S9EP7. Encouraging diversity of thought: leading with lessons from the past and creating forward-thinking teams with Maure Creager

After that, I got married and we moved to Minnesota. I was able to join a startup firm, as an R&D engineer or product development engineer for an electrochromic glass product, which is a product that probably a lot of people in this industry haven't quite heard of. It's like the transition sunglasses, but for buildings, where it's blocking the light and the heat. It was a startup so you have to have a very entrepreneurial spirit. You have to be very fluid and see problems as they're coming and be able to quickly move and navigate with those. I was with that company for about 17 years, so I was able to see it grow from a party of 20 in the company to a party of 500 and being a global product, and I was able to really support that. Along that time is when I really developed a lot of my sustainability expertise because I was their main person for sustainability and material transparency. Now I’m leading the circular economy efforts for CertainTeed roofing and that has been a great learning experience for me as that has really allowed me to translate a lot of the experience from previous. 

Can you talk about how your background in engineering and sustainability have helped shape how you lead your team?

I think leadership qualities, personalities, what makes a good leader translates to whatever industry you're working in. A great leader is a great leader. It doesn't necessarily matter what industry they're in. It's really about the qualities that person has. Perhaps there are some qualities that are more relatable to some of the team members as you enter that industry, but otherwise, I think a good leader is a good leader. In my current role, what's been really interesting to see as we talk about this word sustainability. The word sustainability means a lot of things to a lot of different people and it usually doesn't mean the same thing to me as it would to you all, right? It could mean very different things depending upon our life experiences and our education and our background, but usually there is always something that we can agree on that we are trying to do at the end of the day when we think of sustainability. We usually all can come to agreement that we want our business to be successful and be able to keep moving forward today, but we also want to make sure that we're setting our business up for success in the future and being able to continue to move that forward, which is essentially what sustainability is. We're trying to make sure that future generations are able to do what they need to do with the resources available to them.

What's helped you transition into the asphalt pavement industry and to become a leader in this space? 

You're right. I had never worked in asphalt at all or roofing when I entered this space. Honestly, when I took this position, we thought it would be doing more roofing work, and that is part of my job. I manage the circular economy efforts for the entire business. So we're working on circularity efforts for shingles themselves, but it’s the shingle that goes into paving that is really what my focus is on today. And, you're right, I did not know a thing about asphalt or roads or transportation really before this at all, but I'm really curious. I like learning and I find relationships to be key. Whenever you go into a new industry or a new business development or whatever you're doing, it's really developing those relationships. I try to be very humble. I know that while I may have been an industry expert in electrochromic glass, I will never have 45 years of asphalt experience or probably ever operate a hot mix asphalt plant in my lifetime as well. However, I am a technical problem solver at heart, so being able to really dig in and be curious has helped me to learn quickly. When I first entered the industry, I attended a lot of meetings and conferences just to learn. I didn't talk. I asked a lot of questions very quietly, and really built a network of industry experts that I could reach out to and ask questions from. Those people have been incredibly willing to share their knowledge with me and teach so I can bring in my expertise to be able to develop new businesses, grow products, bring the sustainability knowledge in, and my leadership qualities. I've been incredibly blessed to be on, and to lead, some great teams of truly amazing people over all of those different organizations that I've been with, including the one that I'm on today. The team that I lead now they're really quite incredible. The openness of people to be able to share and collaborate has really, I think, helped me to move really quickly into this space and learn a lot about it. 

So, we might as well make sure that we know what happened in the past to be able to make good decisions going forward. We have all worked with great leaders that we really admired, and maybe we only admired certain qualities and maybe we didn't like other things. By now in our careers, we've all worked for people that we're thankful have moved out of our orbit and that's okay too. So you take those experiences and learn from them. For me, it's all about does it resonate with me as a leader or not? Is it how I would want to be treated as a team member or not? The way that I treat or lead my team is how I would also want to be treated or led. I have learned to be incredibly transparent with my team and stakeholders. As much as I can share with them, I'm going to. I think that really helps to ensure that we're all on the same page. We understand the risks and the rewards. We hear a lot that our people are our greatest resource, but it's sometimes really easy to forget that once we get to a higher level and we're looking at KPIs and the business drivers and what needs to change and how fast we need to move. Remembering that our teams are really what makes it work.

When people talk about circular economy, they're talking about materials, but how can some of those principles be applied to leadership or even business strategy?

When we think about circularity, it's a broad term and it can be interpreted a couple of different ways, similar to sustainability. The way that I simplify it to myself is, my role is really to figure out how we can, within the CertainTeed roofing business, take shingles back into themselves. So it's a composite product that would then be somehow deconstructed and made into a new product, a new roofing product. Or if we cannot do that, or we cannot do that with all our product, how do we then find other solutions that are themselves circular?

In manufacturing or in businesses where we consume raw materials, one of the key factors that we're looking at is the risk and long-term consistent supply of your raw materials. That's something that I think people are perhaps more aware of now after just going through Covid and supply chain issues that we had at that time. But even looking further out, 15, 20, 30 years, do you know that you're going to be able to consistently get the materials that you need for your product?  Again, if you're thinking about the continuity of the business and how to continue to grow it, we know consumers and the market in general is really looking for more durable and more resilient products. So how do we continue to design those products to last longer and to be more easily maintained? And I think that's true in any industry. We're seeing that with the perpetual pavement work that's happening and being discussed today in this particular industry. We're constantly looking at all of our different products and how do we ensure that they're able to either be repaired, which is an kind of going back to how our grandparents thought about things, or lasting longer and I think that will continue.  

Could you share how you create a culture where diverse perspectives drive better decision making in the business?

I think it's incredibly critical for us to surround ourselves in life and in work with people that think differently than us and have different experiences than us. That’s how we become very closed and narrow minded if we're only around people that are exactly like we are. For me it's really important to ensure that your team shows the diversity in all of those things: background, thoughts, experiences, education. Bringing all of those different people and different experiences to the table helps everyone to have a much more well-rounded understanding of whatever the topic is that you're talking about because we all have different perspectives on it, which helps us make better decisions. Whether it's me surrounding myself with a diversity of thought, or the group making a decision. When you talk about the creation of a culture, people may not see the value of that. We can think about that in a lot of different ways. We can think about that as bringing the guy that is an operator into one of the management meetings and hearing what he has to say about something. That's a different thought that perhaps is not normally in that meeting and I bet we'll learn something from that person coming to that meeting. So, people may not think that person needs to be at the meeting to start with, but by bringing them there, letting them share their voice, and then showing how their voice is impacting the decision, or the difference, or whatever you're talking about, helps to bring value to that person. That's how you start to create the culture of change and value difference of thoughts. I think it's really important you bring them to the table and really show their value.

Can you share a time when something didn't go as expected and what you learned from that experience and how does it shape your outlook today? 

I’ve had more failures probably in life than wins, coming from a startup program. You learn a lot. There's a lot of failures that come as you develop a new product. I can't think of one perfect, great example of it, but I know that as we were developing the first product with Sage and putting it out onto the market, we learned a lot. We had done a lot of accelerated lab testing, but it was the first time it was going into the field, and it was the first time that we were producing it. When you're going into production for the first time, your estimates of when you can actually deliver may or may not be correct. And we were wrong a lot with what we were doing. And I was the leader of that team, so I was the one that was making the phone calls to a lot of different construction projects telling them that their product was going to be delayed and that sometimes we were delaying it. It wasn't days, it wasn't weeks, it was months or several months. It's hard to deliver that message and it's hard to get the feedback from people who are yelling and swearing at you on the telephone, telling you the impact to their project, because it's a cost impact, it's a labor impact, it's a schedule impact. It’s huge. But what I learned is really to separate the business side of things from the personal side of things. It's really easy to take it personally when someone's yelling and screaming at you and swearing at you on the phone. You're doing everything in your power to solve the problem for them, but at some point in time, you just can't take it personally and you just need to move forward and solve that problem. I think, with that, you learn how to stay calm in this situation, which is huge. We've all worked for leaders and people and managers that don't stay calm in the moment and that doesn't help anything at all. Blowing up and me getting all up in arms is not going to be the thing that solves the problem. So staying calm is really important. You definitely take away resiliency. Having those situations over and over again make you a more resilient leader.

You're able to see the broader picture, you understand your customer’s issues a little bit more, which always, the more you can understand your customers the better. Then I think in general, it's just recognizing in that situation, there's no end to blame. It’s just a product of the process and how things are moving forward. So making sure that you aren't placing blame, that you're just acknowledging the situation. Figuring out how to solve the problem and then moving forward is really critical. I think there's a lot of value in looking backwards. I love lessons learned and postmortems. I think they're incredibly useful. I don't know if they're used as much as they used to be, but, I think they're really helpful in creating a culture and creating a team. When you're able to openly and regularly look backwards and recognize what went well and what didn't go well and learn from that and then allow the team to really take that and move forward. It's incredibly powerful. The team then has ownership over. How and what changes are made going forward because they've recognized what happened in the past and have insight and decision making authority, how we're changing and moving forward in the future. To me, I think that really helps you to create a strong team because they see the problem and then they see how we're going to solve it and move forward in the future.

Could share some skills or qualities that you see that really differentiate between good and great leaders

All leaders have to be able to clearly articulate the vision of where we're going to us. When I look back at the early days of Sage and when we were starting that company, our CEO and the founder was incredibly inspiring. He just needed to talk to us for 10 or 15 minutes and we all were renewed and impassioned about moving forward. Even if something awful had just happened. So I think the ability to really inspire your team to keep the vision moving forward is incredibly powerful in a great leader. Truly listening, being empathetic, and connecting with your team or your organization on a personal level is also very important. Knowing somebody's name is not enough. You should really know them because part of being a great leader is knowing your team really, really well. Picking up on those cues on when things are going grea and when things aren't.

Some of the other key qualities I think make a great leader having really great integrity. Good leaders maybe have integrity, but just never wavering from your ethics and your integrity is important. Having the grit to be able to do that is incredibly important. The last thing we all look to our leaders to be is decision makers. This is a technical field. We all love data and we all want all of the data to be able to make a good decision before we're able to move forward. Sometimes we don't have all of that. So a great leader, trusts their gut, their intuition to be able to move the decision forward and not everyone is willing to do that. So I think that's another differentiator.

The reason why is because I feel very strongly that it's important for us to support the initiatives that we believe in and The Road Forward and the goals and the mission of The Road Forward very much align with the mission of Saint Gobain and CertainTeed. We're all moving forward and it aligns well with our waste diversion and circular economy goals. But from a personal standpoint, I think it's really important for us to come to the industry. We are new in the industry, nobody knows who we are and I want everyone to recognize that we're coming to them not as like this drop in manufacturer, that's just trying to sell a new technology. I'm really looking to partner with people and figure out solutions. I think that's something that the curiosity and the problem solving and recognizing that the goals that we're putting out there are really hard. The time is ticking. We're much closer to 2050 than we are to 2000 at this point in time. We all remembered the fear of Y2K and that was nothing compared to what we can imagine for 2050. So we need to move, and we need to move quickly. Therefore supporting initiatives that are helping to move that forward is incredibly important and being a part of them is really important. Again, diversity of thought and experiences allow us to be able to move forward more quickly and make those changes happen faster.

As I've gotten older, I have realized I know less. And so I would say stay curious because there's always more to learn, but yet also know yourself and trust your instincts. There comes a time when we're middle managers, where we think we know everything, and then we learn we don't. There's more to learn and I think that is incredibly powerful as we become leaders and are leading our teams.