Karen Burchfield

I attribute my success to everyone around me - all the people who mentored me, all the people I mentored, and honestly, opportunity that not everyone gets. I'm so thankful for the opportunities that I was given, and I worked really hard to make sure others were getting the same kinds of opportunities, and I continue to do that. I meet with people weekly that are leaving their companies for one reason or another, and I still believe that we don't get there unless we get there together. The success that I'm having right now is about all the people around me at Praxy Chain, and Supply Chain Acumen, and the different consulting firms that these retired supply chain experts are working in. I can't do it without each other, and so that's my success.

Very early in my career, I had a mentor that said, remember, everyone that you work with, one day you might work for. If you have a core value of treating others with respect, even when they're not respectful, then you're gonna be okay. I think there's a lot of times the dynamic between people comes back to bite them when that person that worked for you 15 years ago becomes your boss. I don't have interpersonal challenges, even with very difficult people, because I've been around difficult people my whole life. My family always had their own business, and you deal with customers, and you deal with people that, when they're disrespectful, you can't be disrespectful back. You can't just serve back whatever they give you. That really served me well, because many of the people that I mentored became very high in the organization, and you just never know when people are gonna start passing you for a lot of different reasons, and you are going to be reporting to them. I remember the first young man that had been my mentee, he had worked for me, and when I reported to him, we had such a good relationship. He said, Karen, are you gonna be okay with this? I said, absolutely, I am. You have to interact with people like they could be your boss, and in fact, why not treat them like they are your boss? People deserve that respect, and if they feel they have that, then they trust you when it's time for you to come to work for them.

First of all, be serious about yourself, but don't be too serious about yourself. Be serious enough that you command respect, and that people remember you for your contributions, and your readiness, and your depth in the subject, whatever it is. Be ready, and be serious about that. But don't take yourself too seriously. You'll kill yourself beating yourself up if you're second-guessing every word you say, and second-guessing what someone's thinking. So be serious about what you do, and be serious about being competent, but don't take yourself too seriously.

I think the biggest challenges and opportunities are very closely linked, and one of the biggest is the demographic change in the workforce. You have a lot of the changing of the guard, and that to me is one of the great challenges and one of the great opportunities. It's not just in the railroad industry or the supply chain components - most companies are going through that because of the demographic in the United States. The opportunity in that is to go look outside for outside consultants who have that experience, who can bring it back to the people that have stepped up to change the guard. I know that the railroads do that quite a bit - they'll bring back people to help the ones who are learning so they don't have to make the same mistakes. When you have really service-sensitive or safety-sensitive industries, your greatest challenge is preserving your safety and your performance as you change the guard in your workforce. A lot of people talk about AI, that's another thing, but I think the greatest challenge is keeping that safety and that excellent execution as you change the guard in very technical fields like transportation.

My core value is to care more about the truth than the consequences. That's my core value. But there are people involved in that, so you have to be, when you pursue the truth, when you speak the truth, you have to do that understanding there are other people involved who might see it differently, who might even feel threatened by you calling something out. But if you don't call out what's wrong, you can't begin to fix it. So I would say that my core value is integrity, and tempered with genuine connection and care. I was listening to a speaker on a podcast who said, if you speak the truth without love, it's too brutal, and you'll alienate your listener. If all you do is talk to them with love, and you can't give them the truth, you're actually hiding something from them, maybe unintentionally, because you care so much about their feelings. So you have to temper when you're speaking the truth with genuine connection and care for the person you're speaking to. I want to engage others in the answer, but the truth is the most important thing, because until we get to that, we can't work toward a solution. BNSF had a leadership model that really resonated with my core values, and one of the things they encouraged us to do was challenge the status quo.