Leading with Grief and the Ghosts of the Past: A Vulnerable Conversation with Highlights CEO Kent Johnson
Just over a year ago, a tragedy of profound magnitude led to the unexpected death of my beloved father. Since then I’ve worn my heart and my grief on my sleeve.
After taking a month off, I cautiously began working again. Despite our societal silence and shame around death, I decided I couldn’t begin facilitating workshops again without naming the profound grief I was enduring as a facilitator, whose role carries great leadership responsibility and immense emotional labor.
One of my first workshops amidst my new reality of grief was on Radical Candor for Highlights, the organization behind the children’s magazines I loved as a kid. After briefly sharing my current emotional geography at the beginning of a workshop, I got this heartfelt message from Kent Johnson, their CEO:
“I am sorry about your loss and hope you are finding peace where and when you can. I lost my mother 18 months ago and my father in law right at the start of covid. We all experience grief and loss differently, so I know I don’t know what you have experienced or are experiencing right now. That being said, your sharing openly connects to my recent experiences and reminds me to bring that whole part of myself to my colleagues and our work together. Thank you.”
Receiving this message brought a deep sense of hope for the future of the business: to know there are CEOs who are leading their organizations and people with profound compassion and love. Because as Joanne Cacciatore once wrote, “Extraordinary grief is an expression of extraordinary love.” We mourn because we have lost who we love.
As a facilitator for diversity, equity and inclusion, it should be named that Kent Johnson admittedly holds immense privilege and an inheritance of a role that far few of us will hold. Yet particularly amidst this power and privilege, Kent challenges the perception of the stereotypical CEO, a compassionate and humble leader with a doctorate in physics, leading a 75+ year-old family business with grief and the ghosts of the past.
Mel: I wanted to start up with something more lighthearted and I know it's Highlights 75th year anniversary, and in that spirit, would love to know: What was your favorite childhood memory?
I was a kid who just loved to fill up a bucket, empty a bucket, dig a hole in the beach. I also was a game playing kid — whether it was board games or doing computer stuff with dad, it wasn't as hard core as today's video games, but those types of geeky kid things were a lot of fun for me.
Mel: I know you became CEO around the time that you became a parent. How did being a father influence your leadership?
We were living in a city where we didn't know that many people with a really young kid. Having a child and that child’s schedule was really helpful for setting boundaries in terms of work.
I remember you could never do enough on any given day, you really can't get on top of everything, but I knew what time at that point, my son Duncan was almost was one. And so I know, "Okay. You've got be home. If I don't get home, I'm not gonna see him. Gotta be home for bedtime." How do you use commitments in your life to not let the job overwhelm you, and I think that's something that we all can struggle with from time to time. But I can remember pretty vividly in that first year, "Okay, the clock says it's time to go home or you're not gonna be part of the evening's activities with bath and bedtime reading."
It helped keep me with some perspective at the beginning because without that perspective, particularly earlier in my career, I was one to let work overwhelm everything else. That would be my natural response when I became CEO. It's easy just to become completely obsessive with work, and that's dangerous.
It's easy just to become completely obsessive with work, and that's dangerous.
Mel: How do you manage the guilt and uncomfortable feelings that may arise in a society that is focused on achievement and targets?
Yeah, that's a good question. I think guilt is not a useful emotion, so I do everything I can to suppress guilt. But I think the problem is that many of us live lives where you can't.
You're always feeling a sense of inadequacy, because you're not able to do as well as you want. You're not able to live up to your own standards in all these different spheres of your life at once.
You have to lower your standards. You have to forgive yourself.
In a way, maybe the secret to having it all is to sort of acknowledge that you can't have it all -- at the standards you'd set for yourself -- simultaneously, all the time. You have to pick and choose, and you're likely always doing some aspect of your life less well than you could. And that sucks. That's not a good feeling. But I think guilt can make you spiral downward. So, for me, the question is trying to monitor any guilt so that it doesn't suck you down, but you're trying to do ongoing self correction to keep a balance in things. And it's hard.
We've been talking a lot about the idea of putting your [oxygen, not covid] mask on first. The idea that if you're not taking care of yourself, it's really hard to take care of your co-workers. If you're not taking care of yourself, you're not able to be there fully for your family or your friends.
I have to admit, early in my career, I used to not fully understand that. I would fill my time with the things I had to do and sacrifice other things, "Okay, I've got too much work this week, I'm not gonna be able to get my exercise. I have get this done, so I'm gonna stay up late", and it's really a dangerous, slippery kind of slope, because eventually, if you stretch yourself too thin, it catches up with you. And it's a lot easier to stretch hard when you're 35 than when you're 50. Of course you want to stretch, but it undermines everything when you stretch too far.
Mel: What’s your equivalent of putting your mask on first? What do you do to integrate self care and welling into days?
For me, a lot of it's making sure my physical side is staying in some kind of harmony. I've been trying to practice yoga, I'm not brave enough, maybe to go to group sessions at studios, but I have a video online subscription. I’ve struggled with lower back pain, and so I think by mixing in yoga sufficiently, it helps me stay on top of certain types of physical pain.
With certain exercise, you can have a whole mental dialogue on some other topics, you can think about work, the interesting thing about yoga is it forces you just to be present and push other thoughts out. I'm trying to make sure I'm just stretched enough so that it takes all my mental ability to just be there on the mat and pause the dialogues that always run through your head.
Mel: That's one reason I'm drawn to it, just how it connects you to the present, the word vinyasa, means moment-to-moment awareness. So that resonates a lot.
I also have found through experimentation over the years, I have to get exercise because of the role it has on burning off stress, which connects to my ability to have quality sleep, as I don't generally sleep that well. So I become maniacal about the connection between getting sufficient exercise, sufficient mental downtime and monitoring that carefully: "How is my sleep deficit or how's my sleep going?" Early on in my career, I would wonder, "Okay, why am I getting headaches more often?" "Why does my back hurt?" I've come to believe, and I didn't early on, that a lot physical issues are connected to your stress level and your overall emotional wellbeing, like it or not.
If you try to ignore the stress it, it will eventually show up as some physical manifestation. I used to joke with some peers: You gotta look at how much Advil you're taking -- what's your level of pain?
I was monitoring this through the pandemic, how much pain and stress am I carrying in terms of watching Zoom video, sitting in my home office, having the stress in the day-to-day life, and what am I doing to get rid of that? And for me, it's about getting outside, getting sweating, getting quality rest because if I don't do those things, I don't sleep well, and that is a recipe for disaster. You take stress and being stretched too thin and then you layer on insufficient sleep, and you can really cycle downward pretty quickly.
Mel: I'm curious about if you have a spiritual self care practice. I’ve read True North by Bill George from Harvard who talks about the importance of spirituality in leadership.
My parents didn't necessarily agree on a religious upbringing, so I was raised without much formal organized religion. I definitely believe in a higher reason and purpose.
Maybe it's an aspect of a multigenerational family business because I can think that they’re these people who went before us and we're continuing what they did. That also fits in my world view that whatever we're doing, it somehow has to be continued into the future.
I think it's really important to believe there's a future beyond all of us, and that whatever that connection is or that value system is, that it takes us beyond short term. I have deep faith in that larger connection.
And that motivates a lot of what I do. I don't spend all my time thinking like, "What's this going to be 50 years from now?" But I want to behave in a way that our impact ripples beyond us, so in a way that centers my motivation. I don't know if any people would call that spiritual or not, but I think I get a lot of value for myself, thinking that the things we're trying to impact are bigger than us and can last longer than us. And that may connect to my background in physics - physics helps you realize how inconsequential we are in the universe in some way.
I'm curious, you've talked a bit about how your scientific background influences your leadership, but are there other ways that your passion for physics shows up in your leadership or day-to-day?
I think it has a lot to do with methods of learning: how do you have a relentless desire to keep learning and let that learning cross different disciplines and be guided by curiosity.
Being trained as a scientist, so much of what you did is throwing ideas together, like, “What should we try? What are the possibilities? What's the range of all the things involved?”
I'm not an expert in anything our company does, I mean it's kind of funny to say it, but I probably can't do almost every job in our company. I never really had training in publishing, marketing or accounting.
You just have to relentlessly be trying to learn and not be stopped.
I've never had any of the courses that would make me qualified for my job, which is a little scary. I probably shouldn't say these things out loud, but I think having the spirit that you just have to be relentlessly trying to learn and not be stopped by boundaries and definitions, like, "Oh, I'm only... I'm only in the accounting group, I should only know accounting."
How do you learn across disciplines based on the work you're doing or the problems you are solving? I think that's something I certainly take from my training that's been really helpful. I think it's important to have the idea of the beginner’s mind. I think in physics, we are always willing to examine and re-examine things. Is that idea, fact, or assumption really true? Is that thing I think is true really true? Is it still true?
I think one of the biggest risks to my leadership now, and probably one of the bigger risks to the company, is if I start being confident that I understand our business and our markets, because I've been doing this for 16 or 17 years.
Now I'm spending more time in my dialogue of saying, "Okay, I've gotta be learning things, what should I be trying to learn?" But I'm now trying to bring in the, "What do I need to unlearn?"
I think it's dangerous to get too confident. The riskiest things are things you think you know are true, but are no longer true. But you don't realize it. So I work really hard and people sometimes think it's annoying, but to try to act like I don't really know what I'm doing, at least that's part of my internal dialogue.
People have had to learn with me. I'm not the kind of CEO where you bring a completely formed and developed perfect proposal and just get the stamp of approval, I want to play with the idea some, I want to understand how we got to those ideas and decisions. So it's funny when we have new executives, there's some training process and people say, "Okay, don't think Kent just says yes, you gotta talk about it." Because a lot of times, my challenge is, how do I make sure people understand that that's not doubting them, questioning them, but it's my process for understanding how we got there; its my process for learning. It’s curiosity, it's the fun part, it's not negative feedback but just a little bit of a digression.
I remember when I first became CEO. I was 36. I'd been at the company for about six or seven months which means I'd been in the industry seven months, and I'd been on the Board of Directors for a couple of years before that, so I at least knew the board and I knew the executives, and I'd seen two years of the business up close, but I remember when board made me CEO, I was terrified.
At that time, the board said, "Okay, first thing, your first job is, it's pretty simple. Just don't screw it up. Don't do anything." It wasn't like, "Give me a 100 day plan," it was like, "No, just don't screw it up. And don't worry, you have good people, you're not gonna screw it up."
But then they counseled me, they said, "You really have two jobs, not one, and your first job is, we need you to keep learning how these businesses work, how these industries work, so keep learning the business." And then they said, "And your second job is you need to learn how to be a CEO." And they said, "Here's the good news, we'll help you with both of those jobs, but just think of those as two separate jobs, and you have to do both at the same time, you can't do one, then the other, you have to do them both."
And I've tried to keep that with me because I think given how much the world is changing, how small we are, and how many threats there are, I gotta keep learning our business because it's moving, it’s changing, so trying to make sure I don't ever think “it's done” on learning the business.
I'm not sure I ever really set out to want to be a CEO. So I'm not wired - if you look at my personality through whatever , personality instrument or values instrument - like I'm not the person who values being the leader, so it's a little bit incongruous. I'm always trying to figure out how canI be a better leader, knowing that that's a task that no one's ever done with, if you're doing it right.
It sounds like on one end there's this unlearning, there's this physicist that's questioning, which being real, might be interpreted as not confident, yet as a CEO, there is an expectation of a certain level of gravitas and confidence you have to have. How do you balance the questioning with confidence?
It's interesting. I probably do come off as less confident than I should be to people at times. I have a support group of CEOs that I've worked with, and they would probably emphasize my humility, my approachability and my authenticity more than saying I'm confident.
I'm deeply confident on the inside.
It's my style, so it's the only approach or way of being I can be authentic to It's like I wear my confidence on the inside. My confidence is like when I look in the mirror, do I feel like I'm doing the right thing? Yes, I feel confident, but I also think it's healthy to have some doubts. People talk about impostor syndrome as being really negative, and I think it can be very negative.
If you feel impostor syndrome and it's causing you to self-doubt and you're putting a lot of emotional or mental energy into it, it detracts. But I think it's sometimes a little healthy to say, "Well, wait a minute, maybe I don't know what I'm doing here. Let's really think this through." And so I think I have a mix. I’ve been able to do a lot of things successfully in my life. I’ve been blessed to have a lot of privilege to get there and have those opportunities, and so I sort of tend to think I'll do alright at things, which I think helped me get through my early years as a CEO.
On the other hand, once things are done, I don't spend really much time celebrating. I have said to my team, "You all have to help make sure we're celebrating," because for me, when something's done, I've already had all my natural fun with it. Getting there is what I enjoy, so I'm ready to move on the next thing the minute we're done with something, because that's where my fun and joy, engagement and flow comes from - the next thing.
I think you can spend a lot of time being self critical, so I tend to be a glass half full looking forward, but looking backward, I'm more apt to say, "Okay, that glass was 22% empty. Where did we go wrong?" And it's always examining, which is dangerous because if you're doing that, it can stop you, it can slow you down, so I've probably worked to have a shorter memory on certain things. Do the analysis and go, don't let it fester. And sometimes you can't help the festering emotionally, but it doesn’t usually help anything.
It's like if you overanalyze and over retrospect. And so, I'm curious, when you were 36, I'm 36, that felt very serendipitous when I saw your interview because I feel like I'm about to step into some interesting leadership in the world. I love this notion of wearing your confidence inside. How did you at that moment actually feel that confidence inside and if not, how did you build it?
I know that I didn't obsess on it. I was in a spot because I had been brought in potentially to take over, and then my predecessor died, suddenly. I could intellectually understand we were going on a path from point A to point B, it's now a different path, but getting me to be able to do this job is still where we're going. There wasn't any alternative. There wasn't another option.
I think it was probably harder because I had done things external to the company, whether it was school and graduate school and teaching. I lived in a world where at least the perception was, if you were able to do something, that was on you and you got credit for it, or people respected it.
And then to suddenly be 36, in the context of a family business, where now everybody thinks you're not really qualified for what you're doing, you're just there because you're a family member, that was actually harder than I thought it would be emotionally. The sort of, "Oh, okay, good luck. You probably don't have it. I wonder how this is gonna go."
This is the problem with nepotism and family businesses. And so that was harder than I expected. I knew to expect that kind of feeling because I'd read about it, seen it in family businesses.
I think the good thing about being young is you can find a way to ignore those ... [laughter] I have one of my directors, probably six or seven years after my transition to CEO, in a meeting and I said, "Did you guys think about how stressful it was for me when you made me CEO the day after my predecessor died, you just put me in charge and said, ‘Good luck, said all those things. I had a new baby, I just moved and now I'm in this job, it was kind of a crazy situation." We were talking about well thought-out, well executed succession plans and how that wasn't a good succession plan to just throw somebody in that way.
I basically said, "It didn't have to work. It could have not worked." And they laughed and my lead director, I remember he said, “I guess we didn't realize how stressful that must have been for you.” And then he added, “We thought it was gonna work."
I think you can only take a day's worth of work on a day. It has to be one day at a time. Sometimes in those situations it’s ok to not reflect on the magnitude of it. I don't know if that's helpful.
It does resonate, I'd like to get a little deeper because this is why the conversation started in part because of the grief we share. I was really touched to hear your family story, particularly because of my father’s own tragic passing, and how they died in a plane crash, I’m wondering how your family has held that grief and how that shows up in the business — how within a family business, somebody has to die for someone to step into leadership. It is in many ways, very like the hero's journey.
The plane crash happened in 1960. So if somebody writes the epic story of the family and could get into all of it, a lot of that grief and processing and things that happened predates me by a full decade. So what I can sort of see is the shadows of it or what grew out of it. And for me, my aunt is the closest, although my predecessor, who I knew really well, was also the oldest son of two of the people killed in the plane crash.
What I feel is that over time, people have taken that grief and kind of put it into meaning of and commitment to the company going forward. I do wear this weight with respect to that - that being able to keep the company going forward, sticking to the beliefs and values of the people who created it, built it, and then died working in it.
It becomes a way that it's more important than just a business; it's honoring the work of the past and work of people who are gone.
So, at the company, there's a level of emotional value or depth to discussions about where we are trying to go and how we get through problems.
I think it adds into a layer. Not a business question: How do you keep this going? It's an existential question because we've lost people.
My predecessor had an experimental treatment for advanced cancer and that he stole back years. He got to live longer, he still died very young, but was so aware of it coming. When he knew his cancer was back, he was 59 or 60 and he decided he wanted to accelerate moving me into the CEO role because he just didn't feel good. He didn't want to spend all his time just working.
And I said to him, as I was trying to talk him out of it. I was 35 at the time, I'm sorry. I'm like, "Garry, come on, you always beat cancer. Let's just wait. You'll beat the disease again." And he looked at me, it was probably December or something like that, he said, "No. Cancer's not gonna get me. It's my heart. I don't have enough left in my heart."
And okay, he'd been through a lot of medical things, and I think he was more in touch with his condition than any of us, but he then had a situation where his board said, "You know, Garry, you have not kept the shareholders up to speed on this changing timeline for your transition. You really should let them know." And he said, "Okay, yeah, I'll do that." And he wrote an email that had a bunch of excerpts of emails he'd shared with the board about the transition and the timing, and he had sent on that one evening out to our whole family, and he died from a heart attack the next day.
As a scientist, I don't understand it, but here's someone who's so in touch, that maybe he knows what's going on at some level of his consciousness, and so it's weird And there's a lot of grief.
I think I've continued a dialogue with him for the next 15 years after he's been gone because there's sort of a bond as I then moved into his role and learned how it was even harder than what I thought it was just from watching him do it. I never asked “what would Garry do? It was interesting because I asked him when he was alive, "Well, how would I make some decisions in the future? What would you do if the following thing happened?" And he said, "Well, you should never think about what I would do."
"You could think about how I would think or what my values are, but you have to solve, don't lead thinking about what people would have done before you. Take our values, take our beliefs, take what you've learned, but don't be trapped."
He said, "You could think about how I would think about it or what my values are, but you have to solve it yourself. Don't lead thinking about what people would have done before you. Take our values, take our beliefs, take what you've learned, but don't be trapped."
And it's interesting, there’s a place I used to go when I would go running when I would stay at our homestead in Pennsylvania. You can run up the hill to the local community graveyard. There's the founders, there's my great uncle Jack, there's my predecessor Garry. When the company's in a tough spot, or if we have a big decision, metaphorically, I can go through the process of thinking about the past, but in reality, you can actually go there. [chuckle]
Wow, that's powerful!
And I would go, and the company has had some downs and some ups under my leadership, so you go there and you say, "Alright, I'm really kinda stuck here", and I feel their presence, just walking around the homestead, but it is the graveyard's just a couple of miles up the road. And for me, maybe that's connected, I don't think that's connected to grief necessarily.
To me that's connected with: What is the heritage? What's the belief system we're trying to run the company? What did we learn from the past from the decisions they made?
Because we are trying to figure out how to live and act in accordance to the values and sort of the universal things that underpin what went before but not be trapped. And that's tricky because when there are ghosts in your conversation, it's not exactly a two way conversation. [chuckle] And in every multigenerational family business there are always ghosts involved in the conversation. [chuckle]
That resonates. I've sort of had an obsession with the spirit world since my dad died. I'm curious about your own most recent grief and how you hold that while making your own path?
I lost my dad pretty young, he died of cancer before I even joined Highlights, and you know, at that point, so that's 2001. I still sort of think about how he would have loved all the stuff I'm doing, been interested in seeing it unfold. He had no idea I was gonna come work at Highlights.
I was much, much younger when he died, just 32, and I think less supported, less aware. It's just sort of like, okay, work through it. He didn't really want to address that he was dying in a way. We're going to do the best we can with the disease. Not denial, but a little more, let's do clinical trials and keep up the fight, let’s focus on the fight, not on the conclusion.
Whereas my mother, she was far more accepting, she was older by then, but knew for a long time that she had an autoimmune liver disease, that at some point her liver would give out. So we knew it was coming and we could talk to the doctor and understand the trajectory. The one thing that she could have done would have been to pursue a liver transplant, and she ruled that out early on and would not talk about it. She was like, "No, 70+ years old should take a liver, there's not enough livers available. We gotta give them to the young people who need them. And I'm not doing that surgery. I've had a great run, and if this is what's meant to be, this is what's meant to be." Very matter of fact about it. So she's a very different person. It was 18 years later, but I think I probably had more recognition of the importance to how do we do this right.
You can't avoid grief, you can't avoid sadness, you can’t avoid anger.
I had a board member who was helpful, he said, "The one thing you can control and try to avoid is try to avoid having regret in the future." So what did that mean? That meant, "Okay, I've gotta look at what are the things you might regret," like “How well did we do in helping her live the way she wanted to live in the time she had left?” So what does that look like? And what does she really want?
And in our modern world, a lot of that battle for us with my mom was like, the care people provide is so focused on safety and protection. She wanted to be able to do things, even if it put her at risk. She didn't want to use a walker or didn't want to stay home, and her attitude was, "What are they worried about, that I'm gonna die? I know I'm gonna die. Are they worried that I'm gonna fall? I've fallen before, I know what it feels like to fall." She said, "What I'm worried about is being bored to death and not seeing my community, I wanna get out there." And so a lot of what my brother and I did was to try to make sure that happens.
We're having breakfast once, she looks at me and says, "You know, I'm gonna die, right?"
I was like, "Yeah, that's why we're here having breakfast," and she looked at me and said, "I know, I just wanna make sure you know." And I don't quite know why she was saying that, then I just looked at her, I said, "You know, I'm gonna die someday, too," and she just laughed and said, "Well, that's not our problem for this breakfast," something like that.
"You know, I'm gonna die someday, too”
She was pretty special. I looked at a lot of what she was doing as living her life even as she was dying as an example. I mean it was an example. I don't think she meant it to be an example, but I think the interesting thing that's different about my situation is we had a lot of that grief while she was there, right? It's anticipatory grief. It's the "It's coming and we don't know when," which is very different than when something happens, and then you have to process it. And you don't get any choice, you go through whatever you have to, whatever happened. And I was lucky that I was able to take time off when I needed to and be there and participate, but she'd also throw me out and say, "Okay, you've been here for three days. You need to go to your job, you need to go to your family, you can't sit here, you have two kids, go home now," And so figuring the ways of what's the balance that makes sense.
How have you held your grief as a CEO?
My board was saying to me, "Your mom's gonna go through this, you need to take some time now and go. You have to get things in order with her and whatever time you need, you need to do that." So I was pretty open in sharing that in the company. I'm not an overly emotional person in communicating with the whole company, but what I found is my personality would be to keep so many things private, and so what I did is say to myself, "Okay, I gotta force myself out of my comfort zone.”
I would never want to tell people I'm going to have to take the next two weeks off to set my mom up with nursing care, but as a CEO, if I say that, that's then validating that it’s important enough to me and the company, especially to other people going through grief. So, I try to just put it out there, then live it and actually follow through.
I also talk about how I feel in terms of the pandemic, if you act like everything's fine, then anybody in the company who says, "Well, I don't feel fine, I feel stressed, I feel anxious, I'm worried about going to the grocery store” might feel more stressed and anxious.
That’s inspiring. That's why I'm doing this work, interviewing people because your vulnerability begetted even more of my own vulnerability.
When I was 36, I didn't realize how so many people have been through so much that you hear because you never get past that surface level. I do think it's important for leaders and the people you work with to get past the surface. I think we can learn a lot, and I think it will mean a lot. It'll have a lot of rolling impact on other people. You may not be able to see it all, but it will.
“Your vulnerability will have a lot of rolling impact on other people. You may not be able to see it all, but it will.”
It's inspiring to hear your way of being in the world. I think most of us have this image of the CEO as a strong and stoic type A personality with no feelings.
I think there's a lot of pressure. I think the typical old white man CEO doesn't get the same training that the CEOs of the future need in terms of authenticity, vulnerability, like living life with real people. You can see some of them are struggling with it, and I think one should always be struggling with it.
Life is hard, being a person is hard, but I think for the CEOs of the future, people are just going to demand more authenticity, they won't follow inauthentic leaders. [chuckle]. It’s just not happening. Whatever age, I just think things are shifting and I hope I'm good enough to keep going, but things are changing.
The number one thing I've had to learn is to share more that you're not comfortable with.
What I find is if you can get the mix right or the amount, then people who aren't interested in having that conversation with me at least know that those things are there. And then somebody else might say in the hall, "Jeez, I lost my mom. Let me tell you my story” If you show that you're open to the ideas and the conversations, then if you have relationships with people, those connections can get deeper.
I don't feel any need to exude confidence, I feel like I can say things, I don't have to prove that I'm in the job anymore, so if I say something that may expose weakness, say about like how I can't sleep because I'm worried about the pandemic, it’s okay.
Wow, that's beautiful. So we are out of time, but I just wanna leave you with another question. What would you like people to say about you during your eulogy?
Something that somebody said to me that really made me feel positive at work, a characteristic that was true of my mother,
“When they were talking to me, I acted as if they were the most important person to talk to."
I would love for people to say that I took the time and listened. It's hard as a CEO, it's hard in our modern world, it's hard with texting, with constant time pressures. There's so much surface communication.
I was so shy as a kid and my mother, a community activist, politician, and public servant, would talk to anyone who talked to her, like homeless people on the streets. She would stop and talk to whoever and as a shy kid, I was like, "Can we just get home or get back to the car?" [laughter] Like it drove me crazy, I think it was some of her magic in terms of she really cared what people had to say.
I also hope they'd say I was a good person and a good dad, I hope they have a good party.
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It took months to finish editing this interview as witnessing a piece so personal is a form of grieving that requires deep emotional care. Months later, I am still so moved, so touched by Kent’s story and the love he holds for his family -- especially his late mother, Karen Johnson.
And the reminder,
“Your vulnerability will have a rolling impact on other people. You may not be able to see it all, but it will.”
Vulnerability is such an important part of nourishing a culture of emotional wholeness and true belonging. You may not realize how showing up as who you are may make someone you work with feel safe to do the same.
Kent, thank you for having the courage to let us see and hold your grief. It inspires me to be more vulnerable.