The best leaders understand that they don’t have the answers to everything; that is why they constantly seek them. They are in that place of curiosity and exploration. Just like our guest in this episode. As Senior Vice President, West Region at The Coca-Cola Company, Kathy Twells currently leads a multi-million dollar business cultivating innovation and mutual growth for Coca-Cola’s customer partners. Today, she joins Ina Gjikondi and Bonnie Buckner to talk to us about how she sees the evolution of leadership in this world of constant change. With her podcast, The Coca-Cola Compassion Lab, she promotes emotional agility and mental well-being in the workplace—key traits that allow leaders to stay on top and innovate. Kathy also talks about the importance of curiosity, the power of observation, and overcoming the inner critic. Taking us deep within ourselves, Kathy shows us that we are whole beings who need to respond to life in all kinds of ways and in all kinds of spaces—from work to home. Let this conversation inspire you.
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The Coca-Cola Compassion Lab: Leadership Artistry with Kathy Twells
With us, we have Kathy Twells. Kathy is an alumnus of our eco leadership coaching program. She serves as a Senior Vice President of the West region at the Coca-Cola Company. She leads a multimillion-dollar business cultivating innovation and mutual growth for Coca-Cola’s customers and partners. She’s been there and serving the company for several years in diverse positions and different places. One of the things that she’s excited to talk to us about is the Coca-Cola Compassion Lab and the work that she’s doing there to promote emotional agility and mental well-being in the workplace. Welcome, Kathy.
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Kathy, it’s great to see you again.
It’s so wonderful.
You are one of the alums of our coaching program. I will never forget, you getting up at 5:00 in the morning for our sessions and being always there. Even happy to be there at 5:00 AM to take our classes, which is amazing. That was a couple of years ago. Now that you’ve graduated and have these new skillsets. Part of our coaching program is around systems change. What have you done with that? How have you brought that into Coke? What shifts have you seen?
The reason that I got up at 5:00 happily was because I wanted to be there. It was the nature of the program that you developed. I don’t think there’s any other program quite like eco coaching because of the way you connect so many different domains into coaching and how that affects you. I even went through my COVID belt during that and somehow made it through to the end, but I’m so grateful for the discourse, the people that I met, and what I learned.
As I reflect on how I’ve brought that back into my day-to-day life, I’ve been in leadership for so long with the company. I’ve been with the company for several years and I’ve been in leadership for about 25 of that. There’s an evolution of leadership where you begin thinking you have to know everything. You have to have all the answers and be the guide and the sage for everybody. You come to realize that you are as much an exploration as your people are.
What the coaching program crystallized for me in my work now is to stay in that place of curiosity, exploration, questioning, and allowing their own wisdom to unfold, which is the nature of coaching. We’re not telling. We are simply allowing and creating space for someone else to step into their own knowing. I’ve brought so many of those tools into what I do every single day with my work.
Do you have a story you can tell us about that as an example?
There are several. I work with different people in different parts of the company. Sometimes they are directly reporting to me on my team. It might be an outside mentorship. I was having a conversation with someone that I had known for quite some time. They were exploring what they wanted to do in their career and I felt like I knew where they ought to go.
I felt like I had a good grasp of their skills and I was like, “This person should take on this marketing role,” because that’s their sweet spot. In our conversation, I did not share my point of view on that. I simply asked them more about what made them feel more alive, where they felt connected, where their values come into play, and the alignment. By the time we got to the end of that coaching conversation, it was not the marketing job.
They needed to stay in a sales role and go into a different leadership opportunity. Even I didn’t see that for them before we had this conversation. I can honestly tell you that if I had not stayed open to let them walk down those paths, I probably would have been like, “This would be amazing for you. I see you do so great in this.” They might have taken my counsel in that direction. That was a moment. I remember thinking, “That’s the power of listening and not telling.”
It’s a great example, Kathy, of being that internal coach but the leader as a coach rather than a formal title, which is using the skillset. Thank you for sharing that example. I’m also interested as I heard you talk about curiosity and being in that space of exploration. What’s the quality of curiosity for you as a leader? How do you know when you’re in that space? What’s happening for you as you’ve been exploring and being curious on your own as a leader?
We’ll get into the Compassion Lab a little bit later in this conversation, but in the lab, we are exploring many things from mindfulness to the power of presence. When you’re in that mindset and that discourse, you start to think about, “How am I showing up on a regular basis?” I already mentioned the amount of time I’ve been doing this. It’s very easy to get to a place where you think, “I’ve done this a million times. I know exactly what the next move needs to be.”
There’s so much change happening around us and inside of us that if we don’t keep that phrase beginner’s mind if we don’t keep the questioning, curiosity, and inquiry going all the time, we will miss things that are happening. There’s been so much change in the world and in our company that I’ve even started to look to our younger associates about how they’re seeing things, the Innovation they’re bringing forth, and how they see the world differently.
If I don’t stay curious about that, then I run the risk of doing things like we did years ago. That’s not always going to apply. It makes the journey way more fun because it isn’t the same movie being played over again. It’s a brand-new movie all the time, new customers, new relationships, and new team chemistries. It keeps you in a place of possibility.
How do you bring yourself into that space? How do you know when you’re there? What’s your practice around that?
The practice that I try to stay tuned in with is this power of observation. On any given day, I am booked for morning to night. It might be in travel, Zoom meetings, or a combination of customer meetings on Zoom and I have to change channels constantly. One meeting might be an internal problem. Another meeting might be a customer or a coaching session. It’s very easy for me or anyone with that schedule to get lost in the schedule, the to-do list, and what’s next.
Sometimes you don’t even have time between calls. You go from one call to the next. The practice that I try to stay tuned in with is being the observer at all times of what’s happening around me. It might be in a conversation or a meeting. What’s the energy of this conversation? What are the dynamics of this meeting? There are practices at the beginning and the end of the day that help me stay during the day.
It’s starting the morning with a meditative practice. It’s an evening reflection. Not long but just a little bit of a reflection of, “How did I show up? What was going on? What do I need to see?” There’s an extra layer of presence when you’re the observer versus the player in the movie trying to do the right thing, say the right thing, and show up for people. It’s a practice because it’s a daily thing and some days, it’s better than others but that’s usually how I approach it.
That is such a great practice. I want to speak to the practice but first, I want to say I find frequently you talked about so much change happening in the world and in workplaces. I find that there is a tendency amongst leaders that I coach to manage change, especially when you talk about being booked from morning to night. There’s this default of, “I know it. Let me do it. I’ll do it faster. I’ll get it done and I know it’ll be right and move on.”
That internal self-regulation and restraint to keep stepping back into, “I’m with other people. I can be curious.” That’s a lot of self-work. I hear the bookend practice of starting your day and reflecting at the end of the day. It also takes a lot of restraint within the day itself to not get into that mindset. Are there any cues that pop up in your body if you start to forget that curiosity word?
I have to even go back to the coaching program. I would say that when I started the coaching program, I was so much more in my head. Not that I’m not in my head now. We all are. It’s such a cultural thing to be up but you brought forth this whole idea of the somatic wisdom. What going on in the whole being that I need to pay attention to? I’m still honing the skill but the body has become this source of information to inform the practice that we’re talking about.
It might be, “I’m not breathing or I feel a sense of tenseness in my body,” then it’ll be like, “What’s going on here? Why do I feel on alert? Why do I feel uncomfortable?” Sometimes that discomfort might be a natural nervousness because I’m presenting in front of a meeting then it becomes like, “Relax. You’re in service. It’s okay.” I have to reset myself through all of that but that’s somatic language that we’ve talked about in the program. It’s powerful because I can honestly say, I don’t think I did a very good job getting in touch with that before.
As you started talking about the Compassion Lab, I heard you saying things like we’re bringing mindfulness, compassion elements, and some of these tools and practices that you’re doing with yourself. We’re bringing to the leaders inside Coke. Can you say more about the Compassion Lab? How you’re working with it? What’s happening?
We’re in year three of the Compassion Lab. The mission is to normalize these practices we’re talking about in the entire area of mental fitness, emotional agility, and resilience. We’re very used to in the corporate space talking about your physicality, “Work out. Exercise. It’s good for you.” That’s all very normal in business, but there is this emerging dialogue around the inner game and how you play your inner game, I would argue that is the foundation of all things.
As we talk about these practices, I know my effectiveness as a leader during the day. As a parent, it doesn’t matter where I am. I’m effective when I am fully there and I am in observation, curiosity, and self-compassion. The other thing we’ve learned from the Compassion Lab is the inner voice, the inner critic of most of the people I speak with is so incredibly harsh that it does not need to be.
In the lab, between speakers, we do cohorts of sessions on how to manage your energy. To leader-led practices and meditations, what we are attempting to do is allow into the space, as we’ve talked about being an inquiry and being open, to be on the journey together, to not be perfect and not have it all figured out, but to explore what’s happening on the inside so that you can hone your game on the outside.
That is such a shift. I remember at a certain point in my early twenties, I was in a sales job and there was a desire to create pressure cooker situations to think that was going to create more sales or bigger motivation. It’s so interesting what you say about the inner critic that comes up because I coach on that all day long with people. It’s amazing even to hear you talking with such openness about that because a lot of people from the outside would look and say, “She’s got it all together. She doesn’t have that inner critic,” but we do all have that.
That’s already a big shift to think about. That inner critic is counter-motivational. It is not going to push me farther or make me more successful but something else will, which is recognizing. We’re all putting something together, getting quiet, “What are my skills and what can I bring forward in this moment?” That’s a huge corporate cultural shift.
It’s so freeing when you don’t have to be perfect and have it all together. To your story, I worked for someone many years ago who had a belief that if he just put you down, you would then rise up and be tougher if he pointed out everything you were doing wrong. It was not a fun experience, but you realize that. When we get to these conversations in the lab, there’s a vulnerability of, “We’re all trying to figure this out.” You can go ahead and breathe like it’s okay because we will figure it out together.
It’s so freeing when you don’t have to be perfect and have it all together.
When the inner critic speaks and when imposter syndrome is at work, you are far less effective. We talk about the growth mindset a lot at Coke. This mindset of, “If I’m truly pushing, if I’m truly trying something new, likely I’ll fail but that’s okay because I’m going to learn from it. I’m going to keep moving forward.” It’s such a more creative, comfortable, and fun space to live in.
I’m going to use your word now. How are people finding the work they’re doing useful? What stories are they telling? What things are happening in the organization that say, “This is making a difference?”
I don’t know if I have a specific story. I’ll share a couple of things. This is a grassroots program and it’s available to anyone who finds it. We market it and people share invites. It’s been growing over time. In a corporate setting, what we often want to do is say, “What’s the return on investment? What are the metrics? How do we measure this?” That’s what we typically do. One of the things I have surrendered to in this program is to know that if the energy is flowing to be of service in this way that I don’t need to even know, it’s out there in service and I just have to trust that it’s doing what it needs to do.
There’s not one story but there are two things I’ll share. I get emails all the time from people saying, “Thank you for creating the space. That particular session was so helpful. It changed the way I think.” One time I was at a business dinner with one of my associates. A gentleman was like, “I got to tell you, when you first brought this the lab up, I was like, ‘What is this touchy-feely thing?’ It was like, it’s all they’ve got.” I got to tell you. I started going to a few of them. I had some realizations and he totally opened up. It helped him but he was so resistant to doing it. Things like that are usually how I know that I need to keep being in this type of service.
Kathy, you spoke a little bit about what you care about and your vision, but what made you plant the seed or want to do this in the first place? What was that origin story?
I’ve been on this journey for so long myself. We all have plot twists. When I was 29, I had a real severe health issue and almost died. I was on disability for three months and it was a crazy challenging time. Right after that event, I started studying mind and body. I started trying to understand how I got so sick. What happened to me? What was physical and emotional? Trying to figure out how this not happen again. How did this derail?
I was on that journey for so many years that it became a huge part of who I am. In the workforce, that happened to me largely because I wasn’t in touch with what was happening. I didn’t want it to happen to other people. In my leadership, I’ve always talked about this dynamic of how you thrive, have this aligned life, and practice self-care. Many of us don’t and life ends up telling us that it’s not going to work because we lose a relationship, our health, or something goes wrong.
It’s been a part of me for so many years. I was doing other things like the CMO Summit and other creative endeavors. The timing and the environment were right. If you talked about things like presence, meditation, and even breathing years ago, people weren’t in the business space open to bring that in but now they are.
COVID was a big turning point of that because COVID was a collective trauma. There was a lot that changed the way people were thinking and reflecting about their lives. Suddenly, that opened up the space that we are not these segmented people. We go to work then we’re home. We are whole beings that need to respond to life in all kinds of ways and spaces. That’s why it emerged at the time that it did.
We are not these segmented people, where we go to work and then home. We are whole beings that need to respond to life in all kinds of ways and in all kinds of spaces.
This idea of now being the right time, I do think this is the right time for these kinds of things. You spoke earlier about the guy who was touchy-feely and had a little resistance. It’s on both sides but I want to loop back to something you said earlier about the shift in the idea that it used to put some focus and attention to the physical body in a big way like, “Are you exercising every day? This is what self-care looks like.”
Now self-care is getting much larger and encompassing a much more holistic view. There’s a phrase that comes up all the time with me in coaching. People ask, “I need a better work-life balance.” Even that gets looked at so narrowly. What you’re talking about is opening that way out. I’m curious if there are some of the projects that you’re doing at the Compassion Lab and if there are certain things being put into place at Coca-Cola for people to get into that space.
Work-life balance has been spoken about for so long but it’s work-life integration. I don’t even want to separate work in life. It’s just life harmony. What are you doing? We have many roles. We are leaders, parents, friends, caretakers, and creative artists. It shows up at work and at home. The more we compartmentalize and create this linear reality, we limit ourselves and how we can show up in all these spaces.
That is the conversation. What values do you carry? What type of life do you want to live? When are you in alignment and out of alignment? There are many components to the lab from sessions where we practice together to speakers coming in. One of the things we’re piloting is a six-month cohort where people sign up. It’s not just a drop but you say, “I want to go on the journey.” It is about managing your energy, being in tune without alignment, and in the reflection of, “Am I showing up in a way that’s aligned?”
What I love about this program is that we’re piloting and we’re going to learn if it creates more meaningful changes. It’s wonderful to go to a speaker. It’s wonderful to drop into a session. Those are good. It’s something you shouldn’t do but oftentimes, we have grooves that are hard to change if we are not on a journey to look at them over a longer period of time. This is something that launched. It’s going to go through October 2023 and I’ll be happy to share what we learn because there’s a lot of possibilities in what we’re doing.
We would love to learn from that because cohort experiences, bringing people, and tapping into the collective wisdom is always a good way to explore and be in that curiosity. Something got my attention as you were talking about the different roles that we hold. I was curious to know who is Kathy as a creative artist.
Whenever we’re having one-on-ones, I’m always like, “Where did she get that from?”
You said it, so I got curious. I want to know.
When we think of being an artist, we think, “I paint. I make music,” or something that you would consider in the art space but there’s artistry everywhere. I’ve never used this language except it’s emerging in this conversation as a leadership artist. I’m so passionate about raising leadership consciousness because I believe a conscious leader has a ripple effect on everyone that they encounter.
We’re all leaders in our own right. To bring artistry to that is to be able to go back to the observation. Take a step back and say, “What am I creating? What is the picture I’m creating? Does it have a melody? Does it have a texture? Is it beautiful? Is it congruent? Is it messy and crazy?” I don’t know. As I said, I’m exploring this with you.
Doing the lab and the summit that I did for years, which was an event-based program, has allowed personal expression to come in. By the way, it’s not just me. It’s usually co-created by others and being open to what you can receive. You said it. I don’t need even tell you when you are in a cohort, in a community, or in a company. You’re always receiving information and you co-create. You make things together. No one’s doing this by themselves.
When I think about corporations, I frequently have an image of a mountain with one person at the top. As I’m listening to you, the image that comes up for me. It’s much more flattened and horizontal as a flowing and moving marketplace with this exchange of ideas, talents, and input. It’s a nice image.
Honestly, people misunderstand. I did a project back in 2012 where I interviewed a bunch of mission-based entrepreneurial companies. Think like a Warby Parker or Charity: Water, where they existed on a mission to change the world. They were typically smaller. There was such fire in the belly of the people who worked there because they wanted to change the world.
The scope of my project was to say, “How do we create more intrapreneurship, versus entre, into a big company?” I have to give Coke credit, whether it was a summit or the lab. When the idea is brought forth from us, not from the person on top of the mountain, they welcome it in and say, “What is your expression? What can you bring to our community to make us better? Please bring it forth.” Nobody said to me, “I need to know what your ROI is and how this is going to work.”
People intuitively knew that it was right the minute you help the ecosystem, then we’re all going to grow together, so you know that it’s going in the right place. Coke’s been very open to that. People sometimes look at big corporations negatively, like, “The big companies.” Big companies are all made of amazing people who are artists in their own right, who care, who collaborate, and who are kind. I can tell you, we had a loss. We had a failure in one of our business dynamics and I had to report it.
There was an issue that happened with my team where we didn’t win the day on something. I shared it with my leadership team and the pouring out of support of, “How do we help the leader of this team? We know they did everything they could. We win and we lose together.” There was so much humanity in the rallying around. It inspired me and that is a truth of what happens inside functional companies. I’m sure there are environments that aren’t but when you have a good thing going, it’s quite beautiful.
It’s making me think of also the energy, how you set the tone as a leader, how you show up, how you even communicate things authentically and truthfully, and also, how you hold the intention. There’s something also about the right timing or that right moment when you make the ask. I am wondering as we come to a close of our time together, what is a question that you’re at this moment, in this time in your life harmony, as you said? Is there something you’re working with?
When it comes to this internal journey of personal growth and awareness, I feel like there’s always something I’m working with. Usually, it’s not just one question but it’s an entire inquiry of, “Am I showing up aligned to the values that I want to be? Am I keeping my ego in check? Am I in the greatest service that I can possibly be in?”
I finished reading this beautiful book, From Strength to Strength. It talks about the differences between our younger selves and the way our intelligence works versus, to use the terms of the book, the crystallized wisdom and intelligence of the latter part of your journey. For me, I’m in the part of my journey of how to be of the greatest service.
How do I stay most aware of where the impact of that service can be the most effective? Including in my personal life as my kids head off to college, I’m in a season of potential change. The need to be that observer, be aware of my practices, and reevaluate my values is more important now than ever so that I stay on a trajectory of greater joy and peace as I move forward.
That’s a good ending. We all want to stay on a trajectory of joy and peace. Thank you, Kathy, for being with us and for sharing the space.
I want to thank you again for the journey of eco-coaching, truly. We went on so many different twists and turns in that discourse. There were times that I had to step back and think about how I was showing up and how you were framing what we could be in the possibilities of how we could all create together. I want you to know how much you helped me get to this place of crystallization, and how to be in the practices we’ve talked about in this conversation because that’s what your program does. It addresses this whole beautiful person who is trying to figure out how to be of service to the world. I want to thank you for all that you’ve taught me.
That’s great to hear. Thank you, Kathy.
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About Kathy Twells
As Senior Vice President, West Region at The Coca-Cola Company Katherine Twells currently leads a multi-million dollar business cultivating innovation and mutual growth for Coca-Cola’s customer partners. She has been with The Coca-Cola Company for 34 years serving in diverse positions of responsibility & geography and has served in leadership for over 25 years.
Profiled in Marcus Buckingham’s bestseller “Go Put Your Strengths to Work” as well as the 2009 college textbook titled “Sales Management” by Robert Effermeyer, she is a passionate student of leadership and organizational culture. She has interviewed over 25 mission based visionary organizations to identify ways to bring entrepreneurial thinking into large corporate structures.
Katherine is former co-chair of the Chapters committee for The Coca-Cola Women’s Forum, an inaugural member of the Women’s Advisory Council and The Coca-Cola Leadership Advisory Team. She is a former board member of The American Red Cross and NATO Cinema Foundation.
She served as architect and host of the Coca-Cola CMO Leadership Summit from 2011-2019 to provide a source of connection and community among business leaders. In 2021 she launched The Coca-Cola Compassion Lab as a way to promote emotional agility and mental well-being in the workplace. She hosts The Compassion Lab Podcast to explore the power of conscious leadership and the interconnectivity of all things.
She lives in Long Beach with her 17 year old twin boys.