8. Building Bridges with Brian Kelly

California is home to some of the largest and most complex transportation projects in America. In this episode, Brian Kelly, CEO of California’s High-Speed Rail Authority, shares how he builds incredible teams to get difficult projects like the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and California’s High-Speed Rail back on track.

Transcript

David Morris  00:10

Welcome to the eighth episode of the HiPER Leadership Podcast. I am your host, David Morris, CEO and founder of HiPER Solutions. At HiPER Solutions, our mission is to inspire and activate high-impact leaders to deliver positive change. Leaders today are faced with unprecedented change, and yet even the best leaders have had to toss out their standard playbook and think outside the box. It was with this in mind, we started the HiPER Leadership Podcast earlier this year. When we talk about high-impact leadership or as we call it, HiPERs, we really talk about a mindset for driving outstanding results. And today, my guest is Brian Kelly, CEO of California's High-Speed Rail Authority. Now, regardless of your opinion on California's highly political high-speed train, one thing is for sure, and that is Brian has managed to transform the culture at the Authority across the last couple years, really rally a team that has truly committed to deliver a successful project. We're gonna really unpack a key trait that Brian's used across his career. With that, I would like to welcome you, Brian.

Brian Kelly  01:23

Thank you, David. I'm happy to be here. I look forward to the conversation. It's very exciting.

David Morris  01:28

Brian, what was it? I mean, when you got the tap on the shoulder, who was it from and and was there reluctancy even in taking on this assignment?

Brian Kelly  01:37

Yes, the tap on the shoulder came from a prior governor here in California, Jerry Brown, who was facing the end of his last term as governor, and the California High-Speed Rail Authority had recently departed ways with its prior Chief Executive Officer and the Brown administration was looking for the next one. I had served the governor as the Secretary of Transportation. In that capacity, we'd had some successes in other areas, you know, expanding driver's licenses to a million, one million and a half non-documented folks who did not have an ability to get a driver's license before we had passed an historic investment package in transportation, known as SB1, and certainly on the policy, and we were both vibrant and key supporters of advancing High-Speed Rail, and the governor asked me one day if I'd consider taking the job, and certainly I knew the capacity of the organization, I knew the challenges that were before it, and I did have some hesitancy, but I'll tell you, in my line of work, the background I have in public policy, you know, when a governor asks you to take on something, you don't want to say no. And I also care deeply about the mission of the organization and so, I did ultimately say yes, and I’ve now been here just over two years, and while we haven't solved everything yet, I do like the direction we're heading and I am excited to be here.

David Morris  03:00

Wonderful. Well, going back to earlier in your career, what you’ve focused on with California infrastructure and other stuff in transportation included the Bay Bridge: give us some juicy stuff, what it was like as we think about your HiPER Leadership and specifically the leadership around being able to develop that loyalty with your team, and you know, the whole ‘word is your bond’ theme. What was sort of the juiciest example you got on the big challenge with the Bay Bridge and how you had to bring a team together to go pull that off?

Brian Kelly  03:36

Well, I think the biggest challenge with the Bay Bridge, and the biggest lesson that I took from, from that experience was the value of telling folks like it is, and what I mean by that is, every infrastructure project/mega-project has, has challenges. And I think people expect that. I think anybody at home who has ever renovated a house or remodeled a room or put a new roof on. You always come across challenges and you got to get past those. And I think one of the big things that happened with the Bay Bridge that I took a great learning lesson from was in 2004 during the the Schwarzenegger administration, they came to the legislature, I was staffing a senator from the Bay Area then, but they came to the legislature and, and announced that they needed billions more dollars for the bridge, but nobody in the legislature, no policymakers understood what went into that; why that was the case because there was no clear communication on what was going on before this big ask was just dumped on the legislature with only three or four weeks left in session. We paused in the legislature we we performed an audit on the program, and then we used the interim period between sessions to really think about how do we want to approach this, nobody was going to go backwards on getting the bridge done. We wanted it to get to get it completed. We wanted to save bridge to be in place, but we had to understand what the challenges were and what we had to do going forward to make sure that those challenges are understood and that we have a solution that makes sense. Ultimately, we performed an audit, we got a better sense of what the issues were, we put into place new oversight of the project, more common and regular reporting on the status of the project, and while I'd got more money that only came with management reform, we did both of those things on the bridge. And I'll tell you in 2005, we put in a management reform process, we put in a new budget required greater transparency on the project. And since those things went into place, between that time and the opening of the bridge in 2013, it actually stayed on budget and on schedule from that point forward. So, there was a great learning lesson and the other the other part that was just part of that even after 2005, I did learn that, you know, these projects always have challenges, on the construction site things will happen that aren't always what you want to have happen. And the important thing is to communicate, both internally and externally: “This has happened, here's what we're going to do about it. And we're going to make sure that we manage this and mitigate the issues” so that when we move forward, and people will understand both what the challenge is, and what we're bringing to it to make sure it's remedied. And through that, I think you get greater trust in what you're doing. And so, the Bay Bridge to me was the ultimate experience in being transparent. Making sure that you trust the people, the voters, policymakers enough that you're going to tell them, “Here is my challenge. Here's what I'm proposing to do about it.” And I think it goes a long way, when you're just telling them as you're confronting it: “This is what we're going through. And here's what we propose to do.” And I think they get invested in the solution as well. So that was really the biggest learning lesson I took from the Bay Bridge.

David Morris  06:55

Yeah, and you know, we had followed that over the time, and I think one of the things that the audience may not have full appreciation for is the struggle in your own mind. Because it's so easy to just paint a great picture or come up with excuses. And I'm just sort of curious what goes on in your mind as you just don't want there to be a surprise, your management, do you have to run scenarios through your mind or what's going on to be able to avoid having to keep backtracking down the road?

Brian Kelly  07:31

I think you know, the thing here again, is we want to make sure that communication is king and you got to have a culture where people can feel like they can express to you problems, issues. You have to be able to have a culture, where those things can come up: you can formulate a strategy to deal with them. And again, I really believe firmly and I took this again, from the Bay Bridge experience. I really believe firmly that most people, when they consider a major infrastructure project of any kind, they expect there are going to be challenges, they absolutely expect it. They know you're going to run into things on a major construction project. And what's key is that you are, you are talking to them about it, you are telling them what those are, and you're formulating answers to those those problems. So, I guess what went through my mind with various challenges (that) would come up on the Bay Bridge, there were elements where I was concerned, do we have the right oversight in place? If we don't, what do we need to do to improve that? We did some work on that when I was in the legislature, and more than anything, and this had to do with how we talk to the media about it and others. I did want our best people, our best subject matter experts to be our spokespeople on this. There's a there's an old adage that you know, you don't want engineers to be your your PR people, but I'll tell you I prefer and and thought it served us well on the bridge that those who knew the most were the ones who could explain what challenges were in front of us and what we're doing about them. I, I put a lot of value in that expertise. And so again, to me, it was setting this culture where problems can come up, solutions can be discussed, input is taken from all and then we use our best people to communicate what the issues are and what we're going to do about them.

David Morris  09:31

And ultimately the magnitude of this was what? How large was this expansion of the bridge?

Brian Kelly  09:37

Well, the, you know, the bridge itself was the entire replacement of the Eastern span, which was the original bridge was built back in 1936 and had lasted until really 1989 with the Loma Prieta earthquake. A section of that bridge collapsed and folks realized it wasn't up to today's seismic safety standards. So, the entirety of that Eastern span ended up costing on the order of roughly $6.4 billion for the replacing all of it from Oakland to what's called Yerba Buena Island/Treasure Island in the middle of the bay, but it is absolutely up to the highest seismic standards in the world. It is a unique structure, this self-anchor suspension bridge. It's beautiful at nighttime it looks cathedral-like when you're driving under it, but it is it is state of the art safety, state of the art seismic technologies. And as I used to tell the former governor, the best engineers in the world are telling us it's safe. And it's the right bridge for the right time. At the end of the day, I'm awfully proud it's there.

David Morris  10:37

In relative to the schedule it got done when?

Brian Kelly  10:40 

Well, it's interesting. When when we first started the work, it was expected to be done, you know, years earlier and for a lot less money, but I'll tell you, that's another learning lesson there, when it comes to major infrastructure projects. You know, you should neither estimate schedule [n]or cost when you're still in the early stages of environmental clearance, you got to get through those things, you got to bring design forward further, you got to get permits in hand and then you can start talking about what costs are going to be. And so, at the end of the day, that ended up being a 20-year project in terms of when it started to when it ended. But I'll tell you when we reformed the management, and we put in place a new budget in 2005, from that point forward, it ended up coming in on that schedule that was adopted in '05. And just under the budget that was adopted at '05 when we opened it in 2013.

David Morris  11:34

Phenomenal, see the effort I have to go into to get the success story from Brian. It is amazing when you actually stepped in and how that was accomplished. What I would like to do is fast forward a moment to the challenge at hand with High-Speed Rail and then a rewind to something you personally just went through yourself, which I think sets you up with a level of drive that process probably would not have happened otherwise, just for the audience, what are the numbers behind this in terms of what's been spent, what would be spent, and the magnitude of this, you know, that the United States has never seen before from an infrastructure project.

Brian Kelly  12:15

This is the largest and really the most sustainable and probably the greenest transportation project of this kind or scope anywhere in the country and maybe even in the world. Ultimately, phase one of this project is from San Francisco to Los Angeles and further south into Anaheim. And that's roughly a 520-mile segment of dedicated High-Speed Rail service, trains that can operate, are designed to operate at speeds up to 220 miles per hour. It's transformative in many ways. One way it's very transformative is if you think about it today, if you drive a car from San Francisco down to Los Angeles, that's roughly a seven or eight hour car trip. If you take today's passenger rail service from the LA basin to the Bay Area, it's a once a day opportunity and it's about a 12- or 13-hour rail trip. What we want to do is offer that same rail trip, High-Speed Rail, in less than three hours between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Anaheim. So, in that sense, it's very transformative. It's also transformative in how it connects communities in California. Rather than going from taking I-5 for example, and avoiding all of the Central Valley cities to get down to the Central Valley, the train, High-Speed Rail was designed to connect the Central Valley communities with the coastal communities so that you're coming out of the Bay Area region and hitting the series of cities that are really the heart and soul of the Central Valley before you cut back out and go to the coastal regions in Southern California. And then, this way it connects the coastal areas with the economy and the vibrancy of the Central Valley that really has not been done, typically, before in our transportation history. It's not cheap; the entirety of the project will cost somewhere between $85 and $95 billion to go between San Francisco and Los Angeles and Anaheim. And right now, we have in hand, between now and 2030, we estimate a budget of between $21 and $23 billion. That's enough to enable us to get a first operating segment done. We're planning in the Central Valley where construction has started. To date, we are in construction on 119 miles in the Central Valley. And we are clearing environmentally, all of that phase one from San Francisco all the way to LA and Anaheim. And so when once that's clear, then you can expand that design work you can identify right away, get the utilities identified that need to be moved and you can really prep for construction and we will need more money to complete the construction, but we've got funding now again, to clear all the environmental work from San Francisco to LA and Anaheim, and get an initial segment, operating segment going in the valley between 119 and 171 miles. That's where it stands right now, we've we've been able to increase the number of workers at our construction site from about 215 at the beginning of 2019, to now we have over 1000 per week out there on the construction sites, our expenditure rate on getting that capital work done is quadrupled in the last 18 months or so. And we're really moving forward quickly on the on the environmental work from LA to San Francisco. There's a lot to do. There's a lot of challenges. There's certainly funding challenges, but we are getting a pace that I start to like here about the performance and delivery that we haven't seen in a while and we're we're moving forward.

David Morris  15:50

Terrific. You know, as we go back, Brian, to the Bay Bridge and your success when you got involved in being able to deliver this effectively on time on budget from once you got involved, you recently went through a health scare and experience, and what I am curious about this health experience is how you came out of it renewed in your mind on the leadership trait, that you were going to triple down on most to be able to accomplish this gargantuan mission ahead.

Brian Kelly  16:26

Yeah, it was. It was tough in in the fall of 2018, just before I had been in this job, I guess less than a year in this position, High-Speed Rail and you know, certainly I came here knowing of the of challenges the project had had cost and schedule issues that we were just beginning to talk about once I got here and in 2018, and then that fall, I had a health scare that, you know, started out is what I thought was like kind of a sinus infection and ultimately had started to have trouble talking and double-vision, tingling in my hands and feet: didn't realize that it was something much more serious. I had an autoimmune disorder called Guillain-Barré syndrome or GBS. And in some patients, this can cause paralysis for 11 or 12 months or even longer for years before they start to come back. My case was a little bit different; I had a variant that was still serious. I didn't have the full paralysis issues, but I, I did suffer respiratory failure. And I ended up spending five weeks in an ICU unit and a couple of weeks on a ventilator. There was certainly a period of time during that episode when I thought, you know, my time was, was over and, and that was an extremely profound experience. And so, five weeks in the ICU and another two weeks in rehabilitation to come out of that. It does change your perspective on things and a couple of things that really, I found is one, I got a much, much greater appreciation for my human relationships. And what I just mean by that, I think a greater sense of appreciation for people who were going out of their way to express support to me and my family and messages that you just don't get, expressions that you just don't get, unless you're in some kind of a dire circumstance like that, I think. But people tell you how they really feel. And that was a very profound experience for me, made me value human relationships in a much greater way and I think gave me a much greater sense of empathy and compassion for people. And even in the struggles that we are all going through here to move this challenging project forward. I value so much the people here who are giving of themselves to take time on a difficult project, but to to push forward forward on the mission because we think it's right for California's future, we think it's the right thing to do to move toward a rail that is non-diesel, electrified, and clean and can cut travel times and improve our environment while we improve our economy, become one of the great economic powers like many others that have High-Speed Rail, we see that vision is good for the state of California. And so, coming in out of out of that experience, I valued team, I valued human relationships, greater empathy and compassion for what we're all trying to achieve and what we're going through, the sacrifices were making to do that, but also, I think, I doubled down on the mission, realization that life is short, and I want to spend my time doing things that I think are important. Now I spent most of my professional career doing transportation policy, first in the legislature, then in the executive branch for Governor Brown and now here, I really am just dedicated to the mission and feel so good about the people I work with trying to get this done. And that mission is carving out a future for transportation in California that really cuts travel times, improves the environment and expands our economy. And those are, those are the things that I came out of that experience just feeling like, yeah, I really do want to double down on my efforts here, because it would be great to to get this done. It'd be great to give a sense of inevitability on the success of this project. And I think that profound experience gave me more drive, more compassion and more empathy toward toward getting this done.

David Morris  20:35

Yeah, well, clearly the mission orientation is what sets you apart as a...as a HiPER leader. And even when we were having some recent conversations, and I said, “Who's the most important stakeholder on your mind that you need the advocacy firm, etc.?” You went right to the everyday Californian which puts clearly mission right there. My question is going through that health situation, which is really monumental, and reflecting back to how you pulled off Bay Bridge way back when, what would you say the leadership quality that you are going to just triple down on the one that you would not have even maybe been as aware of, that you really believe could be the thing that gets all these stakeholders, the environmental, Governor, legislature, the public, all these are going to be critical to pull this thing off. What are you going to triple down on so we, the audience, can really be there and observe what happens over the next year?

Brian Kelly  21:34

I think there are there are two key things here. One is integrity. And what I mean by that is when we share with folks what our challenges are, those are what our challenges are. And as I said, I sort of came out of that Bay Bridge experience with a great understanding that people do expect there to be challenges. They want to know what those are and how you're going to address them. And so being very transparent about what we're trying to do is something we must do and just telling folks, this is what it is. These are the challenges that you can take to the bank that were given to you, that we're giving it to you straight. And I think that that's really important, you have to re-establish that trust. The second part is just double downing and an emphasis on performance. What I mean by that is, I think for a number of years, before I got here at the authority, there were challenges that were going on, on the project in early construction, the organization was still finding itself not quite what it needed to be to execute. And we've really, in a short amount of time tried to turn that. We have not finished, this is still a work in progress, and we will always be evolving. It is an evolution of sorts, to get an organization where it where it needs to be. And, of course, its challenges always change over time as dynamic, but I am I feeling very good about what we are now able to do on the performance side. We are finally after a long, sort of stagnant period, we are moving forward on clearing environmental processes between San Francisco and Los Angeles. We are expanding our construction sites, we're putting more Californians to work. We've gone from 200 workers dispatched to the job sites to more than 1000 per week now. Overall, 4000 construction workers have been sent out to this, this construction site in the Central Valley where we're underway right now. And so, it's just this effort to perform, deliver and you start to string together a series of small successes, you gain credibility, and through that work over time, you gain trust. And so, I think if you're clear with people in what you're doing, you're clear with them what the challenges are and you're showing them that you are delivering and you are performing little by little, it starts to, over time, snowball into a sense that people have that, “Yeah, they are on the right track, that is moving in the right direction, that is good policy for California” and ultimately, that vision of moving people from the Bay Area to LA or LA to the Bay Area in less than three hours is the right vision for California and a cleaner way to transport people around the state. I think those are the things that that I'm focused on. And those are the things that will be how we ultimately succeed here.

David Morris  24:20

It's really emerging, brutal honesty, just brutal honesty on all sides. I think Winston Churchill, I think about the approach he used, and you're just dealing with too many different constituencies not to use that. It's much easier said than done. Clearly, you know, you had a lot of time to hone that at Bay Bridge. As we think about brutal honesty in general. Not just integrity, but extreme integrity and how you proactively get all this stuff out there what advice you have for the audience. You know, if you're a governor, or you're a chairman of a fortune 100 company, you're bringing in a CEO to run one of your divisions, what do you think some of the best ways to really qualify for this in advance?

Brian Kelly  25:07

I personally like to bring in folks who have a sense of mission that is bigger than themselves. I think in organizations, there's a lot of ways to motivate people and performance. And you can certainly do it with you know, compensation or incentives or all of these different things. Those aren't all easily available to us in government. What I have appreciated very much about what I've seen, in particularly with people who get into public service, there is often a sense of trying to do something bigger than yourself, you know, the idea that the the project or the mission is, is not about me or now but it's about many other people, the future, and and the state and the betterment of the state. And I can get a sense from people when I'm recruiting somebody to come in about what motivates them. I like people who don't look at challenges as or risk as the things to avoid, but things to embrace and to try to use those things to figure out creative solutions and ways to bring forward the mission and realize that these challenges are part of getting there. There's that old adage, right, nothing worth doing is easy. And certainly, there's nothing easy here. We have challenges every day in the field. We have challenges politically all over the place, whether it's our federal partner or challenges through our legislative partners, we have to work through those but it's all part of ultimately delivering on this mission. And this mission is is is why we're here. It's what drives us. I do believe most of my executive team, all my executive team who I've been able to bring in in my short amount of time here are our people like that, they're here to do something bigger than themselves. And I think that is the kind of people who need to be in this business. And I just think I, you know, I think whether it's a company or or public service, it doesn't really matter, because I think even companies today have a role in achieving things broader than just the company bottom line, I actually think there is a role in them being good citizens, good public partners. And I think a lot of folks buy into that value. And I think a lot of folks want to go to work, not just for a paycheck, but also because they want to achieve something, want to get satisfaction out of what they're putting into this. And I think you can find that as you recruit what motivates people and for me, again, it's the people who are focused on achieving something bigger than themselves.

David Morris  27:44

Terrific. Well, again, one thing the audience may not have a full appreciation for, as we've just seen over the years, how underpolitical you are, and you know, you going out of your way to really put these commitments out there to the public and being really brutally honest, as opposed to just within the own team, it just seems like you're doing more and more of that. And we hope you'll continue to triple down on it.

Brian Kelly  28:09

There there just is little value to no value in being insular. I think it's it's much better to be transparent: to lay out what's in front of you. And I think through that you can, you can, it's easier to get folks who are invested in helping you succeed. And I think, so I think that kind of honesty, that kind of transparency is necessary to to ultimately be successful. 

David Morris

Thank you, Brian. 

Brian Kelly

Thank you, David. I appreciate this interview. I really, really enjoyed this time. Thank you.

David Morris  28:42

And thank you to all of our HiPER Leadership listeners. This would not be possible without you. Stay tuned for our final episodes for this season as we cover the distinct HiPER trait of having a consistent pattern of inconsistency. If you haven't done so already, please subscribe to the HiPER Leadership podcasts on Apple podcasts. And, as you're putting together a game changing team to pull off the impossible, come learn more about us at hipersolutions.com