbook with the new.
Mike: That playbook was potentially OK when we lived in a little bit more of a stable, predictable world. You think about the challenges the average leader faces today, and the average human. We've got climate challenges. We've got geopolitical challenges. We have got inflation challenges and supply chain challenges. We have these workforce shifts and changes that are happening.
Everybody, actually each individual, has a different definition of what fulfillment and what their contract needs to be. It leads me to think that the one thing that hasn't changed is the demands on the business and the leader to perform, to get results, to deliver on all the efficiencies.
That's always been around, but the thing that has shifted is people's expectations of what they will and will not tolerate, and how they expect to be able to be treated at work.
Barry: That's why I think it's really important that we do note that this isn't a movement — because I do think it is a movement we're talking about here — to go completely to the other end of the spectrum and say, let's forget about performance. Let's forget about profits. Let's forget about efficiency or expansion. It's about people, and it's only about people.
That would be a misreading of what you and I are talking about here. The new playbook here is a playbook that says not only can you balance those two things, people and performance, but, in fact, they actually energize one another.
There's a virtuous cycle of performance helping people develop. And people, by developing, give more discretionary effort and more commitment, and they give you more performance. That's the playbook that we are really in the work right now of developing. By we, I don't mean Chapman and Co. or you and Mike and Barry. I mean the whole movement of people and leaders who are wrestling with this and putting it into practice and seeing the results from it today.
I think that's the thing we need to be careful of. We don't say we are choosing one over the other. Are we trying to put them in some sort of balance where we're giving as much attention to both? They are one in the same when we're doing this effectively.
Mike: There are two ways we can look at that. In many ways, the leader in the middle of those two, holding those two things in tension, they often do see it as tension. Which one do I appease now? There's this narrative I hear a lot about these people that come into my span of care, they're just this new generation. They've got an entitlement mentality.
It's because we've probably been programmed to believe that's how you needed to show up at work. That's what's expected of you. Somebody, when I was sharing this the other day with the Chief People Officer said, we're bringing our kids up to be like that.
We’re wanting them to be their whole selves and question and have their voice, but when we get into the workplace, we're not allowing for that. Leaders are thinking that, as you say, they're not something to be balanced. They're not mutually exclusive. When we see that they can come into harmony and be integrated, the results are people are way more energized.
They’ll give you their head, heart and hands. They will commit. They'll be part of it. I think that is certainly what Bob was trying to bring to us and help us think about. Why the overindex? It’s because we did the one side so well. We're on the journey now, as Bob's son Kyle really embeds us into Barry-Wehmiller, to firmly understand that these two things fuel each other in harmony.
Barry: Mike, on that journey, if we think about the old playbook where the primary skill sets were financial acumen, the ability to give your team clear direction and make sure they get the work done, we're developing this new playbook. The playbook necessitates new skills. If you're a leader who sees this and wants to be part of this movement of what we would call economic vibrancy, human flourishing, working together, what is the first skill that you would tell a leader? Get really good at this one thing, if you had to pick one.
Mike: It is one that I’ve probably said numbers of times: listen. Why would I say listen? Listening gives us the ability to understand one another, and I think the biggest shift in leadership that has happened to meet this playbook is the shift from a one size fits all.
I think if you think about how we manage, we just thought everybody will get motivated by an incentive. Everybody will be threatened by a grievance procedure or a disciplinary. We just actually used processes and governance ways to try and manage people either through rewards or consequences.
I think the biggest shift is the leader who starts to truly understand each of his or her team members. Understand what makes them tick. Understand what makes them feel fulfilled and what motivates them. I can only do that if I can sit and listen and connect with you as that human being. For me, that would probably be the absolute key starting point.
Barry: I completely agree. I think I would suggest a fast follower to that. After you've mastered the ability to listen empathetically, understand the context and understand where your team is, the second skill that you could follow up with is storytelling.
After having listened profoundly for understanding, listen for also not exactly what was said, but what was underneath what was said. Can you then begin to craft a story for your team or your customers that connect them emotionally to the work that you're about? Not just the task, but the work. Can you craft a vision?
You and I like the work of Nancy Duarte who says the best stories of the story with a construct is what is and what could be. Are you able, as a leader for your team, for the people in your span of care, to craft a vision after you've listened of what is today and what could be?
That's where you begin to really engage a team that wants to give more than what you think they could give. That will take that whole self that they now expect to bring into work, but put that whole self to that work of the vision that you've been able to communicate.
Mike: How do we inspire everybody with the why that they feel compelled that this is work with doing? If I go back to Bob, that's what Bob did so well. I've sat with Bob numbers of times, had the fortune to be in his presence, and he would often even tell the same story.
Every time I walked away feeling stirred and that this is the work I've got to be doing. That compelled me to keep going. I would follow on then with not only inspiring the why but engaging our team in how we're going to get there.
I think the previous playbook pretty much was: This is where we're going. This is what you're going to do to get there. You’ve got to follow that process.
As we unlock people's willingness to be part of, and this generation that sometimes we feel is so hard and entitled, I think if we inspire them with something compelling and you hear their voice and ideas and thoughts about how are we going to get there, we're going to get way better buy in. You do get more buy in from that.
Barry: I think the last thing I would put in our conversation about this is Bob never once suggested this was easy work. He made you know it was important work. He said this is the work of changing the world, so it is worthy work. It's work I think that any leader who goes on this journey is going to look back at some point in their career and say, that was the most important contribution I made in my work life.
It was being on that journey, that Truly Human journey of leading my team, of creating meaning for them, of bringing their growth. That's hard work, but the hardest work is sometimes the work that is most important. Let's go out and change the world, Mike.
Mike: Which leads me to a couple of last thoughts on this, Barry. Being hard work means that when the going gets tough, when you're under crisis, you're under pressure, to hold the consciousness of this is the new path is really hard because it's way easier at that point to default to what we knew and jump back into the command and control. That is an important piece.
I think the other one is that Bob was just this incredibly intuitive gentleman that seemed to foresee things and know things. In all the work I've done in culture, I've often said culture is a reflection of the values, beliefs and behaviors of leadership, past and present.
There’s been countless times I've seen a really great, inspiring leader lead an organization and leave, and that culture just dissipates. Not maybe immediately, but over time if it is not continued in some way. Bob had this fortune of thinking ahead. When he started this journey, he said, I want this to live beyond me.
That's where he really worked hard with his team to say, what do we do to embed this into our organization? That's where we started on the journey of training our people over three days of how to listen, but we also put in other key fundamental learnings of how people can learn about being great leaders, show up for the people in the span of care and build that narrative into the organization.
I think that is what we've been gifted with in Chapman and Co. That is all our experiences, our Truly Human Leader program, Leading for Results. All of those are ways for us to continue that message and to help equip leaders to: One, embody this. And two, to sustain this in their organizations as well.