Terri McEnaney
Since the pandemic began and the country shut down in March 2020, companies have had to change how they go about their business, from social distancing to working remotely to online meetings to a host of other pivots. Terri McEnaney has been leading such change at Bailey Nurseries, where she is CEO, to keep the company and its employees healthy and happy.
McEnaney detailed her actions during her presentation “Embrace Your Leadership Role as Chief Change Agent.”
“We, as leaders of our organizations, have been asked to push for change and bring everybody with us,” McEnaney said. “That can be quite challenging, but also very rewarding.”
McEnaney is careful in her approach to change, whether it is brought on by a pandemic or some other factor. Not enough change, and a company can fall behind, she said. Too much change can cause distress and chaos, so finding that balance is important.
During times of change, it is important to have a foundation to fall back on, McEnaney said. Bailey Nurseries began in 1905 and is a fifth-generation, family-owned company that has seen decades of transformations. In times of change, McEnaney said she relies on the company’s core values to direct her, whether change is impacting employees or customers. Two components of those core values include trust and transparency. Communicating a positive attitude of hope during difficult times is also important as leaders embrace their role as change agents, McEnaney noted.
After the pandemic took hold, McEnaney said she had to implement different avenues to communicate with the company’s roughly 1,000 employees, who are located at Bailey’s headquarters in St. Paul, MN, as well as Oregon, Illinois, and Georgia. The company relied heavily on Teams, a Microsoft communication platform. The company also introduced online lunch-and-learn sessions.
A leader also must be flexible during times of change, especially when something occurs like the pandemic.
“There were many times [in the past two years] when we were short staffed, and that meant making trade-offs, shifts in timing, and being flexible,” McEnaney said.
It is important for leaders to embrace change, especially when “that magnifying glass is put on us as during a time of uneasiness,” McEnaney added. And when employees are enduring change, it is important for leaders to exude a “calm and collected consistency” with them, so they don’t panic about the future, she stressed.
“Change is also about perspective,” McEnaney said after sharing these words from a Wayne Dyer song — “change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.”
Leaders often get excited about change and see it as a positive thing. They use a lot of positive words like growth, transformation, evolution, development that fit their company’s mission statements and strategic plans. However, some people find change very stressful, McEnaney said, and they feel intimidated and fearful of what some of those changes are.
“We have to recognize as leaders that people will take something you say about change that you are all fired up about and say, ‘What does that mean for me?’”, McEnaney said. “Listening, talking through things, and trying to look at things from the other person’s perspective is going to be really important as you go through change. We need to be aware that not everyone is going down the same path we think they are going when it comes to change.”
McEnaney shared some of the things Bailey has done to help its team adjust to change:
Bailey recently put a taskforce together to look at training and development and what they can do to get people engaged. The taskforce selected a platform that they will use for training and development in the next coming years. McEnaney also pulled together 25 of her key employees for a reimagining session where they reviewed events that occurred during the pandemic, what changes they thought would stick around, and what changes they need to adapt to.
“Change makes us face roadblocks head on and deal with them in the moment,” McEnaney said. “It’s important for us to look at where we are today, but also be thinking ahead about the future.”
McEnaney also spoke of personal change and the importance of self-reflection in it.
“We often think that navigating through change in our businesses is the most important thing,” she said. “But it’s important that we look at what we do personally. You're never too young to start planning for your future.”
