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0:00:00 - (Doug Jenkins): Coming up next on Chamber amplified, they.
0:00:02 - (Cheri Mason): Want leaders who care about them, who are engaged with them. We don't have to, like, share our entire personal lives, right? But you want a leader who knows something about you, who, if they're going to be making decisions that impact your life and your family's life, don't you want them to know something?
0:00:20 - (Doug Jenkins): Welcome to the show. I'm Doug Jenkins from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce. On each episode of Chamber Amplified, we're examining issues impacting the local business community from employee recruitment, retention, marketing, it issues. It's really anything that can be impacting your business. Our goal is to give our members tips each week on at least one way they can improve operations and thrive in the current business environment.
0:00:42 - (Doug Jenkins): So we've had a bit of a military theme as of late on the podcast. A couple of weeks ago, Nicole Coleman from Hancock County Veterans Services joined us to talk about helping veterans enter the local workforce, among some other topics. Today we're joined by Sherry Mason, who served as the chairman of the board of Veterans of Appeals and led a team of more than 1200 people through some trying times, to say the least. Sherry is going to be coming to speak at the next Women's Leadership forum here in Findlay on April 17. So we'll get a little bit of a preview of that event. Plus, we talk a lot about how leadership has changed and evolved over the past ten to 15 years.
0:01:14 - (Doug Jenkins): Thanks again for tuning in. Remember, if you are listening on Apple podcasts or Spotify, you can rate and review the show. It really does help spread the word. Now let's get into it.
0:01:24 - (C): Let's talk about the Women's Leadership forum coming up in April 1. Certainly, that's one of our signature events here at the Chamber of Commerce. We're really excited to have you coming to Findlay to speak to our members and the community as a whole. What are some of the things that you want to address when you come to Findlay?
0:01:41 - (Cheri Mason): Well, I think I'm going to be talking about a lot of things that I wrote about in the book, but primarily about how leadership is changing leadership because the organizations and the employees are changing and redefining what professional and personal success looks like. That means leaders have to pivot, and that means new leaders have to be prepared for that. And one of the things that we are seeing is that fewer people are raising their hand to become leaders.
0:02:16 - (Cheri Mason): There's a multitude of reasons when you talk to people, some say they're not sure they want the responsibility, and they see it as a lot of work, and there's challenges balancing home life and work life, and that's certainly true. But also there's a good amount of people who are worried about what if I fail? What if I don't succeed? What if, what if, what if? Well, those what ifs, most likely you will experience some of them on some leadership path because that's how you get to be a leader.
0:02:56 - (Cheri Mason): You're not always successful. You fail and you learn and you go on. And so I want to talk about some of those things because those obstacles and challenges, we all have them in our lives. I've certainly had a few, both as a military spouse trying to build and sustain a 30 year career with the federal government while supporting my husband and raising our family, but also as a suicide loss survivor when I was a child in southern Ohio.
0:03:31 - (Cheri Mason): Life doesn't treat us fairly often. And it's those challenges that when they're presented to you, you decide how you're going to face them and deal with them. And I viewed them as stepping stones or catalysts. And leaders, often leaders have two paths. Sometimes they're reluctant to take on those challenges and they will hide or they surround themselves by people. And other times leaders step out and embrace the people around them. And those are the leaders that are successful because they do then learn to have that balance because they're sharing the load and they're leaning on the people of their organization who are their most important resource.
0:04:19 - (C): There's a lot to unpack there. By the way, for those listening, if you want to check out the book before Sherry comes to Findlay here in April, we'll link to that in the show notes here on the podcast so you can get read up on that. Let's talk about the changing role of leaders because I think that is a fascinating subject. And you mentioned that a lot of people, they shy away from that leadership role.
0:04:40 - (C): I'm very curious about that subject because I even find myself, I'm a member of Kiwanas. I don't really want a leadership role in Kiwanas. I like going. I like to help out at the food drives and whatever, things like that. And I find myself wondering, should I be doing more? Do I want to take on more? Do I have the time to take on more? I'm going to guess that I'm not alone when it comes to thinking about those things, when people ask me to take on more of a leadership role on things.
0:05:14 - (Cheri Mason): So I would agree with you. What you're describing is you're already a leader and you know that, right. You know that, right. You lead from where you sit. And leaders do. We just do, whether we have positional authority or whether we have authority because we're who we are. And people naturally come to us for things, ask us to do things. And so, yes, those are challenges about whether you take on those things. And you do have to assess all of that in your world and in your life. But I think that's where we've seen a gap develop.
0:05:53 - (Cheri Mason): So if you want to go back in history, let's go back. Let's go way back to, like, I don't know, 100 and 5200 years ago when we started with the industrial revolution and machines came into the workplace, and actually they basically were the workplace, right? And we had agricultural communities. Many left those agricultural communities that we historically were on and went into factories and worked. And so who was working on those machines and working with those machines? It was people.
0:06:22 - (Cheri Mason): But what happened was leaders looked at those machines and those people as part of the process. They were together, they were parts of it. They were all one package and took some time. But that's kind of where the labor movement started. And some of the other things happened because people were like, wait a minute, I'm still a person. Yes, I have a machine, but I'm.
0:06:45 - (C): Not just a cog in this, right?
0:06:48 - (Cheri Mason): So it kind of started there. And we kind of learned as human beings, I mean, that's what we do. We learn, we adjust and we flex and we figure out how to use those machines. Well, fast forward in time and technology starts entering our world and all sorts of technology, computers and all those things. Well, again, people had to figure that out. Right? And so if you think about back to when the Internet started, I am what you call a digital alien. I think I was around before the Internet existed, and I was an adult when the Internet came along. And when the Internet came along, it was revolutionary about how we used it.
0:07:32 - (Cheri Mason): And people were kind of like, oh, this is going to change our world. Well, yes, absolutely. It changed our world. But again, leaders kind of saw different things and said, well, we can do more because we have this and we have this and people can do this. And again, they forgot that people, that the employees were people. They keep forgetting that concept. And so about, I don't know, 25 years ago, there was this company that came along called Google.
0:08:01 - (C): Yeah, they've done some work, I've heard.
0:08:04 - (Cheri Mason): Yeah. And Google started doing things with their employees differently, like treating them like people and respecting them and valuing them. And quite frankly, the industry didn't know what to do with that until it became a thing. And Google wasn't mean. Southwest Airlines was doing things, virgin was doing things, Wegmans. I mean, we can talk about all the different, but the business community and the leadership community were like, oh, those are just aberrations.
0:08:31 - (Cheri Mason): Well, here we are 25, 30 years in the future, right? And what do we have knocking on the door as we have AI?
0:08:38 - (C): And that really touches on kind of where I wanted to go next because it's one thing to try and assess, do I have the time to be the leader? That type of thing. But I think it's a whole other thing to change your leadership style. If you've been leading one way for several years to then look and see how Google are doing things and think, well, I don't want to lead that way. That almost feels like a tougher thing to change than anything else we've talked about.
0:09:04 - (Cheri Mason): It can be, but it doesn't have to know people. When I retired from the government, the reason I wrote the book was everybody came to me and said, you have to write a book about what you did, because the changes and the innovation and the way, you know, in the Department of Veterans affairs, in the federal government was unheard of. And you were successful and you have to talk about that. And people were paying attention to, you know, as I started listening and thinking about things, I realized that we have this gap, and you're exactly right. That's what's going on. Leaders have been classically trained or conventionally trained to keep relationships with people, with the people who they work with, separate, because they feel that it gets in the way of work, because that's what they've been classically taught, because that's how it works.
0:09:57 - (Cheri Mason): Except that's not realistic, and that's not what the employees, I don't care what generation the employees are in. That's not what they want. And that's why they're redefining it, because they want leaders who care about them, who are engaged with them. We don't have to share our entire personal lives. Right, but you want a leader who knows something about you, who, if they're going to be making decisions that impact your life and your family's life, don't you want them to know something about you and how you work and what your concerns are?
0:10:29 - (Cheri Mason): And the thing is, for leaders, it's really not that hard to change. It's simply making small changes and figuring out that you can't delegate everything and you shouldn't delegate everything. And that yes, you might believe you have people for that, but are those people really supporting you? Are those the right people around you? Because they might not be, at the.
0:10:51 - (C): Same time, delegate a few things. I know that's where I struggle sometimes, is wanting to do everything and realizing that there's not actually time for that.
0:11:02 - (Cheri Mason): Right. But when you have the right people around you. I went into the board as the chairman. Right. It's a primarily legal operation. And so historically, the board had put lawyers in all these positions because we had lawyers. Right. And I'm like, no, we need to think about this as a business. I'm sure some of the lawyers who worked with the board, and I had several exceptional ones, and many were talented in many ways.
0:11:31 - (Cheri Mason): And I had one who happened to be an MIT grad, and he was extremely helpful. And he was basically, he became the innovation strategist, but he was the outlier. I hired an innovation team. I hired some people to help us do that. I hired people to do budget. Again, delegating is important for a leader when you're sharing that load, but ensuring that you have the right people that you're delegating to and understanding that that can be more people than you probably think it is, because leaders are taught to keep their world very narrow.
0:12:11 - (Cheri Mason): And quite frankly, I don't think that's correct. I think the more you engage with the people who work for you, whether it's ten or whether it's 1000, you're going to learn things, you're going to hear things, you're going to explore things, and that's going to help you improve.
0:12:27 - (C): Certainly the process that you went through. Let's talk about your experiences navigating change in a giant federal organization like the Department of Veterans affairs. Not an easy task, I imagine, one that is taxing at times. How did you find the energy to just keep pushing forward with the things that you wanted to implement?
0:12:49 - (Cheri Mason): Well, the energy and drive comes from, and I still use this today. It comes from my mission statement, which is purpose, impact, and value. I was a VA beneficiary at a very young age, having lost my father, a World War II veteran, to suicide. And so those benefits made a difference to me. But it was not only the benefits that made a difference to me. It was the veterans in the community where I lived in southern Ohio in the foothills of Appalachia, who were the ones that came along and supported my mother and I and helped us right when everybody else treated us differently and tried to make us invisible because they didn't understand mental health and those challenges, I understood the importance of veterans benefits and services to a veteran's.
0:13:42 - (Cheri Mason): Then, you know, I married a military guy, know, got to experience that life and, you know, through those experiences from Mississippi to Nebraska to Virginia to Germany and back to Virginia again, those experiences that military and their family members have. And I was working at VA during part of this time when we were moving around, and then I ended up back at VA after we came back stateside. And for me, it was really about the veterans and their families, and that's what drove me because I knew the organization, although when I took over, was struggling. I mean, I liken it to a ship headed the wrong way.
0:14:31 - (Cheri Mason): We weren't quite taking on water, but we weren't in great shape, and there were storms on the horizon, and they were headed towards the rocks. The difference was the crew knew what they were doing. They just had to have their confidence built back up and their mission put in front of them. And once I started communicating that and working with them and supporting them first, including many who were veterans and spouses and family members, the ship turned. And it turned pretty quickly, I think.
0:15:02 - (C): In a smaller organization, for someone in a leadership role to have the touch points with their employees and the people that they want on their team, they can see the blueprint for that. But when you have a larger organization like what you were dealing with, how do you make someone in the rank and file that you may not engage with even on a monthly basis, but they're part of the organization, how do you bring them into the fold like that?
0:15:24 - (Cheri Mason): So what I did, which was initially was unnerving, and that will tell you something about your organization if you do this, and it's unnerving when you start walking around. At the time, this was pre Covid, you start walking around. And I even did it during the pandemic, virtually like this, where you just kind of reach out and talk to people, right? So walking around, all of a sudden, people were like, you're checking on me.
0:15:50 - (Cheri Mason): The chairman's down here. She's checking. She's checking on us. We're doing this. And I would say this first. It's scheduled time for me to spend time with you, so you can ask me any questions, give me your concerns, but I'm not checking on you. I'm actually probably getting in the way of your work. I'm checking in with you. There's a difference between checking on and checking in. I was checking in, and it quickly became where they looked forward to it, and they were like, when are you going to do it again?
0:16:23 - (Cheri Mason): Right. And I did it as often as I could because it gave people, I became visible, I became very approachable, and I couldn't do it all the time. But the other thing I did is I told them in meetings whether it was we had virtual, because we had people working remotely even then, whether it was virtually. And I met with those groups as well, what I was going to talk about. So if I was going to the hill to testify or I was going to a conference to talk about, I told him what I was going to say and I told him I was going to brag on them. And then I brought stuff back when I would hear things. And some people were positive, some people weren't.
0:17:04 - (Cheri Mason): And I'd say, look, I heard this and this is great, but I also heard this. What are we doing about that? Right. And so I would ask them for their input when we went into the pandemic. By that time, I started with 800. We went to 1200. We hired during the pandemic. I moved them pretty much 500 people out of the building in two weeks because we had the ability to already do that through some other innovation and tech that we could do.
0:17:35 - (Cheri Mason): But then I realized I had to connect with them. I had to keep that connection because they felt overlooked. They felt that life had turned upside down, and they felt the leaders, including me, didn't care. And so I had to reestablish that. And I did that through videos and through engagement. Like, I would have short, small coffee times, and it was scheduled and I was virtual so I could schedule my time a little bit better sometimes.
0:18:07 - (Cheri Mason): But also I had to teach my leadership team, who was fairly new, because we hadn't really built our relationship yet. So I had to build that relationship with them and teach them how to do this because this is not something they were comfortable doing. Right, right. But what happened is the minute I started doing some of these things, just checking in on people occasionally through teams or just having small group meetings or whatever, the organization, the people of the organization took off with it. And so I was suddenly flooded with invitations to happy hours and lunch meetings because they wanted to do it. They just didn't know it was okay.
0:18:47 - (C): Right. You mentioned something that I'm interested in, and I don't want to give away everything you're going to talk about when you come to Findlay. This is just a primer for people when you're here on April 17. But you mentioned sometimes along the way, especially when you're trying to turn the ship around or you're trying to get something important done. Not everybody is going to be happy with what you're doing.
0:19:08 - (C): And it takes broad shoulders to take that in stride. Even when people are going to say things that are just completely out of bounds and really out of context with what you're trying to do, how do you keep coming back and facing that? You talked a little bit about your mission statement and everything. Do you just keep going back to that? Is it kind of the same process?
0:19:30 - (Cheri Mason): A little bit. Part of that is rooted in my early life experiences. So as a multiple suicide loss survivor, having lost my father and brother before I was 18, particularly the loss of my father at the age of four, was very difficult because people excluded us, people treated us differently. And I learned from the strong individual who was my mother that she would not allow me or herself to be made invisible, even though I preferred to. I was like, hey, let me.
0:20:14 - (Cheri Mason): No, we're not doing that. Because she understood that if we allowed that, it would impact our self worth and how we felt. Right. Because we need to matter and we need to have purpose. I didn't get that. Didn't get that for a while. Well, then as a military spouse, when I stepped into that world, my husband and I were 22 years old, right? We didn't know the military. Even though we've been around military a little bit, we hadn't grown up as military kids, and we didn't really know what to expect. And I walked into a world where military spouses weren't expected to want to work or weren't expected to have a career. And I was in law school, and I literally had a senior spouse, more than one, tell me that I was being selfish and that there was nothing I could ever do that would eclipse my husband and that my job was to support his career.
0:21:11 - (Cheri Mason): And because I had already lived through that as a child who had been excluded and treated differently when that same type of invisibility was attempted to be foisted on me, because, again, the senior spouses at that time in the 80s, didn't know that's what they knew. That's how they've been taught. That's certainly not the way they are now. It's completely different.
0:21:38 - (C): I would imagine that.
0:21:39 - (Cheri Mason): Yeah, but that's what they knew. And so I didn't accept it. And so I just didn't accept it because I had learned that I didn't have to. And so the same thing happened when I stepped into the role of chairman. I was a careerist, which in the federal government, normally people who have careers in the federal government aren't tapped to become political appointees. Generally, that generally doesn't happen.
0:22:04 - (Cheri Mason): So I literally walked out the door as a senior executive in the organization or walked back in the door an hour later as the political appointee. And people told me to my face I was going to fail, that I didn't know what I was doing. People in my organization and the larger VA as well as beyond, and my response was the same as it had been to the military spouses many years before. Watch me.
0:22:31 - (C): It's impressive. I'm really looking forward to you coming to Findlay, and I don't want to spoil any more of what you're going to talk about. So like we said, that's the primer for the women's Leadership forum on April.
0:22:42 - (Cheri Mason): 7, and I can't wait.
0:22:43 - (C): We will link to your book in the show notes as well. Sherry, thanks for taking time to join us on the podcast.
0:22:48 - (Cheri Mason): Thank you. It's been my pleasure. It's been great talking to you. I look forward to being back in Ohio and in my old stomping grounds near Ohio northern, where I spent a few years. So thank you.
0:23:04 - (Doug Jenkins): Thanks again to Sherry for joining us. I'm really looking forward to having her here in Findlay for the next women's Leadership forum again. That's on April 17. You can RSVP for that event now, and we'll put a link in the show notes for this episode on how to do that. We'll also have a link for more information about Sherry's book in the show notes as well, so be sure to check that out. Chamber amplified is a free podcast for the community thanks to the investment of members from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce. Because of our robust membership, we're able to focus on providing timely information to the Findlay and Hancock county business community, as well as run things like leadership programs for adults and teenagers and be an advocate for the area while also providing tools to help local businesses succeed. Now, if that sounds like something you'd like to be a part of, let me know. We can talk about how an investment in the chamber helps strengthen the community and make sense for your business.
0:23:50 - (Doug Jenkins): That'll do it for this week's episode. If you have any ideas for topics we should cover in the future, let me know. Just send me an email. Djenkins@Findlayhencockchamber.com remember, if you're listening on our website, you can have every episode of Chamber amplified delivered straight to your phone. Make it easy on yourself. Just search for us in your favorite podcast player and subscribe. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time on chamber amplified from the Findlay Hancock County Chamber of Commerce.