The Human Side of Human Resources: Creating Authentic Connection with Rhonda Morris

I think it's important for you to know the role sports plays in my life. And right now, I am a deeply brokenhearted sports fan.

Yes, I have. And in some ways, I think my relationship with sports has actually helped me be successful in my professional career. Because when I was growing up in Oakland, California, in a blue-collar neighborhood, at a time when children didn't have playdates, you went outside and you played with whoever was outside until your mother started screaming for you to come in the house and eat dinner. All the kids in my neighborhood were boys, all of them. There were no girls my age. I have an older sister, but the older kids didn't really play with the younger kids. So I was forced to play with boys. And in my job now, I'm still playing largely with boys.

Oh, it helped tremendously. So number one, I learned... I'm very competitive. I like winning. And I learned when I was very young that in order to be picked first—remember when kids split up and they pick who's going to be on the team? I was never picked last because I'm so competitive. And I learned that in order to be picked first, I had to be better than all of them. And I was. And when they realized I was going to help them win, they didn't care that I was a girl. They cared that I would help them win.

Not really. My parents are strong believers in education. My father passed away. I come from a family of educators. My grandmother was a principal at a school in Louisiana. She would tell all of her grandkids, 'You're going to college.' So I grew up never thinking going to college was an option, because it was drilled into us. But the drive to be the smartest person in my class, I don't really know where that came from. I made a decision when I was 10. I was running track and I played basketball, and I gave up both of them because the time I was spending at practice was interfering with the time I had to study. So I decided I have to make a trade-off in my training: intellectual and athletic prowess.

Well, at the time, that's what I thought. I have often wondered what would have happened if I'd made the reverse decision.

Do you really? Yeah. Sometimes I can be really zen about it and be like, 'Well, those are the choices I made, the best choices.' And other times, when I get down underneath the surface of that, there's like a pit in my stomach. That pit in my stomach is: if I only would have stayed a little bit longer, if I just would have gotten into that frame a little... what would my future have been? And then I quickly pop up to the intellectual part, which is like, but my life now is really good, right? And I like the choices that I've made. But what if I think the same thing? And I pull myself up out of that also because I want to live a life with no regrets. My father worked two jobs my entire childhood up until I was in high school. So what that meant was my family never ate dinner together because he wasn't home. We only ate dinner together on Sunday night, so one night a week. I didn't spend a lot of time with him. I would get up early in the morning and make his lunch to take to work. And if I got up early enough, I knew he would drop me off at school. So that gave me, and this is perhaps a five-minute car ride.

I was in elementary school. I was little. I loved my father. I pretty much worshiped my father. So anytime I could get with him... which connects back to sports, because I would go to football games. I don't have brothers, so I was essentially his son. My sister, if I asked my sister who won the Super Bowl, she couldn't tell you. If I asked my sister who was in the Super Bowl, she couldn't tell you. So we are... I don't even remember if I've ever been to a sporting event with my older sister.

I was. Thank you for sharing that. Because this makes sense to me why you are the best in the world. So when you think about helping people... let's have fun with this idea. You're a chief human resource officer. How do you define being a chief human resource officer?

If I think about what is my role and my purpose in the company, I think there are a lot of different components of it. One is to either build on or create a culture where people can perform at their very best. So what does that mean? I sometimes think about my job as to make sure we take away things that distract people from being their best. And that covers a pretty wide territory. So I would start with number one: subtraction first. So what are the toxicities? What are the elements and the materials, both relationship and structural, that are getting in the way of people being their very best?

Definitely not. No, no. So help me understand why you want people to be their very best, and is that the same thing you're trying to do?

I think it is the same thing I'm trying to do. I think if we have people who are performing at their very best in their role, it's going to help our business achieve our objectives. Period.

Because I would have to role model actually doing that. That's right. And if you think about one element of that, it would be leadership. There's a lot of research that people leave bosses, not companies. I think it's true. And I'm a boomeranganger at Chevron. I left the company, and I'm kind of a proof point of that research. I didn't leave my boss, I loved his boss. And this was many, many years ago. But we spend so much time at work. We have a lot of internal leadership training in the company, and a lot of it is leader-taught. And I always share a belief that I have with the leaders in the class. I will point at them and I will tell them: you are the person your direct reports go home and talk to their partner, their kids, their friends about, and you control what they say about you. Is it good or is it bad? In your hands with these people, you can be a confidence builder or a confidence destroyer. That's a pretty powerful position to be in.

I don't know what that means.

Yes. And I hope that I am an above-the-line person. I always believe that you have to check whether your perception of yourself is how others perceive you. So while I could think that I would want to test it.

I believe it is important for the people who report directly to me, and I would say it's important for the whole organization, to know that I care about them individually and collectively. Number two, and I'm not doing this really well right now, but I worked for someone who taught me how important this is: the success of the team overall is more important than the success of the individual. And those two things aren't mutually exclusive. Cool. And so we're part of something. We're part of something. Okay, yes. And then number three, I'm pretty old school. You know this. I try to be thoughtful. I write a lot of thank you notes. You have some of that. I've benefited from the thoughtfulness of your... these are not like, 'Hey, I'm thinking of you, thank you so much.' This is like a real note where you've spent time to do it.

Oh, you just... I was this whole time you were saying, I'm like, that's rad. That's right. And I wanted to tell you a story. But you just took it to another level that I was not able to ever have. So at the beginning of every season in a football team, we end up with about 70 athletes at the end of the year and 25 coaches. And I knew that what I needed to do by the end of the year, I wanted to write a note and put it in the locker at the last day of every game or the last day of the season. But I needed to have something meaningful to say. So it gave me this end point to really know somebody, right? Because if I don't know them, I don't know what to write. That's a lot of relationships to build, right? And it was awesome. And some people would say, 'That was really cool.' And most never said anything. But I didn't... you just upleveled the game to put three notes underneath of it and say, 'Hey, if inspired, share. Take a moment and write a note to somebody else on the team.' That is culture building.

I didn't ask you a question. I said except one. Oh, I missed that. You wait, there was one person on the team?

Please do so. I mentioned I was in Houston. Everybody in the company, and this gets back to my broken sports heart. So when the A's play the Astros, I'm in Houston. This has been going on for years. So people will schedule meetings knowing I'm in town, whether I take a group of employees or I go by myself. By freak coincidence, the team stays in the hotel I stay in. As much as I love baseball as a little kid growing up, I think one of the coolest parts of my life right now is I actually know professional baseball players personally. And so they know I'm at the game. A couple of them will ask me where I'm sitting. I was sitting in the coffee area in the hotel working on this, and I had actually taken about 10 of these cards with me. And Tony Kemp, who was a utility player for the A's at the time, came by and he said, 'Rhonda, what are you doing?' And I write with fountain pens, so it's even more old school. And I explained what I was doing. And he said something absolutely incredible to me. He said, 'Can I help you?' I said, 'What?' And he said, 'Can I help you?' And he's by himself, you know, the game wasn't for several hours. And I thought about it. I looked through because I'd addressed the envelopes, and I said, 'Well, half these people are from outside the United States and don't care about baseball, and the other half don't care about baseball at all.' And I'm looking through and I said, 'This one cares about baseball. He's a Cubs fan.' And he said, 'I played for the Cubs. I'll write to him.' So the one person I didn't write to had a card written by Tony Kemp. Not only is that awesome, you're great at storytelling that you just like the right last moment. I was like, oh no, there was a toxic person that she just couldn't stand to write. It's not that. No, it turned into a great story.

Both. Tell me more. I don't think it has to be one or the other. And the older I get, and the longer I've been with a really long time, we have a pretty unique culture. The Great Resignation didn't happen in our company. People tend to spend their entire careers with us. And if I'm not answering your question, bring me back, please. But I often think about what is it about this organization, what's the secret sauce that causes this low turnover? And I think our human resources have a pretty powerful community. And in the world, communities are eroding everywhere. People don't go to church as much as they used to. You don't know your neighbors as well as you used to. And yet we have a company where people literally grow old together. They're on different teams at different times together, and they go through life changes—whether it's dating, getting married, having kids, watching kids grow up, aging parents, having someone important in your life who has a serious illness. And that's a pretty powerful community that builds connective tissue and keeps us bonded pretty tightly together.

A laser-sharp focus and understanding on execution and how to get things done. And knowing that it's not always a straight line, because I believe in getting from point A to point B, but I also believe there's not one way to do that. And in a company like ours where relationships matter deeply, it's important to bring people along with you. So if you just say we're going from point A to point B, in most cases that's not going to work. Having people understand the reasons we're doing this, how is this going to make us better, stronger, faster in the future? Getting head nods. Understanding how do you get the head nods, you know, and not the fake head nods, the real head nods: 'I'm with you.' And even understanding the fake head nods, like, 'I'm going to nod my head in the meeting and then I'm going to walk out and go, she is out of her mind, I'm never doing that.' There's a finesse to that. Understanding the world is gray, not black and white, and it's becoming grayer and grayer and grayer. And if you can't understand and deal with that, you will never be successful in this type of role.

Oh, there have been many. So I was a bit naive when I got in my head. I didn't join Chevron with the intention of getting this job. But when I was progressing through my career and it became a possibility, I thought, 'Wow, I have an opportunity. I am the first Black female corporate officer in the history of our company. Our company's over 140 years old.' And so I thought that was something I would be proud of. What I didn't realize is what came with that. And I have been on many leadership teams where I was a double only: the only woman, the only person of color. And it's really hard to explain what that feels like unless you're in that situation. So it has a negative impact on being able to focus sometimes. You have this thought track in your head of, 'Why am I being talked over? Is it because I'm a woman? Is it because I'm Black? Is it both?' After George Floyd was murdered, and this is as everybody knows in the midst of scary COVID, we were having executive leadership team meetings every single day. And I was talking with one of my peers on a video call and he said, 'How are you?' This is five days after George Floyd is murdered. And I said, 'I'm not doing very well.' And he said, 'Really? Why?' And at that moment, America was literally on fire. And I thought, 'How in the world can he not understand how this is impacting me as a Black American?' So that evening, and we were having these meetings every day, and what had happened to George Floyd was never mentioned. Never mentioned. Meanwhile, our employees are posting on social media, mostly our Black American employees, that they're not okay. So all this is going on in the backdrop of COVID. And I wrote this email, just a few sentences, to my peers at that time, all of whom were white men. I said, 'A lot of our employees are not okay right now because of what happened to George Floyd's murder. I am not okay either. I have often thought about sharing with you what it is like to be the only female and the only person of color on this leadership team, and I thought about doing it during our last offsite, but I didn't have the courage to do so. But one day I will. And in the interim, I want you to watch this 50-minute video from the El Segundo refinery, because the leaders in that facility, the refinery manager and operations manager, had a discussion with the leaders of the Black employee network, and they taped it. It was very powerful. And the employees talked about what it felt like to be a Black American at that time and what it felt like to be a Black American Chevron employee.' So I hit send on this at like 11:00 at night. I don't write things like that. But I was in a space where I wasn't being seen. And I also said, 'I often wonder, what do you see when you see me?'

Well, thank you. I've only talked about that very rarely, and no one's ever said it was brilliant, so I appreciate that.

I've very rarely talk about this. No, no, not this subject. This approach? Yeah, the approach. Probably. But not... I'm... You're the trained psychologist here, not me. So I don't know what I'm doing. Like you said, I was neurotic earlier.

Yes, no, I don't talk... I will talk about race and gender. I don't talk about that experience. I see. I don't talk about that because it was incredibly raw. And it took me a good five weeks to figure out how do I have the courage to have this conversation with them, and how do I structure this conversation in such a manner that people don't get their backs up or feel like it was a personal attack? And I use sports. Yeah, there you go.

Without a doubt. I have to be. I cannot... I don't have the grace to make mistakes.

It makes me crazy. But I have a quote from Winston Churchill on my refrigerator that says, 'Never, ever, ever give up.' And I look at that every day. And that's a source of power for you.

Sometimes I think about what's the worst thing that could happen if I don't do this, number one. And if I don't do this this way. I have to give a lot of advice or counsel to a lot of people that I work with. And sometimes I feel like my job is to make sure that person makes the most well-informed decision he or she can make. And that's what my job is. And that means many times telling people things they don't want to hear. 'If you do this, these are the possible outcomes. This is a good way to do it where you'll have the optimal outcome. If you head down this path, these are the things that are going to go wrong, or the train will wreck.' And I have to do that frequently. And I have to be comfortable telling people things that they don't necessarily want to hear, that they don't necessarily like, and that aren't popular.

I think it's evolving. I think leaders now have to have a deeper understanding of people than they've ever had before. I think they have to have conversations that they've... at least I'll use Chevron as an example, and how I kind of grew up in the company. Nobody talked about feelings at work, ever. Male, female. You did not talk about your feelings. You didn't. If you asked, it was kind of like in society where people would say, 'How are you?' and the phrase 'how are you' is really a euphemism for 'hi.' And if you really stopped someone and you said, 'You know, I'm really struggling today. I didn't sleep last night,' they're like, 'Why are you telling me this?' I think we've evolved. And I think that's probably one of the benefits of COVID: people actually are a bit more comfortable saying how they really are.

He's right. We had evidence of that within our own company. And I'll give you a couple of examples. I'm really proud of this. There's actually a Harvard Business Review article about it. In 2020, when we realized that all these kids who made that sharp left turn and were remote learning weren't going to have anything to do in the summertime, and their parents were already going a little crazy with the remote learning and the remote working. We have an internal social media platform called Workplace, and we have all these different groups: Chevron Dogs, Chevron Cats, Chevron Parents. So I start looking in the parents thread, and there's all of this chatter about camps being cancelled. So I put in a... I use this platform to communicate all kinds of crazy things with our workforce. I put in a question and I said, 'I've noticed this thread of cancelled camps. Would you guys be interested if we created our own virtual summer camp?' And it exploded. And in five weeks, we created Camp Chevron. It was amazing. It was so fun. That is awesome. And we marshaled the resources of this army of retirees, of partners of ours. And we had exercise class, art class, we had a geology class, and it was tiered for different age groups. Financial finance for high school students. My favorite part of all, and this gets to the humanizing piece, was we had executive story time. So the CEO and every single one of his direct reports was taped reading their favorite children's book. And when I proposed this in a meeting, they all looked at me like I had horns coming out of my head and said, 'We are never doing that.' And I said, 'Yes, you are.' And it shifted from 'I am never doing this' to a competition of who did it best and who had the most views. So our CEO read Green Eggs and Ham. Our general counsel read Ferdinand, and he had curated his space with little bulls to match the story. I read Where the Wild Things Are.

Yes. She called me before she shared that because Chevron is known as the human energy company. She's like, 'You guys have a problem with this.' And I said, 'No, I think Kathleen is right.' Because there's still epic fatigue pretty much everywhere. People are... there's fatigue that's left over from the pandemic. There's fatigue, I think, created by all these external things that are happening in the world that are out of our control. I don't think anyone ever imagined there would be two ground wars happening at the same time in our lifetime. It sounds pretty incredible. There's a lot of polarization about a whole host of issues. And then lots of companies, and I'm sure you've heard this, are asking people to do more with less. And so this creates this kind of monumental fatigue. So the question is, how do you create relief? And well, this is I think what you're going to ask me: how do you deal with that? I don't think anyone has cracked the code on it. I don't. However, I think there are little things that can turn into big things that will make a difference. And one that... I'm not a big fan of creating new initiatives or edicts for people to do things. But over time, I've realized that we are very bad at taking vacation and taking a holiday. I spent seven years working in London and a lot of time all over Europe. And Europeans treat holidays very differently than Americans do. Sometimes our vacations are days when you work just a little bit less, or you wake up earlier to get to the emails and stay later. That doesn't help you rest and recharge and turn off. And I often think about how did we get here and how do we get out of this? So there are two things I'm kind of working on. I'm a huge believer in the power of stories. So I made a decision during the pandemic to stop emailing my direct reports on the weekends unless it was a crisis. And I didn't tell them. And one of them noticed about four months later and said, 'You stopped emailing us on the weekends.' I said, 'Yep, I have. Because I'm contributing to the problem. If I'm emailing you on the weekend, it doesn't matter if this is time-sensitive or not, you're probably going to respond. That's taking you away from your family. It's not giving you a break. And most of the things we do can wait. So I just stopped.' And it takes a lot of discipline. It's hard for me. I still work on the weekend, you know. I will respond to the CEO if he sends me something or the vice chairman. But I made a conscious decision I'm not going to do that to my direct reports because I want them to have some time off and to have a break. And if they write to me, I don't respond unless it's a crisis. And that's also hard because I know they're waiting for a response. Or I'll respond and time it so it arrives on Monday. The second thing I would share: I spent a lot of time earlier in my career in our manufacturing facilities. And I was in this meeting that blew my mind last year. It was a manufacturing leadership team meeting. These are the heads of these facilities from all over the US. And at one of them, not El Segundo but one of our other facilities, we had a strike earlier in the year. And I sat through a discussion about what was that like. I would get the strike updates, and it went on for longer than anybody imagined. But what I had never heard was the impact this had on the people who actually... we hadn't had a strike in any facility in a really long time. And there were men and women talking about sleeping in the facility. They were talking about when they would go home, they would cry because it was so difficult. The fractured relationships amongst some of them. They talked about what they did when the strike ended to go on vacation and how hard it was. Most of us have a work phone and a personal phone to turn off the work phone. And I remember I was very struck by one leader who said, 'I put my work phone in a safe and I locked it up, and then I left my house and went on vacation. And I was like, oh my god, I don't know what's going on.' And she talked about how she had to kind of unlearn this. She said, 'Why do I think I'm so important that this place can't run without me?' This wasn't even the refinery manager. It was one of the refinery manager's direct reports. And she said, 'It took me two or three days to just realize, you know, everything is okay. I don't need to do this.' And so I repeat this a lot because I think there's so much power in the vulnerability of sharing it and actually letting people know, guess what, you know, we're not as important as we think we are. And the ship's going to keep sailing with or without us.

Christine Lagarde. I don't know... Christine Lagarde, she's the head of the International Monetary Fund. Of course, yes. Okay. I've admired her for years. She's a woman who's been in a male-dominated environment her entire career. She has held her own in incredible environments. She is listened to, and she is wickedly disciplined.

She also doesn't drink alcohol, so it'd have to be... I don't... I've studied her for a long time. I'm not a big foodie. I'd be happy with a salad.

Boring, I know. I'm boring. I'm a vegetarian. Of course, I'm boring.

What kind of boat? That's a cool question. I'm thinking of an ocean-based boat. I would probably name a boat after my daughter, Erica. It all comes down to love.

Back at you. Thank you.