Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Maureen: [00:00:00] Today our guest is John Heiser. John and I are gonna talk about business as a social institution. Perfect. Welcome. Thank you. Very, so happy you’re here. I

John: am

Maureen: too. So let’s. Jump right in. What’s always interesting to me is companies who can act socially, responsibly and make a profit. Yeah. So I realized that our stock structure may not be, yeah, always favorable toward that.

But I’ve interviewed other CEOs also who are incredibly socially responsible and they deliver very profitable revenue to the stakeholders,

John: right? Our definition of business as a social institution really says, we need to lean into this paradox of value creation. Can you be social responsible and not just have that be an expense to the organization, but actually a profit driver so that you maximize value for the firm while simultaneously creating value for.[00:01:00]

At Magnetrol and some other companies that I’ve worked with that was a core value of the organization. This understanding that this paradox, if you lean into it, you can create value for both. So at Magnetrol we’ve done that in three respects, and we talk about it in terms of community. In our view, we look at this in terms of three communities, the community, which is Magnetrol, which is our core stakeholders, our employees, our shareholder owners, and our key customers, key vendors and whatnot.

The second community is the communities in which we live, work, and operate. Mm-hmm. And so we look at it in terms of that. The third community is the global community in which our products go out and serve. And so we look at value creation in each one of those. So if we start with the community that’s magnetrol, we have a strong belief in our employee base, and we feel that the biggest asset, the biggest driver of growth and sustainability as an organization are our employees.

And so if we can manage that and create value within that, to us, that’s a great [00:02:00] opportunity to create value. How do we do that? Well, we’ve instituted a number of positive organizational interventions, appreciative inquiry, rather than being a top down approach in terms of strategy, in terms of problem solving.

It’s an opportunity to go really bottoms up. So we take any issue that we have from strategy setting to creating new opportunities to serve markets in which we serve. We look at it from. When we’re at our best, what does that look like? And we actually get input from across the organization, all levels of employees, and we bring them together and we talk about it and then set strategy.

Maureen: I love the idea that you’re starting with when we’re at our best. Yeah. Rather than what do we fix up from our worst? Right.

John: Maureen, That’s a great point. Because when you think about problem solving, particularly in an engineering company like us, it’s root cause analysis which drives you down this path of negativity.

And you usually get hung up on everything that’s wrong. And how do you solve it? Appreciative inquiry flips that discourse and says, you know what? Let’s take problem solving from a strength-based approach. [00:03:00] When we’re at our best, what does that look like and how do we leverage that to move us forward?

What happens is it drives creativity and it gets people into a more collaborative sense because it’s not a blame discussion, it’s not a negative thing. It’s really going back to let’s build on what makes us great.

Maureen: Now I wanna ask the question though. Appreciative inquiry doesn’t exclude navigating problems, right?

Or challenges?

John: No, not at all. In fact, we actually used appreciative inquiry. We were finding that it was taking us too long to bring new products to market a big problem, right? Particularly in a company that needs to compete in an innovative space. We were just taking too long. So we used appreciative inquiry to say, okay, how do we get back to doing what we do well, which was bringing products to market faster.

Okay. And so we got the key stakeholders, and that’s the other point of this. You have to bring in all of your critical stakeholders into the conversation.

Maureen: So it’s a bottom up and top down. Exactly. It’s not an either or.

John: And not only is it a bottom up, top [00:04:00] down, it’s also a broad perspective because you have to bring in critical stakeholders that are impacted in some way or help with the issue that you’re addressing.

’cause if you leave out key stakeholders, you’re not gonna get that voice coming in to how do

Maureen: we,

John: how we move forward. So

Maureen: those would be supply chain partner. Absolutely.

John: Customers in certain cases, absolutely. You can bring the customers. Okay. Vendors are clearly important. Okay? Or if you have development partners, you need to bring them into that dialogue.

And then what Appreciative Query allows you to do is to start off with a dialogue about what does it look like when we’re at our best, when we’ve done this and it’s been successful, what was the core? To that. The beauty of appreciative inquiry is you don’t just stop there, and this is where I think it takes care of the skeptics.

You actually get to a design portion where you actually say, okay, let’s build on that strike. So let’s look at the opportunities based on what’s called the positive core, and let’s set those opportunities out. Again, it’s a very generative process because you’re in this creative mode, you’re getting new thought processes to [00:05:00] come in.

Maureen: One of the other interviews we did recently was talking about the physiology of how we change. Chemically happening in our body when we feel under siege versus exactly this generative place.

John: Exactly. And so what happens is then you create this opportunity map. You vote as a collective group on what’s the most critical of the opportunities.

Okay. And then you actually put a plan in place. With commitments on how you’re gonna move forward. And so it really does set up a nice framework. I’ll give you a great example of how this has worked with an employee that we had. We actually did an appreciative Inquiry summit around our business model. I felt we’d lost our way as an organization in terms of how do we gonna compete effectively.

So we did a global summit. Actually, we, we did three summits at all of our global locations again, and we, we had all the stakeholders in there. I had an employee in one of the summits who just was in a very negative mood and she just couldn’t say anything positive, even though the question first thing is when we’re at our best in terms of [00:06:00] satisfying customers or whatever.

Mm-hmm. What does that look like? I pulled her aside and said, you know, you seem to be struggling with this process. And she said to me, you know, John, I just got a lot of things going on. I have a friend who’s got cancer and I’ve just, you know, there’s just a lot going on in my life that I’m just not positive about.

And I said to her, you know what? Why don’t you just take today? And put that aside and just think positive for one day and see how that goes. You know, and let, let’s just try it. And she said, okay, I’ll try. Well, I went back into that room an hour later. She was one of the most engaged employees. Wow. In the whole summit.

Part of appreciative inquiry is that you do skits, the kind that demonstrate what you’re trying to do. Brass, the core. She was the most engaged participant in the skid. But here’s the beauty, Maureen following this summit, she came to me and talked to me about the process and how engaged she was. Subsequent to that, and I’m talking months after the summit, she’s become one of my biggest change agents in the organization, [00:07:00] and she’s from our factory.

Maureen: Not many listeners I’m sure get the importance of engaging all stakeholders, right? Sometimes we

John: get skeptical. Well, think about this. This is a person who works on one of our lines mm-hmm. In our factory, who we’re saying, help us create our strategy. Mm-hmm. For our business model. Think about that. So I’ve got her in this process, so she’s now, and I’ve heard this from her and others about her.

That she goes around saying, look, we’re on the right path. You have to give these guys a chance. Folks at the top a chance, they’re trying, they’re encouraging us. And whenever that negativity starts in the dialogue within that factory, she’s one of the first ones to raise her hand and say, Hey, listen to what we’re talking about.

And so you can see where that change can bubble up. Based on something like an appreciative inquiry process

Maureen: and how important it is to the engagement gives you the space with your employee to build the trust and the time to implement a change because it sounds like you made a change in direction, [00:08:00]

John: not necessarily a change in direction.

It was more an opportunity to refocus, if that makes sense. The other thing about appreciative inquiry that I love is if you think about the business case for it, think about alignment. Think about the fact that now I’ve engaged people in all levels of the organization cross-functionally. The key stakeholders when we start talking now about implementing that strategic plan, I’ve got alignment now across the organization.

And so that’s half the battle in terms of strategy, right, is driving alignment and getting commitment around that, especially commitment.

Maureen: It’s one thing to say, I’m aligned. It’s in my best interest, but am I really gonna, when I show up every day, right, do what you need me to do on the days that I feel bad.

John: And think about this, most of the time when we set strategy, it comes from the top down. And how many times have we heard? Well, if they would’ve just asked me. I could’ve told them it wasn’t gonna work. Right. How many times do we hear that? We’re naive to think that that’s not true. And so what Appreciative Inquiry allows us to do [00:09:00] is to circumvent that and really stop that alignment issue so that now people say, I was part of creating that strategy.

My voice was heard, so now I can get behind it.

Maureen: The thing that strikes me, again, because I hear either or in conversations when you include your team, your vendors, your partners and in some cases your customers. It doesn’t mean the leadership team is off the hook. No. I am imagining some people I know who aren’t hearing nails on chalkboard.

Absolutely. I tried that. It didn’t work. We almost lost our business. Yeah, and you have the look that says Of course. That’s ridiculous. Yes. There’s a balance integrating that allows us to look at both. Magnetrol is using appreciative inquiry. That doesn’t mean that leaders abdicate their role in setting strategy.

John: No, and I’ll, I’ll give you a great example of that actually too. If you think about leaders, particularly at the C-Suite, [00:10:00] we have a better view of the whole. Global enterprise, right? So we’re not just concerned about our functional area or my day-to-day job at the C-suite level. We understand how that all fits into the global stakeholders.

And so we’ve gotta make sure that as we develop the strategy with everybody involved, that we. Keep it at a more enterprise level. So that’s number one. Number two, the appreciative inquiry process. At the end of the day, my role in this is when we come together in that design phase is that I help guide that process.

I say, look, here’s what we absolutely can do. Because it fits with who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish, and here’s the budgets that we have for those. Here’s the things that quite frankly, we just can’t do for whatever reason, and here’s the things and how we’re gonna phase it. And so at the end of the day, the leadership team still has to drive that corporate or global alignment of the strategy that’s being formulated.

And at the end of the day. [00:11:00] We still have the accountability and the responsibility to make sure that as we start to implement these plans, we’re looking at how it is impacting value creation, both the firm and for those communities in which we live, work, and operate. And so it’s not an abdication at all.

I view it more as an alignment.

Maureen: So I hear input from everyone. Yes. Synthesize, integrate, ensure that you have the global view. Yes.

John: And it’s actually done as part of the summit. And then subsequent so they can, you know, again, it’s part of being a transparent organization. Mm-hmm. And so as we develop the strategy, i’m there in my role saying, okay, here’s where we can go forward. Here’s where we’ll aligned. And if you think about it, I’ve done these in three different locations. I have to look at are they aligned from an organizational structure based on the locations? And so we do that. Then we do go back to them and say, okay, here’s what you all told us.

Here’s what we’re gonna do. Now we’re gonna hold each other accountable to actually doing. What we’ve all agreed that we’re gonna go do. And the key then is just the follow up, the [00:12:00] feedback. And so as long as we keep that consistent, which is the other thing we’ve done at at Magnetrol, which is a framework called Giving Voice to Values.

So that as we do this, it’s sort of a speak up organization where okay, we allow conversations to take place to say, Hey, I think that’s aligned from both ends, right? From leadership down. And employee base up so that we can have a conversation where we think we’re off base on something, including coming from me to say, you know what?

This piece of that strategy is not working. Here’s why. Here’s how we’re gonna adjust it.

Maureen: Strategic planning is still required, but we hold it a little more loosely. We

John: have to, right? Because it’s a dynamic world in which we’ll move in. Things are happening on the geopolitical front. Things happen in terms of just our customer base, and actually, quite frankly, things can happen on a regional basis with key customers.

That can impact our strategy, can impact our business, and so we have to be flexible and you have to have an organization that’s able to do that. By creating a positive, and this is key, by creating a positive [00:13:00] cultural environment, a values-driven, performance-oriented culture, you can handle that flexibility better.

You have an organization that can have the conversations to move quickly when you’re faced with adversity or with a change in plan. And so that’s where I think these kinds of things help.

Maureen: Through processes like this, a appreciative inquiry and the planning process, you’ve created trust and the transparency to say you’re not doing what you said

John: and trust becomes a critical issue.

In fact, I brought a, a number of people to, were here at the ILA and I had a panel of employees. Mm-hmm. Because I said, look, you can listen to me, but let’s hear what our employees have to say. And this panel of employees got asked the question, look, you’re a manufacturing company, how do you motivate yourself every day to come to work and do what you do?

Mm-hmm. One of the employees said, we’re motivated because we motivate each other. We come into a place that’s solutions oriented. This is her words, okay? We come into a place that’s solutions oriented, and so we can motivate each other to solve problems [00:14:00] because we spend so much time at work and because we’ve moved to a more positive culture.

That’s motivational in and of itself. So when we get faced with issues, we can handle them appropriately, we can handle them quickly, and we can handle ’em in a positive way. That was her response, not mine. So for me, it was great to hear, that we had that viewpoint, but um, but I think that’s an example of what I’m talking about.

You know, leader, set strategy leaders drive culture. I mean, if you think about my job, I’m the, the ambassador of culture alignment, right? That’s kind of what I do.

Maureen: It’s interesting because CEOs are now starting to say this, and before that, what nobody would’ve said that

John: it was a great article on the Wall Street Journal, I think it was last week, regarding boards of directors. Mm-hmm. And how they’re now looking at creating committees on boards or just in general boards paying much more attention to culture because as we’ve seen in some recent cases. Having a negative culture, having a, a culture that can be problematic, can drive bad outcomes. It was on the fact that what [00:15:00] is the board obligation in looking at culture, and this is a new phenomenon out there.

Maureen: I do some board work and culture is not often mentioned. No.

John: I think that’s gonna start to change. At Magnetrol, we understand the value of culture because we’ve seen it work both ways where we got a little stagnant. As an organization, we’ve now really gone into this change mode of being a more positive organization, which we’re seeing, which again, is creating value, which then brings me to that next community businesses, a social institution, right?

And that means we have to be engaged corporate citizens in the communities in which we live, work, and operate. For us. For me, it’s about aligning. This is why I talk about leaning into the paradox of value creation. It’s aligning corporate social responsibility, societal value with the strategic value of the firm so that you can truly maximize profit, which is a, something that businesses need to think about, obviously, but also create real value for society.

And I’ll give you a great example that we’re doing at m. Again, we’re a manufacturing company. We also are an engineering company. [00:16:00] We have roles at Magnets world that are very rote. Mm-hmm. That you’d come in and do the same thing every single day. And some of those jobs are quite boring, whether they’re administrative or in our factory.

And what happens is we get high turnover in those roles. Okay. That’s a pretty significant cost. Mm-hmm. To us as an organization. So that takes away for profit. The other issue that happens in those roles is you get mistakes. And in our business, because you get bored, you get bored, you know, if you think about it, you’re just looking at the same thing every day or doing the same job every day.

It’s easy to get distracted and you can lose your focus, which can cause mistakes. Those mistakes can be extremely costly as well, in terms of rework on our product that we have to do. Or if a mistake gets made and we build something that the customer didn’t ask for, obviously there can be significant costs associated with that.

As we were looking at this and seeing the impact that it can have on that profit maximization formula, we started to really say, how can we address this as an organization? And this is where it goes right to what businesses and social institution is about. I found a partner [00:17:00] in the Chicago land area, so we’re doing this just in the US right now because we’re just getting off the ground on this.

But I found up an organization that deals with people on the autism spectrum. But if you think about some of those individuals, they want structure. They need structure. They want to do the same thing every single day. And they’re fabulous at it. They’re motivated behind it. They can pay attention to details like you and I can’t.

And so we’re partnering with this organization for those individuals. Now, in many cases, they can’t get a job because of their social awkwardness. They can’t get through a job interview. Mm-hmm. Or they get flustered if things change a little bit. We’ve said to this organization, look, we wanna partner with you.

We think we have jobs at Matter patrol. That can create real value for us. So these are individuals we’re gonna be bringing into the organization. Are bringing into the organization. We’re gonna pay them the same rate. We pay everybody else. Okay? We’re gonna. Give them the same benefits we give everybody else, and the value they’re gonna provide us is one.

We’re not gonna see the [00:18:00] turnover because they’re gonna be happy in these roles. They’re gonna be able to do the same thing every day. They’re gonna create value from us because not only we’re gonna have lack of turnover, but the mistake level is gonna go down and does go down pretty significantly. So you can see where it helps with that equation of profit maximization.

Think about this, Maureen. We’re now creating true value for society because we’re taking individuals who can’t get out there and work and be contributing tax paying members of society that wanna create value in their lives and live independent. Exactly. We’re giving them that opportunity and to me that’s where aligning social value with the strategic value proposition of the firm works and or, but you have to have a culture that’s willing to do that.

The beauty of Magnetrol is we have that kind of culture. We’re very receptive to working in these environments now. Part of this process is we’re doing a lot of training around it. How do you manage people on the autism spectrum? How do you handle situations that may come up? And so we’re doing significant amount of training to [00:19:00] make sure that our supervisors and our employees understand, uh, how to manage those situations and to keep things well.

Maureen: That seems really important, that you’re not just throwing people into a

John: situation. And I think that’s critical. And, and if you’re gonna do this, you need to do it right. And so for us, it just made sense to do it that way. So we’re having them come in, evaluate positions for us to make sure that we’re doing it right, and then we’re gonna do the training.

Another example that I will give you that we’re getting off the ground is that. We have positions in our factory machinists. Mm-hmm. Welders critical to our business. But unfortunately in the US a lot of those jobs have been offshore. Now we still manufacture in the US we manage a

Maureen: hundred percent.

John: No, no, no.

Our biggest manufacturing facilities in the US we manufacture a lot here in Belgium, which is our, handles, our European operations. We have a manufacturing plant in Dubai and one in Shanghai, China. So we’re, we’re global manufacturing, but our biggest facility is in the us. Now a lot of those jobs have been offshore or they’ve gone to what we call the oil patch, where they’re making triple [00:20:00] the wages that we can pay in the Dakotas and down in, in the Gulf Coast of Texas.

Unfortunately, for us as well, the technical schools have dropped these programs, so, you know, resources where we could go if we had a vacancy to get skilled individuals have have gone. So we decided, uh, again, back to this idea of how do we. Maximize prostitute. ’cause if we end up having a vacancy with a welder or a machinist, that impacts our manufacturing process pretty significantly.

And these are positions that are now very hard to fill. So they’re critical, hard to fill. So one is we gotta keep those folks employed, but we have folks that every now and then that just leave for whatever reason. So we decided where we’re located. We have a number of high schools in our area, and some that are in very diverse communities.

We said, look, we know that a number of high school kids aren’t gonna be on the university track. We’re going into these schools saying, look, we want to take kids that are, we’re calling them at risk. They’re not on the college track. When they come outta high school, they’re not gonna have a job. We want to do an internship program at Magnetrol, where we’re bringing these [00:21:00] kids in, in their junior year, uh, helping them with their studies, but also doing an apprentice program in our machine shop and our weld shop when they graduate.

If we have a vacancy, we now have a pipeline of folks that we have trained and, and can kind of come in and, and fill that role. The value is they can make a great wage. Machinists and welders make a terrific wage. If we don’t have a vacancy, we’ve now trained these individuals to go out into the community and get a job at a high paying wage.

And so you can see, again, maximize profit for the organization, create value for society. So if we do align the two to the strategic value of the firm, you can lean into that paradox of value creation and actually create value for the firm, real value, and also create value for society.

Maureen: I love that idea.

In both examples, you are creating value through creating opportunities. Mm-hmm. It’s not a handout.

John: It’s creating opportunity that we can tap into as well as society can tap into

Maureen: and individuals who wouldn’t have had productive [00:22:00] work.

John: Yeah.

Maureen: Both cases now have an opportunity to live a life that was unimaginable.

Right. Let’s now talk about purpose.

John: Sure. So how do you create a purpose for the firm? Right. We’ve defined purpose, or we’ve called it down to one term, and that’s flourishing, and we look at it in terms of our purpose as an organization. If you nail it down to that term, flourishing. Again, we talk about these communities.

We view that as flourishing as the community. That’s magnet. That’s who we are. How do we help our employees flourish? How do we flourish for our owners and stakeholders? The second is that idea of the communities in which we live, work, and operate. And we talked a little bit about how we help the society and Magnetrol flourish in that sense.

The third, and this is where I think for a manufacturing company and engineering and manufacturing company, you start to, that may process control instrumentation. How do you define a purpose in the global setting that can motivate your employees behind that? We’ve defined that in terms of helping our customers in the [00:23:00] stakeholders that they impact to flourish.

And I’ll give you a couple of examples. We deal in industries like oil and gas, petrochemical, chemical power, and let’s take power as an example. Our equipment does two things for those customers, and again, we’re just a small vendor and a very big customer that has a huge refining plan, or in this case, let’s say a power plant.

We do two things. The first thing is our instruments act as safety devices. So if you think about level in a tank or a vessel, a lot of times those are pretty dirty or a caus. Chemicals that we’re dealing with our instrumentation makes sure that, one, you don’t get into an overflow situation so that you’re causing environmental spills or that levels getting too low, which could set off an explosion or something like that.

So we’re dealing with that can obviously cause significant damage. When you bring that back to the purpose of the organization, we’re manufacturing safety devices that have a significant potential impact on the environment or the safety of individuals in the plant and and near the plant. And so that [00:24:00] responsibility, that idea of integrity can really generate a lot of motivation about what we do matters and we need to make sure we’re doing it.

Correctly, and that every instrument that we put out, we have the confidence that we’ll do what we say it will do. So that’s purpose. The other piece of that is if you think about a power plant, our instruments also allow those plants to work more productively and more efficiently. So again, when you think about purpose in the bigger society, if a power plant can operate more efficiently, that reduces their costs.

If they reduce their costs, maybe they can take some of that money. And bring it back into the plant to help with environmental things to make the plant run cleaner. The other thing it can do, Maureen, is it can say, look, if we can now manufacture power more effectively, more efficiently, maybe now we can offer power at a rate that can allow more people to get electricity in areas that we couldn’t before.

While that’s a big state. When we bring that back to our space, if we as an organization can help with that dialogue about the broader purpose, I think that’s a good thing. [00:25:00] And I think that motivates our employees to say, yeah, I’m not just making a widget every single day. I understand how that actually impacts the broader community.

Maureen: So as you say, the more cost-effective, I think of programs in our area where elderly get subsidized power. Cost effectiveness would create the margin to fund those programs.

John: Hopefully, if they’re able to run more efficiently and more effectively, which reduces their cost structure, that opens up other opportunities.

Now, I can’t control what they do. Right. But if I can help in that mm-hmm space or on the flip side of that, if they can see us as a vendor who thinks about things in that regard, maybe it creates a dialogue within them to move down a different direction, which is, you know, an altruistic hope. But, but that’s, should the dialogue going.

Maureen: As your role modeling this idea of alignment for public good. Right. Then other people are going to see how their actions align within their context. Exactly. So what I do may be different than what you do. Right. [00:26:00] It’s an opportunity to give back to our community. Yeah. And share wisdom. ’cause it’s aligned with my values.

Right.

John: And that motivates people. That helps when they’re sitting there on an assembly line, when they’re sitting there entering orders every single day in an office setting, it does help with them to say, why am I coming to work every day other than just for my paycheck?

Maureen: Well, we argue wanna get paid.

John: Sure.

Maureen: So how do you help people understand that linkage?

John: We talk about. We talk about in town hall meetings. So I do a quarterly town hall meeting at Magnetrol, and I do it globally, so I’ll either videotape it or I actually do a lot of traveling. So I’ll go out to all of our sites and we talk about that as part of corporate communication.

The other thing that I do is that we do what I call skip level meetings. Yeah. So I’ll skip management and go down to the employee level, bring people in from different parts of the organization. Can I do this globally? And we have conversations about things like purpose and what are we doing. And then the final thing is don’t underestimate the value of symbolism.

They see how we do things. They see what we’re doing. [00:27:00] It becomes more of an expectation. I think the other thing is when you look at the employee base that we’re starting to recruit millennials, for example. I believe that millennials are the biggest opportunity for change of business.

Maureen: Okay, so more about that.

Because so many people are perplexed by millennials and they dunno what to do with them.

John: Millennials have come into the marketplace with a different expectation of business and a different requirement of business to be more engaged with society. I think you’re seeing that time and again, and we’re hearing that now from millennials as we brought them into the organization.

The beauty of Magnetrol is we have the generational spectrum that work for us. I have one employee in our car factory, he’s a welder. Been with the company 40 years, just celebrated his 40th anniversary last weekend. His father worked at the company, his wife works at the company, his kids work at the company, and his grandkid now works at the company.

Maureen: So you don’t have anti-nepotism,

John: right? No. No, not at all. Because we think sometimes those are the best references that we can get. And so that’s just an example of the. [00:28:00] Generational differences that we have to deal with within the organization.

Maureen: And that’s gonna be the case as we live longer. Right. And live healthier, hopefully.

Right. I did an interview the other day with someone talking about the longevity economy. Yeah. Francis Hesselbein, where a leadership conference, 101 years old, still running the Hesselbein. Yeah. Drucker founders. Not everyone will be working till a hundred. Right. But what’s your HR gonna look like when you’re talking to people who range from the normal 18-year-old or 16-year-old as they’re doing after school jobs to someone who’s 95?

Well,

John: you should see how that conversation actually looks at live, because we have that conversation going on now. I’ll have somebody who’s 25 years old talking with somebody who’s in their sixties and in some cases are company in their, in their seventies. They’re having this dialogue, and I’ve seen the metamorphosis on both sides, where, you know, the older generation, the more tenured generation is coming in line and saying, you know what, that makes sense.

And so I’ve seen these change agents in some of our most seasoned employees, the [00:29:00]millennials, a lot of them have told me the reason we came to Magna Troll was not for the pay, not for the functional area that we’re getting into. We came because of this commitment to business as a social institution.

Because I think they require that now. I think they’re looking for companies that understand the value of being socially engaged in a authentic way.

Maureen: Again, not greenwashing.

John: Exactly. They, they don’t view it as just an expense just to say, look, look at us on our website here. We’re doing, they wanna see actual meat behind the words.

So we’re seeing more of that coming in. At all levels of the organization, not just in our office setting, in our professional band, but across the organization and globally. We’re starting to see that too. So

Maureen: what are you seeing globally?

John: Well, again, if you think about Europe, we’re seeing more employees asking us to do things like that, to to question us at the C level.

What are we doing around these issues and how are they impacting us? I rolled Giving voice to values out in China. This is a great story. [00:30:00] So giving voice to values is a framework of how do we talk about ethical issues. I view it as also a framework for talking about change. ’cause as you know, whenever you’re in a change initiative, there’s resistance and there’s, yeah, there can be issues.

And so how do we, how do we address those? And so when to China, our factory workers and some of our office workers don’t speak English. So I had to translate the whole thing into Mandarin. The first question I got asked as we started this process was. Is this just another piece of Western propaganda that you’re bringing to us to drive down our throats?

That was the first question I got now that could’ve derailed the whole process.

Maureen: Well, especially if you got anger.

John: Yeah. And I was like, this is great. And so the facilitator, his answer was, well, if you look at what President Xi is doing around ethics in China, and he’s undertaking a lot of trying to weed out corruption and whatnot.

So this is consistent with our own president’s commitment. To ethics, so it brought it right back into the culture. The other thing he says is, look, we need to be honest with ourselves. We work for a western company. We [00:31:00] need to, we need to understand Western values as well. And if we look into this, maybe our values aren’t that different to begin with, but there’s some global values and virtues that are transcendent across cultures.

And so once we got that out on the table, it was amazing the dialogue that took place around giving voice to values and in particular at China. And if you think about that culture. In a lot of cases, it’s a very hierarchical, top-down approach. Mm-hmm. In some cases you can stymie that kind of discussion.

We didn’t see that here. We actually saw folks really willing to voice their values and I was just in China two weeks ago because I’ve been going out to see how things have been going and I got to see that in practice that there is this sense is I can speak up and I can talk about how to make us more effective, how to make us more productive.

On the factory floor as well, and a GM that’s very receptive to that and a management team that’s very receptive to that.

Maureen: And again, though, I assume you had something to do with that selection.

John: Yeah, absolutely. And we have a GM who’s been in place [00:32:00] for, for quite some time with Magnetrol and understands what we’re trying to accomplish and actually lives those values as well.

And so that helps obviously. So it’s been great to see that. So you can see where purpose can drive motivation and commitment, and if you can get motivation and commitment by your employees, it’s gonna drive profitability. I think that’s the biggest key to long-term sustainable flourishing growth is.

Motivation and commitment by your employees.

Maureen: I love that we started with strategy and planning and values. You synthesized how we set the course for the company. Then how we connect with the social fabric and all of this goes through the culture, right? And then wrapped up with values and purpose. Yeah.

And how that allows us to retract and retain people, but also create the sustainability. Connecting back to the strategic plan.

John: If you think about strategy, it’s the people that drive strategy. So you’re either gonna succeed strategically based on the the individuals you have, or you’re gonna fail strategically.

But I think that’s just it. That’s where [00:33:00] leadership comes into play, and that’s why leadership is hard, because leadership is the fabric that drives that alignment. Without leadership, you have chaos. And so what leadership does is if you can create that culture, if you can drive that alignment between culture, employees.

And the firm strategy and goals, you’re gonna be successful not only in the short term but in the long term. And that’s where I think the focus needs to be, is how do you create long term sustainable profitability and sation.

Maureen: John, thank you so much for being a role model for these principles we talk about.

’cause it’s one thing to talk about them, it’s quite another to actually live them.

John: Like I said, it’s hard work. Yes. And you have to be engaged as a leader to drive it. So thank you, Maureen.