I wish leaders took leadership as personally as you do. They see it as a rank or position, as power and authority, but they don't take it as seriously as raising a child. And you take taking care of your people as seriously as taking care of your children. You deeply mean it. You deeply feel it. I know people who turn it on and turn it off. And you can turn it off. It's core to who you are.
I always say Simon, you can retire from a job but you cannot retire from a calling. Yeah. And when I look today at the issues we face in the world, I see business as a source of destruction, creating economic value but not human value. And I feel a profound sense of responsibility to change the way the world sees its responsibility to people they have the privilege of leading. I imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are, and end the day fulfilled by the work that they do.
When most people hear me say this, they think it's just the ramblings of a crazy idealist. And I would actually agree with them until I met Bob Chapman. When I met Bob, he claimed that he'd actually built a company that embodied what I imagined. And to be honest, I didn't believe him. I wanted to go see for myself. Bob has spent 50 years leading a company called Barry-Wehmiller. What started as a humble Midwestern manufacturing company is now a 3.6 billion global powerhouse with nearly 12,000 team members. And what he's built is more than a successful company. It's a model of what any company could and should look like. His approach is called Truly Human Leadership. And it's a simple idea: Prioritize empathy, trust, and relationships to drive performance. These lessons work in any workplace and any industry. And it proves that how we treat people at work, how we care for people at work can transform our families, our communities, and indeed the world around us. I encouraged Bob to write it all down, and he did in his book Everybody Matters. With a new edition recently released, Bob and I decided to take a trip back to the factory where he first showed me what he built. And we did something a little different in this episode. Yes, I sit down with my dear friend and yes, there are tears of inspiration. And this time, you will also hear from some of the people whose lives have been touched by Bob's leadership style. They are proof that I can no longer be called a crazy idealist if what I imagine exists in reality. This is a bit of optimism.
This episode is brought to you by Porsche and their new Macan. And when they reached out to us and asked if I would be comfortable to talk about the new Porsche Macan, well, let's just say I already owned one. That's actually my car. So the simple answer was yes. I am someone who has lived my entire life around big cities. So visiting Phillips, Wisconsin feels like I'm stepping into some alternative universe, into a place where life feels simpler, where spending time outdoors is better than any video game. And spending time with family and friends is the most valuable commodity there is. And work, at least for those who work at BW Paper Systems, is now one of the essential parts of the good life. I remembered the first time I entered the plant. I was struck by the sheer size of the place, the high ceilings. It was like a huge indoor concrete football field lined with dozens of surprisingly clean machines. Their movements and their hums giving the place life. This is now my fifth time visiting and every single time I've come back here, I'm struck by how clean and organized and magical it all feels. There's no chaos. Everything is in its place. Everyone knows their role. It's a sight to behold. And like an orchestra, there's a symphony being played by this group of people with a common cause. But that doesn't mean that there's a lack of fun.
I'm a mover and a groover. Like I don't have it blaring right now, but when you none of you are here, my radio is blaring.
You like see your count? How many have you done? How long? What time did you do? Did you get 6:00?
I'm at 9,34. You did 9,000 steps in 3 hours.
Amber got a job here 3 years ago. Her husband decided to join her 6 months later. What did you do prior?
I bartended and waitressed almost 20 years at Club and Eerie right across the street here. So I actually dealt with a lot of these employees and stuff over there. So a lot of people knew me already before I even came here. So when it came to me applying here, they're like, 'We want her. We know what kind of worker she is.'
And what did you know about them just from seeing them come through the bar and the restaurant? How did they talk about work?
Because, you know, usually people come to a bar. It's a great place to work. It's not like they order a double and they whine and complain about their bosses. They very rarely had to order because I already knew what they wanted the minute they sat down. But they said that working for this place was unlike any other factory or facility that you'd ever worked for before. Mind you, back in the day, I did work for another factory. And this place is so much more laidback and easygoing than any place like that. Like they're more focused on the people and like try to help us and take care of us and make sure that we are all happy here.
How do you feel when you come to work compared to the way you would feel in other jobs when you would go to work?
Well, I don't even use an alarm to be honest with you. I just wake up and get going before I need an alarm to wake up. So, and I do not mind, you know, if my leader were to ask me, can you stay? Or even this last weekend, I ended up getting messages and phone calls from the weekend shift and I'm like, do you guys need me to come in? I'll come in. I'll help you out. For some reason, I feel like it's my family, it's my team, and I'm helping them out because I know that if I ask for something, they're going to return the favor. I mean, you can't get that everywhere.
But weren't you always like that? Weren't you like that in other jobs? Isn't that your personality?
No. It gets to a point, you know, where people take advantage of you. If you do too much, it's like they know they can push you and push you and push you and take more and they don't respect you anymore. Like, well, she did it this one time, so she's going to continue to do it and we're going to put more on her plate just because we know she can handle it. No, no, no, no. That's not how it works. Like, make me happy. Like, I'm helping you. What can you do to help me? Is my mentality. But here, I know they care.
Bob Chapman was not always such a people-centric leader. Trained as an accountant, he used to run his business well like an accountant. People were line items. They were an expense to be managed. But something happened. Many years ago, Bob and his wife were attending a wedding. The father of the bride walks his daughter down the aisle and gives her away. Bob couldn't get this image out of his head. Every single person who works in Bob's company is someone's son or daughter. Every employee is someone's precious child who's now in Bob's care. It was this realization that set Bob on a journey that would completely change the way he thinks about leadership.
I'm so curious like when you meet people and they say to you sort of Bob what have you built? What's your business? How do you talk about this?
Well, as you know, my first half of my career was very traditional about management, financial results, and growth. And through the series of revelations I went through, the lens through which I saw people was reversed. I saw them as machinists, labor, union members, office people. But the lens reversed and I saw them as somebody's precious child that's been placed in my care. Everything changed for me. So the lens through which you see people affects the way you treat people. If you need people to achieve results and when you don't need them anymore you let them go, but if you see people as somebody's precious child it profoundly affects your leadership style. My major responsibility to people in the company is to give them a grounded sense of hope for the future. They can trust in my care.
I appreciate that the lens for you changed where you stopped seeing people as line items and mechanisms for your success but rather that you are now responsible for their growth, their success, their happiness, their well-being. How did you make the conversion to be this heartfelt leader rather than just all head and all numbers?
It was a journey. When I realized that day at the wedding that all 12,000 of our team members around the world are not functions for my success, they're somebody's precious child who I have in my care for 40 hours a week, it changed everything. A young man asked me, 'What is your greatest fear, Bob?' I said my greatest fear is that we were blessed with a message of the way the world was intended to be where people would genuinely care for each other, and what I built would fall apart. So we began to create an empowerment team. We asked how do great religions survive? They articulate their beliefs, and then they have disciples. So we said we're going to create our own university. They came up with three powerful classes: Empathetic listening, recognition and celebration, and culture of service. The classes are voluntary, but people see the impact and there's a waiting list.
I know all the classes you teach are voluntary. People choose to go through it and if they don't want to go through it then that's fine. But people can see the impact. What are the core ideas you teach in the empathetic listening class for example?
Well, first of all, one of the things I've learned in teaching this is that we don't know how to listen. We're taught to speak and debate, but not to listen. So we teach empathetic listening, which is the most foundational human skill you can have because you validate the worth of others when you listen to them without judgment. Not listening to debate or respond, simply listening to validate the other person. 95% of the feedback was how it affected their marriage and relationship with their children. I thought, 'This class was built to help people function better at work.' But it healed their homes. That's the power of listening.
Randall Fleming started on this floor 36 years ago. At the time, a young welder who self-identified as Darth Vader. When Barry-Wehmiller acquired the company 25 years ago, Randall was not exactly thrilled. Just like I didn't believe Bob when I first met him, a lot of his new employees didn't believe him either.
Barry-Wehmiller buys the company, and they make all kinds of promises and statements. You see this weird larger-than-life character come in. What was it that he was saying that you sort of rolled your eyes at?
Oh man, just about everything. Before the acquisition, there were no leadership classes and definitely no touchy-feely culture. This was a traditional American manufacturing plant. You clocked in, did your job, kept your head down, didn't ask questions, didn't make waves, and then clocked out. That all changed when Bob and his team took over. We had flavor-of-the-month programs that never came to anything. I was standoffish. I just wanted to do my job and clock out. I didn't believe anything because we'd heard promises before.
So you were cynical at all the promises, which is totally fair because you've heard it all before. But then what happened?
One individual came from Green Bay. They made him the continuous improvement leader. He didn't know me. There was another woman named Moren. They would come by and say hi and how's it going, and I would ignore them. I didn't want to talk to anyone. But they were persistent. One day Moren crawled over the steel and walked right up to me and said hi. I was stunned. That was the start. Then in 2003 I signed up for a voluntary communication skills course. I wanted to prove it right or wrong. I went in thinking it was about communication, but it was really about self-reflection. I came out with a whole different view, not just of the company but of myself. I was angry all the time, but that course changed me. Now I enjoy meeting people. It completely changed my life.
I don't think people appreciate just how poignant this is. I think a lot of leaders label somebody as a mad person. That's their personality. But it never occurs to anybody that it is the work environment that made them angry. Simply by changing the work environment, the person changes. Work makes the personality.
To me, it spills way over into my personal life. My kids and I are best friends. It wasn't like that before. I was dad, they were kids. The big win is being the same at work as you are at home. I was able to turn it a different way.
We've bifurcated the world, right? You have your home life and your work life. But it's one integrated world. If people go to a place of work where they don't feel like they matter, that stress comes out at home and affects kids' grades and self-confidence. A good job is good for your family. That occurs to nobody.
In my education, undergraduate accounting, MBA, Price Waterhouse, then running a family business, I was never taught that the way I would run this company would affect people's personal lives other than compensation and benefits. The most powerful thing we do is validate their worth. The greatest source of happiness is a good job doing meaningful work for people we enjoy. I tell CEOs: you are the problem. 74% of all illnesses are chronic; the biggest cause is stress, and the biggest cause of stress is work. Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford estimates we're killing 120,000 people a year from work-related stress. Caring is a teachable skill. We're working with universities to teach tomorrow's leaders the skills and courage to care.
There are some people who are cynical that this is all fine and good when the economy is great, but when the economy dips, the first thing to suffer is the people. They cut recognition programs, leadership programs, and lay people off. What do you have to say to those companies? What does Barry-Wehmiller do?
We have a constitution of our culture, the Guiding Principles of Leadership. The overwhelming vision is we measure success by the way we touch the lives of people. So we have a constitution that guides us. In 2008 when the housing market collapsed, our orders dropped by 30%. I was taught to let people go, but I realized layoffs are a broken part of society. It means your business model failed. You let people down. My primary responsibility as a leader is to have a business model that makes you feel safe. Layoffs are not a mechanism to balance the books. They dehumanize the impact. We have to teach people how to care. You can't ask people to care, you have to teach them how to care.
is to make sure you're safe in my care where we can create economic and human value in harmony. And when people feel safe, they will share greater gifts with you. You will attract greater talent. There's no downside. Again, some people think it's just about being nice. Okay? It's much more profound like parenting. Parenting is not being nice and being a good steward of the child in your care. Leadership is identical and part of it is having a safe business model where they can raise a family, they can count on you and put their trust in you and have a career with you. That is a foundational responsibility and I've never heard that said before. I think a lot of leaders forget about the ripples, right? Which is they understand that even though they don't talk about it or think about it, the impact it has on people's lives when they get laid off, they also forget about the people who didn't lose their jobs but they watch their friends get laid off. You know, now fear is injected into the system. Am I next? And one of the craziest things I've seen is companies announce, 'We're going to lay off 20,000 people. We're going to do a thousand a week.' And you're just like, how on earth do you think that risk-taking and entrepreneurship and sticking your neck out for the greater good is going to happen? People are going to retreat. They're going to keep their heads down because the unbelievable fear that I'm next. Not to mention the fact that it sucks to see your friends get laid off for no fault of their own. It wasn't a meritocracy.
And you said boards aren't talking about the impact on the lives of the people they lay off. And they're also not talking about how it'll affect the culture for many, many months beyond, if not years.
You know, Simon, some people say to me, how do you justify this investment, this cost of caring for your people, your university, your classes? And I said, I look at him, I say, I don't need to justify caring. How do you justify not caring? Because people really struggle going from using people to care about people. It's a major bridge to cross for most people. But I say, nobody has to justify safety. In other words, safety glasses, hard hats, shoes, safety. No company questions that because we have workers' compensation insurance and we want to manage the cost of it. So it's a cost. So I would say to you, we don't have to justify safety. Why do we have to justify caring? Because this caring is the safety of your soul. I don't need to justify this because in our company, we've had a 25-year growth in our share price of 12% compounded for 25 years. So we've been trying to prove 12% compounded growth for 20 years in our share price. And our share price is because we have a very technical way of creating share price that emulates the market. So I'd say to you, we have exceeded almost everybody for a long period of time. We take a long-term view. So anybody cynical who says no, but performance, performance, performance. Okay, fine. What you're demonstrating is that your leadership strategy outperforms the market. If you look at the statistics, 88% of all people feel they work for an organization that doesn't care about them. And three out of four people are disengaged in what they're doing. When you look at the 12,500 people who work for you, these statistics say that they're doing what they need to do to keep their job. They're not giving you their gifts and you're sending them home damaged because you were not good stewards of that life. That's why I say business could be the most profound source of good in the world if we simply knew how to care for the people. We have a society right now based on money, power, and position. It doesn't matter how you get it as long as you get it legally, because then you can write a check to charity and they'll have a banquet to celebrate your goodness. They won't ask you how you got your money. They'll celebrate you. And I say to CEOs around the world, the greatest act of charity is not the checks you write. The greatest act of charity is how you treat the people you have the privilege of leading.
I have CEOs on here now and then and honestly, in general, CEOs are the worst guests because it's hard to have candid conversations with them. They're very media trained. They come in with their talking points. It doesn't matter what I ask, they know how to get their point across. They're going to tell me about their success, their product, the quality. I'm sitting here in one of your factories and not once have we talked about your product, what this factory makes, the quality. Not once have we talked about your product. This is completely opposite from almost every other CEO I talk to.
Well, Simon, again, it was a couple years ago that university organizational development professors interviewed me for an hour and a half. At the end of that, they said, 'We have never talked to a CEO that never talked about your product.' And I sat back and said, 'We've been talking about our product for the last hour and a half. It's our people.' I'm not going to go to my grave proud of the machinery we built, because we build great machinery. I'm going to go to my grave proud of the people that built that.
For Bob, it always comes back to the people and the trust he places in those who give him at least 40 hours a week of their lives. And there's one story I've been telling for years about two of those lives, Jared Nelson and Lance Johnson. It's a story of a big company trusting someone with a high school education to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a new machine. So, I got to tell you what a treat it is for me. I mean, we met briefly, but I've never actually had the chance to talk to you in depth. I heard your story and I have been telling your story from the stage for literally years. So, I'm going to tell it. Tell me if I get the facts right. Because this is how I've been telling it: a bunch of years ago, Barry-Wehmiller, where we are, one of the machines is getting old and needs to be replaced. Traditionally, when a company needs to replace a machine, somebody in procurement puts together a budget and goes and buys a machine in the open market. Some guy in a suit goes and buys a machine. But Barry-Wehmiller did it differently. They came to the two guys who work on the machine, which was you two. You're not accountants. You're not in procurement. You don't have any advanced degrees. You just work on the machine. And they said to you, 'We've got $750,000 budget. Go buy a machine.' And you went out into the marketplace. You looked at new machines. You looked at used machines. And where these people who sell machines are used to people standing there in a suit and clipboard talking about the machine, you guys show up and you're climbing inside the machines. You end up buying a brand new machine. You spend $500,000. The company saved $250,000 and that machine will never break because it's your machine. That's the story I've been telling.
Yep. It's really close. Really close. What did I get wrong? So, Derek was an operator that we had. Jared was another operator. When I had the opportunity to go purchase a machine, I knew right away that to get buy-in from the operators was probably going to be the most important thing on my side as a leader in that area. So, I went to Jared and Derek and I basically said, 'Guys, this is what we got to play with as far as a cash amount. I don't know what we should get. You guys are the experts on this matter.' So I used a lot of responsible freedom for these guys and I thought, well, we'll see how this goes. They came to work the next morning and they had advertisements, flyers, email clippings, everything sent to me to review. And at that point, I thought, maybe this won't be as hard as it sounds because in my life, obviously growing up and raising a family, you can buy a car, you buy a house, capital equipment like you said, that's really not anything that would have been in my realm of 'I'm going to do this someday.' So I got Jared and Derek involved and they were both great to work with on this process. These were the two that were going to make or break this product and getting the buy-in from them, knowing that they didn't want to fail, that was a success. Yes. And going back, Derek and I worked second shift, Derek worked first shifts, so we'd take turns. He'd go look for stuff during the day and we'd figure out what we wanted, what kind of machine we needed, what we all wanted in that machine. Then we'd meet up at the end of the shift on first shift and talk it over and we went from there. And we did pretty good and we had a lot of insight from guys that we worked with in the past, field technicians and stuff like that. So they kind of drove us in the right direction of what we wanted and what kind of machine we needed for capabilities.
So this is an even better story than I've been telling because you were assigned to buy the machine and you went and said, I need help. You said you know this better than I do. And so it's not just a story of giving responsibility. I get to talk to the person who admits 'I probably shouldn't make this decision.' Most people don't want to admit that in a corporate environment for fear that it's going to make them look bad or hurt their promotability. But you say, 'I'm not the best qualified person to make this decision. The best qualified people are the people who work on the machine every single day.' And here you're given three-quarters of a million dollars. And I think most companies wouldn't trust a couple of guys who work on a factory floor. That's exactly it.
There's this ridiculous, stupid mentality that somehow you're going to waste the money and they're going to save the money when the reality is you know what things cost. You know the value.
How many years ago was that when you bought that machine? I mean, you were a kid back then.
