Shortly after BW Chairman Bob Chapman's passing in March 2026, it was announced that Pat Berges had been named CEO and Managing Partner of Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute.
Chapman & Co. was founded by Bob to bring Truly Human Leadership to organizations around the world, improving their leadership, culture and performance.
Pat was a longtime friend and colleague of Bob's, bringing more than 25 years of global leadership experience to Chapman & Co. He shares the convictions that drove Bob's legacy. Pat is the founder of H3 Leadership, now part of Chapman & Co., and has held senior leadership roles at Covidien and Medtronic. He previously served as executive director of The Curve Initiative, a nonprofit founded by bestselling author Simon Sinek, and has led large-scale leadership development and culture transformation efforts across more than 100 countries.
On this episode of the Truly Human Leadership Podcast, Pat talks about his friendship with Bob and how his mentorship was inspiring and challenging. Pat talks about his leadership journey, the future of Chapman & Co. and why their work is more important now than ever.
You can watch the entire video version of the podcast through the link in the header above or listen through your favorite podcast provider.
Transcript
Brent Stewart: We're going to get to your leadership journey in a second. I want to talk to you first about your friendship with Bob Chapman. How did you meet Bob and how did that friendship develop?
Pat Burgess: Funny story. Actually, I haven't told this publicly, so this would be a breakthrough piece here. I was introduced to Bob by a business leader in the St. Louis area who was familiar with some of the work I had been doing on culture. He called me up and he said, hey, I, I met this guy who's a complete nut.
I think you'd get along with him really well. That's how he was introduced to me, as a nut who just saw the world differently. This person thought I would get along with him. They put us in touch, and sure enough, we got along very well. That was the start of a very long friendship.
Brent: How did the relationship develop? You meet Bob, which is this kind of random thing. Nobody randomly met Bob and then went their own way. Everybody when they met Bob were impacted from then on. How did the relationship go from there?
Pat: Bob and I had a lot of parallel paths without knowing it. A lot of what he had been doing at a much larger scale was the exact playbook that I had been running at a much smaller scale as a middle manager for many years. After meeting Bob, it all kind of resonated with me.
I hadn't read his book. I hadn't even heard of his book until meeting him. And of course, he turned me on to Everybody Matters. Shortly after finishing that book, I got right back on the phone with him and said, hey, Bob, we need to talk more about this. This is much bigger than I realized.
He started laughing. He said, I told you this is a much bigger mission that I need you to be a part of. A big part of our relationship came as Bob recruited me to be a part of this mission informally. Just recognizing that I saw the world in the same way he did and the power of leading people in the right way and the impact that can have on the world.
We had immediate alignment in those values. From there, a friendship was easy to forge. Very quickly, he became a source of advice and mentorship for me. I would come to him with some of the bigger challenges I faced in life and my career. He would always guide me. Typically, not in the way I was expecting.
I really value the friendship because he challenged me in unique ways.
Brent: I’m going to put you on the spot. Give me a funny Bob story. There's going to be a hundred of them, but give me a good, funny one.
Pat: OK. I’m trying to think of a good one that's fit for air here.
Brent: Well, there are a lot of those, too, that aren’t fit for air.
Pat: The jokes that seem to resonate with people around here are the email communications with Bob. I got a lot of entertainment out of Bob's emails, particularly in the final couple of years. You're probably familiar with that as well, where you get the subject, which was basically the first two paragraphs of what he was trying to say in all caps.
Then, you'd get a body with all caps as well. It was oftentimes hard to decipher what was really important. I think in Bob's mind, everything was that important.
Brent: That's right. Sometimes the whole email would be in the subject line. If you got it on your phone, it would be hard to read because you didn't have the ability to expand it out or anything. So, then you're like, I don't know what he wants me to do.
Pat: For all of Bob's strengths, there is one weakness that I think everyone can agree on, and that's context-giving. He wasn't the best at giving context to his emails.
Brent: Oh yeah. That's so true. That's so funny. Over the course of your relationship, what did Bob mean to you, and what did you learn from him?
Pat: Bob taught me about excellence. He taught me that you can't ever be satisfied with where you are or the progress you've made. I left Medtronic after a long career, a couple of decades there, and started some of my own work and pursuing some of my own endeavors. Bob was notorious for challenging me.
We had a quarterly call where we checked in, and every time I’d go into those calls excited, thinking that I was finally going to get that pat on the back where he would say, you're doing it. You're doing what we were hoping you would do. It was never enough for Bob. He would always say, you reached 200 people this year. Pat, you should reach 200,000 people.
That's not enough. We're not. You're not moving fast enough. I learned from Bob a sense of urgency to address this crisis in leadership. It's getting worse. We're seeing data turn the other direction, signaling, a much tougher engagement climate that we're in. I think Bob was ahead of his time in many ways, but particularly in seeing this crisis emerge long before most others did.
Brent: You mentioned Medtronic there. Let's talk about your leadership journey. Where did you get your start in your career, and then how did you come to the place you are now?
Pat: I would start my leadership journey long before my career. For me, my leadership journey started in my youth. It started by the examples around me, as it does for most of us. For me, my mother was the first source of leadership that I learned from and experienced. One of the stories I tell frequently is a story related to my colorblindness.
I’m severely colorblind. As a young kid, I struggled in school when we went to Crayola markers. You might remember, back in the day, they had the names of the colors on the crayons, but not on the markers. First to second grade was a big shift. We're going from the crayons to the markers.
Here I was in second grade, and everyone's using markers. I didn't have my cheat code. I couldn't look at the name to say, the grass is green. I'm going to color green. I struggled.
We had these color-by-number exercises where we had to color in the number based upon what the color supposed to be. I put my picture up on the wall, and my picture was all whacked. The grass was the wrong color. The sky was the wrong color. The trees were the wrong color. All the kids in the class started laughing, pointing at the picture laughing. Saying, who drew this? Who drew this?
I go home that day disappointed and frustrated. My mother pulls me aside and says, what's in your control? What can you control here? I said, I can't control anything. I'm colorblind. What do you want me to do? I can't control Crayola. She said, well, you can't control them, but can you influence them? After a series of coaching conversations, she led me to the library.
We look up the CEO of Crayola. I write them a handwritten letter explaining my predicament, and a couple of months later, we get a letter back in the mail with the first pack of Crayola markers with the names of the colors on them. For me, that was my very first sense of leadership. That was the very first time I felt what it was like to be led in a way that got a better output of me than I could have gotten by myself.
My mother empowered that action in me. She empowered me to see that I could get after this and influence the problem in a way that I didn't think I could. As a result, not only do we have the names of the colors on the markers now for Crayola, but I also have a sense of empowerment where I see a problem, and I know that I have the leadership skills to be able to navigate through that and be resourceful, to try to find a solution.
That's where it started for me. At a very young age, I started picking up on leadership when it was around me. I started noticing when people would gravitate toward a certain leader and identifying the traits that they had and what they did differently. Very early on in my career, I kept a list.
My grandfather told me, he was a GE executive, worked for Jack Welch for years, and he said, every manager you have in your career, I want you to keep a list of all the positive traits and all the negative traits. I've kept that list for my entire career. It's almost three decades long now, this list of every leader I've come across, what they do well and what they don't do so well.
It's a helpful guide for me as a leader in a leadership capacity now because I can look back on that and remember how I felt at different phases of my career and what I needed, and moments where I didn't get what I needed from the person that was leading me. I would say my leadership journey started at a very young age, and it it continues to this day.
I don't think leadership position is ever something you fully achieve. To Bob's message on excellence, it’s something we're always striving to get better at and try to create a bigger impact with. Throughout my career, I've been fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of very influential leaders that have made a significant difference in the world, and I've been able to pull from those traits to build a more cohesive leadership model that I think we can teach, and help others grow through that learning.
Brent: It seems in your time at Medtronic, there were a lot of things that you did that you carried on as your career advanced. Can you talk a little bit about that? I think the Culture Circles came out of that time.
Pat: Culture Circles was the premise for the Bob introduction originally. Culture Circles was a program I started at Medtronic, back in 2013 or so. The idea of Culture Circles was really to create a grassroots movement, to empower an organization so that everybody within the organization feels a sense of ownership and feels as though they have the tools and skills and ability to drive change, just like I did with the Crayola markers.
We started this program at Medtronic in 2013, and it quickly grew to touch more than 10,000 people at the organization and spread throughout other organizations. Back in 2023, we launched a program with the Michigan State Police, a volunteer cause, to roll out a similar methodology with the Michigan State Police.
We branded that as Trust Builder, but same methodology where we identify an organizational challenge, a statement that's overarching for the entire enterprise or organization, and then we activate teams at a subculture level to solve for that problem. What you end up finding out is there's no silver bullet to solving cultural challenges within an organization. You might have a common problem that the organization faces, but there might be a hundred different ways to solve for that problem based upon what function you're in, what department you're in, what region you're in.
Many subcultures will interpret that organizational challenge differently. It'll show up for them in different ways. This approach allows for each of these subcultures to really get after solving for that problem, At the end of the whole cycle of Culture Circles, what a lot of people come to realize is they go through this orchestrated project plan where they're going through a discovery phase and learning more about the challenge.
They're ideating with their small subculture team to try to solve for that problem. They pilot the solution locally, they measure the results, and then they come back to the capstone event and present their solutions. Now, imagine a company large in size and scale, where you have one organizational problem that you identified through your organizational culture surveys.
And then you activate 10, 12, 20 different teams to get after that problem, but open to their own interpretation. What you get at the end of that is you have very diverse solutions to one common problem. Then, leaders can come in and take all the playbooks or a piece of one playbook and a piece of another playbook and put them together for their organization and what works.
The thesis behind this is there's no silver bullet to solve culture. The way you solve cultural challenges is by empowering people at the grassroots level to feel a sense of ownership and pride in the organization.
Brent: Was there an inciting reason that this idea happened? Was there a certain circumstance or situation that prompted this model?
Pat: In Medtronic's case, this was actually pre-Medtronic. Covidien was the company, and Covidien was eventually acquired by Medtronic. At the time, there were two businesses that we were bringing together, and those two businesses had been clashing in a number of ways culturally. The initial effort was to try to bring those businesses together to operate more collaboratively in the organization.
What we came to learn throughout a few phases of that is this actually serves as a very solid integration tool as well. When Medtronic came along and acquired Covidien, this was the largest medtech deal in history. When they came in and acquired Covidien, this served as a key integration tool for integrating those two companies.
Initially, the intent was strictly to bring these two cultures together and create more collaboration. But what we found throughout the process is not only does it serve value in integration and bringing teams together and creating empowerment, but it serves a very valid, developmental purpose. You think about the emergence of AI and other technologies, and what that's doing is it's taking away from career development opportunities in early career.
Those of us more senior in their career, we've had the opportunities early in our careers to have those early career development experiences. Now, we're going to have agents doing a lot of that work. Those development experiences are disappearing quickly.
I think part of the Culture Circles journey, what allows individuals within a company to do is to cut their teeth on experiences that they wouldn't necessarily get in their day-to-day job. Perhaps, it’s an individual contributor has an opportunity to lead a team of peers through this six-month engagement and through the project plan.
Perhaps, it's getting up on stage. And presenting your ideas to senior leadership is an experience that you've never had the opportunity to learn from. Culture Circles not only helps with integration tools, but it serves a very meaningful development purpose to give people real experience and on-the-job growth.
It also serves to build bonds within teams. When people have these shared experiences and can share emotions and struggle together, they form closer cohesion. Through that, when you have a program like Culture Circles taking over an organization and creating this movement within an organization, what ends up happening is you create these strong internal networks that didn't exist before.
The benefits of a culture program like Culture Circles might have an unintended output that you're setting off to launch this with, but what we see happening with other companies adopting us is that it's serving a whole lot of different needs across the development spectrum, across the cultural spectrum, across the empowerment spectrum. A lot of benefits that come from this beyond just the surface-level benefits.
Brent: Let's fast forward a little bit. Everybody had a weird 2020, 2021. Everybody had difficult times then. You were part of something then that was very important. Can you talk about your role a little bit?
Pat: I happened to be responsible for the global training related to our respiratory business at the time, at Medtronic. Obviously, the respiratory business was in high demand during Covid. We were manufacturers of ventilators. One of the challenges that emerged that kind of stayed below the radar of the media for some time was, the initial blitz of being short on ventilators.
We didn’t have enough ventilators. Everyone remembers that phase. It was the March-April timeframe of 2020. Well, once ventilator manufacturing finally started picking up, several companies shared their IP and there was new emergence. All of a sudden, ventilators were no longer a problem. There were lots of ventilators before too long.
By the end of March, ventilators were coming in. Everyone thought the problem was solved, but my group was very close to the customer. What we are hearing from customers was, hey, listen, it's great that we now have ventilators, but we were used to working with three, maybe four or five types of ventilators at our hospital.
Now, we've got 30 different types of ventilators at our hospital. It's not a plug-and-play machine. If you know how to work one, it doesn't necessarily mean you know how to work the other. They are very complex medical devices. We saw this problem emerging where customers were calling, saying, we don't know how to work on these.
Immediately, every independent company is saying, we can solve that for you. Being one of the larger suppliers, we had customers coming to us saying, that's not enough. We need someone to solve it for everyone. I can't go to 30 different company web pages to figure out how to work this. I need one place to go.
That was the premise of the Ventilator Training Alliance. This was an app that was developed in partnership with a technology company called Allego, who dedicated their entire enterprise to building this app for us. Within 20 days, from April 1st to April 20th, the this went from concept to an actual app in the App Store.
Within the first few weeks, it was one of the most downloaded apps in the world. It reached over 200 countries. Countless lives were saved from this. This was essentially an app that brought together all of the ventilator manufacturers in the world and had all of their content available on this Ventilator Trading Alliance app for free, available to anyone around the world, translated and in any form they needed it.
It ended up being a great success. It was a very challenging time and a very challenging project. We ended up winning a Medical Innovation of the Year Award. During 2020, that's a pretty big accomplishment. Bob played a big role in this, as a matter of fact.
This was during the years when Bob and I were having very regular mentoring conversations. I called him up pre-launch. It was ometime in those first 20 days in April of 2020 and explained to him the project I was working on and what I was trying to do. I was seeking his advice on how we get this out. We'd built the app. Now, how do we tell everyone about it?
He said, you need to meet Simon Sinek. I said, that'd be great, Bob. He said, he happens to be a very close friend of mine. I'll introduce you. So, that was the start of my relationship with Simon. It was through that introduction that Bob had made. He said, Simon's the best marketer I know. He can give you some ideas on how to get this thing off the ground.
Brent: It was a crazy time. Everything that you're describing illustrates how much was happening in such a short amount of time. There had to be some leadership lessons that you got out of that time. Can you think of any off the top of your head?
Pat: I can think of countless leadership lessons. One in particular: There was resistance to the solution that we provided. There was a lot of resistance. I remember one particular conversation where I was given the direction to focus on solving this for us, and that didn't feel right. It felt like we had a bigger responsibility.
I got some coaching from a leader of mine at the time who said, here's how we're going to do this. You're going to do that first. You're going to solve the problem for us first, and then you can solve it for everyone else. One of the key lessons there was that my interpretation of no, don't do this was not what I was being told.
The interpretation needed to be rethought and looked at through a different lens. I think the other key learning I had on this is you're in these situations of crisis, and it's easy to think that's someone else's problem to solve. I'm not the one to solve that for me. And the Ventilators Training Alliance was a clinical training problem.
I don't have a clinical background. I don't know anything about ventilators or how to work them or how to train people how to work them. I could have easily said that’s not my job. I also am not a tech wizard. I don't know how to make apps or develop software easily. I could have said it was out of my scope and not my job to mess with.
I go back to a quote that someone on the project team shared with me. One of the executives at Allego, the software developer, said he referred to Margaret Mead's quote, Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world; because, in fact, that's the only thing that ever has.
And here we were, a small working group of people that didn't necessarily have the qualifications or the responsibility to solve this problem, but in fact, we did. It made a major difference for a lot of families around the world and touched a lot of lives. There’s probably a lot of people that wouldn't be here today had this small group of people not gotten together and said we can make a difference here.
I think the biggest lesson is, you look at a problem or a crisis, and it's easy to turn the other way and to think that someone else's problem to deal with. I think when we reflect on how we want to show up as leaders, regardless of what problem we encounter, we should always think we have something to offer in terms of solutions or can be a part of finding a solution.
Brent: Speaking of Simon and speaking of finding solutions, you met Simon, and you became a part of an initiative that he was leading to find a solution to another, not necessarily big problem in the world, but big issue in the world: The Curve. Tell us about that experience.
Pat: I initially met Simon through Bob, as mentioned, and he had offered some advice on the Ventilator Training Alliance. Simon and I had stayed in touch through the years that followed. I got invited to one of the events that Barry-Wehmiller hosted in Aspen called the Massive Conference. Simon invited me to this conference with a dozen or so other, other people.
One of the people there was the Police Chief for the state of Michigan. We hit it off for a while, spent some time together and developed a friendship at this event. As we're wrapping up the event, Joe Gasper, the Chief of Police in Michigan, says, hey, I have some things I'm working on related to talent and culture within my organization.
Can I give you a call next week and just pick your brain a little bit? I said, of course, Joe, give me a call. He calls me a few days later and one thing leads to another. Now, we're having calls every other day. Next thing you know, we launch this program within his organization. We were two months into this. I had recruited this volunteer army of 50 people to help drive this initiative forward. It was unintentionally designed to reshape the policing community in the United States. It wasn't work. I had intended to go down that path. That's what we were doing, taking the same model that we used in the private sector and applying it to the public sector.
We had amazing results with that. As we're getting these results, Simon's starting to tune in more and more, and he says, hey, I need you to come take me through this program. I want to get my fingerprints on it as well. We started working together on this program.
Within two or three months of that, he pulled me in and asked me to be the executive director of The Curve, which is the nonprofit he started, in 2020, I believe, with a group of police leaders around the country. It is aimed at introducing a more progressive culture to policing and addressing some of the leadership challenges that we face in that industry.
He's brought together some of the most progressive police leaders in the country. For two years, I ran that nonprofit with Simon and made some pretty good progress on that front.
Brent: What are some of the things that you think that you are most proud of with your time at The Curve? The things that you accomplished during that time?
Pat: I will say it was it was a shift for me. I learned working in the public sector and private sector is a very different environment. It's a very different pace. There's a very different appetite for change. I would say I probably learned more about myself and how to lead in that environment than anything.
In terms of progress, I think the work of The Curve is work that's never going to end. Just like much of the leadership work that we do in other spaces, it's a constant evolution. I think all we can hope for is steady progress. With policing, it has to start at the academy level, and it has to go throughout the entire organization.
There's a level of buy-in that I see happening now that I didn't see happening three or four years ago. From my vantage point, it’s some really good progress that we have more people buying in. We have more interest and appetite into learning more progressive leadership methodologies.
Brent: There's a commonality in terms of some of the issues that you will see in one sector, as in the other sector. When you moved into consulting on your own after The Curve, were those some of the thoughts in your mind, like, I've been working with this specific group of people in a very intense, specialized group of people, but there's a lot of commonality with what I saw in my in my corporate life, and I can take that. Was that something you were thinking at the time?
Pat: Absolutely. I think leadership is transferable across just about any industry in any community role. Any way you look at leadership, we are looking for the same things that a leader. There's lots of research on this. Regardless of where you are in the world, you're looking for the same qualities in a leader.
You're looking for a leader that you trust and that trusts you. You're looking for a leader that cares for you and supports you. You're looking for a leader that's strategic. All of these pieces are consistent across all industries. Now, I will say it varies by level. There are some variations across industries as well. But, you have to look at where they're coming from and meet people where they are.
If we went to The Curve and tried to introduce Truly Human Leadership and the Barry-Wehmiller and Chapman & Co. methodology, it would probably be too much. It would probably be too much too fast to throw all that at an organization that wasn't ready for it. I think part of what we do at Chapman & Co. that makes us unique and different is we take the time to really understand where our clients are, to diagnose their needs, and to understand what the right tools and the right solutions are to help them get to the next level.
Understanding that baseline on what everyone needs and wants in a leader, but then also understanding the intricacies of here's where they are, here's what they want to be and here's how we need to get there.
Brent: You moved from The Curve to your own consulting company, H3 Consulting, which, incidentally, I don't know if this is purposeful or not, but did you take heads, hands and heart from Bob?
Pat: No, in fact, I didn't even know that was a Bob thing or a Barry-Wehmiller thing until my first day here. I think I saw it on the wall down here. H3 leadership is my company, Head, Hands, Heart. It’s based upon the leadership model that I've built over the past 20 years, which is the theory that the most inspiring leaders lead with their head, their hands and their heart.
If you think about the generational shifts, this is a big part of why leadership needs to remain in focus right now. There's a changing game right before our eyes. 75% of our workforce will be millennials or younger within the next two years. Millennials have very different expectations than those that are in their 50s and 60s. They have very different expectations of a leader.
When you think about that model, head, hands, heart, think back to the parents of our generation. For my parents, what they were looking for in a leader was someone that was strategic, someone that knew themselves well enough but was agile and could pivot. These are leading with the head factors.
Our generation came along, and we're like, yeah, that's cool. We want that. We need all those things. But we also want leaders that lead with their hands, that are resourceful and that empower people and that support their team.
Well, this next generation has come along, and they said, yeah, we need that. We need this, but we also need this. We need leaders that are bold and that are authentic and empathetic and selfless in the way that they lead.
This leadership model is important for modern leaders to grasp because we're managing a workforce that's all over the place. Part of this is having the agility as a leader to be able to pivot and know who you're working with and what their needs are. But the other part is just understanding that we need to look more holistically at how we're leading humans.
How we want to be led is how those in our care want to be led. Understanding those key drivers that will make people feel valued, seen and heard will ultimately get better discretionary effort out of them and ultimately lead to better results.
Brent: All that alignment brings you here to Barry-Wehmiller and Chapman & Co. Let's talk about that. You were doing your own work and still maintaining a relationship with Bob, who can be very persuasive at times. How did you get to Chapman & Co.?
Pat: You know, I didn't even realize Bob was trying to get me to Chapman & Co.
Brent: He could do that.
Pat: He was very slick. I know he didn't believe in sales, but he was selling pretty hard. For probably two years, he was actively recruiting me, and I thought we were just having career conversations. It wasn't until a year ago, this time we were talking, and he said, your company and the work you're doing would be a perfect fit for Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute.
We started having that conversation about Chapman & Co. acquiring H3 Leadership. We were about six months into the diligence. Things were going really well with Bob and with the Forsyth team. And they said OK, we're going to hit pause now for a few months because we're going to hire our CEO for Chapman & Co.
We've had a gap here and we want to hire this position before we before we close this deal. I said OK, cool. No hurry. I wasn't necessarily set on selling my company that I had built or jumping back into a bigger company. I didn't think much about it.
A month or two go by, and I see the job description. I read this job description over for the CEO of Chapman & Co., and it just stopped me in my tracks. I literally froze in my seat, and my jaw dropped. I read it like four or five times. I just kept thinking to myself, if I could write my own job description, in a perfect world, I don't think I'd change a word on this. I was bought in with how it was positioned. And then, over the six months that followed, I started coming in and meeting the leadership here at Barry-Wehmiller and at Forsyth Group. I will say, I was just blown away with how real it was.
A lot of companies have big words on a wall and have a mission statement and talk a big game. Very few companies actually live that game. It became very clear to me that this is a company that walks the walk. This is a company that does what they say they're going to do.
And the values that they stand behind, they live those as well.
Brent: So then, we get to earlier this year, and Bob was still with us. We didn't realize we didn't have that much time with him. But Bob's still talking to you, and you decided to take the position. What was that conversation with him like?
Pat: Oh, it was powerful. It was very powerful. We had a few very powerful conversations at the end there. And one of the things that will always stay with me is he said, it's your turn. My work here is done. It's your turn. It should have signaled to me what was coming.
I also didn't realize it was that close. But him passing the torch, acknowledging the responsibility that we have, and I think feeling the comfort that it was in good hands. He had said to me during that conversation that his biggest fear was that when he left this earth, the message would leave this earth.
In my final conversation with him, my words were, I promise you, for the rest of my life, I will be living this mission and pursuing this mission. You don't have to worry about that. As long as I'm here, this will live on. There were some very powerful words in the closing days. Theall-caps, it's your turn email is one that I have framed at home.
Brent: My last text from him was in all caps too. He was a little frustrated with something, though. That was the difference there. At Barry-Wehmiller, something we're starting to articulate more and more is our vision is to redefine success in business by demonstrating how human and economic vibrancy work in harmony.
Chapman & Co. is part of Barry-Wehmiller, but it's kind of a special part of Barry-Wehmiller. How does Chapman & Co. fit into that vision of Barry-Wehmiller?
Pat: People and performance in harmony is what Chapman & Co. is all about. We are a high-performance driving company. Our goal is to help other organizations reach higher potential. We do that through Truly Human Leadership. The model is pretty simple. When you care for people in the right way, you get better results. There's absolutely a way to have people and performance in harmony.
Unfortunately, many organizations don't get that. There's basic elements of psychological safety that aren't met to where you can't possibly say you're a people-focused organization if you're doing forever layoffs, for example. You're not going to create psychological safety if you're laying people off every single quarter because then every employee is sitting there waiting for the next shoe to drop.
It's this trend. I think Glassdoor created that term of the forever layoff. But, I think back to even five years ago, companies were laying off people in bunches. You'd have one one quarter out of every 2 or 3 years where you'd see layoffs. Of course, that has to happen.
That's the harsh reality of business. There are times when we have to make cuts like that. But the way you do it and the way you treat people with dignity says a lot about your organization and about your leadership. I think the companies that are mindful of the importance of psychological safety in their entire team and people being able to come to work and feel comfortable, that they're secure, they're safe, they're not going to have to be looking over their shoulder.
When they are, if they're not taking risks, they're not being innovative. They're not challenging the status quo. That's what we want in a high-performance organization. We want all those characteristics. The ability to create psychological safety is the very basic first step of understanding what the people part of that is. The people and performance in harmony.
The other piece on performances is I think a lot of companies feel like it's either or. We can either be a high-performance company or this warm-and-fuzzy, very employee-friendly company. You can be both. In fact, you're going to get better results if you do the people side. You're going to get better output because discretionary effort is real.
People will be willing to give you more if they know that you have their back. I think people and performance in harmony is what we do at Chapman & Co. We help companies find the path toward finding that harmony.
Brent: I guess it was probably about 13 years ago or so that Bob did his TEDx Talk, and one of the big statements he made was that there was a crisis in leadership. I've been part of Barry-Wehmiller for 12 years and worked with Bob all of that time. You’d see waves of things. You'd see trends happening. You'd see more books being written about leadership. You'd see it being talked about more in the news that there needs to be a different way to lead.
The millennial conversation happened at one point. Now, we're in 2026. Over the last five, six years, there's been a lot of change.
There’s been a whole lot of change in the world and change that Bob probably wouldn't have envisioned 13 years ago. What do you see right now as being the leadership landscape, and is what Bob said 13 years ago still true today?
Pat: It's even more true today, in my opinion. Bob was a prophet way ahead of his time in terms of predicting the emergence of a leadership crisis. I think there are two forces that are at play right now. They're really putting a much greater emphasis on leaders in the workplace. Number one, it’s the emergence of AI. It’s creating commoditization of intelligence and putting more of an emphasis on the IQ of a leader. The emotional intelligence of a leader is going to drive much better followership moving forward than IQ did in the past. That's one element.
The other piece with AI that we mentioned that we talked about earlier is the earlier career. Individuals are getting less exposure to meaningful development on the job because of AI. And so again, it creates more of an emphasis on leaders to help guide those individuals through early career in particular.
I think the other piece is the millennials. The shifting workforce, 75% of the workforce being millennials or younger. They have different expectations of leaders. We cannot take the old leadership models and apply them to the current workforce dynamics. It just will not work. We see that. The data tells us that today. I think the latest Gallup research shows that 20% of employees are engaged right now.
In 2024 to 2025, there was a five-point drop. It went from 27% down to 22% engagement. The data backs that up. It's a problem. Managers want to lead. I think people in that are put in a leadership position want to be effective. I don't think anyone wakes up in a leadership capacity and says, I want to fail all the people in my span of care today. I don't think anyone does that.
I think everyone has the intentions that are right and wants to lead people in the right way. They just don't have the tools. And that's where Chapman & Co. comes in. We have well-researched, well-studied best practices that we can help organizations apply to improve their leadership capability.
Brent: So here you are. You've been with Chapman & Co. for a couple of months now. You've got the torch, and it's ready to go. What's your vision for Chapman & Co.? What’s your vision and your hope for Chapman & Co. and where you guys go?
Pat: I'll take it up a higher level and say what my vision for leadership in the world is because it ties back to this. I believe that if we create better leaders in the world, we will get better output. It's that simple. The equation for creating better leaders is not unknown.
We have the data that tells us what the more effective leaders are doing differently. If we want to solve the bigger problems that we're facing in the world, it starts at a very personal level. We've touched the lives, one by one, of the people that we lead. Brick by brick is how we build a bigger house.
I think this journey has to start with individual relationships. As far as Chapman & Co. on how we plan to make a difference, I think we have the tools that will make a difference for organizations. I think we have the right assessment methodologies and tools to be able to identify talent. I think we have the right cultural intervention tools to go in and discover what the organizational challenges are and how we can partner with an organization to help solve for those.
I think we have innovative training solutions that are highly experiential, highly differentiated than anything else you're going to find on the market and offerings that are unique. For example, the listening program. Bob used to always say this to audiences. He would say there's four primary forms of communication: reading, writing, speaking and listening.
When you're early in education, you're taught how to read. You're taught how to write. Maybe in some advanced education, in high school or college, you'll have a speaking class or maybe a couple of them if you're lucky. But how many listening classes have you had? Yet, that's what we should be doing with 80% of our time. We have differentiated offerings that I think will make a difference if leaders can invest time into building new skills to lead in future generations.
Brent: If you're a leader and you’re listening to this today and you've heard a lot of the stuff that you've been talking about, obviously your first answer would be, come talk to us at Chapman & Co. We want to connect with you. What would you say to that leader who is on the fence about getting started?
Pat: I would tell them they're not alone. There's lots of organizations out there that have been skeptical. I was a skeptic myself before, seeing that this is possible. You're not alone in that. If you're out there and you're listening to this thinking this could be a value to me, but I just don't know how to get started.
I would say reach out. Let us put you in touch with some organizations that have been on that same journey recently. You can talk with them and learn how we can guide an organization through that and help them drive that change.