Shaping a Sustainable Future with Tabitha Scott

Speaker 1: [Music] everything is a living organism made of the same energy and once we get that then you can forget about all of our differences socioeconomics education background Advantage disadvantage color ethnicity forget that because we're all made of the same thing and if you want an organization to thrive then realize it's living too and to keep it alive you got to take care of it hi I'm Melanie bar welcome back to the built it podcast your go-to place to empower you to live the life and business that you crave I'm here to talk about everything from Having the courage to make life and career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech Innovation I'm here to celebrate your wins and navigate through your challenges I live in the city now but I grew up in a town of a thousand people I've navigated major life leaps a senior level corporate career worked in professional sports and now as a successful entrepreneur who loves business technology family and making meaningful connections with you and the Sheil it Community I also love a good workout and dose of self-care magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so turn up the audio open your favorite Notes app grab your favorite drink and here we go welcome back to the Sheil tip podcast thank you for joining us Tabitha you are a leadership expert and author with a new book powering change tell us about your career path and what led you to become an author my career path started in financial systems and payments and Investments and I felt like I was doing something great for the earth I grew up on a small farm in Kentucky and so nature was really important to me from there I got into corporate building and large construction projects doing renewable energy with them and green them and getting into sustainability and Innovation uses of modern Technologies to reduce energy consumption and so it's always been some sort of transformation in a company whether I was consulting or serving as a officer around something that I love to do which is support nature and help build regenerative businesses and when you talk about change I recently have been looking at the things I'm throwing away thinking how can I reuse this how can I make this better for the Earth and I see how you took leadership into making the world a better place it's interesting Melanie I say I want to help companies go into the future by remembering the past and what I mean by that is Nature's been evolving into perfect balance for four billion years and modern business has been at it for only about 300 and if you think about the sophistication in nature the networks there is no waste in nature there is perfect balance and Harmony there are so many things we can learn diversity is another one of those things and doing the things that energize you being connected having clear Direction and purpose versus the things that burn you out which is getting separate from all these philosophies and standard operating procedures of nature so if we look at it as a badass road map instead of oh the poor planet we must save it the planet's going to be fine just might kick us off so true your book presents a radical shift in perspective for leaders how does the concept of viewing businesses as a living organism apply in modern management yeah I think it's so important in modern management to acknowledge that businesses are living organisms and there's a couple different ways we can talk about that first is the people in the business you have so much imbalance you have burnout and then you have this pace of change that pace of technological change is now happening every 30 seconds so our brains can't evolve and in order for people to keep up you can't just Chase change it's just burning them out they have to find what it is that energizes them is it taking risks or mitigating them is it working with people or working with things is it highly complex or do they love specialty and then the more targeted in you can get with that and connect to what they love and are energized by there's 's no mistake that it's called flow because source is energy for everything so organizations are absolutely no different and they follow those same growth Cycles in all of nature birth growth maturity decline the companies that can't jump onto a new cycle they fail like Compact and Blockbuster so until we view our organizations as living organisms then we can't use all of these Cool Tools of nature to fix them it's so true and even with the podcast I have put out a weekly episode for 5 years and just recently I love the interviews but I was feeling everything was moving slowly and I just did a Rebrand and it brought life and a freshness into the business and I just did a solo episode recently where I said I used to do a tech review once a year now I'm doing it at least quarterly if not more and it doesn't mean to change systems it's just everything is changing so fast and this conversation is so timely because I know a lot of leaders feeling like things are just moving really quickly it is and when you think about our language has been telling this since the time we began talking think about when you describe someone right she lit up the room he's spun up today I feel burned out I'm drained I'm energized I'm transformed I could go on on and on and what is a great idea if you have a great idea a light bulb comes on over your head and so it's prolific in our language that everything is a living organism made of the same energy and once we get that then you can forget about all of our differences socioeconomics education background Advantage disadvantage color ethnicity forget that because we're all made of the same thing and if you want an organization to thrive then realize it's living too and to keep it alive you got to take care of it what do you think is the most important element of leading ership when building and scaling a business in teams the most important part of leadership when you're building and scaling is I call it the triaa framework which sounds teesy but it's super easy

Speaker 1: especially now it's crazy that pce a change right that's so true my favorite thing to ask a new team member is is what do you like to do what's your favorite thing to do because we all have the things we have to do but I always like to know what does someone really like to do because they're going to be the best in that role absolutely and even if you can't people say I still have to do my reports every week it's not about getting rid of all the stuff you don't want to do but it's about finding ways to do a little bit more of it or gamify your workday if you can't do that then say I'm going to do these seven nasty reports that I hate and then I'm going to walk my dog around the block give yourself little rewards and it'll help get you through the day I always time block the things I don't necessarily want to do I think okay I'm giving myself just this time and somehow that makes it go smoother and it does it does tell us about a time when applying the principles from your book improved a company's productivity oh wow the new book is full of corporate examples most of them Fortune 500s where one thing that is evidence of how the methods have worked is I've had double blind live studies and in the book I share six different studies from all across the world Singapore Amsterdam San Francisco different locations different companies all Billion Dollar Plus companies and I had them in like type groups first and we did Innovation and productivity exercises and then later in the day we switched the tables up nobody knew that they were in like type thinking groups first and that they in diverse thinking group second every single place across the globe every single company every single group went up in both Innovation and productivity by having a diverse thinking type of group so I think companies can learn straight away a lot of them have de and I now but let's take that Beyond how we look that's table Stakes let's get to the next generation of that which is cognitive thinking and then the next generation of that I put in the book is I nitive Technologies if you're looking future forward you're looking at generative Ai and then if you're looking at more risk averse and reducing errors you're looking at Automation and technology is part of our Workforce today and I always say we're going to get the best results from many different viewpoints and I am so inspired by AI because I want to get things done faster and so when I find a tool that can help me do something that I want to do in the way I want to do it but quicker so helpful I know why not get on it I know if we don't keep up with the times we're going to be left behind we will for sure I think people are afraid of it because they haven't understood yet that it's just pattern recognition that's all it is whatever we put in there and that of course is the risk is the bias of what gets put in but if you're looking to say hey here's a paragraph that I've written can you dumb it down for me into common language or try to make it funnier for me I think that's a great application I wish I would have had it when I was writing my book I love that it starts you on a path too you know it still can be your authentic you and come from an authentic place it just helps make things move a little quicker absolutely I tell you the first time that it really sent off bells and whistles for me I was coming back from leading a design thinking session with a large Insurance client we had 283 sticky notes after one of those and I had few people in the room sending me their lists of sticky notes and categories and on the flight right before I jumped on the flight I just thought I wonder what'll happen if I just highlight all of these at once and pop it in chat GPT and it spit out here are the top seven themes here's how many are in each theme here's why it's important today to businesses in the insurance sector that's probably why it's trending why it's important so interesting I understand the fear of Regulation and proper use but it really is an incredibly powerful tool well yeah and it frees us up so it's not like I'm not still going to give the data to the Anthropologist team who's going to validate it who's going to look at the visual cues from the footage that day and still do the science but now our scientists are focused on science and not counting and moving widgets one to the other hey it can be amazing how do you suggest business own owners maintain sustainable company cultures while also experiencing the constant change that we're talking about yeah I think you have to take it from this concept A lot of companies and I give some examples in my book about doing things the wrong way and how I've learned over 18 years of working with Innovation and sustainability that I love Malcolm gladwell's work pick one thing at a time and it has to be hyper relevant and so instead of coming out and saying hey we're going to do these great new 20 items of policy forget that it doesn't work what we need to do is say in everyone's goal this year at the performance year end existing process so now you don't have inertia right to start up it's an existing process you give them the choice what one goal would you like to do and you pick a different topic each year like the first year it might be to reduce carbon the second year it might be reduce water and and every single person could do something like the person that orders the copy paper could set all of the copers to default double-sided whereas the person that orders wood to build the structures they might pick a different type of wood or a supplier that's closer to home but it's then relevant and it's just one thing that everybody can do but when you've got a great big company now you've moved a whole lot of stuff forward versus trying to kill people with new policies and it's so true because it's it's not overwhelming too person has the one thing they're interested in and you're right I can gets so much more done and because they picked it and are energized by it they're gonna do it what did you like the most about the writing process and becoming an author oh man I can't tell you that I loved the writing process my sister is an English teacher and I would say she's much better at writing than me what my passion was around the writing process and I did it both books that I've written trust your animal instincts which came out in 2020 and then powering change it was nights and weekends and it's hard to be so disciplined about that so I wouldn't say it was necessarily fun but the passion was nobody's looking at the environment as this amazing brilliant source of answers for business nobody's looking at it that way and I've seen it for so long and having the background in both business and sustainability and electrical engineering I know how energy moves and I have seen the successes in the businesses and I just want to say wait a minute guys you got it wrong that you shouldn't be whining about being forced into ESG and sustainability governance that's not what it's about those are checklists and they'll come and go and they'll change over time but you should be having fomo like I want them to be having fear of missing out if they don't pay attention to what Nature has to share right now if they want to be more Innovative profitable productive if they want to connect more and engage and avoid burnout then get on it check out what Nature's doing so that's the passion is there any advice you would give current or aspiring authors about the publishing process yeah there are so many different options and it could be really overwhelming and what I ended up doing is finding a team of experts in different areas like editors and designers and so I've collected different people over time and kind of put together I didn't do it myself I asked someone who's been in publishing for 28 years her whole family has to put together for me a dream team and I said if you could have a dream team of all these independent folks who would that be and so that's how powering potential media came into being I call it the Dream Team so that was my process was the first time feeling blind and lost and talking to Publishers and realizing I would be giving up rights I'd be giving up royalties but then realizing they could help you with publicity so the first one was trial by fire and I launched it right during Co so nobody was having book signings and it was a very personal book which was opposite of my whole professional business image this was a book about my life and becoming vulnerable and reaching this point of burnout and walking away from the career giving away my stuff living in the jungle and getting messages from animals wow I love that you've had the business side and also the nature side because it's true my son is very scared of Storms and I told him the other day I said look at the tree the tree has withstood years of weather and there's nothing to be worried about but that made me think about the Earth and how it relates to our daily lives and even withstanding business that's right so interesting and I had an advantage because I was raised on a small farm in Kentucky by Elementary School teachers so of course everything was a lesson for us when we had our little Gardens and you learned about planning and budgeting and that things only grow at certain times and to rotate your crops and make them diverse there is no waste in nature and so we learned so many lessons I even remember Dad when I was a kid two blackberry vines and then each year he would plant maybe 10 or 20 more and now there's over 800 and it shows how over time if you just Peck away at something what you can create with that and that's great advice for business too doesn't happen overnight it doesn't and it's okay and that goes back to the new writer thing it's hard I'm not going to lie it's so hard to have that discipline and everybody else is going out to dinner or let's go do something fun this week weekend and you're like I got to write but it will add up and it won't last forever I used to set a goal of doing a chapter a month which was ambitious to get it out there but we are at the right time in the right age this is the year of the dragon it's time to take back what Nature has to offer magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy what is one way that you make sure to find and live your joy yeah I have aligned my career to what I'm so passionate about just in January I started working as executive sustainability officer for gilbane which is A7 billion construction company and they're committed to Net Zero carbon Waste Water by 2040 which is 10 years before the UN is recommending it so I thought that's a really cool and bold you know requirement and they're privately held so they're not required to do it that sounds like a really good time let's figure it out that is amazing so it doesn't seem like work if you're doing something that you love and then for me the passion about the book I've given away 100% of the profits so far if I have an event like here in Denver I've got a book signing coming up and 100% of those profits are going to Rocky Mountain wild the same in Nashville they're going to the Tennessee Wildlife Federation and so I think creating these economic models that can drive the things that you're passionate about and putting your actions where they need to be so I'm just excited for me it's about getting the word out in a very different way thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your leadership knowledge and your knowledge of the planet and how we live our lives it's so fun to think about and important can you please share with us how and where we can find you yeah Tabitha as scott.com and if you want to check out the book go to the tab that says books and it's got local events coming up there who I'll be sending the profits to with those you can see a little bit more about me if you want me to come and talk to your group or if you'd just like to chat about what you can do to get started thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our Sheil it website or at Sheil it on social thank you to my editor rich shelino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave [Music]