71 - Fostering Employee Care, Purpose Alignment, and Personal Growth with Willory's John Bernatovicz

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. John Brunowicz, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder of Willery, which can be found at willery.com. Tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Yeah. Hey, Doug, thanks so much for having me on your show and appreciate the work you're doing. I am technically, I'm Emily's husband and Will and Mallory's dad. That's what I'm most importantly known as. So I've got a, now a sophomore and an 8th grader. Wow. And son Will and daughter Mallory. I've been married for 25 years to my wife who we went to high school and, and college together and My, my story after graduating high school, I was a Division 1 golfer at Kent State University. Go Flashes! I thought about being a professional golfer for a couple weeks. But then I really aspired to own my own business, have a family and start a family and also have children. And so I ended up following that path. And I, over the last 25 years, have built 6 companies. I spent some time in corporate America working for a large publicly traded outsourced payroll, HR company called ADP. And then I got the entrepreneurial bug and have started and/or sold or had failures of 3 of those 6 companies. And I now currently am the owner of Willery, which is a staffing and consulting firm that's got a distinct focus in the HR and payroll space. I also own a water vending company and a fractional sales management business. I like diversification in my investment portfolio.

I guess so. It's not like you're not busy or anything, huh? No.

Yeah. And I love to play golf, which my wife reminds me how much time it takes every time I go and do it, which she's 100% right. But I, that, that bug bit me when I was 7 years old. I, I went out with my dad and brothers and I couldn't get enough of it. And, uh, if I could play golf every day, I would, but I know I'm a little bit weird that way. But yeah, I, I love it. And, uh, I also wrote a book called HR Like a Boss, which will be launched later this fall. It's a SHRM published book. So Society for Human Resource Management will be publishing it as one of their influencer thought leader titles, and super excited for all that comes with that. I'm, I'm never a dull moment in my house, and that's just how I'm wired, Doug. I like, I like a lot of balls in the air, and if not, I get pretty bored.

Good for you. What— let's talk about the book for a second. This is, uh, your first book. I know the process I've written for. What, what got you motivated to write a book, uh, especially titled HR Like a Boss.

Yeah, I wish I would have known you a few years ago, as I mentioned before, a guru around listening and someone who's written books, I could have learned a lot from you. So hopefully we'll galvanize that relationship after this podcast interview. But yeah, the story around the book is, is pretty heartfelt. First off, I— my parents passed away in 2019, 2020. And when my dad, who was the last to pass, was gone, I just did one of those, you know, fork in the road, middle of your life. What am I doing here? Conversations with myself. And there are a few things personally and professionally I had not accomplished that I wanted to. And writing a book was one of them. I had had several friends of mine that wrote other HR books or other type concepts, and they had success. And I envied what they had done and realized that I'm no different than them. I just hadn't put together the process, didn't have the idea. And so long story short, we repackaged a presentation that I did in 2018 to a bunch of college seniors at Kent State University and called HR Like a Boss. And we took these 5 main concepts that were in the presentation about thinking differently, being different, being better, taking action and making an impact. And we built 17 total chapters around it, just under 70,000 words.. And it's described as your guide to amazingly awesome HR. Simply put, to me, HR has whiffed on many things over the years, primarily around what employees feel their employees— sorry, what employees feel their companies think about them. Because most— it's 85%, the last data point I saw— most employees do not feel that their employers care about them. And then 2 out of 3 employees are not engaged at work. And we as business professionals wonder why that is. And I feel like there is an elevated level of HR that needs to be delivered inside of every business. And there's a gap between what that is and what currently exists today. And I wrote the book as your guide to amazingly awesome HR to give my perspective on what it takes to do that, as well as there's over 40 other HR professionals quoted in the book who know a lot more about HR than I do that substantiates some of the concepts that we feel like drives that type of human resources.

You know, as a, as a lawyer turned peacemaker, in the last couple of years I've been doing a lot of consulting with companies over quiet quitting and workplace disgruntlement and unhappy employees. And I see, I see two things, two things. One, CEOs that don't care, and two, HR people that are all into compliance and nothing else and protecting assets. And I think those two things are just driving a lot of employee dissatisfaction. What do you think?

Yeah, it's funny you say that. I was actually— I, another thing I do, I'm a part-time coach at our, our high school golf team, and I was talking to a couple of the, the, the golfers this not too long ago, and I was telling them one of the most important things in your life is to surround yourself with people who care. And if you have a CEO that doesn't care, oh my gosh, I can't even imagine what that business is gonna look like. And you combine that with an HR function that's only worried about making sure you cross all the T's and dot all the I's and, and let's stay outta trouble with the DOL or the DOJ or whatever you wanna call it. And OSHA. And again, I'm not saying those things are not important, right? That can ruin your day when OSHA shows up, but there's a whole, different component to what I'll call developing professionals inside of your business and aligning them to the purpose of your business. Those have nothing to do with what onboarding form you filled out, or did you get your, did you get your I-9 completed? It's about connecting people to your business. And there's a, there's a strategic way to do that. There's a, there's an important way to do that. And when done right, you end up typically finding people that want to be there, that care. And it still is work, but it doesn't feel quite like work when you're doing something you like or love versus, you know, I'm just here to collect a paycheck. And so the unification of that, the strategy around it from an HR perspective, focusing in on the right things inside of the business versus things that are, you know, again, they're not going to call them unimportant, they're just not quite as important.

Yeah, it seems to me that that being able to know, knowing how to listen to employees, coach them, find out what their life goals are, how does, how does the work they're doing for the company get, move them towards their life goals, giving them meaning and caring about them just seems so basic and yet it's so hard for companies to do.

Yeah, again, I, I like to use the word whiff because I'm a golfer and it's sometimes funny, it's, it's, it's a parallel whenever you see somebody capable or not capable of swinging a golf club and they whiff, you notice it, it stands out. It's— some people may laugh at it, some people may cry because it's hard. But I have this thing, I'm not into performance management, I'm into expectation management. And an employer, a manager, and an employee all have an expectation about that relationship that they have. And more times than not, when you have an issue, there's a delta between what I expect and what I'm getting, whether it's the employer, whether it's the manager, or whether it's the employee.. And if we're not abundantly clear about what we expect as an employer, that's all on the employer and the manager. And as I'm sure you know, Doug, the data will tell us, and you've experienced it, I'm sure thousands of times in your career, people like working for people that they enjoy their company and they feel like they're developing them. And most managers are not equipped to do the job. They're either really good at something that led them to this promotion, this Peter Principle idea, right? But they just don't get how to manage people or build relationships or balance that between I gotta manage you, plus I also want to enjoy my time with you. Doesn't mean we need to be best friends, doesn't mean you have to come to my kids' T-ball game. But we have to be able to coexist and enjoy our fellowship together and get our job done. And I think all too often, it's just, it's overcomplicated. It's maybe not, you know, they overcomplicate it by not making it simple. And to me, it's about simplicity. What are the 2 or 3 things I expect you to do every day in your job? And are you doing those things? Have I given you the resources to do them? Are you trained to do them? If there's barriers in your way, how can I help you remove them? And just keep doing that time and time and time again, day after day after day after day. And eventually you end up driving results for most people. Now, sometimes it doesn't work out and they're not, they're not passionate about it, or they're disgruntled, or they just aren't going to do a good job no matter what. But it's, it's pretty simple, basic stuff. It's all about expectations to me.

Yeah, no, I absolutely agree with you. Uh, the, um, so I— there's a big difference between management and leadership. And, and the way that I learned it was that managers manage things and leaders lead people. And people come into management not knowing anything about leadership, and all they're doing now is treating their employees as pieces on a chessboard. They're things to be managed, not people to be led. And I think that if you can make that mind shift to actually thinking about being a leader and the three functions of a leader of pride— direction, focus, and safety— everything changes. And yet I don't see that, I don't see that much.

Yeah, I think one, as I look at whenever I'm doing my job or I'm challenged to be on a podcast or be a presenter or whatever the case might be, I just, I look at my audience, and I try to figure out what do they want and need? What do you, Doug, as the host of this show, need me to do? Hopefully be somewhat mildly entertaining, make you smile on the other line, have you ask your appropriate questions along the way, and we maybe learn a few things and make friends. Like, to me, that's a success. And so I think as a, as a leader, we lose sight of the fact that, that again, overcomplicating things that are simple, Yeah. And galvanizing and building relationships with people at work is hard. And frankly, I have a blog that I've drafted that I'll put out sometime soon is just this idea of technology has killed relationships. Oh, interesting. Email and Zoom and all this stuff. It's just, you know, it, we break up with people through text. We quit jobs through email. Crazy. We just don't have the courage to pick up the phone and call somebody or go to their house. Like, when's the last time somebody popped into your house? Like, it doesn't happen anymore. It used to pop in all the time. People just show up. Maybe they do for you, but for us, it's got a text. Are you there? What's going on? No, I'm not going to come over. It's like, come on over. Like, what do I care? If I'm not here, then I'm not here. If I am here, we're going to have a beer in the backyard and enjoy our time together. So it— to me, to me, it's about losing sight of that relationship and having it in a professional means. And I'm sure you all can see it all the time with people that don't listen effectively. And the impact of that— I mean, I heard something a while ago that I thought was so fitting, that roughly people that work as servers in restaurants, the ones that listen to an order and repeat back only what they heard, make a 20% more tip than a person that might say, oh, you know, the chicken nuggets here are really good, versus you order chicken nuggets with a side of mashed potatoes, gravy on top, carrots, and a lemonade. Person's gonna get more money. It's because everybody wants to feel heard, even when you're ordering chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes with gravy, and carrots.

It is, it is one of the deepest needs that human beings have, the need to be heard and validated. And what's so amazing to me is it's the easiest gift, and it costs us nothing to give it. Cost us nothing to give it. And yet we're never trained or taught how to— that's why my mission in life is teaching people how to listen. Listen to emotion. You're absolutely right. And, and, and, and just that skill alone changes, changes everything. Learning how to listen to an employee, not just say, hi John, how are you? But hey man, tell me what's going on. And just open any question, they can say anything they want. And instead, instead of all I'd say, oh man, you're really excited, you're really happy, or that sounds really cool, or, you know, oh 'You're frustrated,' and just reflect back their emotional experience in the moment is absolutely amazing in how it creates intimacy and loyalty and trust. You're right, so simple, and yet people don't.

I think there's a part of that, Doug, that I feel like has happened over time, and it may be just systemic in the business culture, is that there's this hierarchy of I work for someone, they're the boss, I don't necessarily feel 100% safe with them because I could say something that then they would use against me, fire me, put on my performance review, etc. And you mentioned before 3 pillars of effective leadership. Safety is one of them. And, you know, your ability to create emotional safety for people to share openly what's going on and not be overreactive or incredibly responsive to it. But if they say something to you that maybe it's they're not a fit for the job, that you navigate through that conversation to work them out of the organization, not immediately say, oh my gosh, you just told me that, I'm gonna go talk to HR and you're fired, right? Unless they say something completely out of bounds that warrants that, right? We're just talking about sharing our feelings and how we're doing today.

You're probably aware of that Google study that came out a couple of years ago, uh, that Google did a massive study of its teams to try to discern what was— what created their top 1/10 of 1% highest performing teams. What were, what were the factors that created those teams compared to everything else? And it came down to psychological safety. The, the leaders of those teams had created psychological safety so that people could make mistakes, they could be themselves, they weren't defensive. There was no gossip, no fighting, no arguing, no politics, because the leader created such safety that it truly was a team and they felt safe with each other.. And those are the teams that outperformed everybody else at Google.

Fascinating. No, I believe it 100%. And try, I try my best to do that within our firm. I'm sure I don't do it right every time. But again, going back to the golf analogy, gosh, I learned how to fail forward a lot because, you know, statistically they say every golfer is going to hit at least 7 or 8 bad shots a round. And the relative, the relativeness of that bad for 100 you know, 100-shooting golfer versus Jon Rahm or Rory McIlroy, their bad is different, right? But you have to be able to react and respond to what bad is and, and the mistakes that you make and people to support you. Because if you don't, you'll be afraid to do anything, be afraid to do anything at work.

So, so, Jon, what is it that's unique about you that you bring, you bring to the table?

Oh boy. Well, I certainly have an interesting last name. That part's always a challenge for podcast hosts to get. And you, Doug, did a great job pronouncing it. Even the first try, your guess was spot on. It doesn't happen very normal, very often. I'd say, I say that to me, the uniqueness for me is the combination of things that make me up. So I come from loving parents who poured their heart, time, energy, and effort into me. To help me, you know, help me create opportunities for me to help me be whoever I want to be. I then have a great passion, highly competitive person. I love sports, I love business, I love anything that has a competition to it. You can ask my 8th grade daughter about that. That sometimes irritates her when we play Monopoly. Dad's always got to win. That competitiveness makes me You know, it's, it's got some good parts to it. It also has some parts that are probably a little annoying to those around me, and I get that. I also— the golf thing is unique. I, I played competitively against Tiger Woods and Padraig Harrington and Justin Leonard and Phil Mickelson and a lot of golfers you probably know. I beat a few of them a time or two in my life, so I wasn't too bad at that. And then, you know, last but not least is I, I put my family first. My family is my rock, my wife and my kids. Doesn't mean we, we always get along, doesn't mean I don't have fights with my wife, doesn't mean that there's moments where I need my space, but they're my true north. They're the reason why I do what I do, and I'm trying to build my life out of an example for them so that they can, they can be afforded the same opportunity my parents gave me. So the combination of my parents and my, my own family, my golf, my competitiveness, my business skill, and my— the importance of my two kids and my wife are probably the unique part of who I am.

And I would imagine that that shows up at Willery in terms of the culture that you've created, because of— because of you, this unique combination of love and competition and focus probably shows up really strongly in your organization.

Astute observation. My team would tell you that this is a family-oriented firm that has a unique focus in a discipline of HR and payroll, which makes us different. But there are expectations, metrics, and accountability that we have in our firm that I've created the standard for, but others are upholding that. I'll just put it that way. And so it's, it's— I do have to manage the team. I do have a ton of important roles as far as being the leader, but there's, there's a, there's not a lot of management that I have to do of making sure things get done. And they, they self-police themselves. You hire people that don't need— I remember hearing Steve Jobs mention that if you're having issues inside of your business, stop hiring people that aren't able to manage themselves, right? Hire a bunch of people that need to be managed, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. You're going to spend a lot of time doing that. And so, and he was all about creating that vision and where we're going. And inside of Willery, our vision is to be the go-to HR and payroll staffing firm and to provide a level of service you can't get elsewhere and to bring expertise in HR and payroll within our staffing consulting firm. And we combine that with our purpose of empowering people, which is really about giving back to the community. If we're really good as recruiters, we're really good as business people. There's an organization in our backyard called Youth Opportunities Unlimited that we have galvanized a corporate partnership with, and they're our benefactor of our, our service time and any donations we can make to help them with their mission, which is creating economic self-sufficiency for the youth of Northeast Ohio. So I love that. All those things, that combination really allows us to be different. And we have 5 core values that we live by. We recognize them every single week. We showcase them for our team. They're on their scorecard. Yes, I do. Our performance management tool is called a scorecard because I am a golfer and it was my idea to come up with the name. But yeah, so all that stuff, it's— it allows us to have a culture that puts people in a place to be their, their best. At the same time, we care on them, we love them when things happen, life happens, they struggle, their personal situation takes place. It's, it's a pretty cool environment. I'm blessed to be a small part of it.

Good for you. One more question, I'll let you go. What's one thing about you that we would not know unless you revealed it to us? We would never guess.

Well, my usual one is I beat Tiger Woods at golf, but some, some people know that because I've said that a couple times, um, especially in the midst of it. Um, it's a really good question, Doug. You're, you're good at this. I've never been stumped on a podcast. I gotta think. I'm gonna think on my feet. Well, I would probably, I would probably say this. I, I experienced a few things in my life when I was younger that really created a wall for me from an accountability standpoint, and maybe, maybe caused me to not be as good of a person as I possibly could have been. I grew up in a family that was very loving, but there was a high degree of expectations, and I was just a kid. That wanted to be a kid, and sometimes I didn't do things I was supposed to. And so over the years, I ended up creating this gap between, you know, I really wasn't good at getting feedback early on in my career, really wasn't at all. I was defiant with it. I thought I knew all the answers. And I finally figured out through therapy that that was something that I built over the years, this wall, this guard that I put up. And the moment that I was able to recognize that, have the self-awareness of it, my life changed. My, my life got a lot easier because I wasn't always trying to defend myself. I always wasn't trying to get in trouble. I wasn't always doing the things I had to do to make sure that didn't happen. I could just be myself and I could be honest with myself that I'm imperfect and that I don't do things right. And so I would say I'm a huge therapy guy. I have a psychologist, a business coach, not only in my professional life, but also see one in my golf life, because I feel the power of your mind and the way that you look at things can really dictate your success or failure. And I'd rather be a half glass full kind of guy, but I know sometimes it's really hard to do that and I have to work at it. And so that's probably the most intimate thing I can think of off the top of my head to give you here, Doug, on this show.

I hope, I hope, I hope this podcast gets listened to a lot. This is really excellent. Thank you so much, Sean. It's been great having a conversation with you.

Doug, thank you.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.