Spotlights: C-Suite and really, really good at developing in their career. That way we can keep them here, keep them engaged, and keep them growing personally, profes- sionally and financially. HM: Your company recently launched a new Diversity Equity and Inclusion Services Division. What are your hopes for this di- vision, and will it operate differ- ently from other divisions in the company? BB: The division you’re talking about is slightly different than our own internal efforts around DE&I. This is around helping companies and our customers grapple with DE&I, and learn how to introduce DE&I practices into their own companies. Implicit bias training for leaders,
hiring practices and things of that nature is still very much a new and emerging world. We have over 4,000 customers, and many of them are still in the very early innings of incorporating the right DE&I practices, so we do see that as an opportunity to help our customers get better there. It’ll be a separate revenue stream, and that’s great, but we’re not doing this for the revenue opportunities here. We’re doing it because we think it’s in line with our purpose, and it’s in line with helping our customers create really, really good work environments that help their people live better lives at work. HM: What’s a typical workday like for you as CEO? What do you find most challenging about the job? BB: I’m certainly a big believer in habits. I’m a big believer in getting into really strong habits that are repeatable. Every morning I get up around 5 a.m. I work out every
morning, I journal every morning, I have quiet time every morning, I make my to-do list, and then I get into my day. Some days are a little bit more rou- tine than others, in terms of meeting cadence and that sort of thing, but at the end of the day, as a CEO I’m constantly living with one foot in the present and one in the future. My team and I focus on solving problems today and ones we anticipate in the future. We ask ourselves: How do we envision a future place and lay the groundwork today in the form of projects, implementing strategies, or how we hire, that could help prepare us for the future? HM: Among your company’s stated shared values are “Leadership is here to serve” and “Always know where you stand.” Could you talk a little bit more about what those mean in practical daily work terms, and how they influence the way the company operates? BB: Our five shared values are ev- erything to us, and we actually didn’t discover those until September 2018. It was my first year as CEO, and our turnover had gotten to a point in the previous four years where it was really out of hand. Our culture was not great, our turnover was incredibly high, people were not getting success- ful. It was a little bit of a dark time in the company. We had scaled to a point where a lot of the things we’d done as a smaller company were no longer working. I believe that every company has an inner voice to it. Every sports team, every organization, has an inner voice. As leaders, we get the opportunity to listen to that voice or not. To me, that inner voice was shout- ing at me, saying, “I don’t like you, I don’t want to work here anymore, and
20 Harbert Business, Fall 2022
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