Highlights
This session will feature four leaders who live and teach people-centric leadership to improve the lives of those around them.
Overview
Every company is currently struggling to find and retain talent, and the old way of leading will not work in the future. Employees are no longer tied to a company and want to be treated well. So, what can companies do to create an environment where people want to work? This panel will discuss people-centric leadership—what it is, how to lead with kindness, how to develop people-centric leaders and more.
Panelists
Meg McKee Brown is the vice president of human resources at Cambridge Engineering. She has a heart for unlocking and unleashing the potential of those around her. She holds a degree in environmental engineering from Northwestern University and has worked in manufacturing, environmental, construction, IT and consulting. Brown has spent more than fifteen years cultivating her expertise in building up people and organizations. When she crossed paths with Cambridge Air Solutions, she fell in love with the company’s culture and formally joined the leadership team to continue strengthening and scaling their people systems. As vice president of human resources, Brown is responsible for all aspects of Cambridge’s employee experience. This includes talent lifecycle processes, executive, leadership and employee development, organization development and change enablement. 
Karyn Ross is on a mission to help people create a better, kinder world. An artist, internationally acclaimed speaker, award-winning author, consultant, coach and practitioner, Ross travels the globe teaching people her unique system of combining creativity, continuous improvement and kindness to make a better world. As well as being the owner of KRC (Karyn Ross Consulting), she is one of the "founding mothers" of Women in Lean: Our Table, a global group of more than seven hundred and fifty women lean practitioners. Ross is also founder and president of the Love and Kindness Project Foundation, a registered public charity, and The New School for Kind Leaders. She has created both of these initiatives to help people around the world think, speak, act and lead more kindly.
Ross is the author of six books, including, "How to Coach for Creativity and Service Excellence: A Lean Coaching Workbook," the Shingo-award winning, "The Toyota Way to Service Excellence: Lean Transformation in Service Organizations," "I’ll Keep You Posted: 102 of My Reflections to Help You Start—and Deepen—Your Own Active Reflection Process," "Think Kindly—Speak Kindly—Act Kindly: 366 Easy and Free Ideas You Can Use to Create a Kinder World…Starting Today," and "Big Karma and Little Kosmo Help Each Other." Her sixth book, "The Kind Leader: A Practical Guide to Eliminating Fear, Creating Trust and Leading with Kindness," is available for preorder. Proceeds from her books fund The Love and Kindness Project Foundation. When not traveling, Karyn spends time designing and sewing her own clothes.
Adam Stump is an industrial engineer III at Newport News Shipbuilding and currently works to implement lean and continuous improvement projects on new nuclear powered aircraft carriers. Stump hold an MBA from the College of William and Mary and a bachelors degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from The Ohio State University. In 2021, Adam was a participant in the AME Emerging Leaders Program - a leadership development program which enables lean practitioners to participate in problem-solving work groups, network with peers, and serve the profession in a leadership capacity.
Lisa Weis is a people-centric, lean/continuous improvement expert with over 24 years of demonstrated success in helping hundreds of public and private organizations achieve their vision and meet their strategic goals by engaging people, implementing enterprise excellence and inspiring innovation. Weis was part of the core team that developed the U.S. national lean initiative to help small-to-medium-sized manufacturers become more globally competitive as part of the NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP). She has a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering. She is the lead for curriculum development for the AME people-centric leadership initiative and a member of the AME Mid-Atlantic Region board.
