How to Build a Culture Where It's Safe to Not Be Okay: Jed Foundation CEO John MacPhee

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (0:00)
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I'm Morra Aarons-Mele and this is The Anxious Achiever.
What does it mean to lead with kindness? Not as a value statement on the wall, but to actually do it and create a kind culture? Well, it's about how you give feedback. It's about how you lead meetings. It's about how you make hard calls and show up when things go wrong. My guest today is John McPhee, who's CEO of The Jed Foundation, which is the country's leading nonprofit working to protect the mental health of teens and young adults and to prevent suicide, which is really its DNA. And under John's leadership and that of his awesome team, the organization has grown tremendously to be a $30 million not-for-profit organization partnering with hundreds of colleges and schools and youth-serving organizations and with really incredible results, which John will tell us about. But John as a leader is really interesting and his path like most of us wasn't linear. He came from industry into the non-profit world and as a young person, he failed out of Columbia University. He struggled with anxiety and a years-long feeling that he didn't belong. And he had this moment where as a successful, big deal executive at a pharmaceutical company, his dying mother told him he had been kidnapped by his own prestige. That conversation changed his life. Today, we talk about kind leadership and practice, what workplaces get wrong about mental health. I think Jed has a model. I wish every workplace would adopt. It's so comprehensive. Why belonging is way more than an HR initiative and what it actually takes to build a kind and psychologically safe culture. My conversation with Jed's John McPhee.
John, welcome.

**John MacPhee** (3:19)
Thank you. Glad to be here.

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (3:23)
I'm really glad to have you. I've been such an admirer of your work and your leadership at the Jed Foundation. And today, I want to talk about leadership. I want to talk about young people and the future.
I want to talk about trends that you're seeing in mental health at scale and whatever else you want to talk about.

**John MacPhee** (3:46)
Okay. Let's do it.

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (3:48)
So, yeah. Okay. Well, I'm going to start with a question that I like to ask people, which is, what does leadership mean to you?

**John MacPhee** (3:56)
Yeah. Okay. So, I guess a simple but not so simple question. To me, you know, leadership is about how you show up in a way that with a group of people that helps that group of people, you know, identify their objectives and sort of move towards the objective. So, I view it very much as a service role and a member of the team. I'm not even sure that I really like the word leader, you know.
So, the way that I view my role when I'm in a leadership position like I am with Jed, is I focus on trying to make sure that everybody understands our goals and that everybody feels like they've had some level of authorship in those goals. And if their contributions were not fully listened to, that at least they felt heard and like they contributed. And then it's about communication, communication, communication, and transparency, trying to make sure that everybody has the same information and is aligned so that that team can work together in a very sort of high functioning way. And hierarchies there and leadership is there when decisions have to be made or when there's earnest disagreement, but it's really about sort of being shoulder to shoulder and working together. And I believe very, very much in this idea that leadership should be very kind.
And I think that, I worry that a lot of the messages and the stories that are told in media are suggesting that the bully advances or that the Machiavellian one advances. And I don't believe that at all. You know, I believe that good people do finish first and can finish first. And so, you know, leading with sort of kindness and care, and you have to earn it. You have to earn that trust. And it takes time. But if you can get there as a leader, then I think you're, you know, the whole enterprise is just going to benefit tremendously from that. I feel like I was all over the place in responding to you. Hopefully, it makes sense.