Future Intersections with Ather Williams III and Shane O’Kelly

Change is a constant. No company or organization can operate the same way forever. Whether you're a rapidly growing startup with dexterity built into your DNA or a legacy corporation responding to the market shifts, you need to evolve to progress and improve. How well you can do that depends on your organization's approach and the process of change management. Join me, Ather Williams III, and my special guest, Shane O'Kelly, in this episode of Future Intersections, presented by Wells Fargo, as we discuss change management, implementing new ways of operating within organizations, improving employee morale through culture and communication, and instituting real changes for accelerating growth.

Welcome to Future Intersections. I'm here with Shane O'Kelly. He is a graduate of West Point, as well as Harvard Business School, graduate of both the airborne school and the Army Ranger program, in the Army, which is one of the toughest selection courses in all the U.S. military. So I think there's lots we can explore today with Shane about leadership and managing through change. So, Shane, welcome.

I remember going back to Nitin Nohria, who's most recently was the dean of Harvard Business School, who's recently retired, he was our leadership professor. You had just gotten out of the Army and showed up at HBS. What made you want to make that transition?

So, I mean, we've had lots of conversations over the years about your time at West Point. One of the things you always — and I don't know if I've ever told you this — that stuck with me, we were talking about understanding where you were in the perspective of the class. And the one thing you said to me that always stuck with me was that 'This is West Point. Everything you do is graded.' Everything, whether it's, you know, your bed to eating, the class work, to how you march, the whole thing is everything's graded. And it all gets into a ranking. And if you knew that person was, you know, 1, 2, 15 slots ahead of you in line, they were just better than you. They're better. Yeah. And the honesty with which you said that sort of stuck with me as a lesson for leaders around, just like really being objective about ourselves as sort of a starting point for leadership. So I don't know what you thought about that.

Talk to me about your first command. What did that teach you about leadership, having to take those people from different walks of life, different ethnicities, different religions, and sort of bring them together on common purpose?

What's your most memorable moment in time in the Army?

It's one thing to for you as an individual to dig down deeper and find that extra thing to push you forward, that extra drive. And then it's a almost more complicated thing then to get the man or woman next to you to follow you at that same pace. And so I think about, you know, you have your tab and you're going to deploy and you are in a mission where you have to get people to do this. How do you translate the lessons of what you internalized to sort of bring your team along?

Talk to me a little bit about the business of HD Supply, how your customers are on what your team does every day.

So in order to do that, you've got, I'll call it a sales organization, stacked against each of those verticals who are intimately familiar with the needs of those various segments, whether it's a multifamily housing unit or it's a hotel or it's an office complex, etc. And then you have this massive, complicated logistics organization, it sounds like, that's got to figure out how to stock all that stuff and deliver it just in time to all those people, which is an orchestration of people and machinery that's not easy.

We're in the arguably the fifth industrial revolution with artificial intelligence driving this wave. And it's been obviously a huge splash with things like generative AI models and large language models recently. But we're still at the very infancy of this. How do you think about the positives and negatives of what this could mean for you, the culture and the opportunities it creates? You want to run a lean, mean organization. So there's some of this new technology that can be really helpful to doing that. It also has human impact, which I know in my world we think about what that means.

And I agree with you. And we find that in our services, we find that in the financial services business, that in moments that matter, people want to talk to someone, they don't want to talk to a chat bot, they don't want to talk to Fargo, they want to talk to a human being who has empathy and it's very hard to teach machine empathy. So that's definitely one. And then you already touched on the impact technology's had on customers. And so we all have, we both have, children all in the same age. And so that, you know, teen, pre-teen, up to young adult stage and their expectations for life, how things work, how interactions work, how people what they have a career are all different. And so when I think about your team members, you're going to have that 18 year old, it's their first job, you know, they just graduated high school. Their first job is driving a truck. They were working in sales or operations. It's like we have people who are frontline bankers. How do you think about bringing them into the culture and how what they're going to bring is going to change that culture over time?

You and I have the good fortune of, while seeing things over a couple of decades, being a little more open-minded about things. We're all going to people in our organizations who aren't. And so when we think about being the leader, the buck stops with you and the culture, you know, people should emulate what you do, what you bring to the workplace. What if they don't? How do you deal with that as a leader?

I'm happy you describe it that way because it's validating for me. So when I sit down with my team, whenever I take over a new team or new organization, I start with a basic, a placemat that's founded around a thing called 'the way forward.' It's like, 'This is how we're all going forward together.' And it gets to not the rules to your point, but I'll use your term, the norms of how we're going to operate. If you're at the table, you're here for a reason. Have a voice. If you're not going to have a voice, don't be at the table. You know, there's also things about the creative conflict. We're going to disagree. We need to do that openly. There's no meeting after the meeting. And then when we leave this room, we're going to stack hands and commit because, you know, unfortunately or not, this is not a democracy. We're going to make a decision and we're all going to line up behind it, but we're not going to have passive aggressive behavior. And so there's, you know, and I use that under the analogy of, you know, a fist is stronger than five fingers. And so there's things that I think that we have to do to wind people up to say, 'Look, this is how we're going to work. If you don't want to do this, opt out now.' In a past life and now with this integration and I've done 34 acquisitions and integrations, it's taken me a while to get to this, but I have a 'no jerks' rule because we had a dysfunctional leadership team, in a previous organization where if you have somebody who's not exhibiting exactly, you and I think exactly alike on this in terms of how those meetings should go, it really is incredibly unproductive. And the thing you have to remember, in a big organization, what happens with the ten or so people that, say they're in a key staff meeting, a decision meeting with you, each of them have five, eight, 10 reports and it goes down. So you're turning these gears that end up spinning very, very quickly for the men and women on the front line. And so when you've got a lack of productivity here, it's incredibly detrimental there. And so, like you, if you're at the table, you have to speak up, you have to share your perspective. And it has to be the 'no jerks' rule. What that does is lets people be comfortable with dissent. Because when I disagree with you, I'm not disagreeing with you personally. I'm not bringing an edge to this. I'm not doing it in a disparaging manner. And there's trust and respect. And then I always take input from the key leaders. And back to your fist analogy, we make that decision, we stack hands, and we go execute it. When you have jerks or passive aggressive folks, they're not along and they're like, 'Oh, you wouldn't believe the meeting we had today. Don't worry about that initiative. We're not really going to push it down here in this geography.' Can't have it. You cannot run a company in that fashion.

So I think back to the point you made early on in this conversation, you were talking about your platoon sergeant. And so I think that the thing that struck me when you were telling that story was at a very young age, you realized one of the key things I think of leadership is you made yourself vulnerable. You're like, 'Hey, I know I've got, I outrank you, but I need you to help me be a better me,' which a lot of people don't have the courage to do. So I applaud you for at a very young age, understanding that and embracing that.

I think that's a critical point. And I know it resonates in our industry as well, because I think about the most senior person in a particular line of business was always the person that started here and worked their way up and knew the whole thing. Part of my challenge in my remit is to bring people along and say, 'Hey, look, your experience is valuable, but some of it's dated. There's things that carry over, but you have to continue to learn and grow.' It's creating that integrated team where that team member has been with you for six weeks or that person who's the expert, you know, it's now their turn to lead because these are the experts, not because of the stripes on my shoulder or the bars on my collar. It's about 'No. This person is the expert. We need to listen to them and everyone has a role.' And being humble enough and accepting enough of an environment to change is where we have to pivot.

So if I think about the scenario you laid out, that piece of software that the maintenance manager is using is a channel that you have to interface to. But ultimately, when the hot water heater doesn't show up, they're not calling ABC Tech Company and saying, 'Where's my hot water heater?' They're going 'Shane, where's my hot water heater?' And so you have to figure out now how to manage that customer relationship and to use, I'll use the word earlier, in a broader ecosystem, which requires a different set of skills as an organization than you previously had. Some of that is definitely the product management piece and definitely the focus on IT.

Awesome. Well Shane, I think it's a good point for us to, I could talk to you for hours about this stuff but again thank you for joining us today. I think you've had some great insights for the audience, but I think that one, just the arc of your career and what you've been able to achieve. I've been really, one, proud of you because I remember you showing up in business school and you're kind of like, 'What's going on here?' And then to watch you take your natural ability to lead and your curiosity and your humility and grow into the CEO that you are today. But thank you for joining us today and thank you for all the insights around leadership and managing through change.

Thank you, Shane.