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My guest for Episode #270 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Megan Gluth-Bohan, a remarkable leader in the chemical industry. Megan is the CEO and owner of Catalynt Solutions, Inc., a prominent U.S.-based chemical distributor, and Chemblend of America, a renowned chemical blending and tolling facility.
Her companies stand out as some of the largest certified women-owned suppliers in North America. Under her leadership, they have achieved significant recognition, including a spot on the 2023 Puget Sound Business Journal's Middle Market Fast 50 list. Megan herself was honored as one of the Business Journal's Middle Market Fast 50 Leaders of 2023 and was awarded the prestigious Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2023.
In this episode, Megan shares her journey through the highs and lows of her career, focusing on the lessons learned from her favorite mistake. She candidly discusses the challenges she faced during the pandemic, where rapid decision-making led to deals with untrustworthy customers. Megan emphasizes the crucial importance of taking a moment to pause and trust one's instincts, even in high-pressure situations. This conversation delves into how these experiences have shaped her approach to leadership and decision-making.
We also explore Megan's initiatives to support women in STEM and her efforts to create opportunities for previously incarcerated women. She talks about fostering a culture of open discussion about failures, without blame, within her companies. Join us as we dive into Megan's insightful perspectives on leadership, resilience, and the power of learning from mistakes.
Questions and Topics:
- How did you discover these deals were mistakes?
- How did the dynamic of group evaluation or group effort play into these deals?
- How do you handle team contributions when you're the one with the view of the entire chessboard?
- Have you faced similar situations with other deals since those mistakes?
- What specific factors led to the failures, and what did you learn from them?
- How do you apply the lessons learned from failures to future endeavors?
- Can you describe your company’s culture around failure and how you model it as a leader?
- Do you have a support network or board for advice and coaching?
- Can you talk about fostering a safe space for failure in your company?
- How do you categorize different types of failures and encourage the right type of risk-taking?
- How do you ensure organizational memory of mistakes to prevent recurrence?
- How do you balance treating people right with running a profitable business?
- What initiatives are you involved in to support women in STEM?
- Can you share about your efforts to create opportunities for previously incarcerated women?
- Is there a book in your future?
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- Full transcript
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Automated Transcript (May Contain Mistakes)
Mark Graban:
Hi, welcome to my favorite mistake. I'm Mark Graban. Our guest today is Megan Gluth-Bohan, the owner and CEO of Catalynt Solutions, Inc. A US-based chemical distributor and the owner of Chemblend of America, a chemical blending and tolling facility. Tri is one of the largest certified women owned suppliers in North America. Catalyst was recently recognized by Puget Sound Business Journal as part of the 2023 Middle Market Fast 50 list, and Meg was one of five owners honored as the business journal's Middle Market Fast 50 leaders of 2023. She's also the winner of the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2023. So, Meg, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Wonderful, Mark. Thanks for having me.
Mark Graban:
Well, it's great to have you here. Excited. We're going to have a great conversation later in the episode about what you're doing at your companies to focus on learning from failures. And I'm really excited to get to that, but can't let you off the hook of the main question. We always start with here with the different things you've done in your career. Meg, what would you say is your favorite mistake?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
I would say that my favorite mistake is a collection of sort of two or three mistakes that that took place a few years ago when business was sort of in this just opening back up towards the end of the pandemic and even mid pandemic frenzy, business was scattered and fast and rapid and required a lot of sort of in the moment decision making. And there was a few incidents which led me to sort of realize that the biggest mistake I made was not to take a pause and not to sort of check, gut check some of the business decisions I was making. And as a result, I ended up sort of entering into two to three deals that I just wish I hadn't done, the details of which maybe don't matter that much. We could talk about them. But ultimately, what it taught me was that even in the midst of frenzy, there is a place for pause and a place for sort of gut checking and checking our own knowing as business people.
Mark Graban:
Wow. So you talk about doing deals, acquiring other companies or deals with customers.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
These were in particular deals with customers. And the customers were just people that couldn't be trusted. And I think, again, in every business life, you have deals where you are, you're making acquisitions. I made two last year, you know, and then that requires a certain amount of trust. And, again, gut checking, a lot of things along the way. But also just the very fundamental transactional meat of any business is having customers and having suppliers or employees or any of these operational elements of your business. And I think, regardless of what it is, there is a definite need and a definite moment where we all have to stop as leaders and say, okay, wait a minute. Does this feel right? Is there something here that. That I know that I'm ignoring, even if I can't articulate what it was? And I didn't do that early enough in these circumstances, and it was a huge mistake in both cases, all three of them, but one that has become sort of my favorite because it lent itself to my growth.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. How would you say you discovered that one or all of those deals were a mistake? Was it pretty soon after signing, or did it take some time for you to realize how, you know, for that regret to come out?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Yeah. Yeah. So with the. With the first one that ended up being sort of the largest one, we. We were given an offer to supply a large company sort of in the midst of the pandemic. And we did all of our initial due diligence on that company, like we do our business services, Fortune 500 companies, all the way down to smaller, you know, small to mid sized businesses that make things. I should sort of give that sort of introduction a little bit. And so we're very used to working with companies of all sizes and getting them ready to be credit approved and sort of vetted as customers. In this case, this customer passed all of that, and on paper, the entire deal looked good. But what began to happen is that I began to have a sense of uneasiness about the character of sort of the main principles of this customer. And I leaned away from my own gut about that into what I read on paper about the sort of, well, we did our work, it's okay if we did our work and things look good, it should be good. And at the end of the day, this continued to start with sort of late payments or, you know, sort of small breaches of the contract. We had all these little tiny things that started to chip away and further whittle away at that trust. But the truth is, we kept going based on just this, I would say, over reliance on the technicalities that were in the paperwork of the deal or on the structure of the deal or how things were supposed to work. And also, frankly, probably my misguided faith and the good of humanity a little bit. I think we all have a little bit of that. Wanting to believe that somebody certainly wouldn't do this. And at the end of the day, my gut feeling about the principles involved was right. And we ended up getting sort of obviously a huge breach of contract and then, which resulted in significant financial losses for my company, from which you can't really come back at a certain point. There's no recovering a deal like that.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. I mean, as owner and CEO, I'm guessing that you have a team, salespeople, business development involved. I mean, I hear you taking responsibility for the decision, and I'm not encouraging you to shove that on anyone else, but I'm curious about the dynamic of group evaluation or group effort here in those deals.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
So I do have a team, and I have an incredible team of people. And the thing about being the leader, being the CEO, being the owner, being sort of what I'm just going to call the top of the pile, any pile, whether you're running a business that's the size of mine or something considerably smaller, or simply just a family, when you're sort of at the top of that pile, you have to recognize that the people who are below you, and I don't mean that in terms of their dignity or worth or contribution, but below you in the triangle, they each see a certain part of the chessboard, which is good. That's what they're trained to do. So if you're working in finance, you need to be really mindful of the finance piece. And if you're working in sales, you're mindful of the sales piece. Each of those people were very attentive, highly professionally. So to each piece of their puzzle. And I gathered information from them and understood all of that. But I was the one who had the view of the entire chessboard. And most of the case in business, I would say that's kind of the way it is. There's always some person who sort of sees everything and knows everything. And I was that person in this deal. And it's not that they weren't turning over. Each of them were turning over information that, on its face, taken in a vacuum, could be okay, frankly. But I knew better. I had a gut. I just knew something isn't coming together here. Right. I could smell it. And I leaned harder into the data and their individual contributions that I did to my own knowing, and that ended up being a mistake for which I can only take responsibility, because at the end of the day, too, none of them were the decision maker that could have pulled the rope on that, either. That was also on me.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, I mean, you know, decisions like that or situations like that. I mean, we don't really know. Are we making the mistake of walking away from a deal that would have been okay or making the mistake of going forward with. With something that turned out to be what your gut was telling you? So, I mean, you know, there's. There's no easy answer in situations like that. But have you faced a similar situation with other deals after that? That story and those deals that you mentioned here?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
All three of these deals were very. I won't say similar, but it was. What was similar about it is that all three of these mistakes happened sort of in the right same time frame, and which, I guess was good for me, because there were a lot of then consistent patterns of. Of not only the circumstances, the deals themselves, but also the time that I found myself in, which taught me a lot as a leader. So I'm in the midst of all three, sort of. They all started staggered at different times, but ultimately, they all carried the same theme. We're engaged in a contractual business relationship with somebody on the other side of it that does not have my trust. And I proceeded anyway. And I proceeded anyway because I couldn't really fully articulate why they didn't have my trust. I couldn't put words to it, and I didn't rely on my own knowing as being just as. Just as valuable piece of information as what their financials said. Right, right. And it was in a time when I think, notably my team, we were all scattered to the wind a little bit. We had all just been through this season where the government shut down a lot of commerce. Business that was going on was very high pressure, and there were time deadlines. There were high stakes in all of this. We were all working remotely. We weren't working on our own. We didn't have the opportunity to be working on our own connection to each other and really got checking each other and checking in in the same way that we would if we ran into each other at the lunch room. And then in addition to that, there was a lot of what I'm going to call just internal distraction within the company. We had people working here who were trying to educate their kids during the day while they were at work. We had people whose spouses had lost jobs. We just had unsteadiness in general in the world we were living in. And I think that what that did is it turned in on all of us. Loss of connection, loss of stability. It turned into sort of a loss of our own self trust, self knowing, and self check in. And this was the result.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. So you say there was, you know, financial loss, but the company, at least it didn't sink the company. It wasn't?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
No.
Mark Graban:
I mean, I'm sure it sounded like it was financially painful, but recoverable.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Yes.
Mark Graban:
An opportunity to bounce back or be resilient.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Yes, yes, definitely. I mean, listen, if you ask anybody who owns a business, if any loss is unimportant, we're all going to grit our teeth and say no. I mean, it's deeply painful when you own and run a business and when you're sitting at the top to let something like that happen. And so I definitely spent my fair share of hours and days, you know, moaning, bemoaning my fate here. It was a sizable loss, and especially in the aggregate, all of them together, it was definitely a sizable loss. That said, we had so much richest material to work with as a company, and we have been sort of feasting off the fruit of the lessons from those mistakes now, since they've happened, we've honed our processes. We've really leaned into how much we trust each other and how much, you know, we can say to each other, this doesn't feel right, and we listen to that. We are very attentive to our desire and our need to connect and communicate and to be involved in that. And we also aren't afraid to walk away from something that could be potentially huge, but we just don't feel right about it. And so that's sort of the upside for a lot of that.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, maybe. One other question, Meg, about kind of that specific timing and circumstances there. As an owner and a CEO, do you have a board or peers in the local business community that you could lean on either for advice or coaching through those situations and the recovery from it? Because, like you said, there's business impact and it hits you personally.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
I don't have a board. I'm the sole shareholder of my company, and it's a closely held, not publicly traded company. And so the decision to have a board, you know, a formal board of advisors that I gather together is sort of mine to make. I don't do that in a traditional sense. That said, many advisors makes a person wise, and so I do have that, and I have a number of people that I can call in any of these circumstances. Each of whom have their own gifts and sort of their own areas that they speak into. My life. And I certainly ran all of this by each of them, some at very dark, late, panicked hours. But a lot of it, too, is just having somebody that you can call and say, I feel so foolish, so stupid, and having somebody on the other end of the line say, yeah, I've been there. I did the same thing, and I'm here to be really honest with you about that. And those were the people I found most helpful.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, it's great that you had even that support network to hopefully remind you it's not that you were stupid. I mean, smart people make mistakes. Successful people make mistakes. I mean, that's one of the themes this whole podcast series where your story and others is hopefully reassuring to others who made mistakes.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
For sure. For sure.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. Well, Meg, let's step back and talk a little bit more broadly. There's an article on your website that I'll put a link to in the show, notes about the importance of failure. And that really resonated with me. And I said, okay, yeah, absolutely. I want to have Meg on. On the podcast here. So I'm glad you're here. Can you talk about more generally, this idea of fostering, as you call it, a safe space for failure?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Yeah, I won't say that our company has a culture of failure, because that sounds wrong, but we don't shy away from that. So one of the personal, this starts at the top, right? And if you're the kind of leader where you kind of come in in an egomaniacal way and you're chewing people out in front of their peers from a. That they made and things like that, you're setting up a culture that isn't inherently safe. And I don't actually like to throw around the terms safe space and things like that. Today's culture, because it has a different. It's taken on a different meaning. But I truly do want. Yeah, that's right. But in the context of my business, what that means is that it is safe to have your mistake. And, in fact, we welcome it, and we're gonna break that apart, and we're going to learn from that. You have to do that first and foremost as. As a leader yourself. So I'm going to take ownership of all. The buck always stops here. There is no, there's no shortcut or no runaround from that. And. And then in so doing and really, truly believing that that is mine to own, then I can model a culture of saying, okay, now, how did we get here. And how did this happen? And I don't ever. One of the sort of, I don't know, little quips that I use as a leader. I don't ever. I praise publicly, but I don't criticize publicly. If I'm talking to only one employee, I will talk to them in private. If I'm talking about something that went wrong at our company in a public way, that means that multiple people contributed to that. But I'll never pull one person out and single out one person's mistake. And what we learn in doing that is that when we can break down our mistakes as a group and when we can look at that, there is no such thing as one person's mistake. Really isn't. And so we don't need to spend any time doing that. So I spend a lot of time working with the team. Okay, what did we do? And we have, you know, the cadaver of our mistake, and we're doing the autopsy, what happened. And how can this make us better?
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
And. And it has every time by being super committed to that. But you cannot do that if you're the kind of leader that comes into that with, like I said, this sort of power over pissed attitude. And it's not to say that I wasn't angry, and I haven't been angry when these things happen. So then we don't do that until I'm done with that part, you know? And I do that alone or not with them.
Mark Graban:
Right. Yeah. I mean, I think we've all worked in environments where there's that blaming. There could be yelling and screaming. It could be more passive aggressive. It could be different forms of punishment. But, I mean, it's just, to me, it's counterproductive because it would drive small mistakes or small failures underground somewhere where we can't. We can't ask those questions. Not to turn it into a murder podcast like you're talking about the cadaver. I mean, if it's a missing body, the CSI team, nothing to learn.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
That's right. That's right.
Mark Graban:
So maybe we can get off that.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
No, I mean, it is what it is. Like, I think, again, so this is it. And it happened. Like acceptance. Like, this is it. It happened. And. And, you know, you have to believe it, how much shit happens. I mean, it does. Like, we all put together companies made of human beings, ourselves included. And so we have to expect that. Can't walk around shocked that. That now we have this thing in front of us that we have to fix. It's just how we respond to that. That differentiates us between a good company and a great company.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And it seems like, you know, if you're. If you're talking to the facts of what happened or what didn't happen, we can separate that from any sort of blaming. And I love how you say there's no such thing as one person's mistake. I mean, we're working in teams. There are systems. There are handoffs. It rarely comes down to one person, or even if one person turned the wrong knob on a machine. Well, why did the system make that possible or not prevent it?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
That's right. And typically, I say that if it's only one person, then it's not really a mistake. If one person could do something that would really affect the trajectory of our company, they've probably committed a crime. Mark, we're probably talking about, like, some. Some intentional wrongdoing, but a mistake is that. That belongs to all of us. And one could argue that even allowing somebody to get away with something intentionally wrong could be sort of on all of us. I mean, we could go down that rabbit hole for days.
Mark Graban:
Well, you know, I've done a lot of work in healthcare, and there's a framework and a methodology. It actually started in aviation, I don't know if you're familiar with it, called just culture.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Hmm. Tell me.
Mark Graban:
And the idea, it's like, what's the fair and just reaction to things gone wrong in a workplace? And I'm an engineer, so I love having an algorithm or kind of a flowchart to go through, trying to help flesh out. Is that a systemic problem, or is it something worth punishing? So, intentional acts like a crime or sabotage or something intentional, well, sure, that's worth punishing. But the one example that gets used in healthcare that you made me think of was the idea of, let's say somebody in the healthcare system is known to be stealing drugs, has an impairment problem, and leaders look the other way for one reason or another. Now, that becomes a systemic problem. It's okay. The organization knew, and there could be other circumstances. But if we're not addressing things or at least getting somebody help right, then it blows up and becomes potentially a big systemic problem for sure.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
And I think that leaders right now, in today's business environment, are under even more pressure and are more susceptible to some of those systemic problems. I know every leader right now is, you know, swinging the mallet at the drum about labor, but it's a real thing. We have a major labor shortage. When you have that and you find it so hard to find new employees and then keep those employees, retain those employees. It could become tempting to overlook bad behavior or mediocre behavior or to ignore red flags or signs and an employee kind of, to your example, you know, maybe, you know, there's a little bit of a substance abuse, but you kind of just don't want to deal with it because it took you six months to find that very person, and replacing them is going to be hard, and then we're all going to be short staffed. And I think. And this is what I mean, then no mistake. No, nothing happens in this vacuum of just. Well, you saw it. You knew. So what are we doing about all those other things, too? What are we doing about hiring? What are we doing about retention? What are we doing to be involved in our communities as showing ourselves as good places to work and thereby helping to solve some labor issues? All of these things in tandem sort of make both the problem and also the solution.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. So, one other thing that you wrote about, Meg, I wanted to ask you was the questions that you ask after a failure and maybe to add some flavor to it, how asking those questions when you discover a small failure maybe heads off a big catastrophe.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Sure. It's been a while since I did the article. I don't remember exactly the questions, but our questions around here tend to be. I tend to get pretty specific about what happened and what failed and what resulted from those failures. If you want me to address the specific questions themselves, go ahead.
Mark Graban:
And I wasn't trying to make it a quiz.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
No, no, it's fine. It's fine. But again, I can just sort of give you the general flavor for that. And it leads us to ask questions in a way that lifts the guilt chain, blame the rolling in the. I don't like doing that very often. I have a very. Okay, now what? Now what? Now what? And I tend to be really, really focused on that. And if you don't know now what? And if you can't. If you're. If you're part of the. The problem here and you helped make this mess and you sincerely don't know how you made the mess and you sincerely don't know how to help lead us out of it, like, I need you to just tell me that right now. That's. Again, part of being graceful as a leader is giving people the permission to say, yeah, I screwed this up, and I also don't know how to fix it, and we need help.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. Yeah. And those are, I think, a leader's reaction to all of that either leads to you know, higher levels of psychological safety or worse, you know, how do you react when someone admits a mistake? And how does the leader react when someone says, I need help?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Right.
Mark Graban:
Don't know. Can we rally a team? Can we help? Can we coach them through it instead of getting upset that you don't know?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
That's right. That's right. Because again, it's, we all have to go back to, leaders are people too, and we all have to go back to, like how in my moments, whether it's at work or at home or anywhere else, if I've made a mistake, like how do I want that to be addressed by this person or people that I have to bring that to? And then I try to act accordingly. And so again, I can't imagine a scenario where anybody could achieve good results as a leader or as a company if you're not down on the field, blocking and tackling the way out of it with the team. If you're not, then I think you've missed an opportunity to, to build the trust that then, to your earlier point, has them bring you those mistakes before you ever would have found out about them.
Mark Graban:
Right, right.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Which is important because you can't be everywhere all the time.
Mark Graban:
Exactly. So there's three questions. And I mean, I think we've been going through it together, and these are sort of intuitively how I tend to run the podcast. But you know, what, what specific factors led to the failure? You talk about finding root causes. Music to my ears. What did we learn from this? My mentors, who were former Toyota people, said leaders there, the main question they would always ask is, what did we learn? Which then ties into your third question, how do we apply it to future endeavors?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Listen, all the greatest things about this business, all of the greatest things about this business are here because we screwed something up before. So we have some amazing policies and procedures and processes and the way we work together as a team, all of that is because we did something wrong before and we learned from it. And I'm super open about that. And if you were to talk to any member of my team, they would say that too. Oh, we used to do X, but man, we screwed that up and now we do Y. And nobody has any negativity around that. We also don't say we used to do X and now we do Y because John Doe screwed up one day. And let me tell you the story of his mistake. We don't, we don't do that. I don't suffer any foolish gossip or banter about that either. If I hear it. It's a problem, and I don't hear it.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
It's not the culture we have.
Mark Graban:
Well, sure. And I'm sure you're. You're leading the way and setting that tone, not trashing those people. Yeah, yeah. No, but, you know, there's. There's kind of organizational memory, in a way. You bring up an interesting idea of a failure library.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Yeah.
Mark Graban:
Can you tell us about that?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Yeah. So there has to be a way to remember your mistakes in its simplest form. Mistakes just like our wins, just like any memory we have in our lives as individuals or as an institution, they fade over time. And not only do they fade over time, if you don't forget them entirely, you sort of forget what actually happened, and you forget these little details. Some of the mistakes that our company has made or has, you know, been. Been a part of are things that have a lot of really intricate, moving parts. We deal in the world of chemicals, raw materials and ingredients. And so sometimes, and we manufacture things, too. So sometimes what went wrong, Mark, is actually a really small thing that sends off a chain reaction of other things that appear to be small, and then at the end, it's big. And so we keep really good records, for lack of a better word, of what went wrong, and then we find a way to remember them, but we want to remember them in their accuracy and in their entirety, because if we don't, then we can't also use that lesson, that library, to educate people who didn't work here at the time that that one happened or for whatever reason or another weren't part of the mistake itself, but still need to know. Yeah. It's like having, you know, let's say you have four kids and the two of them were involved in something and the other two weren't. Well, you're not going to drag them in when you're, you know, talking it out with the first two, but you do want that lesson to make its way through the family. It's the same thing here. And so, yeah, having sort of a library and having a way that we keep track of that is really important to us.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, I think one of the things that's important and interesting to talk through is different types of failures, failures on different scales. And I think you said earlier something like, well, we don't love to fail. We're in our culture of failing or losing the game, if you will. But there's some failures that we would absolutely try to prevent. Like, you don't want doing something that would blow up a warehouse that's right. But learning, let's say, you know, small failures and trying to do something different on the website, like the tolerance for risk and failure is different. What are your thoughts on different types of failures? Or, you know, if you will, encouraging the right, you know, the right type of risk taking?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
I think it's important to remember, first of all, that every failure is an incredible lesson for every business, whether it's your failure or not.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
So we can take some really huge public failures that we see on the news right now, and I'm not going to, but let's say, hypothetically, there was a manufacturer of airplanes that had a grave mistake. If you were a certain kind of person, you might sit at your business and say, thank God we don't do that. If you were really good and effective, though, if you were the competing company, you would be so deep into how that happened, and you would utilize that mistake, that grave mistake, to further improve yourself as a company.
Mark Graban:
Right.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
So I think it's so important. I look at that all the time. If I don't blow up a warehouse with chemicals, that's by the grace of God and some great policies and procedures and things like that, and trust me, safety is the highest priority that I have. Like, there is no higher priority. But if one of my colleagues in the industry or a competitor or someone else has a mistake like that, I can do two things. I can stand on the sidelines and use that to dance around the ashes of my enemies, which is terrible. Or I can say, how did that happen? Because we're doing something similar, and I want to understand how that happened. And I can learn from that. There's no mistake that can't be learned from. And if it's not your mistake, then you have even more, what a gift. What a free gift. And you should be grateful in some sense for the opportunity to learn from that and then gracious to the people who made that mistake and are inevitably suffering as a result.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
And so I really think there is a hierarchy of mistakes. There's things like that, but there's also, like, the big ones count, even if they're not your big ones.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Because you're going to hear about other people's big mistakes. Conversely, no one is going to probably hear about the teeny, tiny mistakes that happen at my company. I'm not sure that I necessarily need to broadcast them, but I do think there's something to be said for the good of the order and the good of the whole, for sharing some of those little things openly and without any sort of emotional hiding around that, right. We hide because we're afraid people are going to see that we're, we're not perfect. Well, I'll just tell you, we're not constantly in process here and we're constantly trying to get better. And so it's a balance, right? It's balance of learning from other people's big mistakes that you know about and also sharing a few of your little ones so that everybody like high water lifts all boats, right?
Mark Graban:
Yeah. Well, I think the thing about aviation, you know, for one, people care about it because a lot of people fly. And an incident could affect any of us. An incident not learned from and then repeated.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Right.
Mark Graban:
Would be even, even more tragic. But, you know, in a lot of cases, look, these are very visible, unlike mistakes in other businesses that people don't have visibility to or don't. But for people listening in healthcare, listening to your words, Meg, I think people would relate and say, well, okay, how do we do a better job of that within healthcare?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Right.
Mark Graban:
There are some initiatives like back in the city of Pittsburgh years ago and I think to some extent still happening in the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, wherever I hospital CEO's, you know, they were trying to share with each other for, I think a lot of the reasons that you were touching on when, you know, patient safety is a factor. You know, if, if these hospital leaders realize, hey, we're all part of this community and we have an obligation to the community to share with each other, there's still, I think, vast untapped potential, hundred percent to share those things without trying to shame any hospitals or air everything publicly. But yeah, just, you know, to learn and improve.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Right. I think too, like there we don't put the onus on, on everybody else. You know, you, I watch CNBC for obvious reasons and for a good portion of my day. Right. It sort of runs in the background and whenever something happens, whenever some company has big mistake. But let's say it is a hospital because it does happen, you know.
Mark Graban:
Right, right.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
The commentary you find in that is like, is hospital a taking the steps they need to take to make sure this does happen again? And we'll spin on that for 8 hours. My question is always, what is hospital B, C and D doing as a result of this known failure? Because now they know. Now they're on notice. You can't be at hospital B, C or D and sit there and lean back in your chair as the leadership of that organization and wipe the sweat off your brow and go, who thank God it wasn't me no service in your court now, because now you know, now you know what could happen. And so you have an obligation to look at what could go wrong, be gracious to those who had it happen to them, but then be working your own internal process to make it better and hopefully, to your point, in a collaborative manner. But if you're not, if you're joining the talking heads, going around and again, jumping on the ashes of your enemy, I think you have missed an opportunity for effective leadership, and you've missed it big.
Mark Graban:
Yes. It's very well said. I really appreciate how you said that. Our guests today, before we wrap up, there's a couple other things I want to touch on here. Megan Gluth-Bohan. Link to her website and more will be in the show notes. But before actually moving on to a couple of things that I know are important topics to you and to me as well, kind of wrap up this discussion around culture and leadership behaviors, thinking about, I'm not trying to frame it as an either or, but, you know, on one level, you could say, well, this is the right way to treat people. You could say, well, this is good business. Can you kind of touch on kind of the overlap between those reasons for leading this way?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Yeah, I am a, I've sort of coined the phrase, you know, I use it a lot. And we have human centered capitalism. Treating people right is good business.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
I run a very profitable company because I treat people well. The people who work with me, the people who work for me, the people who depend on me, the people I buy from. Like, all of that acting right gets results, financial results.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
And I would be lying to you if I told you that I was coming to this corporation every day and grinding it out, because I just do this for love of the game, and I just love these people. All of that is true.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
But this is a for profit corporation, Mark. I'm here to make money. Yeah.
Mark Graban:
Right.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
And so I had to find a way to be really clear about both things being important to me. And so I don't see them at all as in conflict with one another.
Mark Graban:
Right.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
And, in fact, I think the one serves the other and vice versa very nicely.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're concerned, you know, there's making money and then there's making money sustainably.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Yes.
Mark Graban:
You know, for the long term. And I think these things are all interrelated. We talk about later labor shortages. If you create a workplace that's engaging and challenging. Right. I mean, I think being thoughtful and constructive about failure doesn't mean we're being easy on people. I mean, I think these things can, can go hand in hand where if we're treating people fairly and engaging them, they're going to want to stay or if they leave and go someplace else for a raise and, like, you know. You know what? No, I mean, I know people have run businesses that are very human centered, and people leave and they're maybe months later in a position where they, they come back. They're allowed back in because they say, you know, I appreciate the culture.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Yep.
Mark Graban:
And they come back. So, you know, that leads to retention and other things that are strengthening the business over time, right?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Mark Graban:
So I want to talk about a couple of things, you know, supporting women in STEM currently or for future generations. That's an important topic in my household. My wife is an engineer and a business leader herself. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts and some of the things that you're doing in that regard.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
For sure. So one of the most important things that people like your wife and myself and anybody who's there is to be there and to be sort of make ourselves available. We know from data that children and then young adults, adolescents, things like that, they go where they see role models, they go where they see people that they can follow to those places. And it's especially important that they see people like them. And so I think the most important thing we can do is to be where we're at and to be visible and to say what we do and to be proud of who we are. So if your wife is an engineer, like, making it known. I'm an engineer. And historically, maybe in some of the places that she's worked and historically in my field, women in manufacturing, women in chemical engineering or chemistry or whatever my background, I'm a lawyer by trade, a recovering attorney. I was trained as an attorney. And I came into this industry, and I came here, and a lot of the leadership of companies like mine and particularly a lot of the, again, the manufacturing industries, things like that, tends to not have a lot of women in these spots. So my job, I feel, and my, you know, one of the things I'm really passionate about is being visible to women who want to follow me, perhaps, or think they might want to. That means supporting initiatives where women are getting started in their careers, maybe out of college, and answering their call for mentorship or things like that. It also means, though, engaging with my own daughters and maybe their classmates and things like that about what's possible for them to want to be when they grow up and being really visible. You can do that without any kind of an agenda, and you can do that without believing. I always tell people that this becomes a political conversation at some point. It doesn't need to be that way. I think it's just about saying we as humans, we want to go where we've seen somebody go that we think we might want to go and somebody we can relate to. And so I think just being really authentic about who you are and where you're at and mentoring along the way is just a key. Mentoring or role modeling, again, for younger kids, it's just about. Being a role model is absolutely important. And I try to support initiatives like that with my time and also with my money.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, that's appreciated for the future of manufacturing for business in the US and, and beyond being encouraging instead of discouraging and, you know, is this still the case, that middle school is like an important point where some girls kind of put themselves on a different track from STEM?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
What we know is, and the data is super, super clear and unfortunate, but we get to middle school and we lose them because there is something that happens. And again, we can, we kind of know what it is. But, but what happens is that we see these girls that used to be these really eager, you know, excited and enthusiastic answerers in math and in science and in engineering or in their, their robotics club. They start to pull back a little bit. They start to let the boys in the class answer a little more. They start to look at whether they're peers. So other women are doing it. Their, their girlfriends are kind of hanging back. So they're hanging back and there's a peer pressure coming at them in a lot of different ways. My hope would be that we could start to normalize answering the question over time. And this is a multifaceted effort and I'm certainly not an expert on how it's being done, but to say, hey, listen, we're all going to start answering these questions if we know the answer and then we've normalized that. And then it takes that out of the mix a little bit, I would hope, over time.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And then as a final topic, in changing directions a little bit. But in that category of creating opportunities and thinking of what's good for people, what's good for business, you have a factory in Chicago where you're creating opportunities for people who've been previously incarcerated, right?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
Yeah, we're working really, really hard. We're trying to put together a program. And I say trying because the, the red tape in the loopholes here is hard, and I get the reasons for that, but I'm still throwing the idea out there because even if I can't actualize this, I'm hoping that people will hear this and will try and do things themselves. But in particular, I'm interested in women who are leaving women's prisons and want the opportunity to restart their lives and have an opportunity to make an honest day's living, doing an honest day's work. I want to teach skills and I want to teach confidence, and I want to teach the ability to, you know, here's a job, here's an opportunity. And while you're here, we've, we believe in you. We believe in your second chance or your third chance or your fourth chance to go out and do something. I want to see the potential that exists there and really put some, something underneath that so that then they actually can be confident and empowered and earning their own way in the world. My belief and my hope is that if they do that, I'll promote anyone doing a good job. I don't care what your past was. My hope is that we start to promote and we start to create an environment for growth, and then that becomes contagious and it becomes role model. They are role models, they are mentors, and they are inspirations in their little world. We all have a sphere of influence, and my hope would be to contribute to that. As you can imagine, that is a lot easier said than done, but that's the vision, and we're working on it.
Mark Graban:
Well, I appreciate you doing that and for sharing about that and for leading the way. I appreciate what you're saying and what you're doing as a leader and a business owner and a CEO. So again, we've been joined today. Megan Gluth-Bohan. Is there a book? Random question. It just popped into my head. Is there a book in your future?
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
I don't know. I don't know, Mark. Maybe I don't have a ton of free time right now, but I think about it from time to time. I really do.
Mark Graban:
I mean, there's, there's different ways of sharing ideas, and I do appreciate you taking time to do it here on the podcast and maybe someday. There's a lot of wisdom and stories that would probably make a great book. But thank you for taking time to do this here, Meg.
Megan Gluth-Bohan:
You bet. Thanks so much, Mark.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks.
Episode Summary and More
Learning from Mistakes: Insights from Megan Gluth-Bohan, CEO of Catalynt Solutions
Introduction to Megan Gluth-Bohan's Leadership
Megan Gluth-Bohan is a prominent figure in the chemical industry. As the owner and CEO of Catalynt Solutions, Inc., a US-based chemical distributor, and Chemblend of America, a chemical blending and tolling facility, Megan has her hands full. Catalynt Solutions is recognized as one of the largest certified women-owned suppliers in North America and was recently honored by the Puget Sound Business Journal as part of the 2023 Middle Market Fast 50 list. Additionally, Megan was awarded the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2023. Given these accolades, her experiences provide valuable lessons for leaders in any industry.
Navigating Business Decisions Amidst Pandemonium
Running a business during the COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented challenges that required quick, often impetuous decision-making. Megan recalls several instances during this time when the hustle led to hasty decisions that she later regretted. One significant insight she shares is the need for leaders to pause and gut-check decisions, even in the face of frenzy. This strategy might have saved her from entering two to three business deals that she now views as major mistakes.
Importance of Trust in Business Relationships
One of the key themes Megan discusses is the critical role of trust in business relationships, particularly when dealing with customers. She emphasizes that these regrettable deals were primarily with customers who appeared trustworthy on paper but exhibited behaviors that eroded trust over time. Initial late payments and minor contract breaches slowly chipped away at the foundation of these partnerships. Megan acknowledges that tending to gut feelings about partners should have been prioritized as much as the data-driven vetting process.
The Perils of Over-Reliance on Data
An important takeaway from Megan's experiences is the danger of over-reliance on data and technicalities while ignoring intuitive uneasiness. Though the customers passed thorough due diligence checks, Megan admits overlooking her gut instinct contributed to a significant financial loss. This cautionary tale underscores the value of combining hard data with instinctual insights to make balanced decisions.
Team Dynamics and Leadership Responsibility
Operating with a team of professionals during challenging times led Megan to examine group dynamics and her leadership style. She highlights that while team members focus on specific aspects like finance or sales, the CEO's role includes overseeing the broader picture—a 360-degree view of the business. Megan points out that her team competently provided data related to their departments, but the final, comprehensive decision rested on her shoulders.
The Role of the Leader in Decision Making
In reflecting on her experiences, Megan emphasizes that as the top leader, it is crucial to take responsibility for decisions. Her team contributed valuable pieces of data, but her oversight and final judgment call were pivotal. The challenge for any CEO, Megan notes, is to reconcile contributions from the team while also trusting their holistic view and instincts.
The Impact of External Circumstances
Megan's narrative reveals the external pressures that influenced her decision-making processes. The pandemic's high-pressure environment coupled with remote working conditions led to a disconnection among team members. Distractions such as handling family responsibilities amidst the crisis-induced remote work added layers of complexity to already high-stake decisions.
Recovering from Financial Losses and Trusting Processes
Despite the financial setbacks from these deals, Megan's company has leveraged the lessons learned, fine-tuning processes and reinforcing the importance of mutual trust within the team. This adaptive approach allowed the company to transform the mistakes into growth opportunities.
Building a Support Network
While Megan does not have a formal board of advisors, she emphasizes the importance of surrounding oneself with trusted mentors. Consulting with these advisors often provided her with the necessary reassurance and wisdom to navigate through tough times. This network of experienced individuals can offer a different perspective and valuable moral support during critical moments.
The Power of Affirmation and Shared Experiences
Finally, Megan highlights the value of speaking with peers who have faced similar challenges. Knowing that others have made and recovered from similar mistakes offers a level of comfort and a reminder that mistakes do not equate to failure. The collective wisdom and support from her network proved indispensable in reinforcing her resolve and guiding her through recovery.
Megan Gluth-Bohan's journey underscores the essence of learning from mistakes in business. Her reflections offer a roadmap for leaders to balance data-driven decisions with gut instincts, trust their teams while shouldering final accountability, and leverage support networks to navigate crises successfully.
Cultivating a Safe Space for Failure
Megan Gluth-Bohan believes in fostering a culture that accommodates mistakes to foster innovation and continuous improvement. She contends that leaders who create a “safe space for failure” and own their mistakes can turn setbacks into knowledge and growth opportunities for their entire teams.
Encouraging Open Dialogue and Learning
Rather than adopting a punitive approach, Megan encourages open dialogue about mistakes. This strategy involves conducting an “autopsy” on the error to extract valuable insights. Megan uses practical techniques to ensure this learning process is constructive rather than destructive. She focuses on console over critique, allowing the team to dissect the factors that led to the mistake without the fear of blame or punishment. This method aims to understand precisely what went wrong and how future incidents can be prevented.
- “Praise publicly, criticize privately” is a core approach Megan employs in her leadership. By acknowledging contributions and learning openly, while addressing errors privately, she maintains team morale and accountability.
Avoiding Blame Games
Megan stresses that assigning blame to individuals for mistakes is counterproductive. Mistakes are often a result of systemic issues rather than isolated missteps. Thus, singling out one person diverts attention from the broader issues that need addressing. According to Megan, if a mistake can indeed be pinpointed to a single person, it might indicate a more serious issue, potentially intentional harm, rather than a mere error.
*Aligning with the “Just Culture” model, initially applied in aviation and adopted in healthcare, Megan emphasizes that leaders should focus on systemic issues rather than individual blame. This approach helps in distinguishing between human error and intentional wrongdoing, fostering a fair response to workplace mistakes.
Addressing Root Causes and Systemic Issues
Megan's approach includes a series of questions designed to get to the root cause of any failure. These questions not only focus on what went wrong but also on what can be learned from the experience.
- What specific factors led to the failure?
- What did we learn from this situation?
- How can we apply these lessons to future scenarios?
By finding answers to these questions, Megan believes that organizations can create robust policies and processes that help prevent future errors. She underlines that every effective procedure in her company stems from previous mistakes that were critically analyzed and rectified.
Building Organizational Memory
Megan strongly advocates for the retention of organizational memory regarding mistakes. She recognizes that memories fade and details blur over time. To combat this, she promotes the creation of a “failure library,” where detailed records of errors and their subsequent analyses are kept.
Benefits of a Failure Library
Maintaining detailed records of past mistakes allows the organization to:
- Preserve Lessons Learned: Ensure that the knowledge gained from past errors is not lost with time or employee turnover.
- Enhance Training Programs: Use real-life examples to train new employees on avoiding common pitfalls.
- Improve Transparency: Cultivate a culture of openness where learning from mistakes is valued.
The intricate nature of Megan's industry—dealing with chemicals, raw materials, and manufacturing processes—demonstrates the importance of recording every small detail, as minor errors can set off a cascading chain of consequences.
The Chain Reaction of Small Mistakes
In the world of chemical distribution and manufacturing, what often appears to be a minor issue can snowball into a significant problem. Megan's strategy involves meticulously documenting these incidents to capture each step of the process that led to the mistake, helping demystify the complexity and prevent replication.
- Detailed documentation and analysis create an invaluable resource for the company, continually refining and perfecting operational protocols.
Megan Gluth-Bohan's philosophy of embracing and learning from mistakes has led to the development of highly effective and resilient business processes. By fostering a culture that sees errors as opportunities for improvement rather than failures, she has driven her companies toward innovation and excellence in a challenging industry.
Supporting Women in STEM: Current Efforts and Future Generations
Role Models and Visibility
One of the most significant ways to support women in STEM is through role modeling. The visibility of successful women in STEM fields can have a profound impact on girls and young women considering these careers. As Megan Gluth-Bohan suggests, seeing people like themselves in roles they aspire to attain provides a tangible example that such goals are achievable.
Early Engagement and Mentoring
Engagement begins early, often in childhood or adolescence. Megan emphasizes the importance of being accessible and approachable to younger generations, showcasing what is possible. For instance:
- Career Days in Schools: Participating in career days at schools to talk about STEM careers.
- Mentorship Programs: Providing mentorship opportunities for young women in high school or college.
- Community Engagement: Engaging with community organizations that support girls in STEM.
By creating an environment where young women see that pursuing a career in STEM is both possible and rewarding, we can cultivate interest and confidence from an early age.
Addressing Middle School Attrition
Middle school is a critical turning point where many girls begin to disengage from STEM subjects. Megan notes the importance of reinforcing participation during this crucial stage:
- Positive Reinforcement: Teachers and parents should offer consistent positive reinforcement for girls showing interest in STEM.
- Extracurricular Activities: Supporting involvement in clubs like robotics, coding, and science fairs.
- Creating Safe Environments: Encouraging girls to ask questions and participate without fear of criticism, fostering a classroom culture where everyone's contributions are valued.
Combating Peer Pressure
Peer pressure plays a significant role in the decision-making processes of young girls. Megan suggests normalizing participation in STEM:
- Inclusive Classrooms: Promoting an inclusive classroom environment where both boys and girls feel equally encouraged to participate.
- Collaborative Projects: Designing projects that require collaboration among all students, thereby normalizing mixed-gender teamwork.
- Highlighting Success Stories: Regularly showcasing success stories of women in STEM to counteract stereotypes and encourage peer support.
Industry and Educational Cultures
Educational institutions and industry leaders must work together to create and promote inclusive environments:
- Internship Programs: Establishing internship programs specifically targeted at young women.
- Scholarships: Providing scholarships and grants for women pursuing STEM degrees.
- Corporation Partnerships: Partnering with corporations to create pathways from education to STEM careers.
By investing in these areas, companies can help close the gender gap in STEM fields and benefit from a diverse and innovative workforce.
The Interconnectedness of Ethical Leadership and Business Success
Human-Centered Capitalism
Megan Gluth-Bohan has coined the term “human-centered capitalism,” positing that treating people right is not only ethically sound but also good for business. She emphasizes that her company's success is intertwined with how well she treats her employees, suppliers, and customers.
- Employee Satisfaction: Happy employees are more productive and loyal, reducing turnover and increasing productivity.
- Supplier Relations: Fair and respectful dealings with suppliers create more robust and reliable supply chains.
- Customer Trust: Ethical treatment of customers fosters long-term loyalty and positive word-of-mouth, leading to sustained business growth.
Sustainable Business Practices
Building a business on principles of fairness and integrity leads to sustainability:
- Talent Retention: Creating an engaging and supportive workplace encourages retention.
- Reputation Management: Ethical leadership enhances the company's reputation, attracting top talent and loyal customers.
- Long-term Profitability: Ethical practices lead to sustainable profitability rather than short-term gains.
Continuous Improvement
A culture that values continuous improvement and constructive feedback is crucial for innovation:
- Encouraging Innovation: When employees feel safe to make and learn from mistakes, they are more likely to take risks that lead to innovation.
- Learning from Others: Observing and analyzing failures outside the company, as Megan suggests, can provide valuable lessons without the direct consequences.
Balancing Profit and People
Megan's leadership philosophy shows that there is no conflict between making money and treating people well. In fact, one supports the other. Businesses can be profitable while maintaining high ethical standards, leading to sustainable success and industry leadership.
Current Initiatives and Future Goals
Supporting Initiatives for Women in STEM
Megan is actively involved in supporting initiatives that aim to encourage and sustain women in STEM fields. This includes:
- Sponsorship: Sponsoring STEM programs and events for young women.
- Networking Opportunities: Creating platforms for women in STEM to network and share experiences.
- Public Speaking: Using public forums to inspire and educate about the importance of women in STEM.
The Role of Industry Leaders
Industry leaders have a responsibility to foster environments where all employees, especially those from underrepresented groups, feel valued and respected. Efforts like the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative demonstrate how sharing information openly within an industry can lead to collective improvement, especially when patient safety or public health is at stake.
Embracing Failure as a Learning Tool
Finally, as Megan notes, embracing and analyzing failures, whether our own or those of others, is critical for continuous improvement. This approach not only mitigates risks but also fosters a proactive rather than reactive culture in business and safety practices.
Together, these strategies illustrate a comprehensive approach to ethical leadership and sustainable business practice, embodying Megan Gluth-Bohan's vision of a more inclusive, innovative, and successful corporate environment.
Empowering Marginalized Populations for Business Success
Megan Gluth-Bohan's commitment to supporting marginalized populations is evident in her initiatives. One of her significant undertakings is the development of employment programs aimed at providing opportunities for individuals who have been previously incarcerated, particularly women.
Employment Programs for Formerly Incarcerated Women
Megan is acutely aware of the difficulties faced by individuals re-entering the workforce after incarceration. To address this, she is in the process of establishing a factory in Chicago that focuses on creating opportunities for these individuals. This initiative is particularly centered on women leaving women's prisons, aiming to provide them with the skills, confidence, and chances to rebuild their lives.
Key Components of the Program
- Skill Development: Offering training sessions that equip women with essential job skills needed to succeed in the workplace.
- Confidence Building: Providing an encouraging environment where women can build their self-esteem and confidence.
- Sustainable Employment: Ensuring that the positions offered are long-term and sustainable, allowing women to earn a living honestly and independently.
Overcoming Challenges
Megan openly acknowledges the challenges and red tape involved in implementing such programs. Despite these obstacles, her determination remains strong. By voicing these ideas publicly, she hopes to inspire others to embark on similar initiatives.
Promoting a Culture of Second Chances
Megan's vision extends beyond providing employment. She aims to create an environment where those who are doing a good job, irrespective of their past, are promoted and recognized. This culture of second chances not only fosters growth within the workforce but also creates role models and mentors who can inspire others within their communities.
Future Directions and Industry Impact
Mentorship and Role Modeling
The ripple effect of promoting formerly incarcerated individuals who perform well can be profound. These individuals can become mentors and role models, exemplifying that positive change and growth are possible despite past mistakes.
- Community Influence: Encouraging women to become mentors in their communities, sharing their stories and successes to inspire others.
- Role Modeling: Promoting individuals within the organization who can exemplify the values of resilience and perseverance.
Continuous Advocacy
Megan's ongoing advocacy for marginalized groups highlights the importance of continuous support and development. Her efforts demonstrate that ethical leadership involves not just supporting those already in the workforce but also extending opportunities to those who face significant barriers to employment.
Shaping Future Policies
By actively working on these initiatives and sharing her experiences, Megan can influence policy and corporate practices. Companies may adopt similar programs, leading to a broader societal impact.
Potential Influences
- Policy Change: Advocating for fewer obstacles in employing formerly incarcerated individuals.
- Corporate Responsibility: Encouraging more companies to adopt inclusive hiring practices.
Reflections on Leadership
Ethical Leadership Traits
Megan's approach to leadership reflects her belief in treating people with respect and dignity. Her actions align with her principles of fairness, integrity, and human-centered capitalism.
- Inclusive Practices: Ensuring that workplace policies and practices are inclusive and supportive of all employees.
- Fair Treatment: Emphasizing fair treatment of all stakeholders, from employees to suppliers and customers.
Sharing Wisdom and Experiences
While Megan currently may not have the time to write a book, her journey, insights, and practices offer valuable lessons. Whether through public speaking, mentorship, or future writings, her contributions to the dialogue on ethical leadership and inclusive business practices are significant.
Her initiatives serve as a blueprint for other business leaders striving to make a difference, showing that putting people first does not contradict business success but rather enhances it.
Conclusion
The efforts and vision of Megan Gluth-Bohan exemplify a progressive and ethical approach to business leadership. By supporting women in STEM, creating opportunities for formerly incarcerated individuals, and promoting inclusive work environments, she embodies the principles of human-centered capitalism. Her journey continues to inspire and pave the way for future leaders dedicated to creating a better, more inclusive world.