Supporting Collective Wellbeing and Taking the Scary Step First
Episode Notes
Jennifer McClure, CEO of Unbridled Talent & DisruptHR, joins Paul on this week’s episode of 52 Humans. She shares a truly awe-inspiring story of how a CEO at a former company guided their team through a traumatic and sudden loss.
About the Guest:
Jennifer McClure
CEO
Unbridled Talent & DisruptHR
Jennifer McClure is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and high-performance coach who works with leaders to leverage their influence, increase their impact, and accelerate results.
Frequently recognized as a global influencer and expert on the future of work, strategic leadership and innovative people strategies, Jennifer has decades of in-the-trenches leadership and executive experience working in and with startups, privately held companies, and Fortune 500 organizations in a variety of industries.
As a top-rated keynote speaker, Jennifer has shared her insights with thousands of leaders at conferences and corporate events around the world. Clients include Procter & Gamble, General Electric, IBM, SAP, Oracle, Bloomberg, Charles Schwab, Stryker, LinkedIn, Notre Dame University, Society for Human Resource Management, Association for Legal Administrators, and Association for Talent Development.
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Paul Wolfe: Hi everyone, and welcome to another weekly episode of 52. Humans, the vlog casts on stories of human first leadership. I'm your host, Paul Wolf. I'm also a human first leadership advocate. And I hope to show can be a source of inspiration to all of us to transform our workplaces by returning to the humanity that binds us. I am thrilled today to have someone I call a friend on my on my blog cast, Jennifer McClure, and we're gonna be talking about human first and empathetic leadership. Jennifer is the CEO of unbridled talent, and disrupt HR, an amazing speaker, and a wonderful human being Jennifer, thank you so much for being on with us today. And welcome to 52 humans. Thank you, that might be my favorite introduction ever. Short and sweet.
Jennifer McClure: Use it you can use it No, it's like your polo says about me. Or you're like you're an amazing human being. We've known each other for a while now because of my time and indeed and your work as an HR influencer. And being in the HR space. And I think the work you do, like the work that all of us do is so important. But you you especially and other people that fall into that, and I do consider you a friend because you know, we'll run into each other. I always know like, I'm gonna go to a conference like, okay, Jennifer will probably be there or like, I'll check first and like, Alright, I've got somebody. I mean, I'm the introvert, I've got somebody to hang out with. So that's always that's always warm and comforting to me, tell us tell the audience of the viewers a little bit more about kind of everything that you do and that you have your hands in. Sure. Well, I was an HR practitioner, leader executive for almost 20 years, and then took a little stint into executive search. So helped organizations find their leaders get an executive coaching certification during that time. So still do some coaching with C level leaders. And in 2010, stepped out on my own, Paul and I were just chatting, I'd celebrate 13 years in business this this February, where I am a full time speaker and trainer, I love to be out talking with people sharing best practices and learning from them and their stories, and then helping others to grow through what we've all learned together. And my goal is to help leaders to find their path to impact where they can create more impact in the lives of the people that they lead and serve. It's such it, you do amazing work. And it's such important work. And so I'm sure in your 20 plus years as an HR executive and leader, certainly as a coach, and in the work that you've been doing for the last 13 years. Congratulation. Congratulations on your 13th anniversary of your business. You've seen human first and empathetic leadership or you've exhibited and so can you tell us a story about a time where you saw that and a specific story and walk us through that? Sure. I think when you asked me the question, that was a good question to kind of think back through some of the things there certainly have been many were a both i and in situations where I've seen, you know, the lack of human leadership. But the one came to mind for me, that I think, still impacts me to this day was I worked in an organization, a global manufacturing organization. And it was an old facility. And the process was fairly manual. So we had a lot of employees who move product manually from one or the other, etc. And in our process, there were large, two ton paper rolls that we had people that moved them from floor to floor in this old facility on elevators. And one day, I just happened to be walking down four flights of stairs from one of the upstairs manufacturing areas. And I started hearing employees at the bottom of the stairwell, screaming, running up the stairs, etc. And it turned out that one of our employees had been in the elevator with a roll of paper and a paper and a moving piece of equipment, and the elevator had fallen. So it fell from the fourth floor to the bottom floor. The employee was trapped in the elevator under the roll of paper in the machine. So I just happened to be right on the scene. And I can't I mean, it brings tears to my eyes right now, I can't tell you what it's like to be in a situation where anyone is in peril, let alone someone who's been with the company for 25 years and is a beloved employee. I mean, even if they'd been there for 25 hours, it would be a challenge. And I think where the human leadership came out was, obviously immediately everyone's trying to figure out how to help how to do what we needed to do. And we happen to have an employee on our staff, our quality manager who had been a former Navy drill instructor, almost 20 years in the Navy had worked as a SWAT team officer out on the west coast with the police department out there. And he came to the scene and he immediately kind of helped us to think what we need to do next triage the situation. And one of the first things he said was this was on shift towards the end of the shift. One of the first things he said was, we need to cancel second shift, we need to send someone out to the parking lot to stop people. As they're coming in, we cancel, second and third shift, we cannot work and our CEO or CFO showed up. And we all agreed, yes, this is not about you know, even though we could have production running in a different area, or even people in the office, this is a serious situation where we need to send everyone home. Long story short, a short after a very long night, the employee was extracted from the elevator and she had passed away. But to sit there again, with my boss, the CEO, the CFO, just sitting there on a pallet, waiting, wondering hoping her family had come, my HR team sat with them in the HR office and tried to wait to get, you know, to give them as much information as they could. It and we all tried to be as respectful and honest as we could with the family and with our employees who were still there helping with the situation. And I look back, and I think obviously in that situation, you're you're a business leader. And you know already that there's a business problem here of potential liability of, you know, future lawsuits. But none of that was in our minds at the time, we really wanted to see if we could get her out to keep her safe. And when that didn't happen, our thoughts turned to her family and to our employees, who again, she'd been there for 25 years. So the factory was shut down for I don't remember how many days but a few days. And before we asked people to come back to work, we asked them all, you know, made available a time where all three shifts could come in, and we would meet with them and kind of talk to them about what we knew were their fears and concerns about getting on an elevator with a piece of equipment and a large, heavy paper roll. All of our product was again, it was a four story manufacturing facility. So everybody worked on those elevators. And we sat as a leadership team in front of the employees and basically cried together, our CEO broke down in tears, our CFO broke down in tears. I was in tears, because we talked about how sorry, we were how sad the situation was, and how much we were going to miss Joyce. And our employees could feel that sincerity. And our CEO, unprompted, we've not really talked about what to say. And our CFO said, I know that many of you are afraid to get back in those elevators. And I want to tell you that I'm willing to go first, I will go with you, I will show you that I believe they're safe. And by the way, the elevator had just been inspected prior to this happening. So it had been certified to be safe. But them saying that they would go first really the feedback that afterwards, just having individual conversations with people the fact that we weren't just saying, Okay, it's time to go back to work as usual. We're going to be right alongside you not sitting in our executive offices away from the factory floor. And again, I think it was a good learning experience. I was part of that. But I also benefited from their leadership, and what they did to really show themselves as humans, we It's not often that you see a CEO crying in front of, you know, several 100 employees. But it's also not often where they say I'm willing to go first. So that's my story. And I didn't realize that would be emotional telling it here. Because we're,
Paul Wolfe: It it's such an extreme example. And I'm so sorry that you lost an employee like that. That is like the worst clearly. The the the emotional part of it, like your your CEO, your CFO, your CEO, the other executives along with you, showing that emotion like that is something that leaders do not do on a regular basis. Most leaders and I don't want to be stereotypical or general. But I think for so long, we've been trained not to we've been trained to have the answer to be in control and all that. And we're human beings as well. And showing up like that, I think goes a long way. Your comment about kind of the employees could tell that it was real like you employees like they're very intuitive creatures. Humans are intuitive creatures, employees, especially when they're a group of executives talking to them, they can poke through those things that aren't really true or that are just being said to be said. But when it's true and human, that is goes such a much longer way in the conversations you had with employees that were still there and after the fact. Did you get any sense from them? Like of what the impact of the executive response was? Do you think there was more engagement, more loyalty? It sounds like probably this was a place where people were there for a while. Anyway, this employee that passed away was 25 years but any sense of have kind of their reaction to the executive, the executives and the executive team, including yourself and how you all handled it.
Jennifer McClure
Absolutely. As you said, it was an extreme example, in a lot of ways. It was a turnaround situation, the company was 130 years old, there were some employees that had been there that long. It had been a heavily unionized facility at one point, and even though it was no longer a unionized facility, when when our team came in for the turnaround situation, there was a massive amounts of distress because people had been mistreated. They were not treated fairly, there were so many things where the working conditions were not up to par. And so the CEO that I mentioned, was a young guy, this was his first CEO job, and he actually convinced me to come to what was going to be a really challenging and tough situation and his vision, I still say he's one of the best vision casters ever because he convinced me to leave a job where I was very happy, very well compensated, very well recognized, to come to a situation where everything was broken, and needed to be turned around, the company was about to go bankrupt. And his vision was I want to make the work life for our employees better. If we do that, then all the financial stuff will come. So we had this was probably about a year and a half into us joining the organization. And we had made some headway, but there was still a lot of distrust you, it wasn't uncommon to walk the floor and have people say we need a union, you know, just because management management doesn't listen to us. And if you talk to them, or I would talk to them, and I would say, you know, I'm here, I want to hear what you have to say. And they're like, you're just the new management, there will be management after you. So they'd seen a lot of that. And I think after this situation, it was one of the turning points to, they really did see that we cared that it was true and sincere. I think the fact that we did after the situation, you know, immediate situation sat down and said, We want to be open, honest. Sure, there may be lawsuits or things in the future, but we want to share honestly, with our employees and not be guarded, we made that decision. And I think as you said, people saw that and her family did as well. So it ultimately did not turn into a lot of the negative things that it could have. Because, you know, we all went to the funeral together, we sat and hugged the family, we were real humans, showing real emotions rather than sitting behind well, we can't we have to be careful what we say. Or we need to make sure we keep a distance, you know, that can be where things really go down a bad path. And I've seen that happen as well as we need to keep a distance because we know this is going to turn adversarial, etc. But we dove in. And I think our employees again, the conversations were that that helped to create trust, it helped them to see that we weren't going to just turn and run when things maybe were bad or negative. And that what we had been saying about we are in this together, we want to make your lives better. We want to improve the results of the company so that your lives, work lives and your home lives can get better as a result. I think it really solidified for a lot of people that we were in this for the right reasons.
Paul Wolfe: Yeah, that's, it's it's so amazing that you know, with any situation, the extreme ones and even the little ones that pop up as an HR leader, so much of the aftermath for lack of a better word is driven by how you respond how the lead ons and not that it you know, not that being human solves all problems like being human is challenging. Like we're all Yeah, we deal with that every day. But I think the the the emotion and the support and the realness of it certainly goes a long way to help situations that can be challenging. Thank you so much for sharing the story and the info. I can see why the CEO wanted to hire somebody like you because you you know your stuff. And like he wanted somebody who knew their stuff and can help fix the broken things and build an amazing organization. And thank you for being a guest on 52 humans.
Jennifer McClure: Well, thank you for having me appreciate the opportunity.