HR Works Podcast: Scaling Empathy—A People Leader's Approach (Part 1)

Hello everyone. Welcome to the HR Works Podcast brought to you by HR Daily Advisor. I'm your host Bianca Heron, content manager here at HRDA. The HR Works Podcast provides clear, relevant, and actionable information on topics that matter to you, the HR professional. When you're on with the best practices and strategies to attract, retain, and engage top talent, and delivering exceptional service to your organization, HR just works. Welcome to HR Works everyone. Today we're joined by an incredible leader who's redefining what it means to run a successful, rapidly growing business with a truly human touch. Joining us is Kyla Hennway Kwellen, Chief Operating Officer and Head of People at Feast in Fetal, one of the country's fastest growing food brands. With years of experience witnessing both the magic and the tough realities of the food and hospitality world, Kyla brings a unique perspective. As a single mother of two and a senior executive, she's passionately committed to leading with empathy and building environments where everyone feels seen, heard, and valued. Since joining Feast in Fetal in 2021, Kyla has been pivotal in scaling the team from 30 to 300 employees. Today she's here to share her insights on how she embeds empathy and emotional intelligence into every single aspect of operations, from how they hire, to how they serve their customers, and even how they navigate tough times. It's about making sure these aren't just values, but operational mandates that drive real success. All right everybody let's get into it. Kyla, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm good. Thank you so much for having me here Bianca. Really really happy to be here. Absolutely. Your background and food and hospitality has clearly shaped your perspective. What were some of those inspiring qualities and challenges you witnessed that truly emphasized the need for empathy and operations, especially impacting women? My early career, I kind of came up in the hospitality world and worked in restaurants and always loved the experience of delivering an experience really for guests that were sitting down to celebrate something and to be joyful around food. And so that always felt so intuitive for me and there's so much warmth in those experiences and delivering food as nourishment for people to connect over. And so I think when I think about how that shaped my lens, one of the areas of dissonance working in hospitality was always that the experience that the hospitality worker was expected to deliver to the guest was not the experience that they're generally receiving. And so as an employee and so I got a lot about how that should work or how that should feel when you're expected to deliver warmth and kindness and generosity at a table. And you know, shouldn't you be treated with that same warmth kindness and generality as an employee. And so I think a lot of my lens is is actually fairly intuitive around this, which is that we need to nourish our teams if we expect them to nourish our members or our customers. You know, I think generally in the food service arena or hospitality business, it's kind of maybe some pre-existing societal dynamics around race, class and gender just kind of amplified, I think. And so really thinking about my experiences navigating those spaces and observing how I was treated or people around me were treated or how the structures that were existing kind of in broader society were being perpetuated at a more amplified way inside of the workplace. And I found it to be really discouraging. And so when I've thought about what I, you know, what brought me really to piece and that all was this desire to create an environment in hospitality and food service where that was not the case. And that's a lot of what motivates me. And so whether that's related to gender or race or you know socioeconomic status or gender identity, like there's all of these, you know, different elements that we're hoping to to at least not perpetuate what's happening more broadly in society. Wow, that is amazing. If I had problems, I'd be waving them right now. That is amazing. Thank you for that. So eloquent and such a meany thing. I'm going to ring myself in because I can go in some way and do directions from there. What I will ask you. This passion for empathy and emotional intelligence and building these environments where everyone feels seen heard and valued valued. Excuse me. What did that come from? Is that from your upbringing or just a passion? So, you know, I think it's actually it's very selfish and somewhat simple, which is that I wanted to create a space I could belong in hospitality and having not, you know, I left that world for about a decade because I couldn't find environments that felt like I could grow or evolve or belong as just a human. And so when I think about why create that space at Viesenfetal, a lot of it is motivated by my own kind of like desire to belong in a space and then thinking about really in true empathy, right, is thinking about what creates that space for somebody else too. And how do we make that space of belonging as expansive and welcoming as possible. Wow. That is amazing. Whoa. That is amazing. I love that. You wanted to feel like you belong and now you literally do that for everyone else in this space as well. That's beautiful. And with that in mind, as I mentioned previously, of course, Viesenfetal has grown rapidly under your leadership from 30 to 300 employees. Can you talk a little bit more in depth about how you ensure that every individual is seen heard and valued and how it isn't just a mission statement, excuse me, but a tangible reality for each and all higher. Yeah. Yeah. So I think one of the areas that I've really excelled in in my career is thinking about how you operationalize culture. So I think, you know, my role is fairly unique in that I work at the intersection of people and operations. And it's really very intentional that it's set up this way because we're people have the operation. And so when I think about what it means to operationalize culture, it means to think about how somebody does their work at the starting point. So I come from a fundamental belief that people want to do a good job that they operate with good intentions and that it's our job as leaders to create these structures and environments that they can do their best work in that they can maximize the value that they create for the business, right. And so we're thinking about maximizing the value that we create that an individual can create for the business and for our members and and then really thinking about leadership and our people team, their role being finding that, making it bigger, right, making the good bigger than that. And so when I think about some of the barriers that are somewhat frequent and in our employee base, it can be things like, you know, there's a rampant substance use and abuse issues in hospitality generally. So we, you know, we see a lot of employees who present with those issues and we look for ways to, you know, when they're ready to get sober, we look for ways to enhance their sense of community or belong in a space because we know that somebody's probability of maintaining sobriety increases. If they are surrounded by a community that's healthy and supportive, right, or when we look at LGBTQ, you know, employees, we think about it's almost like how do you neutralize the playing field more so than like make accommodations. I think when I think about a lot of the blowback with the AI stuff, it really, it frustrates me because it's illogical and it's illogical because the job is not to create a special set of circumstances for a certain group of people. It's actually to look at everybody as providing equal value and finding ways to ensure that each person has an opportunity to produce that value, right. And I think when we think about how that works at Fieson Pettel, it's making sure that the, you know, biases structures barriers to any group of, you know, any marginalized group coming into the organization that we're not perpetuating that within our structures that we're not perpetuating. So racial bias within our structures when we're looking at, you know, promoting people or moving them into different roles that we're not looking at. And we're not looking at these gender identity or sexual orientation as a factor for, we're not a value. through that lens and being really thoughtful that everybody has a lot of value to add to the organization and really just looking at people as individual humans versus a set of parameters that they meet or don't meet. You're amazing. I'm over a little more now. I hear intentionality, there's strategy there. And I hear curiosity, that's what I'm picking up on. Does that play a role in how you lead that and operational excellence as well? How do these traits complement your commitment to empathy when you're building these inclusive, high performing teams? Because you just gave all the examples. Yeah, yeah, so I mean, I guess I think about curiosity and probably one of the most important attributes of a leader. So if my job is to deliver meals successfully to our 12,000 members, I should be really curious about how we do that. And there's with any given problem or with any given challenge, there's probably 15 to 20 different good solutions that are at our fingertips. And those good solutions are most likely to be generated by the people that are doing the work. So when we think about the types of challenges that come up in our organization and the types of barriers to success, we really think about empowering our team members who are doing the work to provide solutions to those problems. And to me, again, it kind of starts with this foundation of, I believe that people want to do a good job. I believe that it's our job to create those structures for them to be able to create value in. And it takes some curiosity to figure out what somebody's perspective, lens, or ability to create value is. One of the other things that I say a lot, probably too much, but it's this idea of matching somebody's investment. So there are always going to be some folks that they want to come in. They want to do a good job, but they're not looking to break the mold. They just, they work because this is a part of their life. And they want to be able to support their families. And there are plenty of roles for people that want to come in, do a good job, and go home and enjoy the world outside of work. There are also a number of other employees who are excited about the growth of the company that are curious themselves that really want to be intellectually challenged that want to grow. And so when we see those individuals, it's our job to be curious at them to figure out what that looks like, and then to find paths where they can again maximize the value that they can add. So we have people that move across departments, or it's not a linear path. It's not you start here, and then you go this path. We're quite dynamic and agile, and how we look at an individual in order to match their investment and to make sure that they can continue to generate value for the people around them and generate value for our customers. Amazing. It correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd imagine that your curiosity, when your employee sees you leading in that manner, and you know, that's how you're moving, it gives them the same leeway to be curious as well and think outside the box. Is that true or not? Would you say that? I mean, I hope so, right? But I also, one of my favorite things is when I see somebody come in and we hire a lot out of the hospitality world. And in my experiences again, and I'll ground myself in that, which is that I worked in a lot of independently-owned restaurants that had a shop owner or kind of a single owner. And there wasn't a lot of room for contribution outside of a very narrow lane. So you come in, you do your job, and then you leave, and you're not asked to provide value beyond that. And so when I see somebody come in and they are watching people around them get promoted or have their ideas highlighted or spotlighted at one of our team meetings. When I see what it does for somebody, and this kind of goes back to the point of operationalizing culture, we have a weekly team meeting. And each week we have this really corny wrestling, W.T.E. style bell. But somebody wins the bell every week, and they win the bell for living our values. And so when you have somebody new come into the organization, and they're observing one of their co-workers, get highlighted for living our values for going above and beyond, or being curious for suggesting a solution to a problem. I would hope that that inspires them, and it just signifies to them that, like, cool, any but, good ideas come from anywhere. It's all of our jobs to create this company, and we can have some ownership and some stakes in how our day looks if we're thinking of better ways to do things.