Navigating Adversity with Transparency
Episode Notes
In this compelling episode of 52 Humans, Paul Wolfes sits down with Kurt Landon, Founder & CEO at Enspira, to delve into the world of human-first and empathetic leadership. Kurt shares a personal story of navigating adversity and making difficult decisions while prioritizing the well-being of his team. The conversation highlights the importance of transparency, sacrifice, and resilience in leadership. Tune in for valuable insights and inspiring perspectives on leading with empathy.
About the Guest
Kurt Landon
Founder and CEO
Enspira
Kurt is an accomplished executive and entrepreneur with nearly three decades of experience in senior business and HR leadership roles across diverse industries and global locations. As the CEO of Enspira, a renowned total solutions human capital consulting firm, Kurt brings a wealth of expertise to help organizations optimize their workforce strategies. He has an impressive track record, having worked with leading companies like Accenture, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Expedia, and Biogen. Kurt's extensive international background includes living and working in eight countries, spanning four regions, and fluently speaking five languages. He has successfully founded and operated three companies and is a sought-after guest lecturer at prestigious institutions such as Northeastern University, Université Catholique de Louvain, and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. Kurt holds an undergraduate degree in Italian Language & International Economics from Washington University in St. Louis and an advanced degree in Global HR Leadership from Rutgers University. Under his leadership, Enspira has gained recognition, with features on NBC News, being named a "Top Ten Workforce Management" firm by HR Tech Outlook magazine, and one of the "Top 50 Companies to Watch" by Silicon Review magazine. In 2022, Inc. Magazine honored Enspira as one of the Top 100 Best Workplaces.
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0:15
Hello and welcome to another weekly episode of 52 humans, the vlogs on stories of human first leadership.
0:22
I'm your host, Paul Wolf and I created this show to inspire us all to transform our workplaces by returning to the humanity that binds us today.
0:30
I'm looking forward to my conversation with Kurt Landon about human first and empathetic leadership.
0:35
Kurt is the founder and CEO of Inspire a Total Solutions, human Capital firm and an amazing human being.
0:41
Kurt.
0:41
Welcome to the show.
0:43
Thanks Paul, great to be with you today.
0:46
It's, it's gonna be a good conversation.
0:47
Can you tell us a little bit about Inspire, kind of what you do to, you know, total Solutions human capital firm?
0:53
That's a broad, broad statement as we both know, but talk to us a little bit about what you do and, and why you started the company?
0:59
Absolutely.
1:00
Well, Inspire is a growth engine for our clients.
1:03
We work with organizations in the for profit and nonprofit sectors and all different industries, different stages of growth and evolution and all geographies around the world.
1:15
And we do three things primarily.
1:17
So executive search for hr specifically we also are building first to market hr software products and we're working on our first product right now, which is exciting and we have a thriving advisory business primarily in the spaces of leadership effectiveness and organization effectiveness.
1:37
That's great.
1:37
That's a lot.
1:38
I love the, that you're bringing your first product to market.
1:40
I'm excited to, to, to be around and, and root for it.
1:45
So, you know, the, what you do around the leadership might leadership piece for companies.
1:50
My guess is you have a fair amount of leadership stories.
1:52
We all do.
1:53
Those of us that have run hr run our own business in, in, in hr probably have more on the non human or inhumane leadership front.
2:01
But can you tell us your, your, your share your example of human first leadership?
2:06
Absolutely.
2:07
I actually thought quite a bit about which which story I wanted to share with you and, and your viewers and I thought that it might be interesting to actually share, share a story about our own firm.
2:18
And this story has to do with adversity and crisis that we encountered as an organization about a year, a year and a half ago and how we navigated that embracing the principles of being human first and people first as a company.
2:36
So, so a little bit about the context to set up the story.
2:40
my firm has been around for five years.
2:42
So I founded in Spra in July 2018.
2:46
And really, for the 1st 3.5 years of this journey, it's, it was it just skyrocket story of growth.
2:56
Really not a lot of challenges or adversity that we encountered.
3:00
And people would always stop me and say, it's really hard to to have a startup or to run a business, business.
3:07
And I kind of looked at them a little bit strangely because we really didn't encounter a lot of, of challenge.
3:13
But we headed into a pretty extreme crisis about a year and a half ago.
3:18
So, like a lot of early stage startups, we were going through one of our first fundraising rounds, a friends and family fundraising round to raise capital to expand our team.
3:30
but also to bootstrap this first technology product that we have been building and to make a long story short, we were targeted by a scam.
3:43
So there's a Bonnie and Clyde type of scam that's out there that targets early stage startups in professional services, specifically that are trying to raise money and to be frank, there's really nothing in my life that prepared me to be on the lookout for this.
4:00
I've never experienced this.
4:02
None of my mentors or advisors had headed me to be on the watch out for this.
4:06
So unfortunately, it's just a case of bad luck, I suppose.
4:11
And essentially what happened is this scam the way they work.
4:16
They do two things.
4:17
One, they try and get into the company and, and drain the company's assets financially.
4:23
But what they also try and do is divert funds from other prospective investors for their own self gain.
4:32
Fortunately, none of that happened.
4:35
But the problem that ensued was that we thought we were taking on a new angel investor who was going to invest millions of dollars into the company.
4:45
And that's part of the Bonnie and Clyde aspect of the scheme.
4:49
So the, the Clyde portion it poses as a very wealthy angel investor.
4:55
And with big promises of bootstrapping the business but never really delivers on that because there's no money there.
5:01
They actually want to take your money.
5:03
And so we had committed to millions of dollars of expenditure believing that this money was coming in.
5:10
And once we put the pieces together and found out that we were being scammed, we had to dig ourselves out of a multimillion dollar expenditure hole.
5:18
And unfortunately, this coincided with one of the economic cycles that we're still dealing with.
5:24
obviously that all businesses are dealing with, with some economic contraction and softness.
5:29
And so as we started seeing some softness in in sales combined with the problems caused by this scam, we were faced with a really daunting outlook where we had to, find a way to survive and dig out of this financial challenge.
5:46
So that's really the context of what happened.
5:49
It became very, very clear to us, shortly thereafter that we were going to have to unfortunately make a bunch of decisions that were going to inflict hardship on our own team.
6:02
Most likely a reduction in force or multiple reductions in force pay cuts, retracting on some of the excessive benefits or offerings that we had within the the firm.
6:15
So that we could really get our financial house back in order following this crisis.
6:21
So one of the sort of anchor points of the story that I'm sharing is is that it, there was a very important moment of introspection and reflection for me as the founder and CEO to think about what is step one in this process.
6:36
And I think most organizations, most leaders, step one involves looking at how can you save as much money as quickly as possible and return to financial order but not necessarily introspecting and looking at oneself as the senior most leader as the starting point in that process.
6:56
And so said, another way I made the tough decision that before I would inflict any kind of hardship on my own team, I had to really walk the talk myself.
7:06
And so I made the decision to immediately take myself off payroll, actually never put myself back on.
7:11
So, have stayed off payroll, for the last, you know, about 14, 15 months.
7:18
I decided to sell my house.
7:20
I sold my car and very humbling decision, actually moved, my husband and I moved back in with my parents, for a period of time while this was going on and it wasn't to, to just feel good about myself or less bad about myself.
7:36
It wasn't to kind of be showing up in a way that, you know, felt good, but it was more around the principles and values behind it.
7:44
You know, you can't just take credit for things going well in the best of times, you have to really be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice yourself if you're going through these difficult times.
7:57
No, that is so walking the talk and like I one, the scams in general are ridiculous.
8:04
Like they're prolific.
8:06
I've never heard of this one before.
8:07
Targeting kind of, you know, companies doing rounds of funding.
8:12
So it's good, good that you shared that.
8:14
So hopefully somebody else that's out there that's, that has a business that may be going through a friends and family round like know what could happen to them.
8:21
to so I guess, you know, just the fact that selling a house, selling a car, moving in with your parents, like those are all very big life changing moments and we, you know, and, and taking yourself completely off payroll, I think is a big step because we see, you know, some of the layoffs, there have been a lot of layoffs in the last year or so and you, you do see some CEO S that take a cut in pay or forego a bonus.
8:46
But I've not seen in the press, anyone that's gone to zero and like, started to and, and again, the, the most of these aren't people that have founded a company.
8:53
What did how did you, I, I not gonna, how did you explain all of that to your employees and why you did what you did?
9:06
And what if you did, what was the reaction even though people were, I assume other people were let go.
9:12
Correct.
9:13
We did end up doing multiple rounds of layoffs.
9:15
We did pay cuts, et cetera.
9:18
You know, I think the reaction was positive.
9:20
I think it's a careful conversation.
9:22
So I was completely transparent.
9:24
I think it's important to be transparent in the best of times, but especially in challenging times.
9:29
But there, it was a careful conversation because I, I wasn't interested in sharing it to get pats on the back or be a martyr or anything like that.
9:38
And it can quickly, I think lead that way if you're using it to be exploitative, which of course I, I wasn't.
9:46
But I think I had to be very thoughtful about how to talk about that.
9:50
And there's still a reality that if you're sitting at the top of the organization and in the course of your career well compensated, then, you know, woe is me senior executive who is going through a momentary period of hardship.
10:06
when there are people who are compensated at a much lower compensation level for years and years who maybe have been impacted by layoffs multiple times in their career.
10:17
They may not necessarily have that compassion for the, the person sharing that for obvious reasons.
10:22
And so I preempted it with that and I said, you know, I'm not, I'm not looking for credit to be patted on the back.
10:29
I'm not trying to be a martyr.
10:30
I'm not trying to be anything other than make sure that if I'm asking you to be subject to hardship that I feel that pain myself and I feel it first and it's that simple.
10:41
I'm not looking for any credit.
10:42
And so I use that kind of very human down to earth language which was authentic for me at that time.
10:50
No, absolutely.
10:50
Because you're right, there is a fine line of, hey, I'm doing this to get a pat on the back or look good in the press.
10:57
And I think, you know, speaking transparently, I think some of the ones that have done it, they did it for that reason.
11:03
And that's why their pr team talked about it, but I think talking about it transparently as here are the things that I've done to, you know, maybe not let more people go or not have deeper cuts or more rounds of cuts.
11:17
Like these are all the things I'm doing.
11:19
, especially a founder led business I think is really important.
11:23
And I think it does show, you know, that you are a human too and you're right, somebody taking a CEO or, you know, a CEO taking a 25% pay cut versus somebody who makes $75,000 a year losing their job.
11:36
That may be living, that may be a dual income with Children living paycheck to paycheck or kind of not having as much cushion, they're very different, very different perspectives and very different positions kind of financially if you will.
11:50
There's so many.
11:51
so I applaud you for that.
11:53
There are so many, I think CEO S leaders of companies, executives and companies that don't, that will make decisions that don't necessarily look at it from all angles.
12:03
They'll look at it purely from a business perspective.
12:06
And I think it is important to look at it from a human perspective and not just their view as a human, as a CEO or a, you know, ac suite employee, but kind of looking at it from the ground up as well because it does impact people that are more lowly comp or compensated in, in different ways than it does.
12:25
People that are more highly compensated.
12:27
Yes, very true.
12:28
I agree.
12:29
Thank you so much.
12:30
Thank you for being on 52 Humans and sharing your story.
12:34
My pleasure.
12:34
Thanks for having me, Paul.
12:35
Thanks.
12:40
Thanks for joining us today on 52 Humans.
12:43
If you enjoyed this, please give me a follow to be notified of future episodes.
12:46
I so appreciate all of your support.
12:49
If you want to watch past episodes or you have a story of human first leadership that you'd like to share on the show, please go to Paul wolf dot com forward slash 52 humans.
12:58
And lastly, as I do each week, I'd like to ask each of you to think of one way that you can bring greater empathy into your workplace.
13:05
It's these small acts of humanity and kindness that make for a better work culture and ultimately a better world.
13:12
I'm Paul Wolf and I'll see you next time on 52 humans.