Bernard Hampton
speaker
129 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Bernard Hampton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So somebody may have better skill in an area, they may have a different experience, they may have different educational background. But if you're willing to put in the work to listen, learn and apply, those are gaps that you can close.
simultaneously by saying regardless of what you do, what level you may operate at one day, having a healthy respect for everyone that you work with elicits or creates an environment where people will always be able to, or at least interested in helping you with things that you want to be able to learn from them and vice versa, but also has the benefit of creating followership.
Those were important lessons, but understanding where people are, And then I shall add a fourth one to it. I think everybody has an origin story that's unique to them that makes them special. And the more we understand them, the more we help people incorporate their voices in different ways, the value, their opinions, their perspectives, that makes the team better.
And so across these four things ends up creating a fabric, from my perspective, of just incredibly dynamic teams that
tend to collaborate better together, they solve problems together, less about competing with one another, because in a company environment, there's one stock price at the end of the day, and the company's at its best when everybody's rowing in the same direction, everybody's being thoughtful about better solutions and how to solve problems, but then doing that together.
I'll tell you two ways. One, I always believe when you prioritize people. I mentioned it before, but they truly are the most important asset in any organization, team, company, regardless of the size.
And so I can't remember who said it, but someone somewhere along the way in history made the statement that good leaders give instructions through the chain of command, but they get information outside the chain. What works from my perspective is, yes, you can't touch everyone, but
Whether it is a visit to a single location, a visit to a massive location, your ability to be there early, build in time to stay late, not overpack the schedule, to be able to grab individuals, make individual connections and find out about them. It's just exceedingly important. It's valuable.
And out of connections, those create the moments where people tend to pick up the phone and tell you the things you need to know when you need to know it without worrying about some structured process to be able to provide information. Extremely valuable.
I can tell you the number of business plans that I've been able to make, derive, explore more information, interrogate a problem I may be trying to solve for the organization, and go further through some of those individual conversations and connections. The second is about origin stories. I do it in my current organization. I did it in the last one that had 13,000 people in it.
This is the impact to me of thinking about the chain of command because once I started this opportunity of sharing origin stories, I shared my own with my team, but not till two or three other people had did it prior. And it was as simple as saying, hey, Alana, we've got a meeting coming up. We're going to be in person. I would love it with whatever you feel comfortable with.
If you take 15 or 20 minutes, share your origin story, whatever parts of it you feel comfortable with. You can use pictures or props if you want, but 10 or 15 minutes to present and maybe spend 10 minutes being able to get reflections or questions from the audience. And that's literally all I ask. And
But I can't tell you the number of times that through these tears are around the room or shock and awe and the things that somebody may not have known about this button up serious professional that's hard charging always. But all of a sudden they became human and the number of connections across the room. And this has worked beautifully, whether it's an established team.
I've used it when there's been periods of change or new organizations coming together. But I've got to tell you, when you talk about the four stages of a team forming,
This process has helped me through several organizations now move through those stages with light speed like I've never seen before, because those connections have brought people together, either because they admire the story, they're inspired by the story, they made a connection to several points in their own history, and it's brought the teams together.
And it doesn't have to be everybody at once. Number one, emotionally, you probably couldn't take it.
to be able to do it. And so we've done this over a series of months where two or three people may start it at an offsite and then virtual meetings in between every month, every other month, somebody additional from the leadership team will tell. And so it may take a year to have a 12 or 14 person leadership team be able to tell those, but the momentum is incredible.
And the side conversations that aren't just about business are also what happens to be able to elicit trust.
So I happened to take my team to the Center for Civil Rights and Justice in Atlanta. And it was as we did the tour through a number of experiences. So in the South, civil rights movement, I'm seeing all of the things that my parents grew up and lived through. And we get to the end and we're debriefing. So it was an offsite that had a cultural element to it.
But at the end, I told my origin story and how my origin story is tied to a stock of cotton. and what that meant for my mom who's one of seven to have been during her high school years she's the second oldest of seven her and her oldest sibling to be taken out of school by their father and for three or four months during the year during cotton season have to pick cotton at 100 pounds a day
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