Benchmark, a global provider of engineering, design, and electronics manufacturing services with 12,000 employees in eight countries, is in the midst of a major cultural transformation.

Rhonda Turner, Chief Human Resources Officer, discusses the company’s journey from a finance-centric culture with uninspiring values to a people-focused and purpose-driven culture that fosters an engaging employee experience.

Rhonda emphasizes the importance of purpose-driven leadership in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how inclusivity fosters innovation and growth.

She also highlights the role of effective internal communication and storytelling in engaging employees and creating a sense of belonging.

Benchmark has established an Inclusion Council and Employee Resource Groups to promote diversity and inclusion and celebrate different cultural events. They are working towards improving the representation of historically underrepresented groups in leadership and technical roles through targeted goals and initiatives.

You can read the full transcript of this conversation on our website.

Learn more about avad3 in Episode 5: “Building a People-Centered Production Company”

Featured In This Episode

Rhonda Turner is Chief Human Resources Officer at Benchmark, where she leads all aspects of human resources, including talent acquisition and development, business partnerships, organizational design and effectiveness, compensation and benefits, diversity and inclusion, and human resources business operating systems. Rhonda has more than 20 years of HR leadership experience and a proven track record of driving business outcomes by leveraging talent management, employee engagement and culture. Her career spans the education, energy, retail and restaurant industries, including positions at companies such as Universal Technical Institute, ConocoPhillips, Circle K and Main Street Restaurant Group, a TGI Friday’s franchisee.

Cameron Magee is the owner of avad3 Event Production, a full-service provider of audio, video, lighting, staging, set design, and streaming services for in-person, virtual, or hybrid events. Cameron founded the company in 2011 in his college dorm room. He now leads a team of over 50 hard-working professionals that design and deliver flawless event production for clients nationwide. Cameron believes that character is as important as competence. He’s committed to building a people-centered production company that brings listening, empathy, and integrity to every client engagement, along with world-class technical expertise and seamless execution.

Adrian McIntyre, PhD is a cultural anthropologist, media personality, and internationally recognized authority on communication and human connection. He delivers engaging keynote speeches and experiential culture-shift programs that train executives, managers, and teams to communicate more effectively and connect on a deeper level by asking better questions and telling better stories.

Want Some Inspiration for Your Next Big Event?

At avad3 Event Production, we're passionate about using lighting, sound, and video to transform event spaces from mundane to magical. Browse our gallery of "Success Stories" to spark your creativity and get some design inspiration for your own future events.

You Need a Show Flow, Not a Script.

A “show flow” is a simple yet powerful tool that savvy event planners use to effectively communicate the essential details to the right people at the right time. Unlike a lengthy script, a show flow is concise and clear, and it fits on a single page. It ensures your general sessions, breakout rooms, and other presentations will flow seamlessly from one cue to the next. Download our exclusive Show Flow Template and set your events team up for success!

Follow the Podcast

If you enjoyed this episode, please follow Culture Amplified in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or any other podcast app. Just choose your preferred podcast player from this list, open the app, and click the button to “Follow” or “Subscribe” to the show.

From avad3 Event Production, this is Culture Amplified. Benchmark is a global provider of engineering, design, and electronics manufacturing services, and the company is reshaping its culture from the ground up … putting people and purpose at the heart of its process.

In this episode ... How does a company with 12,000 employees in 22 locations in 8 countries engage in cultural transformation? What does it take to redefine an organization’s core values? What role does purpose-driven leadership play in the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how does that inclusivity drive innovation and growth? All this and more, coming up.

Welcome to Culture Amplified. I’m Adrian McIntyre. I’m joined for this episode by Cameron McGee, owner of avad3 Event Production. Welcome, Cameron.

Glad to be here.

Our featured guest is Rhonda Turner, Chief Human Resources Officer for Benchmark. Rhonda, thank you for coming.

Thank you so much for having me.

I’m excited for this because as I live here in Phoenix, I’m familiar to a point with Benchmark and with the work that you do. It was a big story in the Business Journal when you relocated here a few years ago. And I see folks from your company around the Arizona Technology Council from time to time. But there are undoubtedly listeners who don’t know who you are and don’t know what sort of company you represent. Could you give us that synopsis?

Sure. We operate within an industry called Electronics Manufacturing Services or EMS. And so we are an integrated engineering design and manufacturing services company. Essentially, we build product for other customers. We don’t build our own product. And we are very complex, low-volume manufacturing. We are currently servicing the commercial aerospace, defense, industrial, medical, and advanced computing industries. We are operating in eight different countries. We have about 12,000 employees worldwide and about $2.8 billion in revenue.

Now, the engineers, the electronics manufacturing experts, may not be known for their culture or there may be stereotypes about their culture. If you were to describe what it’s like to work at Benchmark as opposed to any of the other companies in the space, what would you say is different?

Sure. So this is my first job, professional experience working in manufacturing, period. And then as I’ve heard it described, electronics manufacturing services or EMS can be somewhat of a grind, very hard on people. It’s a low margin business and so very intense focus on achieving profit and being successful. I would say what I’ve heard from employees coming to Benchmark who may have worked for some of our competitors that they find it to be quite different. We have, I think, a very special culture. It’s one that we are in the middle of renovating or transforming, but they describe our culture as being different in that we have a very family feel. Our CEO is very personable, very approachable. Same for our senior leadership team. And the programs that we’re launching are very focused on people. One of our strategic pillars is to deliver an engaging employee experience. We’re very much focused on what that feels like for our employee day in and day out. And I think people notice the difference.

One of the things I know we’re really excited to explore with you is what it takes to transform a culture. And you’ve implied that you’re on this journey, you’re mid-flight as it were. So where did it start out? What was it like to be an employee of Benchmark before this? And where are you at now? But most specifically, what I want to know is what are you doing that’s introducing these changes and making them stick?

I’ve been with the company almost five years. I joined in 20 19. I was the new CEO’s first hire. So, Jeff Benck joined the company in March of 20 19, and I was on board by July. I think it started with a new leadership team. So Jeff at the helm, and then really building out his senior leadership team. And then from there, we sat together to really envision what the future looked like for us. The company at that time, I think, was very financially motivated, right, as most businesses for profit are, but it was very cost and finance centric. Prior leadership had come from the financial leadership team, CFO to CEO, prior to Jeff. And even the company values—there were three company values at the time, and they just reflected cost and finance and thinking like an owner. They weren’t very inspirational and they certainly, I don’t think were reflective of who we aspired to be.

And so that was a conversation with the executive team to really, who do we want to be? And then from there, it was about refreshing those company values, the core values. They didn’t speak to anybody. We didn’t really talk about them. We didn’t live by them, so to speak.

And I had come from a company that was purpose-based and the core values were mentioned and referenced every day. So I knew the power in that. I knew what we could do with that. And so in 20 21—I had to get through the pandemic in ‘20—and so in 20 21, we really set forth to refresh the core values, really throwing out the three that existed and coming up with a new five.

And I’m really proud of the way we went about that. We engaged leadership from around the globe, and we did a series of workshops with our leadership teams and really talked about what was special about Benchmark today, what were our strengths, what did we want to keep, what was missing at Benchmark within the culture in terms of demonstrated behaviors and the language of the business, what was missing there, and what did we need to do more of. And then from there, we went through an exercise whereby the words sort of surface to reflect those descriptions. And we took the inputs from all of our leadership around the world and took that to the senior leadership team. And from there, they combed through it and put their own inputs to it. And we ultimately got down to five new core values, which are: We act with integrity. We value inclusion. We’re committed to customers—and not just our external customers, but beginning to introduce the concept of serving each other as internal customers. We promote ingenuity—so innovation is just a key part of who we are. And we introduced, We genuinely care. And so those have really been, I think, the true start, the tangible start of our cultural transformation.

I’m a cultural anthropologist. That’s my academic background. And there’s a classic in our field. Bronislaw Malinowski was one of the founders of the way anthropologists create knowledge, called ethnography, by writing long-form descriptions of the people that you meet in faraway places and trying to make sense of their world. And he famously said in the 1920s that to do this kind of work is to understand that there’s what people think they’re doing, there’s what they say they’re doing, and then there’s what they’re actually doing. And you have to describe things at those three levels. Principles, a values exercise like that … Cameron you’ve got core values, and you’ve got the poster on the wall and all the rest, but there can sometimes still be a disconnect—even with that engaged listening process—between the words and the way you behave. How do you navigate that, and what are you trying to figure out as you do it?

It’s cool to be in the room with you, Rhonda. You have 12,000 people, we have 50. But the timeline’s similar. We redid our core values, same season. The pandemic … we do event production, so the pandemic took us down to just nothing for months. And so I had a lot of time alone to think about things. And the core values were something that we didn’t have written down. That’s cool to kind of categorize like that. We had what we were doing, but we had never put them on the wall. And I’ll take that over core values that are on the wall in the conference room that are not being lived out at all. But we finally put pen to paper to those and penned five, a great number, and nailed those down. This is who we actually are, and this is what we want to make sure we keep, is how it would work. You’re talking about like throwing stuff out and kind of scaling others. And the five things truly being this is who we are and who we want to be forever from a timeless standpoint. And it’s changed everything. It’s given us so much clarity in hiring as we’ve rebuilt, as we’ve scaled back to where we are today compared to where we had to go. And it’s transformative, but it took pinning down who we actually were and not who we thought we were, who we’re saying we’re being, but it’s powerful. Yeah.

Rhonda, you’re describing a process that is in and of itself a significant piece of work, to engage 12,000 employees in eight locations on multiple continents where you have regional leadership teams, regional workforces. There’s not just the company culture, there’s culture-culture: language, religious differences, all the things that we often think of when we think of diversity, right? But then there’s also the other dimensions of diversity that aren’t always visible. Diversity of thought, diversity of the private practices that people have, the internal conversations, the different approaches to problem solving, all of it. How do you as a leader, especially one coming into this very, very technical industry for the first time, begin to find your own way? Obviously, there’s armies of consultants or others who are supporting this, but what’s it like for you as you go through this process? And how do you develop your own capabilities to oversee it as you go? It’s a little bit like, as a mutual friend of ours has said, jumping off the diving board and inventing water on the way down. You’ve got to figure it out as you go. How’s it going?

So we also launched a diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy in early 20 22. And interestingly, when we were rolling out the values and we talked about introducing inclusion as a core value, we wanted to make sure that it resonated in all the countries where we do business. And in some countries, it didn’t necessarily resonate as strongly as it might in the U.S. And so we had to be very careful and articulate in terms of how we defined it, right? There’s a whole like sort of two-sentence description under each of these values. And so we were very careful to say this isn’t just about one element or attribute of diversity, this is about all elements of diversity. And really talking about diversity as a fact and inclusion as a behavior, and so really driving more of the inclusion aspect. And ultimately it comes down to creating a feeling of belonging in the organization. And when we are welcoming, when we are inclusive of everyone, then people can really feel like they can be their true selves at work and feel like they belong. And ultimately, that’s our goal.

I couldn’t believe more in what you just said. And I am just so struck by the fact that we really are trying to do, those of us who are, we’re trying to do something at the level of humanity that doesn’t have a precedent. Globalization changed supply chains in the 1970s and 80s. The emergence of multinational corporations in the 60s and 70s began that process. There’s a much earlier set of histories of missionaries, for example, going to faraway places. There’s the whole history of colonialism and empire. And now here we are in the 21st century, connected always to everyone everywhere. And you said something that really resonated with me, which is that traditional cultures, the way we have thought of them, are not inclusive. They are by definition defined in most cases as this is “us” and everyone else is “them.” And this idea that we can create space for all of it, I think is so profoundly important. And yet at the same time, just so, I don’t know, it is revolutionary for our existence as a species. And I’m sorry to take it to this level, but I can’t help it. The ingredients are right in what you said. We have to figure out together something that doesn’t come naturally to anyone, which is not just to get along. That’s tolerance. Nobody wants to be tolerated. It’s intolerable. But inclusion and belonging, these are big, big issues. And I know we throw them around a lot in conferences and journals in our industries and things of that nature, but man, it’s more than just something that we can pay lip service to. Does this make sense?

Absolutely.

What are your thoughts about this?

So we work at it every day, right? We’re not done. And I don’t know that we’ll ever be done. And so it’s something that we talk about. I mean, I love that it’s part of our core value set because it just keeps it in front of us. We do literally have them on the wall, right? And it keeps it in front of us. And it’s something that we talk about every day. We actually have an Inclusion Council that we started in early 20 22 as a way to involve our people. So it’s a group of, I think this year we’re upwards of 30 members. I think we started with 16 a few years ago. Upwards of 30 members on this Inclusion Council, representative of all the areas in which we do business. We look for representation across varying levels, from VP down to our production operator. Representation, again, from all the countries. And so it’s this group of people that come together and they really take our strategy and our annual objectives that we’re putting out from a diversity, equity, inclusion perspective. And they’re taking that and they’re saying, how can we engage our people in our workforce in the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion? And how can we better promote inclusion within the business? And we do that via events. We’re celebrating different cultural events. We have two per quarter that we spotlight. And it’s a way to educate others on different cultural celebrations. Lunar New Year is a prime example. We just, we pick that for our sort of primary celebration in Q1. And it’s really educational for a lot of us in the Americas in terms of what this means and how it’s celebrated. And so partaking in these different cultural celebrations sort of makes the world a little smaller, that you are celebrating something all together and you’re learning at the same time. So I would say the Inclusion Council is a big factor for us and helping us kind of bring these things to life and keeping it in front of us. And then from there we have, as many companies do, Employee Resource Groups. And we’ve got two going on three within the company now, hoping to grow more. But that helps spotlight different areas. We have one focused on women and one focused on veterans currently. And so it’s a way to, again, bring the needs of that population to the forefront and help others understand.

Cameron, I’m curious about something. From an event production perspective, you’re often tasked by clients or the event planners that clients hire to deal with production.

Deal with [laughs]

Yeah, you know, the guys in black that are around the edges that nobody wants you to talk to too, because they’re sometimes grumpy. Those aren’t your guys.

Not us.

That’s the backdrop of the change you’re trying to make in your industry.

Yeah, what we’re up against.

But you’re often asked to bring culture to life. Because nobody puts on events just to spend a bunch of money. People put on events to drive impact, to engage communities, to engage suppliers and vendors, all the different reasons. I don’t mean trade show type events, but I mean the ones that are bringing people together to make something happen for the workforce. And of course, you’re an expert in lighting, video, sound, and all the stuff that makes the biggest day of the year a great day for people. How do you translate the kinds of things Rhonda’s talking about—obviously, you don’t do it alone, but how do you think through bringing it to life, actualizing it, telling the story that they’re asking you to tell? What’s the toolkit that you have to do that?

Yeah. One of our bigger events last year that I was really proud of was an event we got to do, and that one was in Vegas for Walmart. And it was positioning them in the digital marketplace. Walmart’s of course known for its brick-and-mortar stores, of course, but e-commerce and the website is the future. And they were realizing that Walmart Marketplace, where these sellers sell, it’s just like an Etsy or an eBay, where people are selling on there, selling their products. They hadn’t really gotten those folks together. And they hadn’t really given those online sellers a chance to get to know the Walmart culture.

And that was a miss until that point. Of course, that’s taken off the last five or so years. That was really launched during COVID, and so events were difficult for everybody. But they tasked us with, hey, we do tons of events together all year, a lot of internal events for their associates. We need to make sure that these folks—I keep saying folks because I’m from Arkansas—but these attendees, when they arrive, they get in a very short amount of time, because their time is so precious, a very short amount of time of a real immersion into what makes Walmart special. And Walmart, for years since Sam Walton coined the phrase, he said, “Our people make the difference.” And in a world of online marketplaces, their competitors, it becomes very algorithm based. It becomes very just where are your units and how are we doing fulfillment, and let’s get these things out of here.

But Walmart’s culture for years has been, our people make the difference. And so we did that. We brought those folks together, and we infused the Walmart way of working, the core values. We got Walmart’s leadership in front of those people in different ways, not just on a big stage for thousands of people in the general session, but we created … it’s the Walmart culture to have what’s called a listening session, which their leaders have done for years where they’ll travel to South Carolina or whatever. They have 5,000 stores plus Sam’s Club and everything, but their leaders will travel in and get maybe 30 store managers together, maybe like how you guys do in some of your countries, to say, “Hey, our leadership’s here but we didn’t come to bring a speech. We came to listen.”

We do the same thing. I love that.

It’s so powerful. And so we created these rooms where they could do that, and it was almost like we created like a living room feel a very circular feel. We’re known for production, but production doesn’t have to be flashy lights and concert. It was, let the production disappear, let the production reinforce, amplify their voices, make it where there was no barrier, help capture it, help put legs to it so it wasn’t just a nice conversation. It could carry on.

But I think that’s the power of events. That’s the power of literally this conversation right here. We could have this as an email transcript back and forth. We could have this as a Zoom meeting, but there’s something about your theory—and you’re proving it—of 45 minutes of us having a real conversation that is just completely different than just a transaction, like you’re talking about the P&L model or just a traditional business model. So we’re honored to get to do that with people on their biggest day of the year. And of course we do the audio, video, and lighting, but they’re asking us to really produce the event at a higher level. And we work with their internal team, and they know their culture and we know the technology, and it’s beautiful when those things come together. I could talk all day about that event, but I think that’s enough for now. Just as an example of using events to bring people together like that.

I love that example. It goes to something that I care very much about, which is there are always mechanics. Rhonda, earlier you said it so well. Diversity is a fact. This is the nature of the world. And yet inclusion is an activity. It’s a set of practices. There are things we must do in order to make this a reality. Talk a little bit about how that happens, the internal communication dimension. Obviously, you’ve got folks in all these different locations who aren’t trained communicators. They don’t think of themselves as storytellers, and yet you’re finding ways to channel the stories and the successes and things in some innovative ways. How’s that going?

Really well. And I think the key for us was investing in a position or director of internal communications, Tiffany Elle, who works on my team. She’s been amazing and it’s been really transformational in terms of our internal communications efforts. We have the richest content now on our intranet site called BenchConnect, and she is capturing the stories, the human story, the emotional story that’s happening at our various locations and sites, whether it be an award they’ve received or recognizing what a great workplace they are in their local country or just the cultural celebration of the quarter that’s just happened. And she’s putting that into an article with photos and putting it out for the whole company to see. And so again, those sorts of things make the company feel smaller and more intimate and create a feeling of look at what’s going on around the world. And I’m so proud to be part of a company like this where we celebrate various things and tell stories and connect with one another is really what it’s all about. And then there’s the traditional PowerPoint templates that we provide to our general managers and help them tell their story locally. And so she helps us with all of those things. But it’s been a really wise investment, I think, for the company.

I’ve said for years, let me try this out on you because I keep saying it to the engineers, but maybe I’m not saying it to the right people. We often hear companies priding themselves on a culture of innovation, and this is a core value, right? I believe you can’t claim to have a culture of innovation if all you’re talking about is innovative processes and innovative products. If you’re not innovating your people dimension in some way or another, then you have a traditional company trying to produce innovative products. That can work, and we’ve certainly benefited from that in our own lives as consumers and the wonderful and amazing breakthroughs that we have every day. How do you nurture a culture of innovation? Because that takes some things beyond just a culture where people are happy at work. Let’s talk specifically about innovation. What are the people dimensions of that and how do you approach it?

I think we sort of talk about innovation most directly within our engineering team because that’s the team that when a customer comes to us, they have got an idea for a product, but they’re not really sure how to build it. This is the team of engineers that comes together to ideate and come up with that design and iterate on it, etc. And so creating a great workplace where they want to be and they feel comfortable, I think helps that they can just be themselves and contribute these great ideas to that customer design. And ultimately, we can build a great product from that. So I think leadership is key in that in terms of creating that great environment, but also encouraging employees to think broadly and to think deeply and to not stop at the first obstacle. I think also this feeling of collaboration, also experimentation, I think is key, right? You have to have an environment that welcomes new ideas and is okay with failure too. And so we talk about that, like it’s okay to fail, but let’s fail fast and learn from that mistake and move on. So you’ve got to have the cultural elements that really support that if you really want to call yourself innovative. I agree.

Now, let me just push back a little bit because engineers are uniquely suited to that way of thinking. They’re inherently thrilled by problem solving and discovery. Hypothesis testing is something they inherently understand and have been trained in even formally in many cases. Can you do that with non-engineers? Could you get other teams to embrace those same ideas without having the same sort of—it’s a little bit of a stereotype, it’s unfair—but without having that sort of natural set of abilities?

I think so. And I think it requires kind of talking about it and defining it and even training to it to help open people’s minds to what we mean by it and what we expect from it. We’re not there yet, but it’s something definitely that we aspire to do.

Are there parts of the business where you actually don’t want people to think in innovative ways? You know, manufacturing is designed on repeatability, right? Quality control means there was nobody having a random idea and trying something in the middle.

Exactly, right. But there’s a balance to that because while we want our production team members to follow the process and comply and build that product to specs, right? We want them to think creatively about their work environment. And so we have a big focus on continuous improvement within the company, as most manufacturing companies do.

And so we’re going through something right now. I’m a judge on a panel assessing various projects that have been going on within the company. It’s called our BEX Olympics. So it’s all about our Benchmark continuous improvement efforts, and all the sites have submitted their projects. They’ve done various Kaizen events and they ultimately have a set of projects that have yielded some financial savings and even some hard savings and some soft savings as well. And so I’ve got six finalists that I’ve been going through and assessing with my team of judges. And it is amazing what our team members come up with, like the creativity, the innovation, and even the production team member who’s on the line. And it’s not necessarily changing the build process, but it’s changing where the parts are and putting things within arm’s reach and eliminating the steps that they have to walk to go get something. And so for them to participate in our Kaizen events and contribute their ideas so that we make a better work environment for them, that’s been hugely rewarding. They’re thrilled to participate in those activities.

Cameron, there’s natural hierarchies based around technical ability, based around experience, etc. But how do you create a culture where that kind of bottom-up thinking makes the overall process better?

I love that you’re doing these Kaizen events. We have a little baby version of that. I just feel like everything I say is baby compared to your scale, but our little baby version is we call them next-time notes, because we do over a hundred events a year. We did over 200 last year, and we have different team members on different crews, different combinations all over the country at any given time. And you learn different things. You know, you learn, hey, at this venue, it turns out the dock shuts down from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. for food delivery or whatever. And we haven’t run into that before. And so we love having the spirit of next-time notes. And it’s very simply just every member of every crew the day after the show, when loadout’s done and you’re on your flight home or whatever, it’s an open journal to share with everyone. Everyone in humility … it takes a pretty big spoonful of humility. How did you grow? How did you learn from this event? And it’s putting on display somewhere where you were weak and are now strong. It’s a safe place—that’s a little overused right now—but it’s a safe platform to say, “Hey, you know what? That was my bad, and that put us an hour and a half behind, and so we had to work harder on setup day to catch up. But I’ve learned from that now, and I think it it’d be a good idea if we put that in our checklist when we’re doing the site visit to ask, are there any hours the dock is closed?”

That’s so silly. But it’s just like the manufacturing example of, “what if we put the parts within arm’s reach?” These ideas that come from everywhere great ideas come from everywhere, but they have to be systematized in business and manufacturing, I’m sure, to then be scalable. And our simple culture is just these next-time notes. And then as our leader and other leaders that are right next to me, we make an example out of saying last year, I read every single next time note from every single event from every single crew member. And our little platform, you can, it’s almost like hitting a like button on Instagram, whatever you can boost with an emoji. And I started boosting with the silliest emojis just so people know, like, he really read this because I want to give an example of being the greatest student, not the greatest expert or the greatest know-it-all. I’m not in charge because I knew everything. I continue to get to be in charge because I’m always trying to grow and innovate and reinvent myself. And it comes from those next time notes.

And one of our core values is around growing and being better all the time. And we say, don’t miss the lesson. And it’s just inspiring to hear that in eight countries with 12,000 people, there’s lessons all around us. We’ve got to put a megaphone to those lessons. Because one teammate, one employee, one person coming up with that idea can really innovate at scale if they’re given the microphone, if they’re given the megaphone, if they’re given the camera, the capture kit, your teammate who’s taking a picture of that and writing a story about it. And it not only directly can move the P&L and savings right there, but it also inspires others to say, wow, I can’t believe these incredible stories are coming from there. What can I do to innovate too? So I love how you guys are doing that. We do that with quote unquote next-time notes, but it’s the secret.

What I think is so powerful about that is these are self-evaluations and self-feedback. It’s not, “Here’s what I think you all need to do differently next time.”

Doesn’t work that way. Won’t work.

Or the way you people screwed me over by being late, et cetera. And you can’t have an environment where that kind of self-disclosure of my failings and my learnings is shared with literally everyone on the team, including the people who write your check, unless that’s coming from the top.

Let’s talk about that dimension, about leadership. You said in the beginning of this conversation, Rhonda, that the transformation story that you’re in the middle of now started with a change in leadership. Sometimes the leadership needs to change, but the people and the roles don’t change. There just needs to be some shift in mindset or perspective or self-growth that makes these things possible. How do you, as somebody who sits in a way, between the chief executives who are focused on the future of the company and the “now” that you have to manage with the people and other dimensions of the company? And how do you navigate between them such that all the leaders are actually providing the space for the things you’re trying to make happen with the workforce?

I think it’s been fairly easy because I have a great group of leaders on my peer team, right? The senior leadership team of the organization. And I think we’re all very aligned in terms of what we envision this organization to be. And we want it to be a great workplace, right?

We’re currently in our third year of our global engagement and inclusion survey. And we’re just now achieving scores that are probably on par with manufacturing industry, which are in the mid-70s. But we know to be a great place to work, we need to be high 80s, low 90s in order to achieve that sort of status. If you think about the Fortune magazine 100 Best Places to Work, those companies are scoring 90 and above. And so while we’re proud of the improvements we’ve made since we started this three years ago, and finally now catching up with manufacturing, we know there’s so much more to do. And we’re all aligned on that. We all say that’s what we want for this company. It’s not success just to be financially profitable and operationally great, but it’s people who drive our operational and our financial performance.

I just facilitated a leadership workshop this week with aspiring general managers. There’s nine of them in our cohort, and that’s the first thing I started talking about on Day 1 was, where does performance come from? It really comes from people. And how do you achieve the best sort of people performance? It’s culture, right? You’re fostering a culture and an environment where people want to give that discretionary effort, where they’re happy to contribute, where they feel welcome and like they belong. And so just drawing this out for people. It’s culture that leads to people performance, which leads to operational and financial performance, and this is how it all works together. And people are … a little bit of a light bulb goes off sometimes. But back to the leadership team, we all want the same thing and so it makes it easy to go after it.

I think upstream from culture is the more broad category of conversations. We’re always talking to ourselves about ourselves, and about our work, and about our manager, and about the company we work for. And then of course we’re also talking to each other, and not always in ways that reflect the core mission vision and values of the company. But this is the reality. There’s always cultural interaction happening because people are always talking, including when we talk to ourselves. Culture change at some profound level is about changing the conversation and getting people to see new things, notice new things, celebrate new things, and change the way they talk. Because human beings, our language creates our world. It’s just unavoidable. We live in that world of words. So we need not just leadership, right? We need it to get down to the level where people are talking to each other every single day. So the managers play a critical role in this. How do you help to develop—I mean, clearly, a workshop like this is part of a bigger program to develop managers. How do you create these capabilities such that they can listen and engage and coach and support their team members in a way that has the whole thing moving in the same direction?

Right. So I think leaders are key, right? Leaders are the role model and I would say the keepers of the culture, right? And it’s them demonstrating the desired behaviors first as a way that people can look to that to say, that’s in alignment with what I know our company values to be. And even emulate that. Built in some accountability into our engagement and inclusion survey by asking two custom questions around the values. One, we asked employees, all employees who are answering the survey, are you aware of the company core values? This was right after the launch. And two, do people here demonstrate or exhibit behaviors that are reflective of the core values? And so it’s a little bit of a report card on leadership, mainly, I think, but you could argue the entire population. But because we get the results in a way that kind of points to a department or points to a site, we can zero in on, is this general manager or are these leaders at this site not behaving in the way that we would expect and not in alignment with our core values? And then that allows us to dive in and have a conversation.

That’s so different than surely what it was 10 years ago, when the three core values were just profit or business, traditional business.

Traditional business, right.

Rhonda, I’m curious about your own personal leadership journey. Were there moments in your career up to this point where something happened and it changed the way you think about this? I mean, clearly, I’m celebrating everything that you’re saying. And as Cameron rightly points out, it hasn’t always been this way, not just for Benchmark, but for anybody. I mean, we really are trying to invent a future we want to live in as opposed to where we’ve come from. Are there key moments or stories that stand out for you, where a lesson was learned or a conflict produced a new insight or a new approach, or something more positive and beneficial changed how you think now?

I think of two things specifically. One is, prior to coming to Benchmark, I worked for 13 years at a purpose-based organization, Universal Technical Institute, headquartered here in Phoenix—educational company focused on post-secondary education in the technical arena, automotive, motorcycle, technician, etc. They stated their purpose was to change the world one life at a time. It’s a pretty bold statement.

Yeah, it’s big.

And it was so powerful. It really attracted people to the organization. It helped retain, I think, people in the organization. And you just knew you were part of something greater than yourself, right? You’re contributing to this greater good and helping change individual lives. And so that experience for me was so powerful to work in that sort of organization. And when I was there, I also worked for a female CEO who was an amazing leader. If you’ve read the book, Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about Level 5 leadership and the servant leader and someone who is humble and cares about others more than themselves. And this was Kim McWaters, my CEO. And so to really be a female executive climbing in position and responsibility, with her leadership, it was so powerful for me. She was my mentor in that regard. So the culture, the leader specifically in that organization, I think really gave me a path and a model to follow in terms of who I wanted to be as a leader.

I think the second thing was specifically identifying my leadership values. We were years ago teaching another leadership workshop and taking the group of aspiring general managers through the book, The Leadership Challenge. And within The Leadership Challenge, the authors talk about clarity of values. It’s not just clarity of organizational values, but it’s clarity of personal values. And it’s when you have clarity of values for yourself and in the organization, that’s when you have the highest levels of commitment to an organization. So the exercise associated with this sort of teaching was taking a set of cards that had 50 different values listed and sorting them into piles, what was extremely important to you, what was moderately important to you, what was not important to you at all. And then taking the pile that was extremely important to you and picking your top five leadership values. And so I went through that exercise along with the learners and found my five. And what the authors of the Leadership Challenge talk about is if you don’t have clarity of your personal leadership—your personal values or quote unquote leadership values—you’re just impersonating someone else. You’re just talking about somebody else’s values.

And I found that true for myself. I was talking about Jim Collins and Good to Great, Level 5 leadership, and saying that’s who I was as a leader. But those weren’t my words. And so when I found my top five leadership values, now I’m able to articulate who I am as a leader and what my leadership looks like to others. And so every new team member that I bring on, I sit down and I share, “Here are my leadership values, and I’d like to know yours.”

It’s so important to be able to model our mentors and to learn behaviors in practice rather than just by being told them. And of course, it strikes me that one of the core issues around equity and inclusion is to make sure that people have a chance to learn from folks like them. And of course, the workplace still, although much progress has been made, is skewed. Or let’s say there’s “legacy components” of the way companies are put together that make it hard for some folks to find examples. You know, I think of the child who needs a doll that looks like her or him so that they can see themselves in the workplace. We’ve made some progress, with so much more to be made, in the realm of having the demographics reflect the broader world, whether it’s with women, whether it’s with national origin, or any of the vectors of difference. And yet there’s so much more that we need to do. As we think about these challenges right now, what are some of the opportunities and what are some of the gaps? What are some of the things that you still, looking ahead, realize “Yeah, we need to tackle this. We haven’t gotten there yet. It’s important. We know it exists, but it’s still something we’re trying to figure out.”

Right. So when we launched our diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy in 2022, we set three-year goals for ourselves as an organization and as a leadership team. And two of those five goals are all around improving the percentage and the representation of historically underrepresented groups, specifically within the manager role. So manager-plus role, levels of leadership. And then also within the technical space. And we define that as one, engineering, but then two, all other sort of shared services type functions: finance, IT, HR. And setting a goal for ourselves, improving that demographic between five and seven percent, depending on the specific role.

We did not make much progress in the first year, but I also I look at it and we didn’t put a lot of investment into it either in terms of education of our leaders, training on interview questions, mandating diverse candidate slates, those sorts of things. And so now that we are building out that infrastructure, we’re now starting to see some improvement in those areas. This year, also, we’re looking to build out a diversity dashboard for our functional leaders. Not setting necessarily a mandatory requirement you must hire, but what that does is that provides awareness, right?

Yeah, just holds up a mirror.

Here’s where you are today at the beginning of the year in terms of your demographic picture. And at the end of the year and in between we’ll you know kind of measure it again so that you can see if you’re making progress or not. And I think awareness goes such a long way. I think people are busy they don’t think about it in their everyday but they’ve got something in front of them a picture a story in front of them it becomes more visible creates awareness and I think that changes behavior.

And, unconscious bias by definition is invisible, is tacit, is taken for granted. So anything that can create visibility around things you might overlook for any number of reasons—none of which mean you’re a bad person—is important because it creates a representation of something that then allows a realization of, “okay, I need to do this differently.”

As we wrap up our conversation today, let’s end with some thoughts about the future. There are things on the horizon that may be coming toward us, things that we recognize are not urgent, but they’re coming. We’re going to have to deal with them. Are there any things of that nature that you’re particularly excited about or particularly worried about? Are there things that you sometimes think to yourself, one of these days, we’re going to have to figure out X?

What comes to mind for me is what I felt has been a gap in our organization for a long time, since we began this cultural transformation journey in 2021, is the lack of a purpose statement. And again, I’d come from a purpose-based organization. I came into Benchmark and manufacturing, it’s not necessarily obvious, perhaps the purpose, but at Benchmark, we already had an external tagline, “When it matters.” So speaking to customers and prospective customers “when it matters, choose Benchmark.” We’ve got the internal talent, the innovation to help you solve your complex challenges.

And certainly in things like aerospace and defense, it always matters.

It matters.

So, we do really important work for these customers, right? We build life-protecting, life-saving equipment for defense and for the medical industry. And how can we take the power of what we’re building and what we’re doing and connect that for our team members to say, I am working on this very important product, and here’s what it does out in the world. And here’s the benefit that that has on a life.

And so we have just launched last month a global campaign. We are inviting all 12,000 employees to provide their ideas and input into how do we make the world better? Tell us, what is your word? What is your adjective? And we’re going to take this input and create a purpose statement from all of this input so that we can proudly say, we make the world better by … or we make the world smarter, more connected, whatever it is. So that, and then a lot of communication around that to help people understand, I’m not just working on a circuit board today. This board goes into this sort of product, and this is what that does out in the world. And I think that’s such a critical piece of our cultural journey that I’ve thought has been missing and just now is the right time to tackle it and to create it.

Rhonda Turner is Chief Human Resources Officer for Benchmark. Thank you so much for joining us for this conversation.

Thank you, Adrian.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Culture Amplified. If you enjoyed the conversation, please share this podcast with a colleague who might also find it valuable. It’s easy to do! Just click the “Share” button in the app you’re listening to now.

Culture Amplified is brought to you by avad3 Event Production, located in Northwest Arkansas and serving clients nationwide. avad3 believes that event production should be flawless so your message can shine. They provide many free resources for corporate and non-profit event planners on their website, including planning checklists, technical guides, and templates. You can download them free of charge at avad3.com. That’s A-V-A-D-3 dot com

Special thanks to Cameron Magee, Tabitha McFadden, Amy Bates, Jessica Kloosterman, Steve Sullivant, Kimber Reaves, and Olivia Martin at avad3 for helping bring this podcast series to life.

Podcast strategy, on-site recording, and post-production by Speed of Story, a B2B communications firm led by Adrian McIntyre – that’s me – and Jen McIntyre. Music by Diego Martinez.

Most of all, we’d like to thank our featured guests, who so generously shared their time, stories, and insights with us. You can learn more about them in the written notes for each episode, at avad3.com/podcast.

For all of us here at Speed of Story and avad3 Event Production, thanks for listening – and for sharing the show with others, if you choose to do so. We hope you’ll join us again for another episode of Culture Amplified.