Hello, everyone. Welcome to Real Talk with Tia and Jill and our very, very special guest, Regan. Welcome. Hi, thank you for having me. Thank you for being here with us. Yes. You know, I think I often make a comment like this is one of the best ways of kicking off our week. Yes. So if you're listening to this live, it's Monday. But otherwise, if you're joining us like by podcast or just rewatching on YouTube, this is how we start our week. I'm so lucky we get to like have these rich, deep conversations with people to start our week off. Yes, yes. It's like these are all the things we've been thinking and it's let's bring other people into the conversations and get other perspectives, which I'm super excited about with you, Reagan, because of your background because of where you're working today and just, you know, really just our topic around food safety leadership and how you've kind of moved in your career. I'm excited to hear about your experience. And we were talking about right before we jumped on, like sometimes we take like little notes along the way because like the gems that come from these conversations really have you thinking all week about how do I incorporate or integrate Listen to the work that I'm doing. How do I have different type of conversations? So I'll kick it off Monday, too, with real talk. Yeah, I think it's a great way to start the conversation and really get a good week going with great insight and creativity. I'm excited. Yes. Yes. Yes. I know we have a lot. We have a lot that we're actually going to cover today. And there may be people joining us who have not been here before. So if that's you, welcome to Real Talk. And this is Guilt Catalyst Food Leaders. This is where we get to have honest conversations to lead people forward in food. So I'm Jill. This is Tia. And we have Reagan Brashears with us. Reagan, let's see, you're, let's see, a food safety microbiologist. You have a PhD in animal science from Texas Tech. And you work at Beacon Point Labs in kind of the business development area. But really, that just means you help people. Yeah. Well, and I think it's really powerful to think that for people to know too that you are a fourth generation agricultural agriculturalist it's a mouthful for me on monday i need a little more caffeine i guess from west texas and that you've been a teacher and a mentor and you've worked with students from middle schools through like international grad researchers and it's so exciting to have you on because this is kind of a peek into or helping people get ready to think about not just where they are today, but even the celebration of World Food Safety Day that's coming up on June seven. Yes. Yes. Yes. Because our theme this year is from burning to solutions. And as you think, you know, the conversation we're going to have today, like, first of all, you're full of solutions. We know our friends and labs full of solutions, but also how you have sort of incorporated your learnings, you know, being a fourth generation agriculturalist, like that's sort of wild to think about. But you've been on your own journey as as well. Definitely. Well, Let's kick off because this episode is a great one for food safety professionals who are leading, either leading themselves, leading teams, leading others. And so this is a great conversation. But to set the stage, Reagan, can you give just a little background about yourself and how you kind of come to be where you are? absolutely yeah so as you're saying um i am a fourth gen agriculturalist so what that means is you know my grandparents and my great-grandparents were cattle and cotton farmers in west texas and really did all of the farm management animal management and really the stewardship of agriculture in west texas and then my parents are both professors at texas tech in agriculture as well so My mom's more in the microbiology side and my dad's more in leadership and communication. So still very deeply rooted in agriculture. And so growing up, I was always involved in FFA. I did agriscience projects, did some mentorship there as well. And when it was time for me to go to college, decided that I was done and didn't want to do agriculture anymore and really thought I was going to switch it up. and went on track to go to medical school. And about halfway through my undergrad education, really was longing for the community of people who work in ag. So I missed the passion of people in food safety. I missed the family-like feel of everyone that I had grown up around because I was so used to grad students and academics always being, you know, in my family home and in and around my parents and knowing them deeply. And I missed that so much. So kind of reoriented and set my sights back on food safety research. did an undergrad degree in nutritional sciences and then a master's in food safety and a PhD in animal sciences from Texas Tech. And my advisors there were always so encouraging about developing your passion. And I love that I get to work in an industry where everyone has the same goals. You know, everybody wants safe food. Everyone wants to make the food supply safer, more accessible, more affordable. however means necessary. And I really enjoy working with like-minded individuals. So I graduated from Texas Tech and then started looking for a job. Was so blessed to find Beacon Point Labs. So I'm here in the business development division. So moved out of West Texas, traded all of the dust and the tumbleweeds and the cacti. I'm out in Charlotte, North Carolina now. So lots of beautiful greenery. I'm still getting to pursue my passion and make food safer every day. I love that. I love that. And I see Sharon is here with us. Hello, Sharon. Good morning, as well as Elizabeth, Beth. Thank you for being here with us. Regan, what a journey it was for you as you thought about, I'm going to do something completely different than the rest of my family, to, oh, I think I have discovered my passion and where I want to be. And this is a little different question, maybe outside of what we kind of talked about, but I've just recently been having quite a bit of conversations with people who are trying to find their passion. Is food safety my passion or do I need to step outside of it? is food in general where I should stay and where I should not stay. So I'm kind of curious for people who I know watch our show and is sort of thinking about that. How does you kind of hone in and really say, no, I really want to be in this space over here because this is where I feel happiest maybe or more fulfilled. What are some things that kind of popped up for you? Sure. I think that as I was, so I went to Baylor for my undergrad, so I did leave home. and got introduced to many different people with a different worldview, specifically people who didn't come from an agriculture background. And I remember having so many conversations during that time In defense of agriculture because people had a different perspective than I did, and people who didn't have the understandings or the foundational knowledge about where our food came from about food safety about. You know things like GMOs and pesticides that are really common conversation topics, especially now. People want to know more and more about the products that they're buying and consuming on a daily basis. And I remember thinking that if I feel so strongly to advocate for these things on a daily basis in these conversations with my friends, with my professors, with my peers, then maybe that's really where I'm going to thrive the most. Maybe this is what my career should be if I think about it and do it on a daily basis anyway. I feel like there may have been some like dinner conversation that just totally prepped you and like helped you have that foundation as well. Am I reading into that too much? Definitely not. I think the worldview that my parents gave me growing up was just so unique and I have just been given such an opportunity not only to learn and to value education in the way that I do, but to understand why we do these things and to see the value in the people that we advocate for. Because agriculture is not just the big scientists in labs, it's the farmers, you know, tilling land, again, being stewards. And we have a responsibility to take care of them and to make sure that all of agriculture is taken care of. And I think that passion for people really came from my parents. But I also love this part of the communication, which is really how do we tell the story and what is that narrative? And when people aren't sure what the story is, as you talked about, there's people who, and we all know, they don't know where food comes from, but they'll fill in those blanks on their own. And so that gift of being able to help share that narrative and an accurate narrative is is something that's really important to us, not just in food, but in agriculture in general. Go ahead, Tia. Well, I was going to say that I feel like sometimes, at least from my perspective, and Reagan, I'm kind of curious if you felt this way when you were in school, that it's almost surprising that people don't know where their food comes from or information. But before I came into food, I didn't think that I was going to go into food. I didn't even know it was... I never thought about working for a food organization or producing food. And just to think back of like, yeah, we really don't know. The general public really don't know a lot about where their food comes from. And like Jill says, like we fill in the gap just as human beings. We fill in the gaps. And so you found yourself having these conversations and you're like, huh, maybe I should maybe I should be in that field over there. Yes. I'm curious. Was there anything like, has there been a story that maybe somebody shared about what, where they thought food came from or something about agriculture that really has stuck with you where you're like, gosh, that was something like, I'm so glad I got to hear that. So I could help fill in that narrative for them. You know, I, I think growing up, we raised livestock animals. So every year we would go to the Houston rodeo, which is, absolutely massive if you haven't been. So we would be there with our sheep, with our pigs. My sister had heifers sometimes. So we'd have all of these animals and they'd be bringing in school tours of elementary students who had no idea about where their food came from. And I remember watching, and this was very early on, watching they would do a milking demonstration. One of the local dairies would bring out a dairy cow and They'd milk the cow and talk about where milk comes from. And almost every time without fail, they'd ask these kids, where does milk come from? And they'd be like, the store. And I'd be in the background like, no, the cows. So I think early on, I realized that there was that gap. And then when I got to college, I would be having conversations about you know, the term like factory farming and where meat came from and was really surrounded by people who were, I think, scared of things that they had seen in the media as far as, you know, fear mongering of why should we not be eating certain products or why we should eat, you know, others. And having those conversations, especially around things like organic produce or conventionally raised meats. I think everyone grows up and learns their own set of information that's not always cross-referenced with literature or scientific fact. Being able to fill in those gaps in conversations of being like, well, let's actually talk about it without having to you know, make anyone feel a certain type of way. I don't think that there's anything wrong with people not knowing background information. I can recognize that not everyone grew up with the background that I did and knowing so much about agriculture. And I think being able to bring that understanding to the table is super important. You know, throughout my entire career, I've been able to speak in front of this vast range of audiences. So that's gone from kindergarten students at the San Antonio Livestock Show to, you know, adults in the industry, all with this intention of communicating scientific information effectively, whether that's about, you know, hand washing and how to prevent cross-contamination or, you know, my dissertation research and, you know, the depths of academic research in the meat industry. But I think that really the ability to adaptively communicate to your target audience really teaches you that clarity is not the oversimplification of information, but it's respect to those that you're communicating with. So for example, if you're explaining listeria biomapping to a CFO or a line supervisor or a regulator, you're not dumbing anything down. So the goal is never to dumb down the science, but the goal is to make it accessible. So you're identifying what actually matters to each person, given their role, their risk, their age as well. And I think that the discipline of finding the essential thing that matters to the audience or the individual and leading with that is what's required. So I think that being in leadership, you have to learn how to translate and adapt that information because the influence really over your audience or over an individual is really going to come from being understood and not just knowing the most. yeah i love the way that you said that around like not dubbing down information but making it accessible and i feel like in leading and leading with that depending on who you're who you're talking to i feel like one of the one of the missteps technical leaders make is that they think oh i need to dumb it down or i need to um kind of leave out some of the science so that you you know we'll feel like people can understand it better um but i like the word that you use around making it accessible you know depending on where people are and just you know your background like you have an experience doing that sort of like practicing that muscle we talked about that in our leadership um courses where you need to practice practice practice you've been practicing this muscle of influence around how do i make this information accessible to someone who probably have never seen a cow being milked or have never been on a farm or have never even heard about listeria or hear about listeria because I work at a food organization, but really I'm about the numbers and about how to make sense of what we're buying and how we're selling. Maybe that's where my mind is. So how do I make that accessible for that person? And I feel like that's one of the largest missteps we make when we think about leadership, because we're either trying to speak in a way that only a few of us understand, or we're trying to dumb it down, to use the phrase, dumb it down where we're really not giving the right information or giving enough information or people feel that, right? They feel like you're trying to talk to me like a school child. And now the whole piece of they like you, they know you, right? They want to work with you. Part of influence is gone because every time they talk to Tia, they feel like I'm trying to dumb it down or I'm trying to talk down to them versus actually making what we do accessible. Right, and that's one of the main issues too is, I personally don't feel like anyone is ever going to be the smartest in the room because I think everyone has different background information that they bring to the table. And maybe I know the most about salmonella bio mapping, but maybe the person on the other end of the table knows most about regulatory function. And maybe the person across from me knows the most about something else. So I think coming in with the understanding that we're all on a team and working together for the same goals is really important. and being able to have those conversations again not talking down to anybody but helping you know to communicate correctly yes so breaking it makes me wonder like what has this like this what we're talking about is like making it accessible or translating so that people we're kind of meeting you know that whole meeting people where they're at but when you think about this translating, what has this work taught you about leadership that science itself never could? Yeah, I think that's a great question. You know, there's a big difference in being book smart and being street smart. And I think one thing that's really important that kind of relates back to what I said earlier about communication is that when you're working with people in different groups and different teams, people need different things at different stages and they need things differently than what maybe I needed at that stage. So putting even myself in their shoes and thinking, okay, well, I would need this. That's not always the most helpful or you know, according to this list of rules and, you know, regulations, this should be the next logical step. And that's not always what somebody needs. So I think that maybe a very highly technical early career person needs more so, you know, just for example, like permission to be uncertain more than they need more technical advice or information put upon them. There needs to be freedom in learning as well. But a mid-career person who's maybe at a ceiling needs someone to tell them the truth about what's holding them back, and that's never going to be a knowledge deficit. So I think the understanding that Maybe more information is not always the best answer, which sounds like so against all of my scientific knowledge and upbringing, because usually the answer is, you know, well, what does the research say? And we have to go back to that. But when you're working with people, you know, people don't. behave the same way that bacteria in the lab do. And we can't predict it. And we have to understand individuals' needs. And I think if you don't have that report and that personability with people, then you're not going to be able to understand how to help them and how to lead them. And that's absolutely something that the books are not going to teach. It's something that you have to develop and work through. And that can be really hard, especially in mentorship positions. I think that When it gets tense in mentorship positions is maybe for me personally, when I see like, oh my gosh, they're going to make a mistake that, you know, it's coming and I can see it coming and I've told them not to do that, but we're going to have to ride it out together. Or if constructive criticism is taken personally or You know, if someone is resisting feedback in those moments that feel really uncomfortable, that's typically where mentorship relationships are either going to fall apart due to miscommunication or they're going to grow and thrive and you're going to be better together in the end of it. But being able to really ride out those relationships despite the friction is going to help you grow as a leader more than it is going to, you know, make you uncomfortable in the short term. Yeah. yeah i feel like that there are so many nuggets in what you just said around i mean just even taking the first point around like sometimes more information is not the answer sometimes you need to let people learn right learn to fail learn from their failures um we were just talking to a client recently where um You know, they were trying to hop over other people making decisions because they felt like that person was a bottleneck. And it's like, no, you have to follow the process. Talk with that person. They might not get it right the first time or the second time, but they are learning. You have to give them that opportunity to learn. Otherwise, they they never will. Right. They'll just lean on other people to tell them when we know. Right. At some point, people will hit that cat. And then you have to be right. You have to be a little bit more transparent around what is preventing you from moving to the to the next level. And we know just as human beings, sometimes we get stuck there. Right. And we and we stop because we are not ready to hear the information or we're not ready to take the steps. And you're right, that is not taught in our technical books. Sorry, our books really tell us, like, share more information, keep sharing information. But sometimes that is not the answer. Absolutely. So Reagan, I'm thinking about, like, as we think about communication and even relating back to, you know, World Food Safety Day and how do we move from burden to solution. We have our audience often has, well, many people from the food industry and usually a large portion from in food safety. But when we're out working in the world, sometimes we're not deep in the research. And I'm curious, as we think about like this upcoming food safety day, what do you see as one of the most important things happening in food safety right now that food safety professionals should should be understanding and even communicating inside their organizations? Yeah, absolutely. So I think that probably the most important thing in food safety right now is that all branches of the industry, so government, academic industry as well, want to understand more about their food safety plan and processing environment than ever before. And the intention of that really is to understand more preventive action than corrective response. So that comes kind of from the convergence of whole genome sequencing becoming routine and also this rapid rise of environmental persistent mapping through bio mapping. And leaders need to understand that we can now trace um, outbreaks faster than ever before in the past ten years, even the past five years. And that means that we can attribute and recall faster and more accurate than we have before. But one kind of drawback about that is that the science has outpaced most of most organizations crisis communication and their corrective action frameworks. So if organizations haven't updated this, if they're not prepared, And to operate for more of a preventative lens and a corrective lens, that gap is going to grow and it's going to become visible internally and also visible to consumers long term. So, again, I think the shift of focus to prevention rather than reactivity is going to be huge in the food safety scene. in the next few years and it's going to cause an effort and a shift from almost everybody in the industry. What do you think is preventing particularly industry from moving forward on or updating, right? Like the shift from reactive to prevention, which obviously we see it a lot too. But I'm curious from your perspective, what do you see as kind of holding industry back from really diving into being preventative? Sure. So I think that there's, couple reasons first we've we have built a system that is almost entirely um built to respond to crisis rather than prevent it and that's okay and we're okay with that it works because what we see um in the industry is you know those are the tangible numbers that's tangible data we we see recall we see it on a spreadsheet of this many pounds of product, this much money, this much time, this many people sick. Preventative action is quieter than that. You know, there's not that many tangible numbers behind it, but the goal is that we don't have a recall, that we don't have an outbreak. So I think it's almost you know, a hard sell for certain stakeholders because there's not concrete numbers behind it saying, here's what happened and this is what we need to do to fix it. It's this is what we're doing to prevent the numbers from showing up. And I think in certain cases that can look like a big spend without fixing a problem. I think that we are very tailored to crisis response. which has been very effective and there's nothing wrong with that. But I do think that moving towards prevention is going to be really important, especially moving forward in the future. So, Reg, I'm going to play a little bit of devil's advocate. because when I think about the core foundation of HACCP, it's always been around prevention. And I see we've got Sharon on with us today, and I know Sharon and Kim Rice are sitting down with Cara Mickelson and kind of reflecting back to the era of mega regs when those came into play, which of course wasn't the first time HACCP was introduced to the food industry. So there's always, there's been this underlying expectation of prevention, even if we kind of moved it into more reaction and control. But it makes me think about like where, like if it's always been this philosophy that we should be preventing and we haven't, where does the industry need some honesty right now about where they've been and what's needed to go forward? Sure. So a lot of these systems, like you said, HACCP, they're absolutely meant to be preventative, but also they're not fully comprehensive. So most food safety systems are calibrated on what happened last. So that could be the last outbreak, the last regulatory action, the last recall that made headlines. It's still reactive to something that happened. And that's not a criticism at all, but reactive spend is way easier to justify. because again, the threat is so concrete and so recent that organizations are typically willing to put in the money in order to prevent that from happening again. And then proactive monitoring asks leadership to prevent something that hasn't happened. And that's not necessarily something that we're trained to value on the business side of things. So environmental monitoring programs, are built to satisfy auditors, but don't necessarily surface early signals of something that could be going wrong. The data exists, but it may be buried in spreadsheets that no one really has time to be reviewing because these processing plants are busy. Everybody is busy. There's not time to sit down and review data like there is in grad school. And I think that how we've been building for decades has invested in this framework that is going to be very, very difficult to change, but long-term as a sign for consumers, for other stakeholders, it is going to be beneficial long-term. And I think also it will help build trust with consumers as recalls diminish, hopefully reduce over time. Consumer trust in science is a very difficult thing to recover once it's lost. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a really good point on how people use HACCP, like you said, from like a compliance driving versus like actually a preventative system right as well as all the other things that surround you that um that should help prevent but like you said it's kind of like in this data that people aren't reviewing um are aren't trending except for maybe the food safety person right where they have or a food safety team where they have this um this knowledge and maybe um they're trying to scream it from the rooftops but maybe no one's listening or they feel like they have this very limited influence within the organization, so they feel almost invisible. As you think about that, as we moved into this compliance realm and we've had so many conversations on how do you move from compliance to commitment? How do you move out of this compliance space? What do you feel like, what do you think it takes for a food safety leader to kind of move from this compliance function to genuinely being a business partner, a trusted business partner within the organization? Sure. So I think there's a few ways to go about this, but kind of touching back on the last question as well. I think that it's important to acknowledge that you can't move from the burden to the solution without agreeing what the burden actually is. And I think that if leadership frames the burden as, the burden is the cost of recalls, then that solution is going to be tailored to crisis response. But if leadership looks at it the burden as the failure to detect early on signals, then the solution looks like an investment in environmental surveillance, supply chain transparency, biomapping, things like that. But also one really important thing about that, too, is that the organizational culture is really going to influence how data is not only collected, of course, but also how it's responded to. So I think that know the transparency of data is inseparable from its quality so we don't always just want to know the good numbers we need to recognize the bad ones we need to be honest with ourselves with our team about if there's something going wrong where is it and what do we do about it you know if if a food safety leader comes to you know the head of an organization and says hey we have we have some really bad numbers how is that going to be reacted to how is it going to be responded to i think that if there is a healthy, consistent response to that and, okay, let's figure out how to fix it. I think that builds a culture where it's okay to come up with, or, you know, to bring forward some concerns and not necessarily like, okay, well, I see some numbers here, but maybe, you know, everything is still technically in compliance, so let's keep going. But really in order to quantify risk is like in that perspective is to learn how to do it in business terms. If you want to move into more of a business partner role. So not just the regulatory consequences or but like also supply chain impact, brand equity, consumer trust, capital exposure, things like that that are really going to matter on the business side of things. But it also requires food safety leaders to really change their self-concept Not just their skill set. So compliance functions, again, are really reactive, but business partners are not usually there when cleanup is happening. They're happening when the strategy is being set. So being in that room requires the demonstration that your perspective makes decisions better. And that usually means, you know, you're having these conversations, you're building that confidence to share data, you're building that confidence to, you know, bring forward concerns, and you're not waiting for someone to ask you a question, you're not waiting to be consulted, but you're actually the one bringing it forward. And I think that also requires us to look at issues more in terms of solutions and options rather than violations so i think the idea of here's here's what you must do that keeps you in compliance absolutely um but you can also look at it as here's here's different ways that we can approach this um here's what we're trading off you know it gives you options it makes you a stronger leader it makes you more of a business partner in that way other than, you know, if A then B, but actually being able to understand the issue, understand maybe where it's coming from and being able to present some different routes of action from then on. Yeah. Yeah. That is so great because I feel like many of us, we are waiting, right? We're waiting to be invited. We're waiting to be be invited into the room, to be invited sooner. I mean, how many times do we hear, if you had just asked me, if you had just told me what's going on, we could have prevented this. But how are we really being proactive ourselves on getting into the room from really our perspective too, like gaining the skills to be able to do exactly what you're talking about. Step into this business partner role versus waiting to be consulted on what's best. Because like you said, the organization is really looking at what I like to call like lag metrics of the organization, which is really reactive versus like how do you identify some lead metrics to help you predict what's going to happen? Yeah, exactly. I'd even go a step further and I think, you know, I mean, we talk about this quite a bit, Tia and I, but Reagan, I think you gave a really good example of where sometimes it's not the metrics that we need to have. So I think about how many indices I see for organizations at maybe a C-suite level where they've included things that factor in like number of recalls we've had or number of positives we've had, presumptive positives. those may be interesting but just as you talked about our metric isn't did we have a recall it's would we have what did we see or miss or what do we need to know before a recall happens to notice that we have something broken right those are the types of conversations that i think is especially as i'm going to say food leaders but food safety leaders and in specifically like stepping into that space and leaning into those types of questions that provide the thought leadership and really more around risk identification, because that's truly getting to the heart of it versus just looking at the dashboard and saying, are we red or green for this month or for this week or this quarter? And that's something that we really can do to have an impact as well. And I love that Sharon too is like, if you need to make an impact, just crash the party. I would expect nothing less from Sharon. Of course. Absolutely. I don't mind crashing a few parties. What are you all talking about in here? Let me help, right? Really, you're here to help. And, you know, Reagan, even as you think about, like, if you're listening and you're thinking, well, I really do work in an environment that's all reactive. Going back and saying, okay, we had this situation. Let's debrief it. Let's do problem solving. Let's talk about what exactly is the burden. I love the way you said that. Let's actually get on the same page of what we are defining the problem as, the burden as. And then from a food safety perspective or from a functional perspective, wherever you live in the organization, you can talk about if you had have known, if we had this information ahead of time, this is how we could have prevented the situation as a part of that debrief. Which will hopefully lead to, OK, who needs to be a part of this early strategy conversation to ensure we're not having issues on the back end? That's a perfect way of stepping into the space and not waiting to be consulted. But really, how do I help bring solutions forward earlier so we're not in the situation in the past? In the future, rather. I always like to think with metrics, and this might be a hot topic or controversial, but when people first lead with metrics, I think about it as being a little bit lazy. You want to be able to see all these metrics because you don't actually want to have a conversation about what's going on. You want to be able to see it quick, be able to see red, green, yellow, blah, blah, because you are super busy and you're kind of worried about things over here. In reality, that's not really giving you what you need. You can't really understand. And I mean, Jill, I know from our perspective, we have many people that come to us and they're like, Well, we had no idea our organization was going down this route and we had this huge risk. This caught us by surprise. Our current metrics didn't really tell us these things are going on. But in reality, they were kind of using it as, oh, let me get informed about these things over here so I can go and do something else and not have other conversations. But really, you need to be digging into what are the conversations behind the numbers that you're seeing. If you're green for a quarter or for half the year, have you asked the question, hmm, are we really green? Or what's causing that number to be green? And are we actually looking at all of these things versus just taking it as an inform as like, yep, yep, check, check, check, we're good, right? Absolutely. And that can, you know, you look under your green and what does that actually mean? And are we consistently under the green or is our numbers rising? Are they fluctuating? Is there a trend that we can see? If we're always in the green, does that mean that we're sampling in the best way possible in the right places, especially when you get into your zones? Are we giving the best representation of that test, of that area? But I think just the questioning of it off the bat is incredibly helpful, especially for people who are wanting to move more into leadership of not just accepting an answer that's given to you, but asking why it is that way. Yes. Well, you know, different times, you know, people aren't often ready to go from where they are today to, you know, I'm going to say the other side of like, wow, I'm going from just being able to share metrics to I can ask, I can now ask deep thought questions. There's this range of human development that needs to happen along the way. And Reagan, knowing that you've worked with a lot of, you know, whether it's students or researchers or, you work in professional settings. What have you learned about developing people across that spectrum that you think applies directly to how food safety leaders are developing their teams or developing themselves to be ready to maybe take it to the next level? Yeah. Sorry, great question. I think that I have had the opportunity mostly to be able to work with people who are interested in growing and developing into more leadership roles. I think that you know, my time teaching undergraduates, probably not so much. And I think that the real key there into getting people to kind of flip their mindset and kind of flip their interest is giving them something to care about, giving a reason behind it about why you want to know these things about why you should be asking these questions. I think that question of the why behind what you're doing can apply to anybody in any position in any industry. I remember this time back during COVID actually, I was doing my master's and we had a very, very tight turnaround for a project. um in order to validate some antimicrobial for the beef industry because lactic acid was gone it was all you know there was a huge shortage of it so we were trying to find ways to validate it very quickly and we're in the middle of this project and we have a new group of interns and It's my first time leading a research project and I've printed out all of the benchtop protocols. I've given everyone their roles. I said, this is what we're doing. Set up an assembly line, you know, very, very structured, very, this is what we're doing ABC. And in the middle of that day, one of the interns looked up at me and she was like, well, why, why do we do the protocol this way? Why aren't we doing it a different way? And I remember my gut reaction was like, why, why is she questioning me? Like I have a master's degree and she should be listening to me. Um, but took a breath and took a step back and was able to, you know, in the moment, correct myself and correct my thinking and just being like, well, they don't even know what the goal of this project is. They don't know why we're doing this. They don't know why we need to be at the lab until three in the morning. They just are here. So, and I think that really changed everything for me. So in that moment, we stopped, I explained the entire project, um, what we were doing and why. And from that moment on in the project, not only was communication better, um, but there was a deeper understanding of what we were doing there out. And that has changed my entire, you know, leadership style in that I always start with background information. I always start with the goals and the why, because without it, you have to motivate people. If you, if your job in that moment is to make somebody care, you have to give them everything you can to make them care because people who don't care are not going to be motivated. They're not going to want to think deeper. And that's a very difficult team to work with. And I think it's your job as a leader to instill that in people and help everyone understand the goals that you're working towards. Yeah, that inspiration, right? We always talk about that, you know, tell them why they should care, their reasons for caring. And in your example, you're giving them everything so they can choose which part of this project makes you go, ooh, I want to do this, where you can connect a value, a belief to this project so it now becomes a part of your passion. i'm like yes i want to see this project to the end once you get someone like that now you have a champion of your of your message and it's not really around like what you have in your mind i like how you're like what like i have to agree i helped set this up like and you're questioning like leaders think that all the time i'm like well i'm the leader i've done this before i why don't you know why you know like how many times people come to us and they're like they should know how to hold product But why should they know? Why should they have this information? How do they know the background of this organization a hundred years when they've only been there for a couple of years? Who says they should know this information? But as leaders, it's important for us to connect that for them. And I always say this is one of the hardest part of leadership because each person has their own connection point to something. And as a leader, you have to know what that And so when you manage, you know, one person versus ten people versus, you know, twenty people, you need to be able to connect with those people so that they'll understand what it is you're doing. But then they're able to connect their own passions to it. That's hard to do. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's one of the biggest things that I think when I think about what leaders could do today to make a difference, it's how do they pause and create space to truly be with people. Because I love the example that you share there, Reagan, because whether it's something in the lab that you're working on or just doing many trials in plants, it's amazing when you're like, yep, we're going to be running down this line and everybody's, you tell them what they're going to do. And then later when you come back out there, I remember doing trials early on and they'd be like, what was that trial for? And what do you actually, did you actually learn anything? But as soon as you bring them in and have a pre-trial meeting, like here's what we're doing, just even the the great ideas people would have like oh well if you're thinking you're going to package that way or run it down this line then you need to know this saved trials and then even at the end when you would get results just having them understand they could help formulate the next thing sometimes where it was like okay this part worked but that didn't and they'd be like oh this is what i saw or here's something that we could try next time so Creating space for people to learn and share is what leaders, that could be the superpower. Even outside of your metrics, even looking at your metrics, you have your KPIs, that's just where we are. But how often are you having a real conversation about them? Actually reflecting, actually talking about where does this number come from? And Reagan, even as you think about when you were giving your examples around environmentals, I'm definitely in the mindset of seek and destroy. We're looking for stuff. But if we're just comfortable with the greens, we're not really seeing what might be bubbling up in other spaces. And I know the work that you all do it's tied to that, helping organizations understand, right, how do you take a more proactive approach to food safety and the work that you're doing and using the resources you have internally, but also your external resources, they might see something different that you don't see because you're there all the time. Yeah, absolutely. So one thing that I really do enjoy on a day-to-day basis here in my role at Beacon Point is that I get to have conversations with my clients about, okay, if this is positive, this is what this means, and here's the next steps. And actually being able to assist with them and consult and almost be an extension of their R&D team and being able to continue that conversation beyond just a red or a green and saying, okay, what does this look like? What does this mean long-term? Because again, maybe the person in that position doesn't have the same background that I do. And if I can do anything to help assist and to help make food safer for that facility, I'm happy to do that. And it's a great conversation and it always looks different, but it's absolutely necessary. Yes, yes, yes. So this conversation has been rich, full of like gems and stuff. And Jill, I don't know if you're gonna ask another question. Well, I was going to ask about like World Food Safety Day and it being a few weeks away. Is that where you're headed to? Yes, yes. But go ahead. Well, no, I mean, we're on the same path, right? You know, it's just a few weeks away. So we know food safety leaders are, you know, if you haven't already, you're probably gearing up for like, how are we going to celebrate? What are we going to do? How are we going to message? But I also think about this moment where we get to challenge ourselves. And, you know, I think about if there's a food safety leader who's listening to this and wants to use this moment with world food safety day to honestly assess whether their team is positioned to lead, not just execute, you know, to help their organization forward. What would you tell them to look at first? Yeah. So I think with world food safety day coming up, um, there's a lot of things that people genuinely think that are important to look at, important to go back to, but I think maybe what we need to look at is not the usual things that we would use as indicators, right? So maybe not recall history or audit scores or compliance records, but really look, as we've talked throughout today, but at their early warning infrastructure and ask with genuine honesty if it is designed to find things before it becomes a problem. So this can look at like your environmental monitoring data from the last twelve months specifically and not the summaries, not the greens and the reds, but the data. And you can ask the questions of what did we find? Where did it come from? What did we do with it? You know, going back to are we testing in the right ways at the right times? Are we looking for the right things? How long is our gap between a signal appearing and getting a positive? You know, really digging into that data, but also understanding of, you know, has anyone on this team brought forward uncomfortable data and what happened when they did? And I think that's really important. Because the culture, again, around data shouldn't be separated from the quality of the data. And the honest assessment of this is it's uncomfortable, right? Like we don't want to have to dig into this. We don't want to know, you know, some of the maybe nitty gritty things. Typically on World Food Safety Day, it's so easy to look outward and to be so excited and publish a statement and celebration online. point out your wins, which is wonderful. None of that's wrong. We should celebrate the things we're doing well. But if that's not hand in hand with this honest internal conversation about how are we going to be better, then you're doing a disservice to your team if you're not actively finding ways to make things better. I mean, are we okay with just being in the green and not looking into that? Or do we want to move forward knowing that we won't be in the red again? And I think that if the honest answer is that your program is maybe more reactive, then you know, take June seventh, take world safety day to be a planning moment and figure that out and have those real conversations and, you know, find ways to fill in the gaps or close them. Burdens become solutions with decisions. So you don't figure those out by, you know, being reactive or by posting on LinkedIn, but being able to have these hard conversations and knowing that something good is going to come out of it. Yes, yes. I feel like exactly what you said is a really good way of looking at culture. When we think about food safety culture, nothing you said had anything to do with the food safety of it and more around the conversations. How do we connect to what's happening? That is the culture part of food safety culture that we keep missing because we're only looking at the data that we have. We're only looking at it almost from a surface. standpoint versus diving deeper to understand how do we ensure we're not in the red again? How do we advance? How do we get better? How do we become more reactive? And then when people talk about like, is our food safety culture getting better? A lot of people feel no, because that part is not happening, right? Those conversations are not happening. The funds behind ensuring that we're not being reactive is not happening. And one of the reasons why we struggle, in my opinion, around food safety culture is because we're not actually looking at the word culture and we're not actually digging into what does that mean for us in our organization. So I appreciate that, what you're saying. And I feel like everyone needs to hear that part because I feel like that's where we're missing, especially in food safety. Absolutely. Yeah, of course, you know, the part that stays with me around this conversation as I think about it is, you know, this the gap that we have and the burden maybe that we have to solve is this space between, you know, as professionals, like knowing what needs to happen. Like we know we need a better sampling plan. We know we need this to happen. We know we need funds over here, whatever that is. It's not just knowing, but it's being able to bring others along with you and move your organization toward it. Yes. Yeah. So Reagan, as we sort of conclude this conversation today, which I've absolutely loved, what are maybe one or two takeaways that you want to give to people that's listening today? Oh, goodness. I think some quick takeaways would be, you know, really assess yourself as a leader and figure out if you're somebody who is really seeing the people that you're leading, understanding where they're at. And if you are doing everything in your power to be able to communicate with them where they're at, and if not, how can we do better at that? You know, how, what are some What are some ways that we can become more personable with the people that we're leading in order to be better leaders? Also, again, if you are in a food safety role, look As World Food Safety Day is coming up, look at your food safety plan. Is it reactive or is it preventative? And are we okay with that? And how do we want to do better in the future? And then overall, just with World Food Safety Day, I think that there's wonderful strides being made across all sectors of the industry. And that is worth celebrating. I think that, you know, every day we all work together to improve public health and improve, you know, consumer experience and consumer trust for our organizations and for science in general. And I think that's a wonderful thing to celebrate. Well said. Regan, we are so happy that you joined us today on this Monday morning, sharing your gems. I know I learned a lot just from this conversation. And then I hope people that are listening have some little nuggets that they can take back to their organizations, to their spaces and have more conversations. I think through this conversation, we see that really moving from burden to solution, it's not really a technical gap issue or a technical project for us. It's really around leadership. It's a leadership project. And it really is the most... in our opinion, the most important investment that you can make in a food safety professional, no matter what level that they're at, that they have these leadership skills to be able to connect with people and connect with their organization so that we can be more proactive. Absolutely. Yeah. So if you're listening and today's conversation, maybe it has you thinking about your own leadership development or how you're positioning your team. You know, we're, we're here for you. We have two resources that you can access. Uh, the first is strategic leader. That's a program that is designed for leaders of leaders in food. So directors, senior managers, you know, people who are ready to develop, to develop the leadership skills that technical expertise alone cannot build. So you can download the modules about that program on our website. We're going to include, uh, of course, include it in the show notes. But I think the other part that we hear people talk a lot about is like, how do I get my organization to buy in that this investment has a good ROI? Once again, we've got you covered. We have under our resource hub a workbook, really, it's a workbook that will walk you through how to make the case for investing in your team's development. And it'll walk you through all those things so that you can position your development and investment to help you move forward on World Food Safety Day to go from burden to solution. That too is in the show notes. And that's such a great tool. It's one of my favorite tools actually that we have because it helps people kind of put into perspective on what do I need in order to develop this case around development. Yes. So World Food Safety Day is June seventh and it's only three weeks away as we've been talking about. You know, as Reagan said, that's a great time to celebrate where we've come, but also really a moment to pause and be honest about, is your team positioned to lead, not just execute? And that is today's Real Talk. Thank you for being here with us. Enjoy the rest of your week. And remember, culture doesn't change until leaders do. Thanks for being with us.
