The Evolving Leader

Change From the Inside Out with Scott Shute

• Scott Shute • Season 6 • Episode 26

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In this episode of The Evolving Leader, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are in conversation with Scott Shute. Scott specialises in combining the practicalities of leading in the modern business world with the wisdom of ancient traditions to help individuals and companies be leaders in conscious business. His goal is for businesses to thrive financially while providing their customers long-term value and leaving employees feeling inspired and whole. When done consciously, work can be a part of the collective healing that needs to take place in the world.

Scott has been studying and practicing mindfulness and related wisdom teachings since he was thirteen years old, and teaching since he was in college. Scott started his career with twenty-five years of customer-oriented leadership and executive roles, culminating with three years leading Mindfulness and Compassion programs at LinkedIn. In 2021 his book ‘Full Body Yes, Change Your Work and Your World from the Inside Out’ was published and he now works as an executive coach, keynote speaker. In 2022 Scott formed ‘Changing Work’ which he describes as ‘creating a collective of conscious business practitioners to help elevate and amplify their work’.

Referenced during this episode:
‘Full Body Yes, Change Your Work and Your World from the Inside Out’

Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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Jean Gomes:

The idea of work life balance is based on a reality that no longer exists. We live in a digitally blended environment where work can permeate into every dimension of life outside of the nine to five, travel, weekends, holidays, and most worryingly sleep time. This pervasiveness of work sits at the root of why so many of us regardless of how wonderful our job might be, or burning out, or becoming resentful of its role in our lives. In this show, we talk to Scott chute, who takes us to a reimagining of work where our spiritual needs are met. Because we can operationalize tuning into our consciousness as a continuous act. Scott, who led this approach at LinkedIn gives us a deep and practical approach to being able to navigate this most challenging of shifts that we need to make to our mindset. If you're going to thrive in a world of rising demand, and increasing uncertainty, take a breath and tune in.

Scott Allender:

Hi, friends, welcome to the evolving leader, the show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to solve our greatest challenges. I'm Scott allander.

Jean Gomes:

And I'm Jean Gomes.

Scott Allender:

How are you feeling on this Friday, Mr. Gomes?

Jean Gomes:

Whew, it's been a long week and a long day. So I am feeling that natural, you know, slightly depleted but very energised by this conversation and really looking forward to it. How are you feeling? Scott?

Scott Allender:

I'm feeling Yeah, a little depleted as well. It's May cember, where my kids are in all the year and sort of wrapping up school kind of moments. And so there's lots of carting them around, I'm their official, unpaid Uber driver. And I usually get just about the same notice, as an Uber driver, they like I need a ride right now. And you can wait in the parking lot until I'm done, because I'm gonna need a ride home as well. And so we're in that full mode. So I'm feeling a little tired and ready for that. But I'm also super excited about today, we're joined by somebody that I've had a chance to speak to a little bit offline before before us joining bid. And he's got a great story. And he's doing great work in the world. Because today we're joined by Scott chute, Scott was as he describes it, Mr. Corporate America on the outside, but on the inside, he was battling with the desire to allow his spiritual wisdom to have a voice in the boardroom. And this led to a transformational shift from Vice President of customer operations at LinkedIn, to its head of mindfulness and compassion programmes. And that's a story that I know we're both really keen to hear today. And in 2023, he founded changing work to curate the best practices of conscious business, and make them easily accessible to all through a community of coaches and practitioners. Scott, welcome to the evolving leader.

Scott Shute:

Hey, thanks very much for having me. Glad to be here.

Jean Gomes:

Scott, welcome to the show. How you feeling today,

Scott Shute:

I am feeling pretty good. I'm getting ready to go on a photography adventure. One of the things I do is landscape photography, so I'm about to go for a week by myself in Oregon and do Oregon coasts and waterfalls. all this good stuff there. That sounds amazing. Yeah. So let's see, if we can I let's just dive into your internal struggle that I mentioned at the beginning. So you felt you'd have this internal struggle, having climbed to the top of a career ladder in one of the world's most high profile and successful companies? Tell us tell us about that. Tell us about the struggle, Scott? Well, I think the struggle, and I don't think it's unique to me, for all of us is how do we be our true selves? How do we be a great person? How do we be

Unknown:

a humane and compassionate person and still be successful at work? And when I was a, you know, a middle manager, I looked up at all of the C suite in my current in that company, I was in all the VPs and I thought, Man, do you have to be a jackass to be a VP here? Because it sure seems like and I didn't, you know, I, that was only the second company I had worked for. So I didn't have that many data points. And it seemed true at that place. And I always wondered, like, what, how's this going to work? Like, and I struggled with this idea of, well, maybe I should leave corporate America. Right. Maybe I should leave corporate America and go do something that is more meaningful. Well, whether that's a nonprofit or in education or in something that felt more meaningful, but you know, I would kind of check in and my inner guidance would say, No, no, no, you're good Stay where you are, stay where you are, and eventually led me over time, you know, 15, and 20 years later, I was at LinkedIn. And I got to experience for me what I've seen as the best that I've seen a really amazing culture and really amazing leadership. Our CEO, Jeff Weiner, at the time, was talking about compassion. He was talking about mindfulness. And that was beautiful. It gave me this, it gives this comfort for me to be who I am, because who I am, is, I've had a spiritual practice, I've had a meditation or contemplation practice since I was 13. And so that's who I am. It's not like I found it later in life. I've been teaching since I was in college. It's a huge part of my life. It's just one that I never brought to work. And so I thought, well, maybe this is a place where I can bring that to work. So I started, I led one meditation session on a, you know, Thursday afternoon. And that first time, there was one dude there, besides me. And I'm sure he was just as terrified as I was, because you know, I never saw that guy again. But the next week, there were three, and then there were five, and then it was a regular thing. And then I became the executive sponsor of our mindfulness programme, we didn't have one, so we built one. And over time, three or four years later, it turned into a full time gig, I turned it into the head of mindfulness and compassion programmes, through another series of events. And so that's kind of the transition. So for me, now, my work is, how do you help people? How do I help people realise, they don't have to leave work, to feel whole. Right work can be a place, that is healing work can be a place that is inspirational work can be a place that fulfils us, and it usually doesn't.

Jean Gomes:

Before we get on to some of those bigger topics, we've talked to several researchers and practitioners and mindfulness. And I'm really interested to get into the specifics of how you experience a doctor there. You said, you started this as a teenager? What are the struggles you experience? Or still have in practising it? And more importantly, what how do you believe? What do you believe it enables in you? So

Unknown:

for me, well, so the caveat is everything I do at work, I find a bridge to be secular, and find a bridge to speak the language of people at work, right? I spent 20 years as an operations guy. And I want everything I do to be super practical. That said, for me, I would draw a distinction between mindfulness and contemplation. And so what I do in my personal world is more of a contemplation. And that is trying to find a direct connection to the divine. And so while mindfulness, in my limited opinion is about the mind and quieting the mind, in my personal practice, I want to go beyond that. I'm trying to develop a direct link between me as soul, which I would describe as you know, a spark of the divine and the broader, whatever you want to call it, the great mystery or God or the divine, or the universe, or whatever your term is for it. And so for me this this struggle, I don't know, I don't, I wouldn't describe it as a struggle. It's the best thing in my life. Right? There's, it's, the struggle is, you know, making time the struggle is pouring, doing it in the quote, right way instead of just kind of out of rote, because I've been doing this for 40 years. But but when I do it, it's beautiful. And what I think one of the things you asked me was, what does it allow for me in my life, it allows for me to have clarity. It means it allows me to have less stress, it allows me to have a calmer set of emotions, and allows me to deal with incredibly hard things in a very stable way.

Jean Gomes:

Now, the reason why I asked about the experience of doing it is because some of the people who have been, we've been talking to about this talk about the you know, the battle too, and they are coming at it from a mindfulness perspective, rather than your deeper approach. And that kind of like just that the minute by minute experience of trying to do it being a battle of keeping in that conscious space, and shutting out other thoughts and feelings and so on, and how that helps them to alleviate suffering and to be able to embrace things in a much bigger way. So I was really also asking it from like, what's it like? What? How do you experience that process? And, you know, sure been doing it for so long. What can you see the journey you've been through and doing that?

Unknown:

Oh, for sure. Well, let me tell a story. So at work, you know, experiment with different things. And one of the, you know, introduce people to different types of practices. Everything from just the quiet still observation to some gentle repetition to visualisation. And we were using a mantra one day, and I like the mantra whew, some people use on I like, who it's for me, it acts like a tuning fork to that deepest part of us, you know, and we sing it together for let's call it 15 minutes. And afterwards, you know, there's maybe eight or nine of us in a circle. And afterwards, I asked one of the new guys, I said, Well, what was your experience, like? And he says, yeah, it didn't work for me. I thought, oh, oh, geez. Okay. And internally, I'm like, you know, kind of starting to feel self conscious or like, Okay, well, let me get curious. So tell me more. Tell me more about your experience. And he says, I wasn't able to get my mind to go completely blank. And I win. But I said, Well, how do you feel? He goes, Oh, I feel great. I feel so light. I feel so like, energised, like, this is the most relaxed, this is the best I felt in 20 years, and we all laughed, I'm like, Dude, what do you think we're doing here? This is, this is not about making your mind go quiet. That's not the goal.

Jean Gomes:

Sorry, this is exactly why I'm asking you. Because so many people have got, like a set of assumptions about what this whole thing is about, then, even when they haven't done it, that might be preventing them from entering into the process. Exactly.

Unknown:

So in other best type that the most powerful type of practice you can do, the most scientifically proven, sort of the most powerful type of practice you can do is the one you'll actually do. Meaning, there's something for everyone, right? And each person can find something that fits them. Because we're all coming at it from a different consciousness, we're all coming at it from a different set of personality and experience. But whatever it is, that helps us attune, not attain, right, our whole life has been attaining. But whatever can help us attune for me to that deepest part of us. Right? And maybe it's sitting in quiet, maybe for me, it's going and doing photography in a beautiful spot and just being quiet. Maybe for some people, it's fishing on a still lake in the morning. But all of those things can also be done in a way that doesn't attune. You know, I can go do photography and be really anxious about getting the shot before the sunrise or I can be fishing and only thinking about the catch and not the quiet. I can be meditating, but I'm, you know, pondering what's my action list instead of really trying to attune. So part of it is the practice, and part of it is the quality of the practice part of it. It's the energy that we bring to it. So when we do that, when we have it with intention, then that's when the good stuff happens. Thank you.

Scott Allender:

I love that. What you said, the best practice you can do is the practice that you'll actually do. So you've touched on some of the benefits that you get from your practice. And you touched on that story. What's the why, for organisations? What's the why for bringing this kind of practice and that people will get from it?

Scott Shute:

Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I'm a business guy. I want to talk about ROI too.

Unknown:

I think about the history of work a little bit, but just to put things in context. So for 1000s of years, the work experience for workers was not great, right? You had kings and slaves in the old days, or maybe not so old days, you had indentured servants and land owners, all during the agrarian age. And then in the industrial age, imagine we're all sitting in a factory making the same thing. And still, as workers were probably seen as just cogs in the machine. But in today's world work looks like this. You know, we're all in our home offices, or we're connected digitally. And in the information age, especially a company like LinkedIn, or any company that is basically a digital company, we don't make products and our product is data, which means our product is people. I don't mean it so crassly, but the biggest resource the biggest asset that a company has is its people. So it makes sense You want your people to be at their best, right? You think about 100 years ago or whatever, if you're in a manufacturing environment, and the machine that made 70% of your revenue was not doing well, right? The machine is over there humming in the corner, but it's like clinking instead of humming. Would there be any debate at all? On the ROI of fixing the machine? Or doing maintenance on the machine? Would we say, Oh, this, this is our most important machine? Do you think we should keep it up? Like, do you think we should oil it or like, take care of it? Well, that's the same question. So as an example, at work, in bigger companies, they'll have a gym at work. And I'll ask, well, what's the ROI of the new rowing machine that the gym, you know, the head of the gym put in? Did you ask them? Like, No, you didn't ask them. Because what you know, instinctively is that when our employees are physically healthy, they're going to be better at work. Or when we drop the air conditioning, I'm going to speak in Fahrenheit. Sorry, for your UK listeners. If we dropped the air conditioning from 78 degrees down to 70, so people are more comfortable. Did we ask about the ROI for that? No, because we want our people to be at their best. Okay, so if you if you appreciate the gym, how many of your employees need for their job to run a six minute mile? And how many of your employees for their job need to benchpress twice their weight? You know, and people laugh, like, Okay, well, pretty much nobody. But how many of your employees? Would you like to be mentally focused, and emotionally stable? Oh, all of them. Right. And so I believe that we should be spending whatever we're spending on the gym, we should be spending 10x or 100x, that on mental well being. So I hope it's obvious. But if it's not, this all leads to when employees are at their best, they're more engaged, they're more creative, they're way more productive, you get better results for your customers, you get better results long term for the company. It's not that complicated.

Scott Allender:

So building on that you cite specifically research suggesting that companies that operate using basic conscious business practices were 14 100% more profitable than the s&p average. Can you unpack that a little bit more? Tell us why that is?

Scott Shute:

Sure. I'm citing the work of Raj Sisodia. And the team that wrote the books, Firms of Endearment and later conscious capitalism.

Unknown:

And at the root of it, you know, what does it mean, these practices? Well, I like to keep it simple. It's essentially when we solve for the whole instead of the part, or we solve for all of the stakeholders instead of just the shareholders. Meaning that when a company takes care of creates a balance creates a balance on purpose of its shareholders, yes, because we have to have a good business model. But also, its customers creating extraordinary value for customers over the long term. And its employees creating a great place to work for its employees, so employees can do their best work, when there's a balance between the three. This is when companies are the most successful, and they cite it as Yes, 14x or 14 100%, more profitable than the s&p average. And if we break it down into why I like, I like thinking about it like this, think about your primary relationship, whether it's a wife or a spouse, or a kid or a mother or whoever think about your primary relationship, and your own goal. Why are you in that relationship? Well, I mean, what do we want to be happy in all our relationships? Right? Well, let's say if I'm in my relationship, my path to happiness is, for me to be happy, I'm going to insist that I get my way 100% of the time. It seems like a good idea. But I mean, you guys are laughing about you know that that is not the path to long term happiness. It's counterintuitive, right? Like to be happy, I should get what I want. But the truth is, if I only get what I want, then the other person's gonna be miserable. And I'm not going to be in that relationship that much longer. So we learn to create a balance. And by that balance, we learn Oh, that's actually the path to happiness. And it's exactly the same way for companies, right? We want to as a company make money of course. You know, for some companies, that's why they're in business. But the truth is when we solve for the hole, when we solve for customers, when we sell for employees, that's the path to making more money over the long term.

Scott Allender:

So that led you to your, your pandemic project. It sounds like the full body. Yes was the book that you wrote during the pandemic? So, it sounds like you're kind of already giving us some of the pitch. But can you give us the full pitch for that book?

Unknown:

Well, in that moment, I was the head of mindfulness compassion at LinkedIn. And people would ask me, What does that even mean? Right? What does it mean to be compassionate at work? And so the book is trying to codify a little bit of that it's a little bit of my story. It's a little bit stories from other people. It's essentially, how do you be a compassionate person in the work environment? Right, that question that we started with that tear that we often or that struggle that we often have. And so I set out to write, like, what does it mean to be compassionate? And in doing so I realised, you know, what, 90 or 99%, of figuring out how to be compassionate, is first dealing with our own mess. Right. So my definition for compassion is, first of all capacity, because our capacity ebbs and flows all the time capacity for three things, to be aware of the other person, to have a mindset of kindness or mindset of wishing the best for the other person. And then the third one is the courage to take action. And as I started kind of codifying things, I realised, oh, it's exactly the same thing for ourselves. And actually, that's the first step. First, how do we be aware of ourselves? Right? How, how, and then to how do we have a mindset of wishing the best for ourselves? In other words, how do we love ourselves? And then three is how do we have the courage to take action when we see the gaps in our own lives? Right, the courage to be at our best. And when we can do that, then we have a shot at doing it for somebody else. So the book is a set of stories. It's fun to read. It even won an award.

Scott Allender:

Nice, congratulations.

Unknown:

Thank you. Yeah, it's a it was a, it was

Scott Shute:

a transformational project. For me, personally, Scott, what did the spectrum of reactions to that book or the work when you take it to executives, was some people?

Unknown:

It depends on how they heard about me? If they've seen me speak, they're like, oh, yeah, we could do some more of that. If they've just heard of this guy was head of mindfulness, then they have their own perceptions about what that means. Yeah, right. It's funny I was doing, I did a speaking event for a sales conference for a tech company. And it was an East Coast, an American East Coast company. And I showed up to the kind of meet and greet the night before. You know, and I live on the West Coast, and we're a little bit more casual, and how we dress and our general attitude. And I show up at this thing, and every guy and it's almost all guys all older than me, you know, in a buttoned down shirt and a jacket. And I was looking around thinking, oh, man, is my stuff gonna play here? You know, is this is this gonna work? My, my event was the next day and I had a, whatever, a keynote. And then I taught a workshop. And I thought, You know what, I'm not going to make any assumptions. I'm just going to go all the way. And my think included. I even did a little five minute, you know, meditation or contemplation. And at the end of it was at Disney World. We got on the bus to go to dinner, and this guy sits down beside me. And he says, All right, you got me? What? Hi, I'm Scott. He goes, Yeah. When would they introduced you? I thought, Man, this is just going to be such a loaded. You know what, right? Yeah. And he said, But you started talking, I listened to you. And then I went to your workshop. And guys, I gotta tell you, brother, I'm all in. I'm all in. You got me. And so I think that no matter where people come from, I want to try to build a bridge to that place. Right? Some people are all about it. They're there. They're already on board. They don't need convincing. And some people have no clue what we're talking about. But when but when I talk about it, like an executive when I talk about it from an operational ROI perspective, you know, then I see the heads wagging and then then I see the gears turning and then it's then it just becomes a prioritisation process. And it requires also some soul searching for them. Do I actually care about my employees? Enough to do this? Do I actually care?

Scott Allender:

The prioritisation piece is is particularly interesting and it's something I was actually sitting here thinking about which is it always feels like the thing that you can like put off right because it doesn't feel like you know, it's not our calendars get filled up with back to back to back meetings. You know, we convinced ourselves that next week things will slow down a little bit and I'll and I'll and I'll do my practices right and then we continually deprioritize it. That's right. So I got a two part question I'm interested in which practices have you found had the most impact on high performing teams? When done consistently? What's the what's the, like, frequency of practice that's required to get there? And how can people start to think about reframing or breaking free from that cyclical trap that we get into, then I'll do it tomorrow. Just like we said, say, when we sign up for the gym in January, right, like, I'm going to do it and then we don't do it, like, how do we how do we solve for that?

Unknown:

Sure. Well, the same challenges we have as individuals are exactly the same challenges we have as organisations. Right, just like when we're busy, you know, when you're the kid's Uber driver, and you're chasing everybody around, and you've got six deadlines, and the bills are due, and you're not sure how everything's gonna come together, man, it's hard to do the self care stuff. It's hard to find time, because there's some really concrete things that need to get done. And to the spiritual practice, the mental well being practices are longer term. And so we always were animals, we're Homo sapiens. So we go to survival mode. And we will always choose survival over wellbeing. It requires us to break free of that. And so companies are the same way, when the company is trying to get to meet its quarterly objectives and trying to figure out how we're going to do this without layoffs and how we're going to meet, you know, customers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's really hard to think about the long term things for our employees, the nice to haves are what we would categorise as a nice to haves. Yeah. So first of all, it's characterising it in seeing the importance of over the long term, right? It's just like taking your vitamins or doing your health exercises, we can all do the do the hard things. But if you don't take care of yourself, at some point, your health is going to fall apart, and then you're not going to be able to do the day to day. Right. So you could you could say, Okay, is it a vitamin? Or is it an emergency room, if we don't take the vitamins, we end up in the emergency room, right? In our personal lives, we end up having a heart attack or a divorce. Right? At work, we end up with employees who leave the company. Right. And when an employee leaves the company, it's the cost to get to replace that performance is somewhere between 150% and 250% of their annual salary. So if you're a leader and thinking about the long game and the long health of the organisation, you're thinking about yourself and your employees from the long game. And so that's one way to think about it is getting our minds right, and how we prioritise. One of your questions was, what are the practices to create high performing teams? And what actually works? Yeah, which was the single biggest factor. So Google did this project project, Aristotle, I don't know, now, eight or 10 years ago. And I don't know what they were looking for, or what they thought they would find. But they found that the single biggest factor in creating a high performing team is not where you went to school, or your level of IQ. Or if you're in the same room together. The single biggest factor is psychological safety. In other words, think about animal versus not animal. If I'm at work, and I feel threatened, if I'm always worried that somebody's going to say something about me, or I might get fired, or I might get written up, or I might get whatever the thing is, I'm worried about, like an animal. I'm cowering a little bit, maybe not literally, but emotionally. And when we're like that, we're not creative. We're not open, we don't share information. But when we feel safe, then we are we get to expand, we're expansive, we're creative, we can, we can bring forth solutions that may or may not work. We can innovate. We can interact with each other in healthy ways. So this is the single biggest thing. And there's lots of ways to create psychological safety, but it starts with a leader. Putting that on the list of things that are business critical, not nice to have. It's business critical. Just like the machine, my most important machine in a factory is the one in the corner generating 70% of income for the team, the most important machine is and I don't mean it crassly like that. The most important asset we have is the people it's the team itself. And so how do I take care of the health of that machine? How do I create psychological safety so that they can be creative and get to where we need to go?

Jean Gomes:

Both Scott and I have come across quite a few organisations who have gone down the path of rolling out mindfulness programmes for example, and found And 612 months later, didn't work didn't get adopted became marginalised. And they divest from it. In your experience, what what went wrong? And how could an organisation planning to do and it doesn't necessarily need to be mindfulness, but any of these kinds of practices? How do you set the stage for this to be successful?

Unknown:

I think a lot of companies don't put that amount enough oomph behind it. So they'll roll something out. And the rolling something out looks like oh, hey, we're giving everybody a copy of headspace or something like that Insight Timer, pick your app. And then that's it. That's it? Well, when you're, when you're an employee, how do you even know about that? Right? There's at a company that has 10 or 15 or 150,000 people, you announce something once, and, and then the next week, 1000, more people started. They don't know anything about it. They're just like everything else, just like marketing to customers, you know, it takes seven times to give a message to somebody before they hear it before they internalise it. And in the same way, there needs to be the steady drumbeat. And not just coming from, oh, here's another thing that we do. That's not right, not just coming from HR or the wellness group. You know, the wellness person stands on stage as hey, we got your copy of headspace, you know, we're really excited about it. And then you go back to the office, and your boss is like, Okay, we have these projects that are all due next Thursday go. And we don't have time for anything. Which one are you going to listen to? Well, you're going to listen to your boss, right. But if your manager your direct manager is in the your staff meeting, talking about her own or his own experience, using headspace, and why it's so important, and encouraging you to take time, whether it's using headspace or in your own time, encouraging you to take time to take care of yourself. And everywhere you look, that message is consistent, then it works. But when it comes from one place, and the 1000 other messages are inconsistent with it, of course, it's not going to work. Why would it?

Scott Allender:

Let's stay with this for a second, because I'm thinking about our leaders that are listening right now. And not all of them will have decision making authority to adopt a mindfulness programme across the whole organisation. And oftentimes, in much of my experience, I find that when leaders hear about what companies should be doing, they always think that's a different leaders job, right? Like, like, that's not me, right? I'm not that I just run this little area over here. Sure. So let's make this actionable. For people who don't have the decision making authority for the whole organisation where we might not get full adoption, right? But they're listening, going, you know, I run a team of 10 people or whatnot, like, I want to do this, how do I do this? In a culture where maybe it's not accepted, or, you know, espouse to something important, but I want to do with my team. So it's gonna be a little countercultural, and I think we're gonna get some benefit, and I want to do it, what would you say to that leader?

Unknown:

So it starts with intention, and let's assume that they have that intention. And the intention is, I want to create psychological safety in my team. And I want to, I want for my employees to know that I care about their mental well being, that even if the rest of the company doesn't seem like it's cares, I care, I care deeply about it. And and then I know that they'll, they'll work for me, regardless what's going on around the work for us, our team. So that's a good place to start. Right? So if I have that intention, what percent of my staff meeting Am I willing to spend on that? Because if I'm not willing to spend five minutes in out of a 90 minute or 60 minute staff meeting, then it's just those are last words, I don't really mean it.

Scott Shute:

Right. But if I have that intention, and I believe the things that we're talking about, then I'm willing to spend three minutes or five minutes, or maybe 15 minutes, sometimes not all the time. And in that three minutes, it could be something different every time. It could be like, Hey, guys, let's just, hey, I know that this last week has been crazy. It's been crazy for me. I just want to take a little break here. Like I just want to check in and see how y'all are doing like, like you all did at the beginning of this call. Or just check in and an honest check in if it becomes rote. Oh, every time we check in, then it's just the same as everything else. It has to be meaningful. It's like Hey, Scott. Hey, Jean. Like, how are you doing today? No, no, really? How are you doing today?

Unknown:

You know, and like, Okay, well, sometimes I get Hey, how are you doing? I'm fine. Oh, yeah. Well, okay, on a scale of one to 10. How are you doing? Like, I'm a, I guess I'm a six. Alright, well, what are you normally? I guess I'd say I'm it normal. I'm like an eight. All right, well, If you care to share, like, what's going on like, what's, what's the difference? What's the difference between your six and eight? And is there anything we can do to help you get to eight or 10? And just the, the asking is not, it's not about putting a number on, it's not to quantify anything the asking is just say, Hey, man, I care about you. That's all you have to do. And every once awhile, if you want to include mindfulness, like, you know what, let's just take one minute. Let's take one minute before we dive into because I know you guys all came from back to backs, you're busy, you're stressed out, let's just take a minute and just slow down before we dive into things, right? If you want to just sit and space out, that's fine. But like, we're just gonna take a minute, just no devices. And just like this has calmed down for a second. It's that kind of stuff. You don't have to be an expert. You don't have to have gone through teacher training for mindfulness. It's just slowing down and showing that you care.

Jean Gomes:

That alone, this just had a bit of an impact on me.

Scott Shute:

Yeah, yeah.

Unknown:

And why? Go back to the why? Because we're animals, we're homosapiens our whole lives are spent in survival mode, everything about our nervous system, everything about our survival systems is for survival. So we're not it takes a lot to calm ourselves down and get out of survival mode. And our Migdal is Be quiet for a while. And let that other part of us evolve, right? So when I talk about my practice is trying to have a, you know, a direct link to something bigger. That's what I'm talking about. I'm trying to let go of the body, let go of the mind, let go of emotion. And then it's what's left? Oh, I want to exercise that part. I want that part of me to be able to shine. I want that part of me to answer the question when you asked me instead of the nervous human part. And then I'll be at my best. And as a leader, if we can help people cultivate that. Now we're talking about ROI. Now we're talking about amazing results, amazing people, amazing teams.

Jean Gomes:

My experience have you on this call is that why you're credible amongst might be a cynical audience or sceptical audience even is that you truly have embodied this in your life. So this is not coming from an intellectual. You do understand it, obviously. But it's coming from a total embodiment of it. So you know, it's apparent in you that you bring this into a situation. Many people aren't because they are living in that survival world. And they're stuck in the struggle of trying to embrace it. And when they bring what might feel like it very counter cultural, counterintuitive word like compassion into that space, that brings out a reaction in certain people that this is soft, and it's maybe you know, kind of provokes a kind of anti entitlement reaction in some some people.

Unknown:

That's this is a really important topic, actually. People when we talk about compassion, we talk about treating people, right, they go to that place. They go to say, as an example, I had a leader once, you know, we're doing performance review, every six months, or every year we do. We do rankings and ratings, right. And we do performance reviews. And that's how your comp is decided. That's how we hand out bonuses and salary adjustments and promotions and all the things. And on their list of people was, I'll make a person up, Bobby. And Bobby, last time had gotten a poor review. And Bobby again, this leader was giving them a poor review. And so we were talking about I was like, Well, what is happening? Like, why is Bobby still here? It's like, well, I really, I really didn't want to give him this feedback. Because you know, I wanted to be compassionate. It's like, whoa, you have totally, and I mean, totally misconstrued what this whole compassion thing is all about. Right? Compassion is not letting Bobby slide being a poor performer. Compassion is addressing the problem. And it is a problem addressing the problem directly with compassion. And so to be honest, in that, in that moment, the performance conversation then turn to that leader, it's like, oh, this is somebody I need to deal with, right and deal with in a compassionate way. So compassion requires a level of courage, as a person as a leader, which is extraordinary. So think about your toughest conversations with your spouse, with your kids, with your partner, whoever in those two Office conversations, you have to deal with things, right? But because you love them, you're trying to do it in the most compassionate way you can, but you still have to deal with it. And then think about situations where you didn't deal with it. You didn't deal with it, you let a really ugly thing passed by a really thing that's not acceptable pass by and ask yourself, was that compassionate to them? Or me? And the answer is no. Compassion requires a level of courage that is way beyond the norm. Where way beyond the norm. So this is not soft. This is not some West Coast hippie feel good thing. Like this is how good results happen. And it requires a level. I'll say it again, it requires a level of courage most people don't have. Yeah,

Jean Gomes:

I think it's a very, very powerful statement.

Sara Deschamps:

If the conversations we've been having on the evolving leader have helped you in any way, please share this episode with your network, friends and family. Thank you for listening. Now, let's get back to the conversation.

Scott Allender:

So you've built up a community of experts in your work you're doing. And I'd love to hear a little bit about that, about this networks. And and even the work that you're doing. In the inner MBA programme, tell us about a little bit.

Unknown:

I'll touch on the inner MBA first because it's easier to talk about. So inner MBA is a nine month programme sponsored by sounds true in the beginning, it was sounds true plus LinkedIn plus wisdom to Dotto kind of got it up off the ground. And it's cool, it's basically nine months of deep, deep content and learning for folks that want to do the inner work, right. A lot of times as leaders, we're taught how to do the the technical parts of our jobs, whether it's the finance or sales or support, whatever it is, this is the inner side, how do we deepen our How do we change our mindset? How do we have compassion all and a huge broad set of topics. So I'm an instructor as part of that. When I left LinkedIn, two and a half years ago, I started you know, I'd written the book. And so I was doing a lot of speaking, and executive coaching and that sort of thing. And I still do that work, you know, so hey, look, if you're leading a company off site, and you need a speaker, hit me up, this is this is what I do. But I still had this mission, my mission is to change work from the inside out. And I realised like I, and I mean it, you know, in its biggest form 3.5 billion of us in the workplace. And so I realised pretty quickly, okay, well, I'm not going to make a very big dent in it all by myself. So let's, let's do something together. And so I pulled together people just like me, coaches, and podcasters, and practitioners who were doing the work of conscious business. And my goal was to help all of them be more successful. And that's phase one. And you know, it's going well, we have 600, and something people in our community just just by word of mouth in the last few months. But the next phase is the more important one, and is that to build a community of leaders and a community of just everybody who are interested in making work a better place? And so we're building content. So as an example, we're building content, as those coaches as those consultants together to codify what is conscious business? And what are simple practices that leaders can put into place? You know, so my, the, the, the project I'm most excited about is we're writing a book together. So 25, people all write one chapter, you know, and we get it out in five months. And I hope to do a series of these. And, interestingly enough, somebody reached out one of our one of our members, and they said, This is awesome, I love it. This is what the Quakers do. I went, what interesting. And I said, well, the Quakers, their relationship with the divine is more like a question instead of unknowing. And so they'll write together as a way of deepening their own understanding. So they'll write a book together as a way of deepening their personal understanding of the Divine, their collective understanding of the Divine. And they'll use that book as a way to spur the conversation both inside and outside of their community. And I thought, that's exactly what we're doing with this book. And this movement, is that not any one of us has a corner on what does it mean to be conscious business. But if we all get together and talk about it, and write about it, and codify it and build things together, then we're expanding our own individual understanding, but also our collective understanding and bringing other people along for the journey. So we're just getting started, but I hope, I hope that if we did this in two years, we'd be talking about the million

Scott Shute:

And members of people who are have all joined, and we're, you know, we're all in it together. Yeah, I love it. If you got to kind of picture what what might become, in that period of time

Unknown:

at the root, how we're different than a lot of things out there, because there's a lot of stuff out there.

Scott Shute:

One is conscious business at the core, and two is community. In a, we're built on this platform called circle, which I appreciate. And so even though, so everything has a community aspect to it, going back to that psychological safety, going back to this, like the power and finding our people, you know how it is like when you go to a party or work and there's, there's people that just don't feel like my people, and then there's people's like, Oh, I feel comfortable around you, regardless of whatever else. This is a group that's like, oh, it's feels like I'm safe here I can, I can be a run my people. So everything has community in it. And so what I see over time is a place where the coaches can do their work, and we're bringing the leaders to them, you know, and we'll have a, you know, if Jean is a is a coach is like, Okay, I'm bringing Jean 20 people, and then Jean can now do group coaching in you know, once a month or twice a month in a way that is natural and fits his work environment. So everybody wins, these leaders get an experience to work with other leaders. But they also get it in an environment which is

Unknown:

which feels good and is led by someone who cares and is light hearted. And over time, we all are energised by that experience, and then bring it back to work. Here's what I realised. We talked I talked about changing work from the inside out, there's a Rumi quote, I'm always dropping a the Rumi or Hafiz. So there you go. The Rumi quote is, yesterday, I was clever. And I tried to change the world. But today, I'm wise, and I'm working on changing myself. And I'm aware of both things, right. So I want to change the world. But I know that to do it, the only way to do it is for each one of us to change ourselves. Right? There's no war when there if there's peace in people's hearts, right? There's only there's only compassion if people have compassion in their hearts. And so it's changing the world, one person, it's changing work one person at a time. So

Scott Allender:

how is this work? Changing? You? Like? I'd be curious, the this work you're shaping. Yeah, it's such a powerful sentiment to talk about this. And I think you're right. And so I'm curious, like, how is this been changing you over the past

Unknown:

several years? Yeah, thank you for asking that. What I say all the time is that this work is how I serve. This is the work that I do. It's how I you know, make a living. But for sure, it's how I learned. And what I'm learning is, you know, I'm still we're all works in progress, right? All of us, there's not a person on the planet who's not a work in progress. And for me, it's about the journey from me to we, I spent my whole for sure. Younger part of my life in achieve mode. And I achieved a lot, I'm good at achieving, right, I'm good at lots of things. And I spent my whole life trying to be good at things and achieving. And now I'm trying to build a movement. And that still feels like achieving. But the shift, and I'm telling you I haven't I'm not there yet. The shift is moving from how is this about Scott? And Scott success to how is this about us, and the result of the whole. And that's an ongoing challenge. I have 30 years of learning how to make money, right? And I'm trying to use the good parts of learning that, but letting go of the not so good parts of learning how to do that. And it's hard. The inertia part is hard, right? So I'm I am learning every day what it means to be a servant of the whole instead of a servant of myself. I'm still working on it.

Jean Gomes:

I know it's a big question about how in your vision of consciousness does AI play a part What's your your feelings about? This

Unknown:

is I go back and forth about being terrified and excited by AI for and probably as we all should? I don't know yet. But here's the thing what I do know, like every other new technology like the atomic bomb, like the internet, like the phone like everything, is that we as a people as a species will use AI as our consciousness is. In other words, we have a total range of consciousness are some people who are. This is not the right the right words, but they are good versus bad. Some people will use it for evil, some people use it for greatness. So I listened to this guy talk the other day about communicating with whales, you know, and how AI could help us communicate with animals. And I thought, that's so cool. I want to talk to a whale. I want to talk to the birds in my backyard. I want to talk to my cat. But then he went on to talk about, well, maybe this is not such a great idea. Yeah, because these whales have had societies. They've had language for 300 million years. You know, and comparatively, we're just a speck in the evolutionary food chain. So what if we start talking to them, and we mess up their patterns? Right, we give them wrong information. And I thought, Oh, interesting. This whole thing with AI with every other technology, just because we can doesn't mean we should. So we will use it as our consciousness is. And I hope, I hope that we grow as in consciousness to use it for good reasons. I hope that AI can help us with our consciousness. Imagine that.

Jean Gomes:

Yeah, it's been a positive symbiotic relationship with anything requires us to recognise that every technology is just a reflection will the use of the technology will just be a reflection of our base motivation. That's our worse. So that's a beautiful place to bring it to close, I think.

Scott Allender:

Yeah. Well, thank you for this. Scott. Certainly appreciate your time. And thank you for the work that you're doing in the world because it matters a lot. And it's appreciated. Thank

Unknown:

you for having me. I appreciate it. And if you are listening, you care to join us in our little movement, hopefully turning turning into a big movement comm check us out at changing work.org And feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love to hear from people.

Scott Shute:

I respond to every single person so please do reach out. I would love to hear from you.

Scott Allender:

Excellent. Well, we'll put all that in the show notes and do take Scott up on his offer. I highly recommend it and until next time, folks, remember the world is evolving. Are you

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Jean Gomes

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Scott Allender

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