The Approaches to Work-life Integration with Scott Shute

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspiration to help you operate at your fullest potential, integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. I'm your host, Ashish Kothari, the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad and author of the bestselling book Hardwired for Happiness. I will be your personal guide on your journey to explore the many facets of happiness, wisdom, well being and flourishing, from personal growth to building more positive environments at work. In each episode we will share powerful insight, tips and stories from our guests who are leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge. Whether you're looking to overcome life's challenges, to go from good to great, or to enhance your team's performance through flourishing, this podcast is the place for you to find more joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Join us every week as we rewire for Happiness together. Welcome to the next episode of the Happiness Squad Podcast where we engage with business leaders from flourishing experts and solution providers to help make flourishing your competitive edge. Today we are excited to feature Scott Schutt, the visionary founder of Changing work and former LinkedIn executive known for his innovative approach to blending ancient wisdom with modern workplace dynamics. In his most recent role at LinkedIn, Scott was the head of Mindfulness and Compassion programs. His latest venture, Changing Work seems, seeks to curate the best practices of conscious businesses and make them more widely available. Scott is also the author of the award winning book the Full Body. Yes. In this episode, Scott shares his journey of integrating work and life seamlessly, offering insights from his acclaimed book the Full Body. Yes. We jointly explore the essence of work life integration, challenging the traditional notion of work life balance and providing practical advice on aligning one's purpose and values with their career. Scott's unique perspective, shaped by years of mindfulness and compassion practice in the context of work, will help you find joy and fulfillment no matter what role you are in. You will also discover how the Changing Work collective is paving the way for a revolution in how we perceive and approach our work. Stay till the end to learn of an exciting offer on how you too can become part of this revolution to change work from the inside out. Scott, my dear friend, it is so lovely to have you with us on the Happiness Squad podcast. Thank you for spending time.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

So Scott, you and I only got to know each other, gosh, almost six months ago, but I still remember the first time I met you and I had a full body yes. Full Body. Yes to you. And that's been your book. And then I discovered your book, and I was like, yep, that's what I was feeling. I was feeling the full body. Yes. So I wanted to just start with, you know, sharing with our listeners a little bit about that book, Full Body. Yes. What inspired you to write the book and what you hope readers take away from it?

Well, in that moment in time, I wrote it four years ago. It came out three years ago, came out in May of 21. In that time, I was the head of mindfulness and compassion program at LinkedIn. And there was always this question, like, what does that mean? What does compassion in the workplace mean? Like, why should I care? And I kind of wrote the book as a. As an answer to that question, you know, how do we live compassionately? And what does that even mean? And the. That's partly why I wrote it. And partly why I wrote it was like it was a calling. I was driving home in, I don't know, December of 2019 with one of my friends. We'd been at a speaking gig together. We were putting on a little mini conference, and he was driving, I was in the passenger seat, and he gets this funny look on his face while he's driving. He looks over at me and he says, the universe has told me to tell you it's time to write your book. And then we both laugh. And then. But I took it seriously. I kind of checked in with myself and felt like, yeah, you're right, it is time to write it. You know, when I actually got to the writing part, it was April of 2020. We'll remember what was happening in April of 2020. We had all been sent home, and so I got to trade commuting time for writing time. And it just, it spilled out. Like, I wrote it in 10 weeks. It was so the. The time was just so ripe, like a fruit that's been waiting for 30 years and it's finally ready to pick, and it's the perfect day to pick it. That's how my book was for me.

I love that. You know, Covid had this impact on so many. Right. So, like, it's. I was on a similar journey, Scott, as you were. And, you know, my journey, as I've shared with so many folks on the podcast, and, and with you. Right. My journey had actually started around 2014, where as a fourth year partner who had checked off every box on how to be happy and flourish in life, work hard, get promoted, et cetera, et cetera, I was dealing with Anxiety. And that's when my journey had started. Around, hey, why am I so anxious? I've got everything going right and I'm dealing with this. And that was my journey. On researching this topic of. I wasn't researching compassion. I didn't even know what compassion was. I guess we all know what compassion is. But like, you know, writing on mindfulness was another one. Growing up in India and not actually ever having meditated right, that was kind of my life. So there was this whole field that wasn't even available. But when I started searching, you know, what keeps us in fear and what is a different way, that's when I started to discover all of this work. And like you, you know, Covid 2020, when we stopped, I had changed my life over the last six years based on what I was learning and implementing and integrating and teaching others. For me, it was a very similar moment when I decided that, you know, hey, I should write this book, Hardwired for Happiness. Well, its original title was From Fear to Freedom. So, you know, it's funny, when we stop, we find the space, we find the time. And I think that was the gift of COVID to me. I was in three CDs a week before that. I don't think I would have had the time to write it. But, you know, this time was ripe to actually sit down and write the book.

That's right. It goes, you know, it was certainly a gift. Covid was a gift, right. In many ways. And of course, of course, like anything that happens, there's the bad that goes with it. Of course. But this is the truth. In every moment of life, everything has two sides, right? There's the thing that we think is, quote, good, and the thing that we think is, quote, bad. The truth is, it's always like that. It always just is. And whether we perceive it as good or bad is what makes it good or bad. That's the only thing.

Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. And at the heart of the equanimous equanimity, which is at the heart of mindfulness and so much of Buddhist teachings, right? This notion of there is no good or bad, it's what you make of it and how do we actually hence, learn and walk the middle. But listen, you talk a lot around in this book, the Full Body. Yes. You discuss this notion of integrating work with the rest of your life. That was so in sync with, in my own world, how I perceived it. It's not about work, life, balance. It's about integration. So talk a little bit and share with our listeners, how you describe the difference between work life balance and that seems to what everybody's going for versus this different approach of work life integration.

I come at it a couple different ways, or at least a couple different ways. One is this idea, and maybe this is the more traditional way to think about this is it's integration versus balance. Meaning, like the two of us, we're both at home in our home offices. That's different than it was 10 or 20 years ago or four years ago. Right. So not only are we working at home, we're sleeping at work. Right.

I love that.

It's literally integrated. So. And with the phone, I was. I was having this conversation the other day. I remember the instant when this happened. I was at a hockey game with my friend. I don't know what year this was, maybe 2005 or 6 or 7. And during the intermission, my friend gets out this device, which I had never seen before, and he starts looking at it and playing with it and doing stuff. I'm like, what? What are you doing? Because I thought it was so rude that he wasn't talking to me. And he said, oh, I got this thing, it's called a BlackBerry and it has all my work email on it. I'm sorry, I'm kind of addicted to it now. For me, that was the moment right when you can start to work. Like, literally, you can do work now, not in the office. So there's this whole idea of, okay, how do we just make it all work, then integrate it? And that's kind of, you know, people are figuring that out. It's the idea that if we have this hybrid work environment, like, I can start a load of laundry right now, and then in whatever, in an hour, I can go start the dryer. And it's like, integrated my life and my work. And that's kind of beautiful. But actually, what I'm talking about is even different than all of that, which I. All of that is important. What I'm talking about is our attitude toward work.

Yes.

Right. So we're recording this on a Friday. And what do we say on Fridays? Oh, thank God it's Friday. Right. Because this means that our work is almost done, and on Sunday night, we get the Sunday scaries. Or on Monday morning, like, oh, it's Monday. Why? It doesn't have to be like that. That's my point, is that if work is done right, it can have the same level of joy, it can have the same level of beauty, it can have the same level of creativity that the Quote, rest of our life that the weekends and nights have. And I've seen this. I've seen this in my own life. And look, I'm not Pollyanna. I'm not totally delusional. I know that work is still work, but, you know, life is still life sometimes too. There are hard things about life. And so seeing it just for what it is as an opportunity and not assuming that it's bad, that's what I really mean about this work, life integration, that it can be amazing. And when it's done right, it can be a source of healing, it can be a source of inspiration, it can be a source of joy.

Yeah, that's for sure true for Jiro Dreams of sushi. Jiro. Right. And if work is a source of joy, you don't retire from it. You do it just like that is your why. Right. You live into that. I love that notion. As Scott and I always thought about this and I shared this with people somehow. We always. This work life balance thing, people think about work and life. We almost draw this boundary even in that context. But I'm like, yeah, but your life is not just life, right? You're not saying this is when our times. This is Scott's time. This is Scott's time with my wife, this is Scott's time with my kids. This is with my friends. This is the amount of time I'm going to spend with whatever. So we're not demarcating all these other aspects of all the different things in which we can be spending time in life. Then why are we doing that in this hard line between work and life? And for many people, they do it because work is just an inconvenience and nuisance to put up with because they think that's just a source of income. And now I'm going to live my life and I'm like, why? Why don't you change. I love what you're saying. And like, why don't you change your work where that becomes as much a source of joy so that you. You think about it as a continuum, you live it as an integration. You don't think about these explicit hard breaks.

It's true. And look, we have a really long history of it not being good. So let's, let's be real about it. If we think about the history of work. And let's roll back to. I mean, it started way before then, but like the building of the pyramids as an example, probably done by slave labor. So you had kings and the rich people, and then you had slaves or later indentured servants or something like that. And our leadership practices started like that. The leadership practice was, I told you.

To do it, go do it.

There's no questions, go do it. Right. So then we evolve and then, so that was the kind of agrarian age. Then we evolve into the industrial age and kind of the 18, mid-1800s. And so we imagine all of ourselves in a factory and we're all building kind of the same thing. And as a worker, same deal, we're kind of viewed as interchangeable, just as part of the fabric of the machinery. And so the management practices, the leadership practices probably didn't, you know, they probably weren't that much better than slavery, honestly, not to diminish any of it. Right. But then if you fast forward to today to the information age, work looks like this. We're at home, you know, we're talking on the phone. All of our jobs are around data. Not all, but many. And companies have really gotten more clear. Most companies that do truly live in the digital age realize that their employees are basically the only hard asset that they have, the only real resource, the most important and valuable resource that they have. And so as employees want more and demand more and expect more, leadership practices have to change as well for, for them, for companies and leaders to be able to track that talent. So this whole thing about being able to choose your profession and find meaning in your profession is relatively new. And so we're kind of hacking out, you know, a new frontier in this world. And it's, it's cool.

You know, I've been one of the things that I've loved about the work that, you know, we are collectively doing here. Right. Is so one of my favorite things that I try and help companies implement is this amazing work done, you know, at Michigan Ross by Amy Brozinski and Jane Dutton around job crafting. Right. It's 25 years of research around the fact that if we are able to help people re craft their jobs, both how they think about the impact they're making in the world, but also task craft and relationship craft to change their work. It's a really practical way for leaders to support their individual workers to make work more meaningful, make it less draining that we can, you know what I mean, achieve these things. These are practical interventions. And by the way, we can implement it in three months, in three, one month sprints, and all of a sudden there is real change. Right?

That's cool.

That happens.

There's something really powerful about this, about purpose. You know, I read, I don't Remember the source? But it was the fact was that 9 out of 10 workers say that they would take a job for less money to have more meaning in their work. Think about that. That's crazy, crazy powerful. And there's all these stats around the purpose of our jobs. And, you know, these things are really powerful. And, and what I found in my own world, like, to be frank, is that it got easier as I moved up the food chain, right. As I became a manager, as I became a leader, became a senior leader, it got easier to see how I could connect the dots between my day to day work and how we as an organization were impacting the world. But I'm inspired by my friend. I'll call her Susie. It's not her real name. We were having this conversation about purpose, and she's a customer service rep, more like technical support rep for a company that makes stuff that goes in other stuff that goes in other stuff that goes in other stuff. Right. And so I was asking her, well, how do you connect your work to purpose? And she says, well, look, I'm on the phone all day with customers, and usually they're mad about something or they're just trying to find information about something. It's my job to get them that information. She says, my purpose is I want my interaction with that person to be the best thing that happened to them all day. And I thought that there it is, there it is. It doesn't matter what they could be talking about. Anything, whether it's dog food or some systems implementation or whatever, but it's this human connection that she was choosing, and for her, that was extraordinarily meaningful. It didn't matter what they were selling or what they were buying.

Beautiful.

It was the human connection.

Yeah. And it's possible in no matter what job you're in. Right. So this research they did, by the way, that I'll give you a stat here. Right. So when we, when I was at McKinsey, we researched purpose. And most people, even though they say, why do I need to find purpose at work? Work plays a big part in meaning making. For many people, it becomes a core part of their identities. In our research, what we found was 85% of senior executives found what they do as meaningful. Like it connected to their why and meaning. You know, that number of 85% dropped to 15% when it came to frontline. 15%.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, it makes sense.

And what I love about meaning and purpose is if we think about this as a core leadership muscle, if you're able to Create more meaning into every person who works at your organization, right? You figure out a way to create meaning. If you do that, you get their heart and mind, not just arms and legs. There's a massive productivity boost. There is a significant lowering in attrition because as you said, people will rather take a job that pays less, that has more meaning, or will stick around in a place that has more meaning and invite others. Right. In order to do that. But let's go back to the point of work life integration. Right? So you and I, you know, are like, I truly, I mean, look, four years ago my life was integrated. Eight years ago, it absolutely was not. There was work and there was life. Right? But that's the reality for so many people. There is still work in life and they're playing in it. And here's two of us, right? We've been there. I think we're. They're like, okay, great, you guys have done it. And so you can talk about work life integration all day one. But I am working and I don't find my work meaningful and I'm struggling. And that all these demands. What are some practical steps, right, that you advise if you are younger in your career or you know, you just working in a place that you don't find meaning and you're thinking about this is work and this is my life. What are some practical ways in which they can achieve work life integration?

Yeah, I like going back to purpose, truly. And there's a couple tools that I enjoy that help me make those decisions. The first one, you and your listeners are probably familiar with ikigai, the, the Japanese concept or derived from a Jasmines concept of ikigai kind of meaning. Purpose of life. It's the intersection of four circles. A Venn diagram. What I love to do, what I'm good at, what the world needs and what I can get paid for. What I love to do, what I'm good at, what the world needs, what I can get paid for. And some of these things are subjective. What the world needs is totally subjective.

Yes.

You know, actually almost all of it is totally subjective. But I like to think of it as a map, you know, so if there's, and there's, if you do a Google search or a search, you can find a visual and just map yourself. Where are you right now with your, with your life? And you know, for every decision, is there a way for me to get closer to the center of the bullseye? So as an example, I was in a frontline or maybe second line manager role and I'd been doing it for a long time and I was kind of bored with it, you know. So if I think about, well, what am I good at? What do I like to do? Well, what I really like to do is I really like coaching and mentoring. Like, all right, well, I have a big organization. I could spend more time doing that. I could spend more of my focus with my direct reports and my skip level reports actually doing, you know, coaching and mentoring. And if I start to identify myself not as a. In this case, an operations leader, but as a people leader, that shift in me was actually pretty profound because what I like to do. Yes. What I'm good at. Yes. What the world needs. Yes. And I was already getting paid for it. So great. So part of it is a shift. The other thing we can think about with Ikigai is in the. In the spirit of work life integration is. It doesn't all have to be about work. I think of it as a portfolio, you know, so maybe someone is. I'll make it up. A singer. Right. When I was 18, I thought maybe my two choices were I was either going to get an engineering degree or go be a singer.

And I'm probably a rock. Rock band at that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in that moment, you know, one of the bubbles is what you can get paid for. And I was super nervous as. Especially with my dad was about could I get paid for being a seer? And so I decided to think of it as more of a portfolio. I can still do whatever the job is, but I can do this singing thing, this music thing. I can do it on the side. And that can be the. A part of me that still gets realized and that becomes pretty beautiful. So the Ikigais one, the second one is our values. There's lots of good exercises out there to help figure out what your values are. You know those. Those sheets that give you a hundred different values and you have to pick and pick and pick and pick until you get down to your top three or top five. Those are not that hard to find. They're out there. Another way of thinking about it is when was the last time you were really mad or really upset? And it might not be the same value, but I guarantee you one of your values was in violation.

Yeah. Anger is about boundary that's been crossed that you hold sacrosanct, AKA a core value.

That's right. Or when was the last time or several last times you were really excited or, you know, fired up about something. One of your values was being expressed. So if we learn more about ourselves then we can fine tune our lives, both our work and our non work part of our life to get all of it right and work is just part of it. If we view it as separate, it will be separate. If we view it as Monday's terrible and Friday sucks, or the other way around, Monday's terrible and Friday's great, then we'll always have the separation.

We hope you're enjoying this episode. If you'd like to start building habits and integrating the hardwired for happiness practices into your life, come check out Rewire our program on the Happiness Squad website. Rewired contains 35 minute micro practices that can help you truly build habits for a happier, healthier life filled with more love and meaning. The program uses the science of habit formation and the power of community to support you in moving from knowing to doing to being. Now back to the episode. Yeah, I love it, right? Two of the core of the nine hardwired for practical happiness practices awareness. Know yourself, know your values and live more into them. Right? And purpose like find meaning. In fact, we use the ikigai in that. So like many of the listeners will be familiar. But I loved how you articulated it, right. Including your story, Scott, is people look at it and say it's something out there, right? But it is not. I think it is a very practical way, like tune into what you love. Well, I don't know what I love. Well, okay, go back to number one, know yourself. Actually take an inventory of what do you love, right? If you had leverage, your strengths. What are your strengths? How can you use them? I have a funny this thing on, on this whole what the world needs, right? In fact, you know, we went through, I was studying this Great resignation, Great attraction, Great resignation. One of the top downloaded articles at McKinsey. Some of my dear friends wrote it. And there was this period, remember like 21, 22, where all of a sudden the world had stopped and people were just quitting their jobs. They're like, I don't want this and I'm going to go find my meaning out there somewhere.

That's right.

I'm going to go do the van life. I'm going to do whatever, whatever. And I was just like. I mean I was having so many conversations, you know, because my reflection was the following. I'm like, look, first of all, if you have a job, I don't care how terrible your job is, if you have a job at a company that is making money, right? You probably in some shape or form are leveraging some of your strengths. Otherwise they won't like if, if you were doing everything that was your weakness, you would not have that job. Let's be clear. So one box checked. Second, in whatever shape or form even. I love your example of Suzy. If you are an input into the seventh level input that somebody uses, the reality is if your company makes money, they are exchanging value with somebody else that that person values. That's why they're writing a check. Right. And if you take it all the way back, in the end, all of it goes to consumers. Even if you're providing an input to a sub assembly into an assembly into whatever the end product is reaching a consumer and they're paying a check that is cascading through the value chain. So we don't part with money on things that we don't find valuable. So you already got three out of the four things there the world needs willing to pay for in strength. So isn't it easy to find what you love here? And I loved what you said. You know, I started seeing myself instead of operations manager as a people leader. First try and find and infuse what you love here rather than go search for three out of four things out there. Because now you're going for something I love, but you don't have all the other three things that you're going to try and find. Right? I don't know. It was just. It was. I had so many of these conversations with people who were like, quitting it all. I'm like, you gotta play the odds.

That's right. This is why. So the title of my book is called the full body. Yes. But the subtitle is change your work and your world from the inside out. Most of what we're saying is it's our attitude towards these things. I didn't have to quit to go be an xyz. I just have to change how I perceived it. And to the extent that I'm capable of, then shape. Shape my job, shape my interest to fit.

So look, as you opened and you said, you know, you read the mindfulness and compassion programs at LinkedIn, I'm curious, can you share with our listeners? Right. What were some of the characteristics of that program? And like, really, what was the outcome for employees and how did it affect even the experience of customers who engaged with those employees?

Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, let's start with what.

What was it?

Right. What was it? So, and it was both mindfulness and compassion. So I break them apart on purpose. So mindfulness, in my opinion, is an individual sport. Right. Like working out at the gym. You could think of it as mental exercise, building our self awareness, that sort of thing. So literally what it was, we started with meditation, but it wasn't just meditation, but we started with meditation. And, and we had, it was myself and my assistant or business partner and about a hundred volunteers over time. Right. So small budget, small central resourcing, but with those volunteers, we created 50 or 60 weekly meditation sessions all around the globe. And in that moment, LinkedIn was about a 15,000 person organization spread around the globe.

15,000. So 15,000 people?

151 5. Yeah. Now it's 20 something. But at the time it was 151 5. We gave everybody access to an app. We started with Headspace, we migrated to Wise at Work from our friends at Wisdom Labs. I really love that one because it's, it's designed for people who are working. And so there's sessions in there not just about how to relax, but also, oh, I have to go give somebody, or get feedback, like how do I prepare for that internally? And every year we would do a 30 day challenge around the app. So we'd make a big buzz about it. And if people completed the challenge, which was basically use the app 20 times within the month of October, they'd get a free T shirt or a free hoodie. And what I would say is, never underestimate the power of a free T shirt or a free hoodie on human, on human behavior. What else would we do? We would do quarterly retreats. So once a quarter on a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, myself and a. Usually I'd bring in a guest, would introduce six or eight different types of mindfulness or meditation practices to give people a flavor of what's out there. We had a speaker series.

Sorry, Scott. How long was the retreat? Was it over the weekend or just that afternoon?

Three or four hours.

Three or four hours?

Yeah. Okay, three or four hours. Try to make it accessible. Those are the basics of the mindfulness program. And then on the compassion side, we had a choice of whether to use things that already existed. So as an example, silly or search inside yourself is one of the bigger things. And we could have done that, but our CEO at the time was talking about compassion. And so I really wanted to operationalize compassion. And what I've come to believe is that while mindfulness is an individual sport, it's essentially my own personal development. Compassion is how we interact with other people.

Yes.

Well, that means every single thing we do as a business, compassion can play a part in how do we build products, how do we sell products, how do we market them, how do we service them, how do we treat each other, what are the policies that we use to treat each other, treat our customers, treat our shareholders? And so it's everything. Well, that's everything is a big place to boil down to. So I started by focusing on, I want to build a few workshops that are still around personal development and how we can implement compassion in our lives and how to think about it. And at the same time, I'm not saying that I made LinkedIn a more compassionate place. I felt like I was more like an investigative reporter and trying to capture the things that worked and maybe the things that didn't and codify them and bring them out to the world, which was partly why I wrote the book, is to start to codify and bring those out to the world. So I'll give you an example of what compassion in action looks like in this moment. In whatever it was 2018ish, our head of sales would stand in front of whatever it was, 5,000 people at sales kickoff and say something like, hey, look, our job as salespeople is to provide long term value. So don't sell something our customers don't need at the end of the quarter just so you can make your quota. Well, look, my first job after engineering school was in sales and I guarantee you that was not the message I heard as a 26 year old, you know. So for me, the root of compassion is when we move from me to we, when we move from only thinking about money and shareholders to thinking about creating balance for the whole, all of the stakeholders, including our customers, providing value for customers, including our employees, providing a great environment so they can be fulfilled and do their best work. And yes, shareholders too, because it's their money. We want to be respectful of it. But when we create balance for all of that, the research shows that companies actually do better. They actually make more money when they solve for the whole versus only thinking about finances.

So, Scott, I'm curious, so let's take that example of what you just said, right? So you have a head of sales who says, and I love that message, solve for what? Solve for the bigger. Right? Solve for the big. Not just for the quarter to make your money, but let's take this for the head of sales who probably makes enough money is relatively well said, easy for him to say, but how does that person who is like an entry level sales, who has probably a large part of his salary, money he needs to feed his family, tied to the commission, and if he doesn't make that quarter. It's a big deal. How does that person put it into practice?

Look, I think this is systemic. So, yes, even if the leader says it, what about the policy? So if you're a salesperson and you miss your quota 2/4 in a row, are you put on a performance plan, you know, and sent packing on the third quarter because then it doesn't hold up, or if there's pressure from your manager, who got pressure on them, who got pressure on them, all about quota at the end of the quarter. It's great to say it, but. And so I think it comes down to policy, but also a deeper understanding of what's happening on the ground. I know that some of our sales tools, some of our tracking tools help with this, but it goes down to the individual decisions that are made at that rep level. So if the rep feels like they're getting pressure and they're saying, oh, you know what, I could have closed this deal for $70,000, but I'm not going to. Because what they really need is, is a $12,000 subpart of this product. If they can have that conversation with their manager and still be whole after it's done and the manager gives them a pass, then we're good. Right? But if the manager is like and views them poorly because of that decision and the policies in place view them poorly because of that decision, then the whole thing breaks down. So what I would say is, yes, it's a good story, but unless we're all bought into the story, unless we're all bought into the practice and we're all bought into the policies and upholding it at every level, it will break down.

Yeah. No, I love that. I love that. Right? And I know that's why it's also hard for people to implement. But, you know, you and I are on the same mission. I mean, like, all the work I'm trying to do is. Even when it comes to flourishing as a concept, everybody talks about flourishing at an individual level as if that's gonna solve it. And we know, right? This is research. November 2023, McKinsey Health Institute. 97% of drivers of burnout have nothing to do with the individual. Only 3% is individual. When it comes to well being, they say, okay, fine, that's burnout. But you know, only 16% of the people are burnt out. Again, right? Not much larger number, but okay, let's talk about well being. Only 27% of interventions and enablers of well being are individual. 73% are job, team, organization, so unless to your point, we fundamentally take these concepts that we know are good value creating for the long term, for the whole ecosystem, not just for the individual. But if we don't fundamentally change policies at the organization level, job design at the, you know, literally at the job level, and the team constructs and how managers are leading and role modeling and supporting, it just becomes a story. It doesn't get into practice.

That's right. It's like our own lives. We pretty much know all the answers, right? You, we know what causes weight loss and weight gain as an example, one that's, as an example, really easy to understand, but extraordinarily hard to put into practice. We know what to eat that makes us healthy versus, you know, perhaps unhealthy. We know that getting sleep, you know, will make us more healthy over the long run. We know all these things and still the behavior doesn't happen. Why is that? Well, usually there's some sort of short term versus long term gain, right? I want to eat the piece of chocolate or the piece of cake right now. I'm not thinking about my long term health or my long term weight gain. I have the piece of chocolate cake in front of me right now. All right, so we get that as an individual and we know why it's so hard. The exact same thing happens at a corporate level. We are often executives are almost always measured on a quarterly basis and then, you know, sub breakdowns of that. The quarterly earnings report, we are driven by it, right? The, the CEO and the CFO have to get on that quarterly call with all the investors and you know, they're dealing with representatives of the investors who just. Their whole job is to make their customer money. So it takes that entire system to stop and say, well, actually for the benefit of humanity and actually for the long term benefit of our shareholders, here are the choices we're going to make. And that takes a courage and a foresight and a long term thinking that are sometimes just really hard and sometimes put the CFO and the CEO into danger. Right? Because if they start saying things like that, you could have a shareholder revolt. You could have all kinds of things. So I agree with you that it requires us to have a systemic view. So I long for a day when the shareholders are saying, I want the CEO to treat customers with long term value. I want the CEO to lead an organization that helps people develop so that they can be their best for the good of humanity. Because my daughter or my granddaughter or my niece or my nephew are going to work at that company. Or I want them to work at a similar company. When we start solving for the long term and we start solving for the whole, then we have a chance.

Then we have a chance. And you know, we can start with for example, really taking care of our employees. Right. And the research is there. So I love the work of Alex Edmonds. He was on our podcast, right. He was one of the only guys, only and only guys. And I've looked, I've read, I've looked at over a thousand research papers around this, both when I time as the firm and over the last two years. He's the only person who I have found who showed causation, not correlation. Raj didn't show correlation. Right. Raj had anecdotes with conscious capitalism, even some of the work at Oxford around and indeed around, return on assets and work well being are best correlations. Professor Jan Emanuel himself says it's a correlation, it's not causation. We have all the evidence that this actually should be driving it, but we haven't proved it. Alex did. He showed that when you look at top places to work those companies, when you forward project shareholder returns, 2 to 3.5% incremental shareholder value creation versus peers over the long term. The key as you said, is over the long term this breaks down if you're looking at anything less than a four year horizon, but over long term, I mean this is a strategy that can create 30 to 60% alpha higher value creation, but it needs to be pursued as a fundamental transformation, as a fundamental strategy for creating value. Just like you're gonna do digital or AI or pricing. This can't be a side hustle or we do this work when we have money. But if I'm short on money, I'm going to cut heads, I'm going to take out benefits because I just got to figure out a way because I can control that cost, I can't control that the next order shows up, but I can control this. So I'm just going to go at it. Right? But it needs to be adopted as a strategy and I hope through the work we are doing, through the work I want to get to the Changing Work Collective that you know, that is not just a pie in the sky thinking but we make it a reality in the years to come, right? More and more people. So towards that let's talk a little bit. I loved what you have started. I've loved seeing the community grow. But I want to have you speak in your own words around the Changing Work Collective and you know, your vision for it and how you've gotten it.

Off the ground, it's kind of evolved like this. So my mission in life, my personal ikigai, is to change work from the inside out, partly because I've had a lifetime as a seeker in wisdom traditions since I was a teenager and I've been an executive. So this is just my life. It's the combination of all of these things together. And when I left LinkedIn two and a half years ago or so, this is my mission. But you realize pretty quickly, like, if my ambition is to change work for the three and a half billion people in the workforce, like, I'm just a drop in the bucket, you know, just a tiny fraction. So I realized, okay, well, this is going to take a lot more than me, so it needs a coalition. And we started. I came across my friend Nicholas, who I had met in our work together at Google when I was at LinkedIn. We wanted to build something together. And so we started by building community for people like us. So people who are solopreneurs, practitioners, authors, podcasters, whatever, and to make it so that we could help each other be more successful, right, with the idea that's like a force multiplier. If you help, you know, this. This handful of this growing community of people who are doing the work and help them be more successful, then it's, you know, more people can be successful. This is phase one, and we have about, as of this moment, about 600 people in our community after, you know, six or eight months. Phase two is we then want to curate the best practices, the best research, like. Like just. Even just between the two of us, we have lots of different research sets that we talk about. What if we collected all those things? We collect the best practices from all these practitioners and make them available to enterprise, make them available to leaders, and then collect those leaders who are interested in doing the work right, Provide leadership development for them, provide things that are really easy for them to go back into their workplace and put to use. And then the third audience is individual contributors. The people who are many are often living in a world where their workplace is not compassionate. And so what are skills or things or tools that we can give to them so that they can change their work from the inside out. It's a movement. It's designed with these three audiences in mind. And if we can collect everyone and get everyone on board, then we have a chance of making some change.

Yeah, well, I was lucky enough, right? I know Nicholas, because we live in Boulder, so I was lucky enough to be one of the early members of the collective. And it's been just amazing to see it grow. The quality of folks who are in there, the generosity that flows through the network, the co creation, right, Collaboration. When we can operate from a place of abundance, right. In a group that, let's be honest, Scott, like there are not many, there's a lot in the group who don't have the financial security that you and I have. But yet the abundance from which it's easy for you and I to be abundant, like, of course, like, yes, fine, not a big deal. But what I've noticed in the collective, right, which is really powerful, is it doesn't matter who the person is, how young they are, where they are in their life stage, but there is an overall mindset and environment of abundance that everybody's operating for. And that's what's so special, my friend, about what you and Nicholas and others have created. So, like, kudos. Kudos to you. And I'm just rooting for the collective to truly make this vision a reality, right. Of where. Yeah, we are changing work from the inside out, by the way. That's the only way.

Yeah, I appreciate the support. I like what you said about abundance. Just in my own development, even with abundance, right. I come from a very privileged place at the moment, Right. I still struggle with it. It's such a human ingrained need, a survival instinct that we want to continue to accumulate so we can survive. This is how we were programmed for survival over hundreds of thousands of years. And yet when we're surrounded with the right people, when we feel safe, when we feel encouraged, when we feel inspired by each other, it does, it allows for that sense of abundance, that sense of like, oh, I believe in this. Together we can do this. And there's such a power in that.

Yeah. And you know, what makes it possible is what we started with. You know, I just kind of make that connection right now. So I'm just gonna state it and what starts it is because you're absolutely right, right. I talk about this. We are hardwired for fear. We are hardwired for scarcity. That's how we are. That's how we have evolved over millions of years, right? So we can, in any moment that will show up. No matter how much you got. You got $5amillion, 5 million, 50 million a billion, it doesn't matter, it'll show up. But the key is choice and pause. And I think that's where, you know, it brings us back to kind of your starting point. And no surprise, the collective is what it is. It comes back to two things. To make that choice and do something different. Mindfulness and pausing can make a big difference. And if I'm going to choose something which is not about me, but it's about we, compassion provides that. Right? So if you build those two as important pillars, we can operate more easily, we can make that choice more often to see and operate from abundance. But if we don't have those foundations, I don't think it actually is possible.

That's right. And this is, you know, my favorite. One of my favorite quotes is from Rumi. He said, yesterday I was clever and I tried to change the world, but today I'm wise and I'm working on changing myself. And this is fundamentally what we're talking about. If we want to change politics or war or education or pick a problem in the world, the environment, whatever it is, it only starts with us and our own change, our own consciousness. And as each person makes that change internally, then the external choices we make become more clear.

My friend, that was beautiful. I love that quote. I think this is a wonderful place for us to wrap up this podcast. I would love to have you back. We can talk a little bit more around the Changing World collective. The tons of things that you all are creating right in that. But listen, from the bottom of my heart, Scott, thank you. This was an amazing conversation. I truly feel a kinship with you from the first moment when I met you. And I'm blessed that we get a chance to collaborate together in the collective and outside. Thanks for the amazing work you're doing.

Thank you for having me. And friends, if you want to continue the conversation, join us@changingwork.org we have a little bonus. If you're listening, we have a coupon code. Podcast24 will get you an extra month of access. So two free months of access for you. Thank you.

Thank you, Scott. Take care, my friend. That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us. Review and share Share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week. Sam.