Some people dream about meeting Oprah Winfrey, the president of the United States, or maybe their favorite movie star. My dream in recent years was to meet Bob Chapman, chairman and CEO of the $3.6 billion global capital equipment firm Barry-Wehmiller. Today, I am thrilled to bring this dream to life by hosting him as a guest on this podcast. Recently named CEO of the Year by the Society for Human Resource Management, the number three CEO in the world by Inc. magazine, and a top 10 social capital CEO by International Business Times. Bob Chapman dreams of a world in which people leave work each day fulfilled by their work rather than drained by it. Chapman has championed meaningful work and caring work environments through what he calls truly human leadership. This leadership philosophy and the transformation it brought about at Barry-Wehmiller were the inspiration behind his 2015 Wall Street Journal bestseller, Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family. Also in 2015, a leadership training firm, Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute, was founded to bring Barry-Wehmiller's trademark culture transformation training to for-profit organizations. You'll finish this episode feeling inspired and equipped to help build better organizations for tomorrow. Let's join him in a movement that aspires to a society where people think of others first — a society where everybody matters. This is E3: Engage and Empower with Empathy. Welcome to the show today, Bob. It is so nice to see you today, and that is completely an understatement and I will tell you why. When your admin sent me dates to schedule this podcast, I deliberately picked the date closest to my birthday. You didn't have February 3rd available. I was super bummed about that and I was thinking what an incredible birthday gift would it be to have a conversation with Bob Chapman, who I've been admiring from afar for the last three years. Watched your TED talk, read your book. I consume fervently anything that you produce — any writing, any stories with regards to your work — because I truly believe what you are doing is not only going to impact businesses in an incredible way, but it really will have a positive impact on society and the way we treat each other and take care of each other as humans. Thank you for being my birthday gift and thank you for being here today. I'm really excited about this conversation.
Yeah, and I'll begin, Rebecca. A little bit like you, I was a pretty average student in high school. I went and decided to get an accounting degree at Indiana. I did fine, and then decided to go to graduate school, MBA at Michigan. So I have a very traditional, good education. And then I went to Price Waterhouse for about a year and a half and worked in public accounting. So my background is very traditional. Nothing unique about my background. When I got into business, obviously creating shareholder value, profitability was my focus. In my case, I stepped into a company that my dad had bought for $30,000 in the 1950s. A 100-year-old company that made machinery that was struggling — it had old technology. So my beginning was kind of dealing with a very challenged organization that did not have much of a future. When I look back, Washington University invites me to speak every year at what's called Defining Moments. And when I look back, it caused me to look back on my journey. I took management classes, I got a management degree, and I thought we were supposed to manage people. That's just what I thought. And when I got out and when I saw the world, that's what people did. People came to me with questions because of my position. I could tell them what to do. It felt good. It was what I was taught and what I experienced. I was never taught to be a leader. So management, in my opinion, the word management means the manipulation of others for my success. The lens through which I saw the people in our relatively small organization at the time — I was a nice guy. We had a kind of challenged but nice company. But I saw people as functions. An engineer, accountant, labor, hourly workers, union workers — all these labels which described them. And I thought this is normal. When I went out and was involved in various organizations, this is the language we use. Clearly the word leadership is dramatically different than management. Leadership means the stewardship of the people whose lives you have the privilege of leading — those people in your span of care. So that went from seeing people as functions to seeing somebody as somebody's precious child who simply wants to know they matter.
What we learned is the way we lead — again, I was never told in my education, probably you either — is that the way I would treat people at Barry-Wehmiller would affect their health, be a major factor in their health, and be a major factor in how they went home and treated their family, their spouse, their kids, and behaved in our communities. So when we see this anger, this frustration we have in this country, you'll realize that most people — 88% of all people — work in an organization where they feel that the organization does not care about them. So I want to go back to this foundational issue. You kind of — because it's going to be the theme — you weren't taught that way, I wasn't taught that way. And I had a series of revelations that changed the way I saw people in my span of care. I went back and went up to Harvard and I said, 'What is the purpose of education?' Because I went back and thought about my education because we had a similar education. What people said is that the founding fathers felt we needed an informed citizenry to have a democracy. So our education system was foundational, according to this team I talked to at Harvard, to have an informed citizenry so we could have a democracy — which makes sense. But then the industrial revolution came along, which we attribute a great deal to the growth in our society and healthcare and standard of living. The great benefit of the industrial revolution came along. We thought, 'Great, we will give people better paying jobs, more predictability, better benefits. We'll build communities around these factories.' But the theory behind that was we were going to create wealth, better paying jobs, take them off the farm, put them into a factory where they can get a better wage, better benefits. And at the same time, the entrepreneurs created a great deal of wealth as we use those people to create wealth.
When were unions formed in the very early stages? Because we didn't know how to care for people. We used people to create economic value. So the flaw in the society we have today is that we thought success would be a society with a great deal of abundance — healthcare, vacations, nice homes, nice communities, good arts. But we forgot one critical component in the industrial revolution, which is the human revolution. Where we see people as our purpose. If we saw the industrial revolution as a chance for people to be who they're intended to be and appreciated for that, and that these opportunities we created and these companies were growing would give them a chance to grow and be a part of a team and share in the benefit — it would have been great. Nope. It was the entrepreneurs — the wealth gap between the entrepreneurs who created these global companies, legendary Henry Ford and others. But we saw people as a function, and the more people we could hire because we needed them. And we didn't pay them well because we cared about them. We paid them well because that's what we had to pay them. We gave benefits to be competitive. So the foundation of our society forgot one key element as it began. Because again, if success is money, power, and position — why today, with the most prosperous economy in our history, do we have the highest level of depression, anxiety, and suicide we've ever had? Because we forgot that when we come together in communities, in companies, in organizations, we need to learn to care for the people that we have the stewardship of for 20 hours a week, 40 hours a week. And that is the key thing that we missed. We thought good pay and good benefits would create happiness, and it doesn't.
So I became aware of that. The lens that I saw this society — I said it's broken. We forgot a key component as we enjoyed this prosperous economy. So I started talking about we need to care for the people we have the privilege of leading. So again, the lens through which I saw people, the way I was educated and the way I experienced the world — I saw people as functions, not as somebody's precious child. That is the revelation that led to truly human leadership, that led to our book. People are our purpose, and people simply want to know that who they are and what they do matters. It is not that we have bad people. Because when the CEO Roundtable came out and said we need to think about more than just the shareholders — and I know some of these gentlemen, they're really fine, good gentlemen, fine family members, good community members — they meant it. But they have no idea how to do that, nor do their boards ever talk about caring. They talk about profit. So I was interviewed by organizational development professors from a major university. After an hour and a half interview, they looked at me and said, 'You are the first CEO we have ever interviewed that never talked about your product.' And I paused a minute and I said, 'I've been talking about our product for the last hour and a half. It's our people. I will not go to the grave proud of the machinery we built for our customers. I will go to my grave proud of the people that did that.' It caught them completely off guard. So the foundation of truly human leadership is a focus on the people we have the privilege of leading. Making sure that when they leave our care — when we have them in our care for 40 hours a week — they go home feeling valued so they can treat their spouse, their children, and behave in the community. To me, it is the key to solving the issues we face as a society around the world.
