What if the best workplace we’ve ever experienced is just a fraction of what is possible? Dare we dream of something so far beyond ‘business as usual’ that it feels like a fantasy? ...to venture past the workplaces of the past and into the unknown to imagine and create something recognizably different. To create Truly Human work.

The preceding passage is from the introduction of the book, Human Work: Five Leadership Mindsets for Humanizing the Workplace, written by Leanne Holdsworth and Naryan Wong. On this podcast, we’re going to talk about the five leadership mindsets mentioned in their book’s title and we'll address the initial question asked in their introduction.

Does your organization have a Speak Up Culture? One where people feel it is safe and worth it to share their ideas, concerns, disagreements, and mistakes?

Are you a leader who listens? What are you doing to make sure all voices in your organization are heard? These things are vital to having a thriving organization.

You may recognize Stephen Shedletsky from his work with Simon Sinek. On this podcast, Shed defines a Speak Up Culture and talks about why it is important for leadership, business and the people within. 

Howard Behar, former president at Starbucks and a key figure in establishing their culture, talks about his views on leadership, his time at the coffee giant, Uber, Lyft, Amazon, Whole Foods and a whole lot else.

Over the past several years, for multiple reasons, we’ve seen an upheaval in the workplace. Not least of which is the so-called Great Resignation.

But could the turmoil of the last few years result in better workplaces? Could business leaders really understand the value of caring for their people? Could we really see a massive shift from traditional management to Truly Human Leadership?

Dr. Alise Cortez thinks so. In fact, she thinks the time is ripe for a Great Revitalization.

Dr. Alise Cortez is an author, leadership consultant, an organizational logotherapist, the host of the Working on Purpose radio show and the Chief People officer at Dr. Alise Cortez and Associates. Alise has been on our podcast before, where we had a conversation about the insights she gained from leaders and their experiences in 2020.

On this podcast, Alise will talk about her new book, which is incidentally titled The Great Revitalization: How Activating Meaning and Purpose Can Radically Enliven Your Business.

You may have heard our CEO, Bob Chapman, say that the person you report to at work is more important to your health than your primary care physician. It sounds outrageous, but it underscores one of the profound truths we’ve discovered at Barry-Wehmiller: That the way we lead impacts the way people live.

The research to back it up can be traced to Dr. L. Casey Chosewood, the Director of the Office for Total Worker Health at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Learn more in this in-depth discussion about wellness and work.

Jennifer Wallace recently wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, "The Power of Mattering at Work" that was forwarded to Barry-Wehmiller CEO, Bob Chapman.

Jennifer has written a book that discusses the importance of mattering in children that comes out in August 2023, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It.  Along with her friend, Sarah Bennison, Jennifer is trying to build The Mattering Movement, with the goal of helping people of all ages learn the skills and tools to enact meaningful social change by identifying genuine needs, big or small, and to recognize the unique value that each individual can bring to the world.

Bob and Jennifer struck up a conversation because of their similar interests in the idea of mattering. Bob invited Jennifer and her friend, Sarah Bennison to visit a couple of Barry-Wehmiller facilities. After their visit, they had a conversation with Bob and Mary Rudder about the idea of mattering, which is featured on this episode of the podcast.

“Today, leaders need to recognize the impact work has on peoples’ overall life satisfaction. It is an antiquated belief that leaders should focus solely on the professional side of team members’ lives. Work needs to be a positive influence, given that it consumes much of our waking time. The work we do and how we feel about it shapes our identity. Leaders have a responsibility to help their teams understand the importance of their work."

On this podcast, find out more about what "The Optimistic Workplace" is in an interview with author Shawn Murphy.

Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute is Barry-Wehmiller’s consulting arm that helps other companies and organizations through what we have come to call a Truly Human approach to business.

They can help companies hire the right people, inspire them through a thriving and inclusive culture, develop and support your leaders and create stronger customer loyalty.

Sara Hannah and Matt Whiat are the leading partners of Chapman & Co. On this THL Refresher, we’re going to bring you a couple of individual talks given by Sara and Matt that discuss their personal leadership journeys.

Bill Ury is the co-founder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation and is one of the world’s leading experts on negotiation and mediation. Trained as a social anthropologist, Bill has carried out his research on negotiation not only in the boardroom and at the bargaining table, but also among the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the clan warriors of New Guinea.

On this podcast, Bill shares his unique perspective on how empathetic listening can make a difference. Not just across a negotiation table between world powers, but in our day to day interactions with people. He also has a conversation with Barry-Wehmiller CEO, Bob Chapman.

One of the cornerstones of Truly Human Leadership is that everybody wants to know that who they are and what they do matters. 

Someone else that came to that same insight in a scholarly manner, through his experiences and his research, is Professor Isaac Prilleltensky. He, along with his wife, Ora, wrote a book on the science and importance of mattering: How People Matter: Why it Affects Health, Happiness, Love, Work and Society.

You can find our more about the Professor, his work and his book on his website: professorisaac.com

On this podcast, we talk about the science of mattering, the poverty of dignity in the world, the importance of listening, moving from a me-centric culture to a we-centric culture and we also talk about how all this relates to the work place and how leaders can apply the science of mattering to those within their span of care.

This is such an important discussion, you’ll want to go back and read the transcript of this conversation on our website, trulyhumanleadership.com.

It’s been almost eight years since the publication of Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family by Raj Sisodia, one of the founders of Conscious Capitalism and Barry-Wehmiller CEO, Bob Chapman.

It’s the story of Bob and Barry-Wehmiller’s journey from traditional business thinking to Truly Human Leadership. All these years later, people are still discovering the book and are touched by the story.

Around the time of Everybody Matters’ release, Bob and Raj did a number of interviews talking about why they wrote the book and what they hoped to accomplish by writing it.

At the start of every new year, many people make New Year’s resolutions to get in shape. They join a gym, go on a diet. But do we ever think about what shape our leadership is in and do we take steps to change it? On this podcast, David Vandermolen talks about the shape of leadership and offers tips on how you can improve yours.

Matthew Lee, Baylor professor and Research Associate at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and Brian Wellinghoff, Barry-Wehmiller Director of Strategy, Improvement and Culture, recently had the opportunity to speak at the Humanity 2.0 conference at the Vatican.

This conference gathered distinguished academics, researchers, philanthropists, and business leaders around the question: “How do we promote human flourishing in our world?” 

On this podcast, we feature a conversation between Matthew and Brian about this event and it's importance. You'll hear about the idea of human flourishing as it pertains to business education and you’ll hear how Barry-Wehmiller fits into this work.

Rightsizing, de-layering, business re-engineering, streamlining the organization…these are a few of the more current terms for the conventional business practice of eliminating jobs to improve profit.

You rarely hear anyone talk about the impact on the lives of the individuals and the family members of those laid off after sending them home with damage to their self-worth and a dramatic loss of income. Rarely do they consider the impact on those who remain in the organization.

On this podcast, we look back at Barry-Wehmiller response during the recession of 2008-2009 where many companies were laying people off. It was a time of shared sacrifice, but we came through it stronger and more dedicated to our beliefs. Just as a caring family would.

We first talked to Mark C. Crowley in May of 2021 when people were starting to return to the office amidst a global pandemic that transformed the remote work paradigm in 2020

Around that same time, something called the Great Resignation was happening and just starting to garner attention. According to a report by the BBC, in 2021 an average of nearly 4 million people left their jobs each month.

On this week’s Truly Human Leadership podcast, Mark and talks about the state of the workforce since the Great Resignation began, if it is still happening, how leaders should respond and other issues brought about by this long-simmering reckoning.

Our friend Lynne Twist is a global visionary and pro-activist committed to creating a future that is environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just.

Lynne has written a new book, Living a Committed Life: Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger Than Yourself. Its stories demonstrate how a commitment to a purpose larger than yourself can enliven and empower, enable you to see new possibilities, turn breakdowns into breakthroughs, engage in effective action, and draw on resources and capacities you may not know you have.

This podcast, is a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of purpose, the importance of purpose in business, and how it can help us turn this world from me-centric to we-centric.

Building trust requires constant, authentic communication. Communication is not just about words; it is also based on actions. Every action communicates something to the people in an organization. Too many companies say one thing and do another, breeding deep cynicism among its people over time.

This THL Refresher podcast features a discussion on the nature of trust and how to build trust in your organization with the Leadership Freak, Dan Rockwell, and Matt Whiat and Sara Hannah of Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute.

In 2009, at the age of 20, Kristen Hadeed started Student Maid, an all-student cleaning company that grew to employ more than 400 college students in two cities. In 2021, she took the lessons learned from that experience and moved fully into leadership development. 

This was our first interview with Kristen, originally from 2016, but she had a prescient insight into the causes of today's "Great Recession." She has been part of a growing generation of leaders who are helping to highlight the sense of meaning and purpose that millennials are looking for in their work.

In other words, like everybody else, they simply want to know that who they are and what they do matters.

Who heals the healers is a question Barry-Wehmiller CEO, Bob Chapman asked in 2019, long before the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, the need for better leadership in healthcare has reached a breaking point. Healthcare professionals are suffering from burnout and other mental health issues and are leaving the profession in droves. On this episode of our podcast, healthcare industry vets Paul DeChant and Bruce Cummings talk about their efforts to reverse the dramatic trends.

Recently, our CEO, Bob Chapman, spoke to a group of new Barry-Wehmiller team members in our St. Louis office. Bob gives a good overview of the history of our company, the development of our culture of Truly Human Leadership and how we are trying to trying to change the world. We decided to share this talk on this podcast in the hopes that it would be as inspiring to you as it was to the team members in that room.

Many people think of customers as existing externally from an organization, someone who pays for goods and services. We at Barry-Wehmiller feel that anyone becomes a customer at the moment we have an opportunity to serve. A culture of service is culture with a shared purpose where everyone is focused on meeting the needs of others inside and outside the organization.

Our friend Bob Burg is an author and speaker who has taught true customer service to hundreds of thousands of people with his book, The Go-Giver. On this podcast, he gives is thoughts on how to treat customers in a Truly Human way.

Barry-Wehmiller is a $3+ billion global supplier of manufacturing equipment to a variety of industries. Our companies build machines that help our customers bring their products to the world.

So, how does a company that builds manufacturing equipment and measures success by the way we touch the lives of others and is trying to build a better world approach environmental sustainability?

This podcast features a conversation with Carol O’Neill, the Group President of Packaging for Barry-Wehmiller and Michelle Bryson, Global Sustainable Packaging Leader for BW Packaging Systems. They talk about how our values shape the way we approach environmental sustainability and the journey we are on to be a better partner to our customers and to the planet.

Michael Pirson is an Associate Professor of Management, Global Sustainability, and Social Entrepreneurship at Fordham University and Research Fellow at Harvard University.

Michael is also part of a group comprised of business leaders and professors from around the world that wants to transform business education into institutions that foster human-centric leaders who honor individual dignity and demonstrate the courage to care for others.

Brian Wellinghoff, Barry-Wehmiller's Director of Strategy, Improvement and Culture, has led Barry-Wehmiller's support of this group. On this podcast, he talks with Michael about humanistic management, what it is and how they are working to Humanize Business Education.

As well as co-authoring the groundbreaking book with Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey, Raj Sisodia is the co-founder and co-chairman of the Conscious Capitalism organization. A professor at Babson College, he’s written seven books and published hundreds of academic articles.

On this podcast, which reshares our first interview with Raj, he talks about Conscious Capitalism and the process of co-writing our book, Everybody Matters, with our CEO, Bob Chapman. Raj also about his own leadership journey and shares much of the thoughtful insight he’s written and spoken about around the world.