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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Steve Macadam. Steve served for 12 years as CEO and President of EnPro Industries, a $1.4 billion publicly traded company. Steve is also one of the lead presenters and CEOs [who are] part of Sounds True new Inner MBA program. This is a program we’re producing in partnership with LinkedIn, Wisdom 2.0, and a division of NYU called MindfulNYU. It’s a nine-month certification program that begins in the middle of September 2020 [and] runs through May of 2021. A fully virtual option is available as well as scholarships, and you can learn more at www.innermbaprogram.com.
I’m so happy I had this chance to feature on Insights at the Edge, Steve Macadam, because he’s really a thought partner for me. With what type of training best supports a new type of business—a business that focuses equally on human flourishing, as well as financial performance? Here’s my conversation with Steve Macadam:
It’s a great joy for me to be speaking with Steve Macadam. He is such an unusual business leader. Recently when we were together in front of a live audience at an Inner MBA hub at Wisdom 2.0, I said in front of the audience that to me, Steve Macadam is like a unicorn; not sure as a very accomplished CEO if he liked that or not. But I think of him as such an unusual, rare type of person—someone who has a traditional business background, a Harvard MBA, worked as a consultant at McKinsey; and at the same time, has wholly and enthusiastically and I would go so far as to say fervently embraced a path of personal development not just for himself, but in his leadership of organizations at EnPro, which is a large, publicly traded manufacturing company. He introduced the notion of the company operating on dual bottom lines. I wanted to start our conversation, Steve, by having you explain to our listeners what a dual bottom line is, and how you came from a traditional business career to operate with a dual bottom line as your focus.
Steve Macadam: Yes. Ok. Well, hey, Tami, and thanks for having me on this. The dual bottom line, technically is just the view that performance of the company, financial performance of the company, and the development of people are held at equal levels of importance. So, one is not subordinate to the other. I often use the term they’re two sides of the same coin, depending on what side you want to look at. Now, that said, we actually didn’t really—the dual bottom line, that terminology came to describe our overall operating model, operating philosophy system, which is actually much bigger and more involved and detailed— which I’d love to take a minute to describe if it’s OK, because the dual bottom line is almost a colloquial descriptor of that, that we came to after some period of time, used inside the company by everyone to just describe this overall notion of the type of company we were trying to build.
The type of company we’re trying to build really was built around the purpose, the formal purpose of enabling the full release of human possibility. And with three important values: safety, excellence, and respect. Respect really points to human dignity and the equality of all people. And a governance model that is built on federalism, meaning dual citizenship of affiliation with one’s operating plant or operating division as well as EnPro, as well as the notion, as Charles Handy called it, of subsidiarity, which pushes the responsibility down to the closest unit of action, if you will.
The other key governance element is the notion of council governance, since it’s a distributed authority and power model. And then underneath that overall purpose, values, and governance sits our principles, and then our operating system. And our principles really had to do with leadership and beliefs that we hold about leaders, beliefs about our worldview, beliefs about people, and beliefs about economic value. Under each of those four categories there are four or five key sub-elements that articulate those principles more fully in terms of what we believe as a company and how we’ve tried to organize. And then underneath that, our operating system is specific to EnPro and includes what we believe is important for how we do innovation of sales, sales and operations, planning, manufacturing, strategy, and human development. And that’s all wrapped up.
So you take each one of those elements and there are then lower-level principles, practices, beliefs about each of those, what it takes to do each of those in an excellent way. And many business people would be very familiar with many of the elements and some of them are a bit unique to us in terms of how we thought about it. So that whole picture, if you will, is what became known over time as the dual bottom line model.
TS: Well, there’s a lot in that Steve, and over the course of our conversation I want to bring forward some of the highlights. But to begin with, tell our listeners a bit about your own journey from being a more traditional, financial performance-oriented leader, to being a leader who embraced this more rich, complex, human-based—this is my language— type of organization with a dual bottom line.
SM: Yes, well, I guess it wasn’t a big, huge epiphany that came to me one day, Tami, it was over my whole life and career. Starting very young, when I grew up in a very modest household in a small steel town in Southern Ohio, and started working to make money when I was in sixth or seventh grade, passing papers and cutting grass and so forth. It was a very blue-collar town. I went to [inaudible] high school, I went to school with children of blue-collar families who were friends of mine and so forth. Even from that very young age, I was very comfortable around people that did work with their hands. And even in my jobs, summer jobs and first jobs as a mechanical engineer, I worked at DuPont and worked shoulder to shoulder with the mechanics, and pipe fitters and millwrights in the chemical plant.
And really it was—I didn’t know it at the time, but as I look back on it, those were very formative years because I spent a lot of time with people who did such a good job when it came down to the actual task. Some of these people had poor reputation with management as people that weren’t committed and so forth, but I worked with them and when we got to an actual task, whether it was aligning a pump or installing a seal or whatever the task was, they were very, very good. And they cared a lot about doing that job very, very well. I started to become interested without really knowing it into why does the company treat them like a dishonest, misbehaving teenager, if you will, right? With all these rules and requirements and doubt that they’re going to—the working assumption is that they’re trying to screw off more than do a good job. And that’s not the experience that I had.
Then as time continued to evolve, as you mentioned, I went to business school at Harvard, was lucky enough to have Chris Argyris as one of my professors. He was one of the guys that Peter Senge really studied under, and learned about, and wrote about as part of The Fifth Discipline. It was right around when Peter came out with The Fifth Discipline. I remember reading that book, and a lightbulb went off in my head and I said, “Wow, that’s how companies really should run.”
And so then [I] started to work at McKinsey, and worked at McKinsey for 10 years serving a whole range of different clients, mostly focused on operations work. It was always strategy, but a lot of operations work—I worked with a European automotive company in assembly and factory, worked with pulp and paper companies and paper mills and box plants. And worked with electric utility company and coal and gas-burning plants, and nuclear power plants.
I worked with frontline folks of all degrees. And what we did is we mobilized, we were working to mobilize the problem-solving capability of those frontline groups that we would bring together and facilitate problem-solving teams to identify improvement opportunities, and so forth. I came away with so many insights about how much latent potential resided in these parts of the company that were just left without a process, just left a virtually untapped because the way the companies ran really prevented that type of initiative-taking and creativity and teamwork and so forth. It certainly wasn’t built in a proactive way. At best, the clients I worked with, it was neutral and somebody could do something if they really took initiative and were like that, but in many cases, it was actually kind of held back, if you will.
Then after I left McKinsey, I went back to the operating world became a leader, became then a CEO, at a pretty young age, I was 41 years old. And wanted to have the organization really involved in helping improve the way we ran. Originally, at that time, in my career, it would have been a dual bottom line model, it would have been a very people-oriented model. And it would have been developmental and, “Hey, let’s include people, let’s educate them, let’s treat people right, let’s have good values, let’s have a good purpose, et cetera, et cetera.” However, that is all to the end of making more money, making the business accessible, right?
And I’d say that’s where many really good companies today sit. They care a lot about people, they treat people right, they bring talent in, they develop it, and they expect it to perform and perform better for the company. The shift that I made once getting to EnPro was this full notion of the equality of that, that those were not different. Because when people believe—I think when people believe broadly that they’re being invested in but they are being somehow treated as a means to an end, as opposed to an end unto themselves, it’s different. There’s still just a little bit of, “We management, we’re better than you, we’re smarter than you. We get to set the rules. We do set the rules. You follow, you do what you’re told. Yes, we’ll involve you and so forth, but to a limit.” And I saw that as capping what was truly possible for people to create and do and produce.
It also didn’t square with how I view the world, and as I’m going along in this, I started doing much more personal ego development work to learn more about myself, and how my ego patterns were shaped over the years. I started doing more spiritual development work of really clarifying my own beliefs and what was really important to me and how I wanted to live my life. And a big part of that is my view of sacredness of every human being, every soul that’s on this earth. I believe, again, that’s how we’re made. That’s how we should relate to each other, with that level of love and compassion and equality.
That’s what then I said, “There’s got to be a better way to run a company that acknowledges—a type of company that vast majority of people would love to work in because they would be treated so well, they would be trusted, they would be seen, actually seen as ends and ends unto themselves,” right? Yes, they know they have a job of course. And we know we have to be successful as a company. And we use our work in the company and that drive for excellence to help make people better because people working better together, listening to each other and being more authentic, et cetera, et cetera is what leads to better execution on problems, opportunities, more creativity, more intuition anyway, right? So it all works together. And that’s where we came up with this new model, that then at the end became known as the dual bottom line.
TS: Well, Steve, as you’re talking, first of all, I noticed my heart enlarges. It rises in me as you talk about people being ends in themselves. And that there’s a real distinction here, and I want to get into it a little bit because it might seem subtle, but I think it’s really important. The distinction between let’s develop the people in our organization, let’s train them, let’s teach people mindfulness so we can make more money. That’s different than saying the development of people is an end in and of itself. And I think my discovery of you and our growing friendship part of the reason it’s been so meaningful to me is that I think I thought well, “Oh, Tami, you think that way and you run a nice small company in Boulder, Colorado that publishes spiritual wisdom teachings. So, you have the luxury of thinking that way.” But here you are, you’re under the pressure of public markets and giving shareholder return on a quarterly basis. And you held that up as an ethos that people are ends in themselves, and it worked for you. So that’s what I want to get at, this distinction.
SM: Yes. Yes. Was there a question in there? Or you want me to just talk about it more?
TS: Well, I want you to talk more about it because I think a lot of companies, and even companies who are sending people to the new Inner MBA program that Sounds True has created, this nine-month certification program, are like, “Great, I want the people who go to this program to become more emotionally intelligent, so we can make more money.” That’s part of why the program appeals to people. And there’s value in that. But I often notice something in me gets a little tweaked. Like I’m like, “No, that’s not it. You’re not quite honest.” I guess I’m just looking for some dialogue with you on this point.
SM: Right. Well, look, I believe that there is an equality to people, and a potential that resides in the human capacity. And at the level of everyone’s soul, I believe we are all looking for the same thing. And what is that? It’s we want to be seen. I don’t want to be seen as superior to you, nor do I want to be seen as inferior to you, right? I want the freedom to be able to express my own authentic self without any fear of judgment or condemnation or et cetera. I want to be able to assume that you have integrity in that. I want to be included, we want to be included, we want to feel physically and psychologically safe when we’re together. We don’t want to feel abused or at risk. I want to be acknowledged, and I want to be able to use my talents. I want to be able to bring my full self into whatever situation we’re talking about.
Obviously, I want to be treated fairly and I want to have others listen to me. And by the way, I’ll be accountable for my actions. I want you to help hold me accountable, right? These are—companies don’t install these descriptors or these into people, but this is how people come, right? This is how people are. We believe at EnPro, that people should—that we need to organize our governance, our ways of working, our ways of coming together as teams, our ways of interacting and communicating, and every process and practice in the company has to be aligned with the view that that’s how people are going to be treated.
We believe that people are, as we use the term inside of EnPro, hardwired to learn, that people want to be and want to learn and be challenged. This has been proven to me over, and over, and over again. I said to the guys, I said “Show me, you take me, do you think there’s somebody in our company that doesn’t have characteristics? I said, “I want you to take me to them.” Because I have not yet met the person, Tami, who wants to go home at the end of the day and say to their loved one, “You know, I was really mediocre today.” That’s not how we’re wired. We are wired for excellence. We want to be proud of ourselves. We want others to be proud of us, we want to do a good job. We tried—in EnPro, we try to design our daily work in a way that this learning muscle is always being used. It’s always being used, but it’s being used in an environment that’s very supportive. Everybody’s being authentic with each other. We’re able to give and receive assessments from each other that help us get better. And it’s not in a threatening, judgment, power-based way, right?
So when we do that, then the organization just flourishes. We do think of more creative things, we take more risks, we win more on this. The organization learned, the pace of learning inside of EnPro is phenomenal. In fact, Ed Hess, I’ve mentioned to you before, he’s a business professor down at Darden, he’s written a couple of great books—Learn or Die about companies, and then also a recent book called Humility Is the New Smart. Well, he’s working on a book right now called, it was something about hyper-learning. That’s probably the title, Hyper-Learning, and he’s going to use EnPro as one of his case examples because the individual and organizational learning is at such a fast pace, because it’s wired in to do that.
This does lead to better financial performance. It doesn’t have to be seen as “Oh, that is why we’re doing it.” It’s not why we’re doing it. We had people inside our company, and I can think of two off the top of my head. One of them was doing a great job for our company and it was the woman. She had always aspired to be a psychologist. So, we paid for her to go to school at night. She worked on it, did a great job for us while she worked at the company, was a coach, was the head of HR for one of our businesses, and volunteered at a children’s crisis center. And then when she got her degree, that’s what she went and did. And we all felt great about that, right?
We had another individual, a senior sales executive, one of our top people in the division, direct report to division president, doing fantastic, responsible for all kinds of sales, right? He went through our centerpiece leadership development program that I taught twice—I’ve told you about this. I’ve taught it twice a year with others. And was an opportunity for people to really begin looking at their selves, their own purpose, their own ego behavior, and what was really important to them and so forth. He realized that—he and his wife had adopted three Russian children several years before this. And he had told his wife when they did it, if it ever became too much for her, he would change his career and [work from home]. He had to travel a lot in this job. At this program, he realized that, that time had come. Because one of the kids in particular was a little older when he was adopted, and had issues that needed the father around. And so he left, and he stays a very good friend of mine, I talk to him frequently.
How could any organization say that’s not a good thing for this person, and humanity, and the way we want to operate? Right? When leaders have that attitude of caring, when EnPro has that attitude of caring for others and wanting to do what—wanting to support people in what they determine is best for them, that’s just a winning formula.
TS: When you look back at your 12 years at EnPro, what would you say were the practices or the new ways of operating that you’re the most proud of, that were the most innovative?
SM: Specific ways of operating? We call those practices and processes. And I think one of the most powerful is what we called authentic community building. And it’s really effective. It’s a team coming together and working effectively together. And there’s Scott Peck—M. Scott Peck was probably one of the leading developers of the community practices. We leaned heavily on him and heavily on a guy that was his understudy that we brought into the company to help us, a guy named [inaudible] who’s written stuff as well. But we learned a process called community building. And we named it that specifically because the normal language around team building and team effectiveness and so forth, has some baggage with it.
Frankly, I’ve done it both as a leader and as a participant, as a team member. I’ve done the ropes course and the this and that. It’s—generally, many people put it under the category of team building, I don’t think it works. Anyway, but community building works, and the definition of community is just, it’s very simple: a group of individuals that have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, and they have deep relationship and a significant commitment to each other. Its members will share in each other’s successes and failures. It’s a very authentic and safe environment.
If you talk to one of our people, and you’d say, “What’s it like to be part of whatever community?” Any given person would be part of a number of different teams—councils, we call them—where they would have done and actively do this community building practice. They might be on a division council that’s responsible for the leadership of a specific business or they might be on a manufacturing council, or an innovation council. And some councils come and go. Some are more permanent, they are around for a while. But if we have a specific issue that we’re going to tackle, like we need to redesign our benefits, our company benefits program, which we did a few years ago. We would create a new benefits council, it would do that task, and then it would more or less disband. And the councils are characterized by folks that can join and leave. There’s not a hard wall around it because it’s built on these principles that we’re talking about of acceptance and equality of people. It’s easy for people to join and leave without the normal social consequences of breaking up a group, or trying to join a new group or so forth.
And most people would describe those communities as, if you said, “What’s it feel like?” Well, it’s a psychologically safe environment. I’m here to support it, and everybody on the team feels equally responsible. We’ve all learned a new type of language to take ownership of our beliefs. So, we use “I” statements when we’re making a statement of how we feel about a particular issue. And there’s a number of practices associated with this, including, we will sit in a circle with chairs and no tables between us and we’ll do a meditation to start, to get everyone present in that space. Sometimes silence, sometimes guided. We will then do a check-in where we’ll have—at the end sometimes if there’s not much time, and depending on the group, we’ll do a one-word check-in where we’ll just go around and everyone will share one word that’s their current mood or what’s going on inside them. Usually, it’s a shorter, it’s a check-in that allows people to say, “Here’s what’s going on for me right now.” And then there’s a check-out at the end.
And then these rules are followed throughout the process. The whole purpose of that is so that that group has a real conversation. And it’s a full conversation happens in the room, not in the hallway or the so-called water cooler, coffee pot, et cetera. And there’s disagreement in these and everybody participates. When people leave, they feel good about the fact that they’ve been fully—they’ve had shared ownership with everyone else. They’ve been able to share what’s on their mind with the group. Typically, these groups come to an answer or direction that’s far better than any one person or two people could have developed because they kind of get in the flow. And we’ve taught everyone how to work on themselves, manage themselves in this process. We have an expression inside of EnPro that we use frequently, “Not my idea.” So when people put forth a new idea, we’ve taught folks how to not be so identified with, is that right or wrong? Am I being called out on this? Does everybody agree with me? Or whatever. It’s just an idea. It’s not my idea. It’s an idea. And folks build on that and talk about it.
We have—the power of the collective just is huge. Community can be built with small groups, and large groups, and it takes time. It takes a little bit of understanding of the methods needed to do it. It’s not 100 percent reliable, but it’s pretty reliable. I’d say, 75 or 80 percent reliable when done according to the rules and protocol and methods that we have. And when it works, it’s one of the most rewarding ways for people to come together that I’ve ever been part of, or experienced or seen.
I’d say I’d put that at the top of the list, Tami. That’s one of the practices that I’m most proud of, of how we do things, because that’s touched virtually all 6,000 of our colleagues in the company.
TS: Now, you mentioned psychological safety, and that these councils, these communities have a high level of psychological safety. There have been studies now that have shown that a success of the team, the performance of the team, the number-one factor that leads to that is psychological safety in the group. How were you able to create that at EnPro?
SM: Well, I think, again, I wouldn’t say we’re 100 percent successful, but we’re pretty darn successful at it. And I’d say we started at the top of the company, teaching—I learned in our top team we all learn together. And then we became vulnerable and exposed with this process in front of the next layer. I still remember one of our experiences, it’s called the fishbowl exercise. People in the inside of EnPro, who are still there, this would have been, gosh, probably 10 years ago now, the first time we did this. But it was our January conference, we had a top hundred people from around the world coming. The way it worked is, we sit in a circle in the middle. We had EnPro Executive Council meeting, a real meeting, not just roleplay, but we had a real meeting. And everyone else sat around and stood around the outside looking into this “fishbowl” right? We were there.
We worked on some hard issues, and we challenged each other. We went through the whole extended community-building process in front of everyone else, to role model. “OK guys, this is not just fun and games, we’re not just making people feel good.” Because normally groups come together, and we actually learned that this is what Scott Peck called “pseudocommunity.” And the characteristics of a pseudocommunity, which you’d find in almost any company, in any group that comes together over extended periods of time, they’re generally conflict avoiding and they really try to ignore, sweep under the rug, individual differences between each other, and very general blanket statements are allowed without being challenged. They’re pleasant, but often the proverbial white elephant is never named.That’s not how communities stay; authentic communities it’s the exact opposite, extremely genuine, and authentic. It’s a conflict-resolving body, where individual differences are recognized and celebrated.
So we taught it. We demonstrated it, and then we started to teach it and experiment with it. And then each of the executive council members were charged with leading both their immediate team, and then what we had—when we designed our operating system in the early days, which was what I mentioned is how we do commercial activity, manufacturing, innovation, et cetera. We had specific councils formed with folks from across the globe, call it 10 or 12 per person. And two of my team were assigned to lead each one of those and their job was to practice leading in a new way. One, they didn’t have single-point accountability, they had to share leadership with another person. And number two, there was a whole set of things that they had to practice to bring to that group the same type of community-building practice and the same type of authenticity and feel as they were experiencing in the EnPro executive council level.
That was a real challenge for them, it took a long time. It took a couple of years to work through that, in some cases. And we did keep hammering at it, and keep practicing, and keep talking about it, and practice again and practice in public, in front of other people so that when someone did hold back, they were challenged. And it slowly, very slowly but surely, I started to witness more people speaking truth to power, if you will, right? Well, there’s two sides of that coin. One is the leader has to want it and support it and it has to manage their own ego in the face of it, which is not easy. And the subordinate, the lower level person has to have the courage to speak up.
And we worked on both sides of that equation, Tami. We worked very, very hard and through these leadership development programs we did, through how we came together as an executive council on a monthly basis, and through the practice that they used with others; and then as we cascaded it down and we started to do development programs with front-line folks, we followed the same set of practices, and taught at the front level. The same kind of thing, where they were able to see the leadership role model and so forth. And then over time, over my time there as I encountered—and other leaders, as we as a collective, encountered folks that could not make this type of transition quick enough to meet our needs, and they held positions of power, they left the company. That was a big part of it, too.
TS: You mentioned as the leader that you had to welcome—that’s my word, but people speaking truth to power, you had to create receptivity for that. What’s the journey you had to go through, Steve? Very personally in working with your own ego patterns, such that you were receptive in that way?
SM: Yes. I think it’s started, Tami, with—I went to a nine-day program at an organization called Learning as Leadership, it’s called Personal Mastery. And it was a nine-day program for us, to each of the—I went basically by myself with—this is with the company right before I joined EnPro. I was CEO of another company when I learned about this. And went to this program, these nine days are very intensive. But what we did is a very, very detailed self-diagnosis of all of our past and our ego patterns. They have a very, very rigorous methodology to map this out in this series of charts that all connect.
But basically what it is, is it’s going back anyone who’s been through psychotherapy, I would imagine is very similar to this. I’ve never done that, but I view this as psychotherapy for more or less healthy people. And going back through all the different emotional events, that happened to us when we were young, mostly from our caregivers, our parents, and our family situation, families of origin. But also other sites of shaping as the Strozzi would refer to them, of authority figures and so forth. And we form these patterns of, way of behaving. Now, of course, this program starts with an extensive 360 that’s done by one of the LAL team, interviewing a person’s feedback partners. And in my case, it included my wife and people I’ve worked closely with. And it’s a pretty tough process because they don’t spend a ton of time talking about strengths. Most of it is about development needs.
And what I learned in that process was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m really not, I’m not coming across with others.” I’m not working with them in a way that quite frankly, I was very proud of. And even though I was a pretty darn good, I thought I was a pretty darn good leader at the time. I wasn’t abusive or anything like that, but it’s just the subtle things of—I was never listened to as a child, so I want to be the one with the answers. I want to be that’s smart. I’m trying to prove myself. And I don’t like conflict, and I don’t know—if I had a nickel for every time my mother said, “If you don’t have something nice to say about somebody don’t say it,” which was one of the societal values of the time and I came up learning this. So when I had to give one of my team members constructive feedback, it was very, very difficult for me. And I was always looking for a way to ease out of that. “Well, people know that, right?”
So this is the kind of feedback that was coming to me. When I went into the program in the beginning, I was ready to try to understand what this was like. It was an inflection point in my life. I really learned a lot about myself—why was I so emotionally closed, and why did I do all these things? And that really started me down a path, and then we sent other people from that company, and I saw them beginning to work on their own patterns. And I saw the organization begin to just soften the political lines, the [inaudible].
And that was a different company that I think about a year after I went to the program, I ended up leaving the company to join EnPro as the CEO. The LAL organization has been a big part of our journey as well. So while all this other stuff I was mentioning was going on, we were sending individuals from the leadership, that we’ve sent 60 or 70 people over the years, over these 10-plus years we’ve sent out to LAL for this nine-day program. It’s expensive so it was only those—we can only afford to do it for those where we had a lot of leverage. So all our division presidents, all my team has been, all the next-level down leaders of the divisions have been. And then they had a program called Shared Mastery where you would go as a team, and I took the initial team there. Then as the team changed over a number of years later, I took the team back. That’s a five-day program and really works more on the type of community. All the participants do individual work as well, but there’s the whole group working together, sharing what they’re learning about themselves and talking about how do these dynamics show up with each other.
Once I started down that path, I became more and more interested in that. I think it’s gotten more general business press. Some number of years after that, Kegan and Lahey came out with Immunity to Change, which speaks directly to that phenomenon. And the more I learned about—then when I started to understand the power of reflection and quiet time, and started meditating again—I had meditated younger when I learned it, it was long, long time ago. But I had come in and out of the practice over the years. And when I started studying the work of Dan Siegel, which I studied a lot of his stuff, much of it, as you know, through Sounds True. I started to realize, whoa, this is not just—this is essential for brain health, and clarity of thinking, and clarity of purpose and direction, and so forth.
So I started doing that, which then took me more into my own I would call spiritual growth, spiritual journey, where I began to try to really deeply clarify what was important to me and challenge many of my own mental models and beliefs of some of the past, perhaps more dogmatic ways of thinking about things, into a much more softer and universal and spiritual way of thinking about the world and the universe. As part of our program at EnPro, a big part of it was about, what we came to call accessing Source, which is really what Joseph Jaworski has written so much about in his book, first Synchronicity, and then, the book is called Source, right? Which is tapping into what he would describe as “the implicate order,” the knowledge contained in the universe looking to emerge.
And that’s what the whole, U Theory and Otto Scharmer is all about. So we brought Otto in and he taught us all how to follow a U process, that really helps individuals work to tap their intuition because of this source of knowledge there, in solving problems, and seeing emerging futures. It all then began to build on each other and it all kind of fits together—at least in my own mind, it may not be coming out that way.
TS: Steve, one of the things that’s so interesting to me when you talk about accessing source and tapping intuition; I imagine employees being trained in that if they’re working in Silicon Valley, they have to learn mindfulness meditation, and know what’s emerging in the fields for the future. But here you are, you have 6,000-plus factory workers, and you’re teaching them meditation and how to access Source and intuition to improve the quality and their performance and their own depth of experience working in manufacturing plants. And that’s what is so astounding to me. How were you able to introduce meditation at that level to factory workers?
SM: Yes. That was a challenge, still is a challenge. Some hardcore—it takes some time for folks to get a little bit more comfortable with it. We don’t push, we have a centering, as we call it, at the beginning of team meetings, where in the beginning there’s just three minutes of silence for everyone to just collect together. But going into the, as it’s called, the implicate order, it sounds too fancy, right? If you read a normal business book, it would call “entering the state of flow as a team.” Well, how do you do that? Well, it requires this authentic community context as well, right? I don’t care what one would call it. But it has to be an environment of psychological safety. It has to be an environment where people are all participating, where they feel ownership, et cetera. That then, along with the quiet time, the reflection, not always being in a hurry, allowing everybody to talk, slowing down the mental process, building on each other, and so forth and so on. It emerges, it emerges over time. And the more folks do it, the more comfortable they become.
I could tell you so many fun examples, Tami, that I have of… I’m thinking of manufacturing process right now where we make one of our flagship sealing products up in Palmyra, New York, called GYLON. And it’s cut into gaskets that are used in—it’s the best in the industry used in high performance, high temperature, and highly corrosive environments. And it basically seals two gaskets in some kind of a pipeline system with a chemical or something that you don’t want to leak, it can’t leak. And we would produce it in big sheets, and then we send these sheets out to gasket cutters around the country who are our distributors, and they cut it into gaskets and deliver it to chemical plants. And for years, the years when I got there, they had always struggled with these big sheets there. I don’t remember exactly how big but they might be, 80 inches across the width and maybe—it’s called an 80 by 80 inches, so they’re big sheets. But they would come out very wavy. And that would come and go, and we could never solve the problem through the traditional problem-solving tools.
Well, in these problem-solving tools, what you would see in many organizations are engineers leading a sophisticated design of experiments type of method, and getting people, putting in the ideas in, et cetera, et cetera. Well, finally, we approached it with this new way of thinking—this has been a number of years now—and sure enough, the team came up with a way to permanently solve the problem. We haven’t had a problem for, I can’t even remember, either five, six years.
So here’s a process, it’s been around for 30 years, Tami, of how we do this. And it was one of these things where it’s more art than science and so forth. And people run it different—these are the things you run into in practice. We’re in the truck parts business, we make parts for the wheel end of semi trucks, the oil fields, and hubcaps, and braking systems, and suspension and so forth, everything that would go into the wheel end of a class-A commercial vehicle, right? That business has been around for probably 60 years. And we’ve been producing these core products for a long time. One year, that team introduced 12 new products. Where did they come from? I’ve never even thought of 12. It got all introduced into the marketplace in one year, and this was just one year. And when we first started this new way of thinking about innovation and bringing people together, and frankly got comfortable with more risk, with the organization taking more risk because we trusted people more.
TS: Now, interestingly, you said just specifically about the meditation practice that you’ve introduced in these groups, you call it centering. That makes a lot of sense to me. But then you said three minutes of silence or a guided practice. You know, at Sounds True we do a one-minute, “good minute” practice. And what I noticed, especially with new people, is at about 30 seconds, you can see people starting to squirm. One minute, and this is at Sounds True in Boulder, Colorado! Three minutes of silence, that’s a long time, Steve, for a lot of people.
SM: Yes. Yes. It is. It is. Yes. Yes. It’s great. It’s great. Seriously though, when did our society get to a point where an individual that’s in a group of people has to feel uncomfortable sitting with their eyes closed for three minutes of silence? When did that happen? Because I don’t think it’s good for our society. I think that people to be with themselves and be comfortable with themselves and comfortable with their own interior world, it’s just such a huge gift to give people. And it’s not something to be feared or avoided. It’s something to be embraced and celebrated. And, oh my gosh, yes, all this stuff is going on, all this mental mind chatter. What’s it all mean? How does it drive me? All these kinds of things, this is what we talk about. So anyway, go ahead.
TS: Let’s take this one more moment, Steve. How did you get thousands of people comfortable with this? “What kind of—I mean, centering, I get that language. How else are you indoctrinating me into a cult? I’m not comfortable with this. This is religious.” All the normal objections that people have.
SM: Yes. Well, we didn’t start it across the board on day one. We started with the senior team. We practiced over time. We cascaded it down. It fit into the larger purpose of what we were trying to do with the company and shape the company, so folks saw others do it. Then when we got to individual factories, we would typically, we’d form up into what we call core teams, which were folks that would begin to come together in this council format that I just described. And we would start slowly at a site. We didn’t really force people; we said, “Here’s what we’re going to do,” and we had enough courageous people that led in that, and I don’t mean leaders, I mean front-line operators and so forth. And as we started to have successes, we talked about it, and brought more visibility to it. It became more common, it would spread at that site. We would share it across other sites.
I’ll give you an example. There’s no rocket science here, it’s just sticking to it over a long period of time. But it was so rewarding because as a CEO, most of the times when I hear from the front-line person, it’s not good news, right? It’s a complaint about something or whatnot. So, one time I go into my office—this is, we were probably two years into our transformation. And we had rolled it out, we’d started at the top, and I went around and did a series of community-building sessions with cross-functional folks. Kind of a diagonal slice, if you will. I would go to a given site, depending on its size, and I would spend a day, and I would run four community-building practices.
And I would start those, Tami, by reading “The Rabbi’s Gift, ” which is the preface to Scott’s textbook, The Different Drum. And it really is a mythical story about acceptance of others, no matter what they bring to the table. It’s a very good little—it’s a short little story, takes about five minutes to read. And after getting the group together, we would do a centering that I would lead. Many times, this was their first experience with the centering. We’d do a centering, and then I would read this story. And then I would just sit there and I would start by saying, “How did that strike you?” And I would redirect the conversation into the middle of the room instead of with me. And there might be 15 to 20 people in the room. And folks would start talking about it. What was meaningful to them in this story, what were the insights they gained, what did they like about it, what did they not like about it, and so forth. So, they could be honest talking about just a mythical story, right?
And then after maybe 20, 25 minutes of that, I would say to them, “What would it mean to create…” so for that 20 to 25 minutes, I haven’t said a word. And if there’s silence—if somebody says something, one of the principles of community building is to respect silence. So I literally would not say a word—we’d sometimes sit there for five, seven minutes before the next person would chime in. But slowly, people would realize, OK, I’m going to share something, Talk about pregnant pauses, this was it! So then, after about 20, 25 minutes in I would say, “Well, what would it be like to have that type of environment here at work?” That’s the only question I would pose.
And then the group would start talking about what was really going on in their group in that site. Now here we have people—supervisors, department leaders, hourly folks from all across—start having, for the first time ever, an honest conversation, and it wasn’t a gripe session. It was an honest conversation about what it’s like to work there. And then they would go on for some period of time and I would then begin to engage, to have people begin to, as they felt more comfortable, begin to elaborate on different things.
Anyway, I did that with a group at one of these sites and then—and it had to be probably six or nine months later. I’m in my office in Charlotte, I go into my room, I’ve got a voicemail. I listen to the voicemail, and it’s this guy, he says, “Steve, you don’t know me. My name is Gregory Johnson, and I work in the high-pressure sheet group.” Again, this is also up in Palmyra, New York. “And I’ve been here, I’ve been in this company for 25 years. You don’t know me and I just thought you should know, it’s working. You came up here six or nine months ago and read us a story about the rabbi. And I just thought somebody should tell you, it’s working.”
And then he hung up, that was it. And so my next visit—I think I called him, and got him on the phone, and I went up there not too long after that for a visit, and sat down with him and other members of that team. And I said, “What’s going on, guys?” And they were—I mean to a person in that team, they were excited. They said, “The whole place is—we feel like we’re owners of this, we get to work on the things that we think are important. We’re changing it, we’re making it better. And by the way, we’re producing more sheets, our costs are down,” et cetera, et cetera. Now that’s after a lot of work with the division president and all the leaders between the division president and this team. And this is a couple of years into it.
So what I did Tami—you said, how did we get this kind of practice spread around? I did a global town hall meeting from that site with that team. And so here we are, we did virtual town hall meetings. And I was sitting there with those guys. I said, “OK, guys, tell me what you’re so excited about. What you’ve been doing? How you been working together? What do you think about it,” right? And then they’re able to ask questions of them, their colleagues are able ask questions that you normally wouldn’t ask in front of the boss, because they might embarrass the boss. Questions like, “What are you doing with all that meditation crap? How’s that working? I don’t like that.”
And they’d say, “Well, we center, and we’ve grown to think it’s helpful to us because we just calm down. We’re coming in off the floor, we’re meeting in the room, it’s good to just take some time to settle in. And yes, we like to check in because we get to find out what’s going on. We know each other, we know our colleagues better now. We’ve worked with them for 25 years, and we know them better now after a few months of doing this than we have in 25 years. That doesn’t mean we necessarily are friends who are going to go hang out outside the workplace, but by gosh, we can work together.” This is the kind of things we’d hear, and this is all on a town hall we actually did. And so others around the world see this as their own people speaking to them, and they’re able to say—it gets a little bit more credibility.
So, it’s all of these pieces, Tami, that have to be consistently done over many, many years to really move an organization of our size and complexity, because as you know, we’re spread out all over the world.
TS: Well you know, as I mentioned in the beginning, Steve, I find you a very unusual person, and so grateful for our relationship, and grateful that you are a contributing faculty member to the Inner MBA. You’ll be teaching on authentic community-building as part of the virtual program of the Inner MBA. It’s a nine-month certificate program. Sounds True has created it in partnership with LinkedIn, Wisdom 2.0, and graduates get a certificate from a division of NYU called MindfulNYU. The program begins in September of this year 2020, it runs through May of 2021. And for people who are interested, you can find out more at innermbaprogram.com.
Steve, before we conclude our conversation, just one final question for you. The Inner MBA is designed for business professionals to come and have nine months of the type of training you’ve been pointing to, as you talk about the transformation that you’ve led at EnPro. And when you gave a talk recently at the Inner MBA hub at the recent Wisdom 2.0 conference, you talked about what you called a leader’s “essential development imperative.” And really what you pointed to, and this is a quote, that “Whatever the level of development of the leader is, of any unit, of any manufacturing plant, of any division or company, that sets the limit to the development level of that organizational group.” And to end our conversation, I wonder if you could just comment on that point. Because I think sometimes people think, “Well, the organization, it can grow and it can thrive even if the leader is unconscious and XYZ, or not committed to the development.” But you’re pointing to something quite different here.
SM: Yes, and that’s not something I’ve ever—I don’t remember ever reading. It’s something that I’ve come to just in my observation. And again, it’s, as I call it, the collective development of the organization, not necessarily the development level of any individual in that group. But whether it’s a plant and there’s a plant manager or a shift supervisor, or as you said, a company in our division, the division president, it’s just that in the model that we haveand we don’t have time now to talk about self-management and so forth, but we just live in a society and in our companies where there is some level of hierarchical structure. And I don’t think it’s bad, it’s an efficient way to organize and conduct things. And leaders have a real role to play, but because of the power and authority that goes along with that role—and sometimes it’s visible and you can see it, sometimes it’s very, very subtle. But because of that, I’ve just come to have a strong point of view that that leader, wherever they are in their inner capacity, in the inner development level, sets the cap on that organization.
That’s why I’ve been so excited about the Inner MBA since you first told me about it, some number of of months ago. Because it’s exactly, exactly the types of behaviors and insights and practice that we’ve been working on for a decade at EnPro. I hope people see it for what it is, but if someone really aspires to have a great organization, this type of work, whether they do the Inner MBA or do it some other way, is absolutely essential in my view.
TS: And, Steve, when you say a leader’s inner development, I just want you to define that, if you will, how you would define that for our listeners. I think sometimes people hear that and are like, “What? Inner development? That sounds a little vague.” What is that?
SM: Yes, well, when I was speaking out there at the hub, I used a guy named Barrett Brown’s definition, and he called it “vertical learning.” And it really is how someone thinks, how someone interprets situations, how a person handles complexity and ambiguity, how a person cultivates relationships and works in—it’s basically their own operating system, right? Just like a PC, if you want to draw an analogy. It’s the operating system of a leader, and it is driven by these unconscious drivers of the ego that need to be sorted out and understood, it’s driven by the clarity that leader has around what they want to create, and where that comes from in them. That’s very deep work, that’s very personal work. And so, very reflective and contemplative type of work to come to this, right? And that’s what then ends up inspiring and motivating, creating a better kind of great, enduring organization. That’s how I think about the notion of inner development, Tami.
TS: Again, I’ve been speaking with Steve Macadam, he’s one of the CEOs and conscious business trainers who are participating in Sounds True new Inner MBA program. And if you want to find out more, just go to innermbaprogram.com. Steve, thank you for your friendship and for all that I learned from you, and such a joy to be able to share with you with the Insights at the Edge audience. Thank you.
SM: Thank you, Tami.
TS: Thank you for listening to Insights at gthe Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at soundstrue.com/podcast. And if you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app. And also if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you, and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together, I believe we can create a kinder and wiser world. SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.
