Hearts Afire

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And now here's the host of Hearts Afire, Adrienne Mendoza.

ADRIENNE MENDOZA: Welcome to Hearts Afire, a South Texas Blood & Tissue and BioBridge Global podcast.
This is our pilot season, and we are excited to bring you the stories of our employees and our mission.
Today I have the greatest honor of all, to get it introduce my former boss Richey, who's going to introduce me to you all as our team members.
So welcome Richey Wyatt and tell us first, before we get started, what is your role here. What's your job?
RICHEY WYATT: Well before I get into that I just gotta say I've never been on a podcast before. I'm very glad there's not a visual component to this because it's really hot outside and I'm all sweaty and I've had a very stressful day trying to save and enhance lives the best that I can.
And this is a really, really welcome thing to be in an air-conditioned studio with you Adrienne as well as our as our executive producer David King.
So to your question, my name is Richey Wyatt. I've been with the organization for over four and a half years, coming up on five years. I am our General Counsel. I oversee our HR department. I do various things but I also am our Chief Compliance Officer.
That gave me the great opportunity, it gives me a great opportunity to oversee our Global Quality department which Adrienne ran, and so it allowed me to be her boss for about four years. And it was a great, great joy.
ADRIENNE MENDOZA: So I'm super happy to be here. I am very very, very happy to be here and excited about the entire journey I've had with this organization. I really loved working with you and I still get to work with you which is great. I enjoyed my time and Global Quality as much as I'm enjoying time now.
RICHEY WYATT: So well it was fun for me. When I interviewed for the job, you were already here and so I was interviewed by Marty and some others, but then I also had the opportunity to to interview with some folks that I'd be working with, including you.
Before I started the job, I walked out of that interview thinking to myself OK I think being chief compliance officer won't be so bad, because this woman Adrienne knows what she is doing and it turned out that my impressions were spot-on.
And so going back to those early days, I would say one of the things you were already in the process of sort of turning our quality department into what we now call Global Quality department, where it was pretty not siloed – not the right word – but the team was really embedded into the different business units and working somewhat in silos and you had the vision to say that BBG needs to have a global quality department.
We still have expertise to this day and Emmanuel is doing a great job carrying that on, and also making his own enhancements that are fantastic for the group.
But you had the vision to really globalize it and to really create something not just well including with MasterControl specifically with that tool, but much more broadly than that, and that was something that was very impressive for me from day one.
Tell us a little bit more about what your thought process is when you embarked on that.
ADRIENNE MENDOZA: Sure, well it kind of goes back to when I even discovered BioBridge Global and I originally came over for QualTex as the director of quality for Qualtex.
But it was because and I was drawn to the whole idea of what BioBridge Global is, in that it's this overarching entity that has a lot of depth in both blood banking and cell therapy and laboratory testing, in my view was unique in the world literally. And I still have that opinion today.
I've searched and searched for another BioBridge Global, not to go somewhere else but just to wonder who else is out there doing what we do. And there isn't anyone who has the same breadth and able to capture within one organization all these skills capabilities and talents.
And so I i saw when I came in to apply to the organization that this was a really unique organization with a distinct advantage in that it would be able to help support developing new things that are not available yet, whether it's new technologies for testing for diseases or it's helping to develop new cures or it's helping make sure that the population's needs are met through safety testing and through blood products.
And it kind of drew on a lot of my experiences in my career leading up to it. I was just excited about what we could do as a whole team together as BioBridge Global, and with our different quality groups it wasn't as agile as it could be as if we were one quality group for all of BioBridge Global.
Cross-pollinating and sharing ideas, sharing insights about how we could do things even better, and that's really the idea of quality: how to do things always better.
RICHEY WYATT: Yeah you know, and you really transformed the group and in doing so helped transform BBG. Another thing that kind of started really percolating in your head that then we started working on together maybe about a year or two into our partnership was not just the global part, but it was what does quality mean, right?
In a small sense, quality means OK, making sure that we can handle FDA audits, and that you know we're on top of all the things that, you know, of a regulatory nature. But you started to think about quality in a more expansive way, literally, all the way when the organization started talking about delight the customer, which meant our internal customers but also our external customers and customer onboarding.
Tell us a bit more about the view that you have of the word quality.
ADRIENNE MENDOZA: I love quality. To me, it encapsulates the idea that what someone's getting out of something is not only meeting but exceedingly better than expected and that means that it's not only what they expected to be: something safe, something that's going to work, but also that it feels right and that means not only to our customers.
When we think about customers externally, our businesses, we work with our donors we work with, but it's also to the employees.
How does the experience working here help them do their job better and what gives what's the opportunity for them to continue to grow and learn their skill set to master the craft that they have?
So to me, quality is encompassing of the idea, it's a philosophy of how to do things with the utmost care and concern for what the outcomes are going to be for the person who's affected by what you're delivering.
RICHEY WYATT: That's was a really cool paradigm shift I think, our evolution of the way that we were thinking about things and so I know kudos to you on that and I think it's been very effective.
One reason that that you were effective in sort of both those paradigm shifts but also in just running the department and then also that really impressed me and Marty and all your peers and people throughout the organization, some of your leadership skills and not just your management skills and leadership skills, which I think are two different things.
But it impressed me, your ability to sort of bring the best out of people and get your team and various teams to be functioning. Tell us a little bit about kind of the way you think about, because this obviously applies even more so now in your current job of being the Chief Operating Officer of South Texas.
ADRIENNE MENDOZA: Well I think first and foremost, you know, we have got to enjoy working together, working as a team. Building a great team means that you not only have that, it means building within the team the talents and capabilities you need in order for that to function.
But it means that team has to really care about each other, they need to respect each other, have confidence in each other, trust that there is going to be something that they each bring to the table that will make the whole group better.
And to me, I enjoy building a team, I enjoy designing the team in terms of how should it be structured, making changes in terms of ‘let's move this person over here, let's move this person over here’ and sometimes in a counter-intuitive way.
Yeah it's fun to kind of design that. That's one of the sort of organizational design ideas – how should this work together to put the right people with the right group. Maybe sometimes you need someone who's going to be a great effective team builder, someone who knows how to develop and nurture the capabilities of the team from a from a leadership standpoint, and then other times need someone who's more technically savvy to kind of skill up maybe the teams themselves.
So for me it's an art form to match people together and put people together that are going to be really effective. So that's my philosophy, look for those talents, look for those skills that the team members have, and what support they need from their counterparts, their peers or their leader, and then put the right people together.
And it's always an iterative process. It's never going to be finished. You always have to make those additional tweaks, because people are always growing and learning something more.
RICHEY WYATT: Yeah, and the one constant in life is change, right? One thing that I feel like that you and I were most simpatico on was just some of the underlying style that we share, in terms of leadership.
And I actually have two books in front of me just as reminders. One of which I was very immersed in when we were working together, another book has actually come to come to my attention and the attention of our organization more recently.
One's called the Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni and another one's called Love as a Business Strategy that's put together by these consultants that we have called Softway. They're very similar. These two books really kind of fold together I think really, really well and it's common sense, except it's not it's not put into practice widely in lots of organizations – which is basically putting humans first, right?
It's basically creating a level of trust through respect that allows the best ideas to come out, right, and with a real emphasis of learning from mistakes, for example, and really getting ideas from all different places and putting that humanity first and foremost. Because what is an organization but human beings coming together working on a common goal we share?
A little bit more about your thoughts on that?
ADRIENNE MENDOZA: Yeah I think both of those books really complement each other really well. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team really talks about how trust can erode and create a dysfunctional environment, and it's very true.
I've seen that first-hand, I've worked for companies that had some dysfunctional teams and the way to restore function in the team is really through the strategies that are kind of outlined in Love as a Business Strategy.
You've got to have the humility to be able to look at your team and ask them for feedback: How am I doing? What can I do better? What are my weaknesses? Are there things that I'm doing that are perceived to be something I wish that they wouldn't be perceived to be?
So having that opportunity to care about and the concerns of others and hope that they give you the feedback that makes you better and makes them better as well.
RICHEY WYATT: So you know, for me, we have will always have areas to grow in this regard, but I know we're all on a journey at BioBridge Global, and it's not just tissue or GenCure or QualTex, to implement more love as a business strategy within our organization because it's so important for the functioning of our teams, to make the work, that we do not only just save lives and do the good work, we do for our mission but be enjoyable for us and bring value to us and our families, to our emotional well-being.
ADRIENNE MENDOZA: Yeah that is so important, you have got to have fun and enjoy the people you work with because we spent a great part of our lives here.
RICHEY WYATT: That's right. You mentioned the word humility, too, which is just kind of at the core of that and being willing to be vulnerable, right, so you can admit mistakes or share with others and create. That that it allows us to create the trust, which then creates the psychological safety and the respect for teams to really function, you know, really well.
ADRIENNE MENDOZA: Yeah, you know in terms of that and I think that this is one of the things that I really appreciated about working with you directly daily is that you were not afraid to let me know things that I needed to improve upon, whether it was my writing skills, my communication skills, something I might be making a decision on that you thought I needed to rethink or just be more careful about.
You taught me to - and I'm still working on this, we're all a work in progress – to take more time, you know, to not rush and just get to an answer, but to take more time and you know it takes a while to build the kind of trust and rapport that you feel like I can take that that that constructive feedback without criticism.
It's not criticism, it's constructive, it's out of love. You are trying to make me better and have been able to make me better since working here, and it's those kinds of actions from a manager to their staff, from colleague to colleague, from donor to our staff, and out you know in all different directions that really helps us to to be better, be better humans, better workers, better for what we do well.
RICHEY WYATT: I think that that's fair. I mean in fact I do care about you deeply and I care about this organization deeply and when those two things kind of come together it really helps and it actually reminds me of we were having a one-on-one I don't know it was probably a year and a half ago or so and you know we had developed a really, really strong partnership and worked really, really well together.
And we were talking about, or I decided that let's talk about, your career and you know you had various career paths in front of you here at BBG or potentially outside of BBG, and one very obvious career path would be to become our Chief Compliance Officer, you know, my job. Y ou don't have to be a lawyer to have that job, and you can take that job and you can actually grow it in different ways that I haven't necessarily grown it.
But then you also clearly had a talent and an interest in the operations in various operations, for QualTex, for GenCure, for South Texas. Really for you have a deep knowledge into a lot of what we do.
So I asked you, I said ‘I'm going to put you on the spot here you can think about it for a second but in your gut whether we're talking about in two years or five years or 10 years or whatever do you see yourself and again whether it's here or somebody or somewhere else do you see yourself as a Chief Compliance Officer, which was kind of on the path where you were on, or an operator you know a chief operator?’
You kind of paused on it, but you didn't pause that long you paused for about 10 seconds and you said an operator. Boom. I don't know if I was expecting it, I wasn't not expecting it, but that really then helped you and me kind of channel, switch gears a teeny bit, in terms of thinking about your career and thinking about what was best for BBG.
And behold about a year later you became named as Elizabeth’s successor to be the Chief Operating Officer of South Texas. So I feel like that was a kind of at least between the two of us, sort of a momentous, a momentous one-on-one conversation that we had.
ADRIENNE MENDOZA: Yeah I remembered actually very, very well that conversation. It's almost like I took a leap off of, you know, coming into the unknown because I'd been working in Global Quality or in quality and quality and regulatory affairs for so long that I was scared, but at the same time I was excited about it and it was like taking a leap.
And I knew I was in a moment of, I knew that was going to be a pivotal point in in my career, my answer to that question. It took me a little bit of time, but as I reflected on the things that I really value about what I'm doing here, I felt that for me the greatest impact I could make at this juncture in my career is to help move us operationally into a really well functioning team, into a place where we could make an impact not only locally but you know throughout the world in the work that we do.
I was excited about what we've already done as an organization operationally. We're definitely you know world-class leading edge on many areas and I wanted to be part of that in a very direct way, leading the teams who are making that happen.
In quality and regulatory affairs, we're often in a supporting role. We need to find a way to help those things get done and we're certainly part of the solution, but we may not always be able to be in the driver's seat to that change.
And so for me, that answer was because I really thought it was time for me to help drive uh that change and and get the support around me with the team to make things even better.
RICHEY WYATT: Which was a very cool decision on your part. Of course it's a whole different level different type of responsibility where you're in charge of a profit-and-loss statement and, you know, putting budgets together, etc., and also it helped that you had developed and you were blessed with a fantastic bench of leaders in Global Quality which is now very ably and beautifully run by Emmanuel Casasola.
I don't know if we have any more time but one more thing I wanted to mention is that for those that don't know Adrienne is an extraordinary lover of animals and she has a horse named Coco, so I just enjoy getting updates on all the time. So how's Coco doing?
ADRIENNE MENDOZA: She's doing really good. She does she doesn't enjoy this very, very hot weather, she's very sweaty and hot when I go and see her. She likes the fall and springtimes best.
She's now 17 years old so she's getting a little bit older, slowing down a little bit, in terms of we're not going any anywhere wild and crazy on a trail ride. But she's like therapy when I leave, you know. Our jobs are stressful, we have moments where we can have sheer panic and then there's also sort of, you know, moments where it's routine.
But you have to have a place to get away from the daily grind and when I'm with my horse, with Coco, I cannot think of anything except for being with her. It's important for your safety, No. 1, you're dealing with a 1,200-pound animal that could, you know, kill you if you're not focused.
And so you have to be focused on that, plus you're in nature, you're exercising, you're sweating too and you know pulling saddles on and off and going out and just exploring new places it's extremely fun.
I always love to be exploring, I love to try new things and that's an avenue outside of work that I can do.
RICHEY WYATT: That is very cool. Your predecessor rode motorcycles, you ride horses. I'll let the audience decide which is more cool.
ADRIENNE MENDOZA: Well thank you so much Richey. I'm so glad you were here to join us on our very first um episode of Hearts Afire.
RICHEY WYATT: Well, it's an honor and a pleasure. Thank you Adrienne.

Executive Producers of Hearts Afire are Heather Hughes and Jay Pojenski. Your Director is David King, with technical assistance from Matt Flores. Our logo was designed by Roberto Esquivel. Iur host is Adrienne Mendoza. If you have an idea for Hearts Afire, please feel free to email us: heartsafire@biobridgeglobal.org.