032: Slow Down to Speed Up: Leading Through Crisis and Change (with Jennifer Brogdon)

In this episode of The Co-op Heroes Podcast, we sit down with Jennifer Brogdon, CEO and General Manager of Upper Cumberland EMC, recorded live at the Tennessee Electric Cooperative Association meeting in Florence, Alabama. Jennifer's story is one of family roots, hard-won trust, and learning to lead through a crisis before she'd even settled into the job. Jennifer grew up watching her uncle become an electrical engineer and her grandfather work as a lineman, and she followed a similar path into TVA, where she spent 28 years moving through engineering, marketing, and eventually regulatory oversight of local power companies. That last role taught her how to be both a help and a hard conversation, and it built the relationships that would later pull her into a co-op CEO seat. Six weeks into the job, one of the worst ice storms in the co-op's history knocked out power to a third of its members. Jennifer walked through what it took to lead a team through repeated freeze and collapse cycles, why communicating constantly with members mattered as much as restoring the lines, and how that storm exposed a system still run on paper lists and yellow post-its. What followed was a lesson in change management that took nearly a year to get right, not because the solution was wrong, but because the people who had to live with it weren't part of choosing it. Jennifer talks about stalling a rollout, rebuilding trust with her district managers, and the moment a visit to a neighboring co-op turned resistance into buy-in. Featured topics: - Coming up through TVA and the pull toward co-op leadership Leading a team through a week-long ice storm crisis six weeks into the role - Why the "perfect" solution failed and what got the outage management system finally adopted - The role of story and peer relationships in change management - Where AI, distributed generation, and standardization are taking the grid over the next decade Jennifer's outlook on where cooperatives are headed treats today's supply chain pressure and rising demand as an opening rather than a threat, one where co-ops build new expertise instead of waiting for someone else to solve it for them. This is a conversation about what it looks like to lead through the moment nobody trained you for, and come out the other side with a better system and a stronger team.