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Joan Morehead
Visualization is Key
Joan Morehead joined Edward Rose & Sons in 2021 as its Chief Human Resource Officer and is excited to be part of a highly collaborative team.
Her focus is to promote actions that create an environment of integrity and trust to build a productive and healthy workplace.
During her career she has worked for organizations across several industries, including health care, retail, automotive, human services, education, construction, and property management.
Culture advancement has been and continues to be a top priority. Her favorite thing to do is remain curious and ask the question, “Why do you work here and what keeps you here?” Want to know what she hears? Ask her.
Joan has earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Kendall College of Design and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She studied with the Gallup Organization, Toyota University and Peking University as part of her master’s degree experience.
She treasures time with her family traveling, gardening, and creating art pieces for others to enjoy. Joan considers her family and friends her greatest treasures.
More from Joan…
Joan has seen how visualization can impact those she works with. In her experience, people weren’t always visual learners.
“…Early in my life, I was a tutor for adult literacy. When I went through the program, they talked about how in the in America in the 30s and 40s, many of us were audible learners. You think about the communication tools that were available at that point in time was radio. Then, as the computer and the TV introduced itself into society, we became a higher majority of visual learners. So today about 65% of the US are visual learners. Now when you look at the difference between adults and children in the K-6 arena, the earlier children are 80% visual learners. We learn to adapt from that pictorial world into evolving and accepting other types of media or information.
But when you can put a picture in front of somebody, then it creates a communication opportunity as well. People connect with pictures. So when I was doing consulting, and trying to sell HR services, it was really difficult to talk through people couldn’t visualize it. So, I found myself drawing this seven piece, pizza in front of people. And they said, ‘Oh, now I get it.’
They could see how the cycle repeats. How you can get stuck in a certain stage. That’s why I worked with the team I was at with at the time to create a colorful imagery that people could recall and it really helped to sell the services. I’m not selling today inside of my organization to get customers, but I am selling principles and ideas. I do have the opportunity for people I work with to help them engage in the concepts that we’re trying to talk about to help the organization move forward. And, you know, an HR has been we came out of the days of personnel which was very much a gatekeeper type of role. We can’t afford to do that anymore and we don’t have to because there’s electronic support for us to do that gatekeeping stuff that we can spend our time then not doing things, but being with people and interacting and ask them the questions like a call I got early this morning. One of the people I work with currently said, Joan I’ve got some questions I want to ask you, they call me on my cell phone. And in today’s world, people have more access to each other. So that ability to communicate and have people understand each other is really, really important.”
