Leading In The Time Of Virus
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 204: Brad Hiranaga
This episode is our fourth of Season 2, which we’ve sub-titled, “Leading In the Time of Virus”.
These are shorter, focused conversations in which we discover how some of the world’s most innovative and creative leaders are adapting their leadership to our new reality.
These people are among the world’s best problem solvers.
This episode is a conversation with Brad Hiranaga of General Mills - one of the most human leaders I know.
Brad talks about casting the right personalities as well as the right skills in a virtual office, about the need to take time to connect with people on a personal level and about how companies will need to evolve if they’re to become part of the new society that is already being formed.
Here’s Brad Hiranaga.
Charles: (00:56)
Brad, welcome back to Fearless. Thanks so much for coming back on the show and for coming back on so quickly. Neither one of us two months ago when we recorded the last episode had any idea we'd be sitting here today obviously. So crazy how fast the world has changed.
Brad Hiranaga: (01:08)
It doesn't seem like that was two months ago. It's funny how fast time has definitely flown. But thank you for having me back. I appreciate it.
Charles: (01:15)
Yeah, absolutely. Tell us where you are at the moment and what your situation is.
Brad Hiranaga: (01:19)
Yeah, so I'm in Minneapolis and we at General Mills had moved to a work from home policy about, I can't even remember now, about two weeks ago, or maybe it was two years ago, I'm not sure. One of the two. It was two weeks ago. So everyone that could and was able to move and work from home remotely went to that. So I've been here in Minneapolis and school for my kids also was paused the same time.
So feeling really fortunate that have obviously a place to stay that's safe and access to food and family is doing well and finding new ways to connect. But so I feel very fortunate about that. Then it's been interesting because we obviously, I work for a company that makes food for a lot of people across the globe. So the places for us that have had to stay open are the plants.
So those folks are the ones that are still having to go into work every day and ensure that they can manufacture the food and get it to trucks and then get it to our customers. But everybody else, and I'm really proud of the way that General Mills has led that. The employee safety's always been a huge priority and they've shown that in the actions that we've taken over the last couple of weeks.
Charles: (02:33)
Yeah. I mean I think it's a great point that the heroism of people who are just going about doing what three weeks ago was their regular job, but now are very much on the front lines of supporting society and making sure society still continues. It cannot be underestimated. It's just extraordinary how the sacrifices those people are making.
Brad Hiranaga: (02:51)
I think you just said two things that stick with me. The heroic actions that people are taking and then also the folks in the front lines. So I know a lot of the people that we see everyday on the news that are in healthcare, doctors and nurses and health administrators are working around the clock. Then also a group that we're highly supportive of and teachers are also having to pivot and change the way that they do their classes and ensure that kids are getting educated.
So those are a couple of groups. But a group that probably doesn't get as much credit just because of where they sit but plays that same type of heroic role are folks that are working in these industries that have to have things that are still made and produced. I couldn't be more proud of the people that are having to go into work every day, run lines that would make Cheerios and Nature Valley granola bars and all the food that we make, to get it out into people's grocery stores.
They can buy it or they can pick it up. It's been funny because we have this purpose at General Mills that's about we're here to make food that the world loves. Our CEO, Jeff Harmony just recently pivoted that and said, "Right now we're here to make food that the world needs." That to me has been highly motivating. I think you always feel that, I mean, working for these companies and you feel a sense of purpose.
We've talked a lot about purpose in marketing over the years, but I think it's been a lot of times it comes out on the other end as a way to create a marketing campaign. But this is the true time where you're actually seeing, I think, purpose in action for these companies organizationally that are operating at a way that it affects everything that they do.
So that part of it for me is just been really cool to see how you can, in every action that we take, whether it's employee safety or working really closely with customers to get things out into the market at the pace they need to get food on the shelves, to just pivoting the way policies and changing things the way we do things that no longer make sense in this current world.
To be better for employees and be better for our business, it's been fascinating to watch.
Charles: (04:51)
Yeah, it's interesting isn't it? Because you're right, we're working at two speeds. You and I were just talking about the fact that we're living through the longest month in history. This March will not end.
Brad Hiranaga: (05:00)
Endless March.
Charles: (05:01)
Yeah, endless March. And yet things are changing so dynamically, almost every hour it seems. It's a hard reality to come to terms with, I think.
Brad Hiranaga: (05:09)
Definitely it is. I think that your theme on leadership and as you and I've talked a lot about that, I think that that's creating a different kind of need for leadership and expectation for leadership. I know working from home for lots of us is challenging in different ways.
But I do think on the other side of that is opportunities for us to, at least for me, is to figure out ways that I need to connect more. So we've been trying to figure out different ways to connect with our team, even as a leadership team, by using technology and making sure that we can have visual contact of one another. But also having a cadence that's much more regular and much faster just because you don't get that same day to day contact.
So even things where we'd have a leadership team meeting once a week or once every two weeks that's moved to multiple times, if not every day a week, just to keep things clicking along. I think that those fast-paced kind of quick check-ins and moving stuff forward and making sure we're making decisions in those meetings. Those are things that I hope that we take forward with us as we move into the next phase of hopefully coming back to work in a more regular way.
But I've also just really started to see, and I feel the same way too as I look at other leaders, that you really need to have that connection and this humanization of people that's coming out, is really I think obviously a basic need for people that crave that. I know I even crave that too. Seeing people in their homes and where they're sitting. Showing off their pets and talking about their kids or their spouses.
Hearing people in a obviously much more human time, where people are being impacted and affected by this and how they're sharing more of their true selves. This idea then that type of leadership is more humanized and there's more empathy and I can relate to other people on what they're going through and we can kind of share a deeper connection. I just think that that is such a positive piece that's come from all of this that I know I've been really excited about.
Even in my communication that I do with my teams, I try to show more of that off. It's funny, you could speak for three minutes on all sorts of business topics and it's funny, I just did a video last week for my team and I was talking about how I'm taking up new instruments or I'm trying to learn a language and that's what everyone wants to talk about. Business stuff was kind of way more secondary as well.
Oh, I'm learning to do this language or my son's trying to pickup and do the trumpet and blah blah. I think that's so cool. That's how people want to engage with one another. So how I can take that forward in terms of how I lead and make that more personal connection I think is going to be something that I've taken from rest of what's been a really trying time.
Charles: (07:44)
Do you feel like you know people better?
Brad Hiranaga: (07:48)
I think, yeah, in some cases, yes, in some cases there, completely differently. It was easy I think when this first started to really get really internal about, oh, how's this going to affect me and my family? Or how's this going to personally, like how am I going to do my job? What I started to realize is once you start asking the questions a little bit, you think everyone's affected the same way, as I went into it.
All of a sudden you started hearing people talking like, “Well, my husband's going to lose his job and he works in the film industry and they're going to be shutting down.” Or, “We both work and my husband or my wife is a doctor and now we don't know how to do, I can only work from 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM and my kids are going to be here all the time.” So I think other parts of their lives, which maybe weren't at the forefront or just didn't come up in natural conversations, are now more the center of the conversation.
We talk about that first versus jumping in and talking about what's the objective on the business list that we're trying to crank through. I know even in our calls that we do, I'd say almost every single call, it's almost a check-in with everybody, which is great. I mean that's how they talk about in relationships. It's always good to have check-ins and see how each person's doing.
I think that's almost the natural cause of that, is it's a very human way to start a meeting is like, how's everyone doing? Does anybody need anything? Is everyone okay? That is opened up I think, a lot of conversations that I definitely didn't have in a regular work cadence that I was going through when things were previous to this whole virus outbreak. That part's been really cool.
Charles: (09:20)
One of the things I've heard from other people is how they are changing the way they empower leaders that work for them. Empower teams to move, because you can't sit there and you don't have the same level of control or visibility on stuff. So that process is about you getting clear with yourself, I imagine, to begin with, about what are the guard rails and defining them perhaps in a different way than you've had to before.
Brad Hiranaga: (09:40)
Yeah. Much more I think with much more clarity, with much more simplicity, with more intention, whether it be a crisis or whether it just not being able to be there day to day with people where you're working through it. I think it's been something that myself for sure and that our team has really been specific about setting. Again, working for a company where things are decentralized and where you have lots of teams, it's easier to influence more softly through the way that we work.
Now what we've said is, "You know what, we're going to have to be much more overt." Because people otherwise that are working remotely are going to otherwise that they're interpreting things, are trying to make decisions off of softer types of recommendations in what we're saying. So that shift I think to being much more deliberate about those things and driving clarity has been really important. One of the things that's on my mind a lot right now is, as people are wanting to stock up on food or ensure that they can get food delivered in the safest way.
More people are migrating online to buy groceries than ever. So from my perspective, it's, okay, are we prepared for that? How do we get prepared for that much more quickly if we're going to see a much bigger hockey stick ramp up of people adopting that behavior? Because once they go online and see how easy it is and much more convenient is to purchase things, they're going to get in a routinized behavior of that. We need to be there prepared so that when those trends change, we're ahead of the curve.
My team and I are talking about that a lot because we want to make sure that we're not reacting to things but proactively providing solutions to consumers and our customers to be ready for that. So that for sure, has been I think, a shift for even as I look to plans that we had already put down in place three months ago. It's like, well those plans are not good anymore. We're going to have to shift this because this is going to be a much bigger change and consumers are changing way more quickly. The silver lining of this is that, those are behaviors that I think are going to change. Marketing is going to get modernized way faster than ever before through this crisis and online shopping is just one of those dimensions.
But I think that there are shifts that are happening that I feel actually very excited about because I think it's on the other side be a lot better in terms of how we build brands.
Charles: (11:48)
One of the attributes that somebody talked to me about the other day that I thought was really interesting was that they said, "We're starting to think about the different characteristics and personalities of people and how they show up in group dynamics. They said, "Sometimes we're bringing in people into a group in which they are not necessarily the skill that we need or they don't have the expertise or they're not responsible for an area, but their personality is so positive and so uplifting that we just liked the energy that they bring to this particular group or this particular situation." Have you started thinking about the same kinds of things? Are you starting to cast differently?
Brad Hiranaga: (12:24)
Yeah. I mean for sure. I think that's something that I feel in my career I've been a huge proponent of is, to your point, not just the right capabilities and skillset, but getting the right type of leadership skills that will add to a group in a way that makes it stronger, better, more cohesive. It's funny when you talk about that in like a sports analogy.
You almost call those people like the glue person that can kind of glue the team together and think about things that adds a different perspective or a different positive spin on everything that you're looking for. For sure, I think that is so important. We were in a leadership team meeting the other day and we were saying, as we look at jobs of the future, it's not necessarily just about the skill set and the capability. The role we're looking to fill needs to always be filled by an amazing leader. An amazing person that comes in and brings that care kind of first. That has to be the priority for things.
I don't want to say that's a shift to that, because I think that's always been important. But for sure in today's day and age, I think that's even more important than ever. It's to your point, cast those types of people and put them in those types of roles. Because generally speaking people can pick up the skills and stuff that they need to round themselves out and they wouldn't have gotten that far in their career as a leader, I think without having them.
But certainly as they get further along in their career, those are the things that people are looking for. In times like this, I do think those are the people that shine really brightly and that you're super happy that you have on those teams that can lead in different ways. I see that across our teams right now, leaders that are stepping up and doing things that I'm stealing from them.
Because I'm like, wow, this is a really great way to capture this sentiment or this is a really great way to tell the story or this is really a great way to lead through challenge. I don't think that's ever more important than it is right now. I thought you might be going with a slightly different angle on the question which was, I know our team right now, which is top of mind around how people on the leadership team, process information and need to see different things that will convince them or ways that they will be comfortable making decisions.
I know there's tons of different ways to lead, with Myers-Briggs and all sorts of different models that are out there. But we had done one recently where we went in and it was this Prouty method that we used and it was like blue, red, yellow and green. It was funny, because in our group of marketing, there's a lot of people that I think lead with yellow, which is all about leading with like ideas and inspiration and all that sort of thing.
But in most organizations there's a lot of people that kind of lead with blue, which is more about data and logic and ensuring that you got the right information. Then the other, green is people and red is more of like action. So we had a mix on our team. But I think naturally, we have more people that are drawn to yellow, which is ideas at the end. What I found about this is, that in this kind of time, most day to day stuff in a business I think is very blue, very driven by data and logic and here's what the numbers are and then here's red, here's what the action is.
I think that's true and that's necessary, this is to say that you need all of them. But I also think in this time what I've seen flip, over the last two weeks even, is people are looking for that green and yellow. First and foremost, how are people doing? Then secondly, let's give some optimism and some ideas and some inspiration. So it's been fun to see different leaders flex those things in different ways as we've gone through this and the folks, and I think in most organizations kind of take a step back to the data and the action plan, to being about the people and the ideas. In this instance I think that those people have stepped forward. So I'm really happy that we have a mix of everything because you need them all. I love your word of casting. I think we've cast the right people to do that. I think it's important for every team to have a mix of those folks that can step up in a situation like this.
Charles: (16:17)
So in fact, you're seeing innovation and creativity coming through because those are the people that are kind of leaning into the possibilities created by the restraints of this current situation.
Brad Hiranaga: (16:27)
100%. It almost feels a little bad as a leader to say, well, here's all the opportunity in this. You and I might have talked about this. I heard this great quote the other day from one of our leaders at General Mills who was actually in the China region. He had said, “In the Chinese alphabet, the symbol for crisis is danger plus opportunity.” Once in a while you hear one of those types of sayings, you're like, wow, that really just stuck with me.
For myself as a leader, I am always looking for opportunity and I'm always looking for the silver lining. In some cases when business hasn't gone as well or projects haven't gone as well in our company, I'm always like, okay, what could we do better? What's the opportunity to almost judo move ourselves out of this and use the inertia of negative to create positive?
I think in this case, there's a lot of opportunity to create positive for work. How we communicate, how we humanize our leadership, how companies need to show up. You talked a little about just basic shifts that people buying more food online. But the more fundamental thing I think, I'm more energized as by a leader is, is how we have to humanize these companies.
Where companies I think before were like, we're shifting what we want to tell you out. I think as organizations, we really need to listen to what communities and consumers and partners are telling us and pull that in and really reflect that in the way that we do our business. So whether you call it humanized growth or whatever you call it, where you truly are understanding people and what they need and at the very depths of them to say, okay, these are things that we as a company can do to truly solve these problems and be really human led.
I think that whether you're in frontline work right now, like creating healthcare equipment, or if you're creating food or if you're in technology or whatever, this humanized growth, this element, instead of being one of the nice things you do down the list of things that you check off. I think it becomes front and center of how every company has to operate and what consumers who are going to be putting their dollars and being loyal to will expect.
That's what I'm really excited about because I felt that that was always the way forward in how you build brands and your businesses. But sometimes I think that gets lost and we make sacrifices at the cost of that. Now I feel like if we don't operate that as the true North Star and first and foremost, it's going to be really difficult I think, to be a business that's going to be successful in not having that mentality.
Charles: (18:57)
I think we both believe this, that what we come out of this with is a much more caring society because we've all discovered how fragile, what we all thought was going to be true and how we all had this belief that the future was inevitable. If we did the right things, if we were smarter, if we worked harder, if we took better risks, that we would somehow come out ahead and suddenly none of that is true, in fact. All of this can get taken away in 14 days. The lives we had ahead of us were gone. We'll never be the same again. There's no possibility that what we had a month ago is coming back in that way. We'll be different in many, many ways.
Brad Hiranaga: (19:37)
You're absolutely right. I mean, just to think about the nature and how quickly the world can change any of this has just been, at least in my life, the prime example of that. The interesting thing though with these challenges, and I like how you positioned the things that have changed but then also where the true colors of organizations or companies that can help really show up.
This creates a dynamic for that. I mean there's so many companies and leaders that are stepping up right now. Watching different governors that we know nothing about, now leading different things in ways and becoming almost these heroes across the way that politics has really been lacking maybe for a while, I think has been fascinating. For me when I look at even General Mills as a company, we tell a lot of stories internally about things that happened decades, the company's been around for 150 years.
But there's a story that was told about Cadwallader Washburn who was one of the founders and the plant he was operating on the Mississippi river exploded and it killed some employees. So they were obviously devastated by that. So they did a lot of work to figure out, “How do we improve plant safety and employee safety?” Once they figured out a lot of these really great processes and practices, they not only kept them for the company, they actually shared them with the industry broadly. It was about this idea of kindness and goodness.
It's not just for yourself. It’s the effect that you can have, this amplifier exponential effect, share it. I think right now what's happening based off of the last couple of weeks and what's going to happen in the future, is that the work that companies can do can be the legacy that they provide for future generations to talk about. I know even as our company goes through, there's donations that General Mills is making to food grants and those types of things.
Just keeping its lights on and making sure that we can actually provide food is a huge deal. But one in particular that was really cool the other day that I heard about, these stories are everywhere, is that from folks that are on WIC, the Women and Children Act, that it can only buy certain products in a grocery store and they're very limited to what they can buy and what they're allowed to buy on subsidy.
General Mills is actually prioritizing, making those products so that those don't run out of inventory. It's things like that, that when I hear that and when we push for those things, it's so exciting and cool to see that those will be stories I think that will last and go on forever and ever. Without crisis sometimes I think I'm very guilty of this. You just get this monotonous thing of like the day to day happens and you work through it.
But it almost, again, not to make this all about silver lining and opportunity in the future, but it almost seems that sometimes something like this kind of jolts you out of that like, okay, what are we actually here for to do? How do we make a difference and what kinds of things can we do when you're really pressured to make decisions?
That's the kind of stuff that I really feel is going to be exciting to look back on and say, as a leader or as a team or as a company, we did this, and tell future generations that those are the DNA fibers that the organization they choose to work for really have in their system.
Charles: (22:42)
Yeah, I think that's so well said. As you know, I think one of my focus reference points on this podcast has been talking to leaders about, “What is your intention? What difference are you trying to make? What legacy do you want to leave behind?” I think that the Coronavirus will create much more focus and awareness among leaders of those questions and will, I think, help them to come up with more meaningful answers that I think many leaders will be willing to invest in until this point.
Thank you so much for joining me today, Brad. Great conversation as always. I wish you and your family obviously good health and stay well. I look forward to being able to get back together in person sooner rather than later.
Brad Hiranaga: (23:20)
Oh, I do too, Charles. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. The same to you, I hope you and all of your family stay well and safe.
Charles: (23:26)
Thank you.
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