1148: How to Build Cultures Where Everyone Knows They Matter with Barry-Wehmiller’s Bob Chapman

People don't feel they matter. And when people don't feel they matter, you get this poverty of dignity. Leaders weren't taught to care for people. They were taught and rewarded to use people. So, it's just a totally different mindset. When you invite somebody in there, you can look them in the eye and say, 'You are safe in my care.'

Well, I am excited for this truly human exchange we're about to have and to hear about your truly human leadership.

It captures kind of the transformation we've been going through for the last 20 years. It's kind of contrary to my education and my experience in the business world, which was about using people to achieve results. Truly human leadership flips the lens through which we see those people we have the privilege of leading to seeing them as somebody's precious child and treating with respect and dignity, which is truly human leadership. Understanding the impact we make on people's life, their health, and the way they go home and treat their family. So, it's truly human leadership is a totally different way of looking at the people you have the privilege of leading.

Well, and you know, I look back on my business education. I took management classes, got a management degree, and got a job in management. So, I thought my job was to manage people to achieve results. And if we needed to lay them off or fire them, it's just business, you know. And so, I saw people in my education, in my experience, they were functions for my success. I was a nice guy, we had a nice company. But the way you see people impacts the way you treat people. And so, our education system doesn't prepare us to care for people. It prepares us to use people to achieve results. And people don't get promoted for caring for people, they get promoted for achieving results. So, it's a totally different way of looking at leadership as a profound responsibility to the people you have the privilege to have in your span of care.

Well, I think the best way to look at it is, you know, again, we're taught it's about achieving financial results. And as you know, there's I think in 2025, layoffs are at all-time high. Only 2020 had so many layoffs. So, you're seeing major corporations using layoffs, announcing layoffs to send a message to the shareholders that they're going to make more money. And we use people to achieve that signal. Because why would a company announce they're going to lay off 10,000 people? Why would they announce that when they're going to? We know psychologically the damage done to the people who get laid off is horrible. And we know the impact on the people that don't get laid off that are still there, they don't feel safe because they could be next. So, again, I was not. We never discussed layoffs in my education, in my experience. It was just things we do. And so, the transformation was when we saw people not as functions for my success, but we saw them as somebody's precious child, a revelation I had, you can't lay off your kids. And so, I would say to you that, you know, having been in business and leadership for 50 years, half of my career was pretty much that's just things you do. It's not pleasant. You don't really want to do that. But it's the way you make numbers work, and the market rewards you. So, layoffs hang over most people's heads. They don't feel safe. How can I decide to raise a family, buy a home, bring a child, get married, if one day they're going to walk in and say, 'You know what? To improve our earnings, we're going to have to let you go. I know we recruited you, but right now we're going to have to let you go.' So, a lot of people in our country feel a lack of dignity because they don't feel safe. They feel they're being used. I think Tom Friedman said it beautifully to your audience in the light of this. He said, 'More than a poverty of money, we have a poverty of dignity.' And when people feel used, not cared for, they feel a sense of humiliation. And when you feel a sense of humiliation, you'll see anger and unrest like you've never seen before. So, what are we seeing right now? We're seeing anger and unrest that confuses us. Why? We have a very prosperous economy, but we don't know how to care for each other. And that is the foundation of truly human leadership, and layoffs are just one of those tools that we are taught in business school and rewarded for by the public to achieve financial results, and that's sad.

Yeah, well, then I'd say to you, if you want to optimize your profitability, which is our responsibility, because the business model. It's interesting. I think I want to get this message across to your audience. I was when Harvard wrote the case study on our company, about 10 years ago, they invited me up to be in the class, and then the professor asked something I'd never thought of. He said, 'Is Barry Wehmiller's success his business model or its culture?' And they voted. 75% voted our culture was the key to our success. And then Jan Rifkin, the professor, looked at me and said, 'Bob, do you want to comment?' And I got up and I said, 'I understand why you think our culture is the foundation of our success. But let me tell you how I would answer it. The foundation of our stewardship of our people is the business model. It's not about getting the right people on the bus. It's about building a safe bus, which is your business model, and then having drivers who are your leaders who know where they're going and how to drive that bus safely. Then anybody that gets on this bus is going to be safe. So, it's the responsibility of leaders to design a business model and to keep that business model efficient, and then not use this brutal tactic of layoffs and right-sizing and downsizing and justifying that we failed to do that. We failed to keep this company efficient and we had to hurt people to achieve the efficiency. You know, I was on a panel with a CEO of a major bank, very impressive gentleman, and he said they went from in I think this case from 300,000 people to 200,000 people without a layoff by using natural attrition. When somebody retires, they brainstorm how they can redesign the work to not have to replace that person. And if you do that every day, which is a matter of you know, I don't want to gain weight, so I don't have to lose weight. So it is a way of viewing your responsibility. If you think your responsibility is only to the shareholders and you don't care about the people that you impact, that's sad. Okay, your responsibility is to all the people who put their trust in you, shareholders and all other stakeholders. But again, it's not just about being nice. It's making sure you have a good business model and that a business model stays efficient, not has to be hammered once in a while with 20, 30,000 layoffs. Layoffs are a tool that the market likes and it rewards you because you're going to be more profitable. That said, we are absolutely destroying our country for economic gain and not human gain. So we've got the most prosperous economy in our history and have the highest level of depression, anxiety, and suicide we've ever had. Why? Because people don't feel they matter. They're just tools for somebody else's success.

Well, I think the business the story most people tell about Barry Wehmiller said in our book and a lot of people talk about it 0809 which hit all of us. And we had developed what we call the guiding principles of leadership, kind of the constitution of our culture. These are things that define and guide us in our culture. And I was flying around the world talking to our team members about this. And the more you talked about it, the more it was implanted in my heart and soul. And 08-09 hits, I walk into our board meeting in January of '09, and my board looks at me and says, 'Bob, don't you need to lay off people?' And I said, 'Why do you say that?' He said, 'Well, everybody's laying off people, Bob.' I said, 'No, I think with our backlog, we're going to be okay.' About a month later, I was in Italy visiting our operations in Italy. I got an email from the United States. Our largest customer, major customer, put on hold a major order we had that was giving us significant work. It's one thing not to get a new order, it's another thing for the orders you've got to disappear. And I sat in my hotel room. Prior to us having these guiding principles of leadership, I would have done what everybody else did. I would have said, 'Well, we need to let people go. We need to let 20-30% of our people go because we don't have work for them.' But because I talked about we measure success by the way we touch the lives of people, which is our guiding our North Star, I sat there in my room and said, 'What would a caring family do if a member of the family was in stress? We would all take a little pain so that family member would not have to take that pain.' That stimulated an idea I had never heard of before, never considered. And it was, 'What if everybody took a month without pay whenever they wanted, so they could be with their family, their friends, time of year? We'll give you a month without pay, and we'll get through this without letting anybody go.' Emailed back to the United States. Flew back to the United States a few days later. They were ready to implement it. The reaction of our team members was unbelievably positive. They were more than willing to take a month without pay. A, they got the time with their family, but B, they felt they were helping their fellow team members keep their job. This cloud over their head disappeared because all of a sudden they felt safe. We even had people volunteer to take somebody else's time off because they knew the other person wasn't in as good a financial position they were. It was unbelievable the environment we created. It was only because we had this North Star that said, 'We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.' And after that, we learned that what's called business excellence staffing model. As much as you need to design your products to be efficient, cost-effective, you need to design your organization to be cost-effective. And that's a powerful tool. And so, we constantly are monitoring when somebody retires or moves away or, you know, whatever reason somebody leaves, that natural attrition, we brainstorm, is there a way to redesign that work? Not to dump it on somebody else, but to redesign it to eliminate it. So, it's a constant process of being efficient. So, there's no need to let people go because you are trim and fit to fight. So, again, that's what a major financial institution did that I was incredibly impressed with. We learned about it through a lean event up in Canada. But it is profound. So, it's a failure of leadership when we lay people off, but the market rewards us and the boards see the share price go up. So, it's a hard struggle because they weren't taught to care, they were taught to use people.

Well, let's say seriously, it's again, I had never heard of this practice until our team came up with it. But every organization should look at do we have our people I invite into our organization with the expectation of being with our company, are they safe? Is our business model designed such that there is a job for them and they can trust us. That is a foundational responsibility when we invite people into our company. And so, we work extremely hard to stay financially absolutely rock solid, which we are, okay? And I'll just add, our share price has gone up 12% a year compounded for 25 years, okay? And so, you'd say, 'Well, gee, we outperformed some of the legendary investors in this country because we are good stewards of our business model.' So, business needs to be more human. We originally called it people-centric leadership, leadership focused on the people we had the privilege of leading. But Simon Sinek came along and said, 'No, no, Bob, this is truly human leadership. This is the way we are called to treat others.' Again, when you see that the issues we face in our country and the people who, you know, with 65% of all people would give up a salary because if they could fire their boss. We have TGIF, thank God it's Friday, get the hell out of this place and have a beer and kill the pain. I imagine a day as you will understand where we have TGIM, thank goodness it's Monday, get away from the kids, the spouse and be with a group of people who I really enjoy being with, okay? That is my goal, TGIM. And again, this is not an American issue, this is a global issue. People don't feel they matter and when people don't feel they matter, you get this poverty of dignity and I'm sure your audience will understand that because leaders weren't taught to care for people, they were taught and rewarded to use people. So, it's just a totally different mindset. It takes extra responsibility to make sure your business model, when you invite somebody in there, you can look them in the eye and say, 'You are safe in my care.'

Yes, through the series of revelations, I had three revelations that converted me from management to leadership. And we realized that we had been blessed with a vision of the way that would heal the brokenness in the world. And a young man about 20 years ago said to me, 'You know, Bob, what is your greatest fear?' Now, I'm an eternal optimist, so I had to think a minute and I said, 'My greatest fear is we were blessed with a message that could heal the world and it would die with me.' So, we got up the next morning after that dinner and said, 'Okay, what do great religions do to survive over centuries? They articulate their beliefs and they have disciples that carry those beliefs forward.' So, I said, 'We need to create some disciples. We can't send them back to universities because universities don't teach people to care. They teach people to use people and reward them.' And so, we decided we had to create our own university. I mean, this is just a breakfast conversation. And the good news is we had a whiteboard, no preconceived notion. And so, when we decided, 'Well, how are we going to create disciples?' This incredibly talented team came up with three things. And the foundation, the one you mentioned, a gentleman named David Van der Molen said, 'We're going to teach empathetic listening, which is the greatest of all human skills, okay? To listen without judgment.' When you listen without judgment, you don't listen to debate, you listen to validate the worth of others. I thought when you cared for somebody, you went over and talked to them. It turns out when you listen to somebody instead of talk to them, it profoundly changes the person you're talking you care about. So, it's the opposite of everything I was taught and learned. So, that is the foundation of Trillion Leaders. That plus recognition and celebration, we spend a lot of time teaching people how to let them know they matter in thoughtful, appropriate, timely ways all over the world. And then, a culture of service. Bill Ury uses the word, 'We need to move from a me-centric world to a we-centric world, where people genuinely care about others, not just themselves.' So, those three classes,

In empathetic listening, the rapid-fire is don't listen to the words because 80% of all communication is nonverbal. When you listen, don't listen to the words, listen to what the people are really saying. That is the key. To look behind the words, to you know, with a combination of their face and how they express it because a lot of times people will tell you what they think they mean, but there's much deeper and that's one of the skills we learn.

I'll give you a personal example that I think makes it really simple. I won't I when our son was young and about to move in his own bedroom, I walked into the house after work and my wife said, Cynthia said, 'I want to show you this wallpaper I put picked out for Cal's room.' So, we walk up to the bedroom where he's going to stay and she holds this wallpaper. I was said, 'What do you think?' Trying to be a good husband, trying to be very thoughtful. And how do you misinterpret what do you think about this wallpaper? You can't really misinterpret what what do you think? So, me and very thoughtful, I said, 'You know, it's really an interesting wallpaper, but don't you think it would look better in the family room because I couldn't imagine it being in my son's room.' She took the wallpaper and threw it to me and said, 'If you're so smart, you pick out the wallpaper.' And what I realized is what Cynthia asked me, she didn't even know it. What Cynthia asked me is, 'As your wife, am I capable to pick out wallpaper for our son?' And what did I tell her? No. So, she didn't even know what she was asking. I see this all the time. There's a lot of deeper meaning what people are asking them when we superficially think. So, taking some time to listen and think and flex to the personality type of the person are keys. I again, we've taught this to 20,000 people around the world and the most common statement is, 'It changed my life just to learn to listen without judgment.'