S9EP4. Leading with values: the power of people-first leadership with David White

We're a values-based business. Really looking forward to diving deep into what that is to us. You have a lot of companies out there and we're the same that, you have your mission statement, right? You have values, you're going to walk in to a company, they're going to have a values, they might have posters on the wall with values. We do. They have vision statements. But really, we believe that values are really how you conduct business. Your mission is going to tell you what you do. Your vision is going to say why you do it maybe, but your values are how you do it. And that's just what we think separates us in certain ways. It's what gets you up before the alarm clock goes off. That's what we love.

Could tell us a little bit about your journey into leadership and what that looked like for you as you've progressed through your career.

So, you know, growing up in a family business environment, you start your journey a little earlier than most. I was probably 16 when I got dropped off at the asphalt plant to start working in the summers. By the way, you can't do that anymore, but back then you could. And, so I started working around a lot of these remarkable people, that I still get to work with today. I'd work through the summers in high school and summers in college. I was on the road crews and, these people become family very quickly. When you work closely with them like that every single day, when you start your journey with them. After college, I was in the operation side of the house and worked in the field, for well over a decade.

You do life with them. You’re going to weddings, you meet their kids, you know those kids names, you're going to graduations, you're going to, their football games and, you end up at weddings and funerals. So when you talk about blood, sweat, and tears, those are all real things that happen because you do life with them, they're your family. When that takes place and you start to grow in leadership, there's a trust that is built there because of the life you've lived with each other. I think that's what's unique about certain family businesses, right? When you have that level. I think that's a differentiator sometimes with certain businesses like that.

Superior Paving is a tri-family based business. What are some of the most significant leadership changes that the business has experienced over the years?

Some of the most significant, obviously, I would say from generation one to generation two. That's a big massive transition, right? That takes a lot of nurturing, takes a lot of communication, and a lot of transparency within the families to make sure that it’s something that is able to survive and it is able to be sustained. There was a lot of hard work that was done to make sure that happened correctly. And there's a lot of hard work that still happens today to make sure we are forging a path forward to make sure that this company remains highly successful and that we're setting it up for the future. Transparency is probably the biggest thing that we needed to make sure we had when we set it from generation one to generation two, from family leadership.

My father told me, look, ‘one thing I will help you with is I'll help you get a job. I'll let you get a job here, but after that, I'm not going to touch it. You will work for the person you're supposed to work for. And if that person decides you're working hard enough and they want to move you up, then that's up to them. You're going to work like you would be in a normal job. If they want to decide to give you a raise, that's up to them and how you're doing.’ So that's how it's been for all the family members. If you're going to work here, it's going to be just like you would be anywhere else. You have to have expectations. You have to meet those expectations and, in many ways, exceed them because you're looked at a little different. So that's been, I don't want to say secret sauce, but it's been something we've really worked hard for. And one of our values is excellence. We define it as exceeding expectations and that's something we really work hard to do as family members being a part of the business.

So, if we are, developing remarkable employees. And we're doing it with our values, which our values are excellence, partnership, integrity, and commitment. That's EPIC, by the way. We're doing it with our values. Then all of the things that are extremely important, like tons, which is our great multiplier. All the different things that everyone measures that are extremely important. If we are investing in our employees, developing them, then all those things just take care of themselves, right? It just happens. So our focus is on our people. I'm getting to your question; when we're pouring into our folks, pouring into our people, training them, developing them, setting clear roles, responsibilities, and expectations, and defining what those are for our people.And setting them up for success with a competency model and giving them a blueprint for where they want to go and having those intentional and thoughtful conversations, then it gives you a defined level, a defined bench if you will. It clearly gives you access to who wants to go where, where they want to be next, who has can fill a certain role. And that has just really helped us get to a level where we feel we have. Strong succession throughout the departments within our company.

What are some of the certain qualities that you see other leaders around you that you want to incorporate into your life as you continue leading Superior in the future?

Oh man, I am constantly listening and learning when I'm at these associations, especially NAPA. I've just always been enamored and blown away by some of the people I get to be around. Being blessed enough to sit at the table of influence is one thing, but to be able to absorb some of the knowledge, and just the way people show up in some of these meetings. Anyway, I just feel blessed, but sometimes it's the way people through maybe some challenging conversations. The way that they can show up with poise, the way that they can show up with respect, even though it's extremely challenging moment. That is something I've always wanted to strive to do, because I can get pretty passionate and if I can run that through the old filter and show up with some, demeanor and some calm and some poise, that is something I've always been so impressed with people, how they do that especially when the other side is pretty animated and fired up.

People with strong integrity is something that, when there's so many different doors you can walk through, to try to get something done or get something accomplished. And the folks that will always without question, choose the integrity door, that is something I'm always looking at and always focused on and something you always want to grab ahold of. I'm always drawn to those people. Another thing I look at with leaders within our industry, ones that are so dedicated to safety. Anybody that talks about safety, and they make it a point and somehow in a conversation, or if they're up at the podium talking and safety comes out, that is something that I'm extremely passionate. People ask you, what's the one thing that keeps you up at night, that's the one. And so, when other leaders are stepping up to the plate and talking about it, I am quickly drawn to them and I want to find them after a meeting and talk to them and learn more about who they are. We have incredible leadership in this association and, I'm just blessed to be able to be a part of it.

I'm curious to hear your take on partnerships and how leadership qualities can really play into building and maintaining those relationships in the industry.

One thing that's great about our industry is the ability to bring about all sorts of different, unique partnerships in order to get so many things accomplished, right? I think without our industry; you're not moving things forward. You're not moving goods and services. You're not moving products. you're not delivering on much at all without us. So that brings about so many different things that you can do. And I think about the partnerships that, we've been able to do with our DOTs, we've been able to build incredible projects. We've been able to bring about unique innovations that otherwise wouldn't be. We’ve been able to partner on a lot of safety initiatives. We’re actually working on one right now and one of the things that we've been chasing is the safety of our people. We're working on ways in which we can shut roads down to get traffic away from us. We finally got some folks to say, this is a tool in your toolbox, but you need to help us better understand how we can communicate it to the public. You got to better help us understand how this will impact us from a quality standpoint, how this will impact us all the way through the system. They said we will make sure this is a tool in your toolbox, but it takes a lot of partnering. It takes a lot of trust to make that happen.

When I think about within NAPA, I think about partnering with our state associations from all the things that we do within research to implement and deploy all these incredible things, to educate. To chase down initiatives that are so vital to our industry, moving forward for the sustainability of our industry. There's so many unique partnerships that foster positive experiences. We could be here for a while. It's a different podcast!

So there's that. But then I think the important part of getting into leadership within an association like NAPA, as I mentioned before, is to be able to sit at the table of influence to be able to sit there and somehow stand shoulder to shoulder with people that maybe sometimes you're even competing with, but to stand shoulder to shoulder with them and row in the same direction on important initiatives that will shape the industry - who doesn't want to sign up for something like that? That's impactful in my opinion. I'll never forget the first time I walked into my very first NAPA Meeting. It was 2007. My father was becoming Chairman and it was in San Francisco. I had no idea the scale of which NAPA was. I didn't know it was this big an annual meeting. I didn't know. I remember walking in to the last evening, it was back when they were the Young Leaders, I walked into the young leaders dinner. And back then they did the dance and all that stuff. And it was massive amount of people blown away. And I remember the Young Leaders Chairman, his name was Ross Kashiwagi. He was a Granite. He stood up and he started speaking. And I remember I told my wife, Debbie, I was like, who is this guy? And I found out there was Chairman of the Young Leaders Group, Young Leaders Committee. And I leaned over to Debbie, and I was like, 'I don't know what that is, but I want to do that. I want to do that.’ And that was just, I got to figure this out. How do I become a part of this Committee? How do I one day get to get into leadership in that and just chase that down? Because how cool would it be to be a part of NAPA, to be a part of whatever this young leaders group is to sit and learn all those things from all these incredible people and network like that. And then just slowly build your way through. It’s just an amazing experience that people have to get, to be a part of. Your business needs it.

When you look at some of the trends or challenges out there, what do you think leaders really need to be adopting to in the future?

So just speaking on my end, we need to constantly be educating ourselves on what's out there. We need to have a lot of self-awareness and recognize that we are not the only ones that are going to be able to learn this stuff and be able to implement it. There's some incredible folks, at least in our office, that are leaps and bounds ahead of me on some of the things that are happening in this world when it comes to, let's talk about it, generative AI. What's happening in this world when it comes to some of the technologies that are taking place with our equipment and those things. So I need to, as a leader, take off the heavy backpack of, ‘I've got to figure all this out myself. And then teach and train all of the people in this building.’ No, no, they already know it. They're already ahead of it. And what I need to do is collaborate with them and figure out the best way that we can implement it within this company and lead from that space. Now, that might not work in everybody else's business, but that has been the most effective way to lead in this company, by opening the door. And empowering our people to learn, grow and lead, from where they're at. And it's just been so exciting to see that happen. So yeah, there's a lot of things coming and self-awareness around the fact that I'm not going to be able to capture all of it and lead it from that way. That was a quick lesson I needed to figure out on my own.

How does a company build that kind of culture where either they're evaluating the people coming into their business to make sure that they align with those core values that you have?

I love this topic. So, we call it our values based journey. We started it back in 2012. We always had values, but we never really articulated them, wrote them down, did the work, put them on a poster, all that stuff. So we did that back then. And one of the ways that we get to where you talked about just now, Richard was, we had to constantly talk about them. Every meeting that we're in. We have what we call values and action stories. Now, when I say every meeting, I mean every meeting. It could be a meeting of 40 people. So our operations meetings every week, we call them our family meeting. You know, we're talking about everything from a safety update to our two week look ahead. I mean, it's a massive update where there's 20 people live and then we have a hybrid of 22 people offline or what have you, but we start with a values and action story.

It could be as simple as, ‘Hey, I saw Richard today. and he was showing excellence. He was exceeding expectations’ and we share that. Then someone else will pop up and say, ‘I want to share a values and action story about Brett in partnership. He showed that he was being one team by working really hard, with Kate doing this.’ And you have every single meeting, even if it's just three of us, you start with the values in action story. So, when you start doing that, it's this little snowball effect where the values are spoken every single day. It just becomes a part of your culture. We go out to the crews, we start our morning huddles with a values in action story. We talk about our EPIC values. We talk about our mission. It is all over our building. If you walk in, the first thing you're going to see is a big, massive board with our EPIC values and nothing but pictures of our people. When you walk in our training room, all you're going to see is our values. You're going to see EPIC all over the place. And all we do is speak about it. So that's one thing to do is speak about it. But then you have to show up that way. And it starts with all of us, all of our leaders. You have to live it, you have to practice it. And then when you mess up, because we are not perfect beings, we're human beings, you have to own it out loud and be transparent about it where, ‘Hey, I did not show up with excellence today. I had a moment here where my commitment was a swing and a miss.’ And here's where it was when you own those things and show them that you are a human being and you're transparent with your people and that the values were missed on, then the value start to speak life into people. They lead the way for us. They're the light that shine our path forward. They always will be.

So, I think if you love your people truly do. Then you're going to be a great leader and everything else is going to take care of itself. So that's, that's the only advice I think I could give.

If you could describe your leadership journey in one sentence. What would it be?

A journey of self-awareness, that's been my leadership journey. Values-based leadership pushes you into a true self-awareness journey. There's a book I read probably once a year, it's called Leadership and Self Deception. It's from the Arbinger Institute. We do Arbinger Leadership training here and it teaches you that people are not objects or tools. And you're like, yeah, of course. But you'd be amazed at the fact that even though you say you love your people, how often we can tend to have this inward mindset where it's my goals, my objectives that I want to push through ‘cause I'm the leader. This is what I think is best for my business, that we use people as objects and tools to get done what we get done, but to flip the script and have the outward mindset to go through the self-awareness piece of ‘Hey, I'm not going to know everything.’ There are people in this building that are going to be really well versed and smarter at this than me. And together we can accomplish some great things. It's been the journey of self-awareness, Richard. That's what it's been.

To follow up, when you talk about self awareness, could you maybe share kind of the process that you go through in relation to self awareness?

I have, you say toolbox, there actually are a whole plethora of tools. I'll say it again, what we go through with Arbinger, I'll give you one that I use often, and it sits on my desk. It's called the influence pyramid. When you think of a pyramid, you know you look at the very top of a pyramid, and there's this word that says correct right, where you're correcting. And the very bottom of the pyramid tells you to get out of the box. It tells you, reminds you, ‘Hey, people are not objects. You need to think about what their goals and objectives are.’ So you got the very tip of the spear. The tip of the pyramid goes straight to correcting, straight to telling. People love to be told what to do, right? I know my kids, it's their favorite. So, you go straight to correcting or it's the bottom of the pyramid is what are their goals and objectives. And then the middle of the pyramid is listening and learning. So, I always have this thing on my desk to remind myself in whatever situation I'm in, where on this influence pyramid do I need to be?

‘Cause, you're constantly needing to influence things, right? For the good of the company, for the good of someone's career, maybe for the good of whatever they're going through in their life. So where do I need to show up best for them? And so many times I see that I want to just get in there and fix. I want to get in there and correct. And so often I need to drop down in the pyramid and either build a relationship or I need to listen and learn more. And it's very rare I need to get at the tip of the spear and correct. So, for me, that's one of the biggest tools that I've been able to utilize. And that's why I keep it on my desk because clearly my default mechanism has always been to correct and fix. So that's just one tool, I've got a pile. I got a pile of them ‘cause I need them!