Speaker: 0:01

Welcome to the Heart Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love. Join your host, Tom Jackobs, as he delves into the insightful conversations with visionary business leaders who defy the status quo, putting humanity first and profit second. From heartfelt strategies to inspiring stories, this podcast is your compass in the world of conscious capitalism. So buckle up and let's go. Let your heart guide your business journey.

Tom: 0:36

Ladies, lads, and lighthearted listeners, meet our gallant guest, JL Heather. Having honchoed change in high halls from VML to GE, he's also a coach with a claim commanding leaders to come alive. Today, he'll share his journey swimming in the sea of sincere, heart-led business ventures. So batten down the hatches, folks. This will be an emotional rollercoaster ride that even T-Mobile can't disconnect. So stick around for the treasure trove of tales on the heart-led business show. JL, welcome to the show.

JL Heather: 1:12

Thanks, Tom. I admit that was a fantastic intro. Really helps set the tone. So I'm excited to be here. I'm ready to jump in.

Tom: 1:18

Awesome. Well, I'm glad that you're here. And you know, the first question I always ask is what's your definition of a heart-led business?

JL Heather: 1:26

I love the question and I've been thinking about this a lot as we kind of led up to this, cause I like the concept of heart-led and maybe, you know, first answer the question, which I think is always a good step to take. When I think heart-led business, I think a business that is really focused on being authentic, empathetic, and human-centered in their approach. And the reason I love heart-led so much is human-centeredness has become a huge part of who I am, how I do business, how I engage with clients for probably the last 20 years to varying degrees. I didn't always call it human-centered. That's more of a new term to me in like the last 10 years. If that's new, I don't know. But when you say heart-led, that was what came to mind and I'm sure there's probably room to define each of those terms a little bit authentic, empathetic, and human-centered, but that's where I am with it.

Tom: 2:15

Yeah. That's awesome. And your current practice is all about that, taking those leaders and making them more human-centered, heart-centered and all that. So, tell us a little bit about that transition for you into that or what inspired you to be a heart-led business yourself?

JL Heather: 2:32

When I look at it, the biggest thing, well, actually, I'll start with this, I'm a big fan of assuming good intent. Right? So when I was looking at all the organizations I was working with, all the leaders I was working with, and I would see these gaps between their intention and then the effect they were having, I kept telling myself it had to be due to a lack of understanding rather than a lack of caring. So it was seeing those gaps, having that belief that at heart, people are good, that really led me to try and find some ways to bring authenticity into leadership styles and the way organizations work and the way teams work to help build some empathy. Within the same arena and hopefully work on leading that towards a human-centered approach to our customers, to our people, to the way we do business. And I think over time, so I started out in the process world lean and agile, been doing that for like 20 years. The first chunk of that was very much a, let's go in, let's figure out what's wrong with your process and then let's fix it. And if you, I don't know how familiar you are with the world of organizational transformation, but only 8 percent of organizational transformations are what you would call successful. Everything else, so all the other 92%, either break even or fail. And I think it's 70 percent outright fail.

Tom: 3:50

Not surprised.

JL Heather: 3:50

So we would look at these organizational transformations. We'd see them failing because we weren't much better than the industry average at the time. And when we looked at the ones that were really successful, we found out it was when we were able to sit down with the leaders and really have what I would call, maybe now a heart-led conversation, a human-centered conversation about the way they were leading, the effect they were having, and how that was missing the mark with the intention they were shooting for. And we could actually shift their perspective, give them some concrete tools, and all of a sudden, transformation started not only working, but sticking. Because behavior was changing. You change process that doesn't change behavior. That just changes a little bit of what people do. And honestly, process only governs maybe half or less of what people do in an organization. So that's really where we made the transition from changing process to changing people. And then in the last year or so, we we've gone full time into the business, starting this business and really focusing on the people, the culture, along with the transformation. So I think that's really what led me here, right? Yeah. And maybe the heart of it, to summarize, is that gap between attention and effect. And really helping people see it and fix it.

Tom: 5:03

Yeah. And, and you specifically work with leaders, right?

JL Heather: 5:06

Yeah, so I work with leaders primarily. We also do work with teams from time to time. And I'm a firm believer, everyone on a team is a leader in one aspect or another, but in the main area we work is with executives, senior leadership to kind of help them move in the right direction.

Tom: 5:21

Okay. I think what you said earlier was really kind of resonated with me is the difference or the gap between intention and effect. And when you go into a leader of a fortune 500 company, and I can imagine that there's some tense conversations maybe, or some ahas or some maybe even emotional conversations that happen. What have you seen in terms of helping leaders? And helping people make that transition between or becoming aware of their intention and the effect of what they're doing.

JL Heather: 5:54

Well, I think most of the time, what you end up seeing is people. No one wakes up and goes, you know what, I'm going to go in and I'm going to make Tom's life miserable today.

Tom: 6:02

Well, I think some people are like that though.

JL Heather: 6:04

Maybe We'll see how this interview goes. And yeah. No, but in general, I don't think anyone wakes up and thinks I'm going to go in and make my team's lives miserable today. And part of what you have to help people do is recognize what is their actual intention. Because sometimes we don't think about that, right? We think about business goals, OKRs, KPIs, things like that. But we aren't really spending a lot of time truly understanding what our intent is, what we're trying to accomplish beyond moving the needle on a number. So there's that. A lot of times we don't have a clear view, especially the higher up in leadership we go of what the effect we're having is. I think at some point, even the best intentioned senior leaders and executives are probably only hearing somewhere around 30 percent or less of reality, right? And I, if I'm trying to remember the statistics and there's a lot of studies about this, but it's pretty clear that once you get high enough up your view of what frontline, customer contact, individual contributor type people are doing in your organization and how they're feeling. So the next thing is we help draw some lines between what they're doing and the effect it's having. That can be through like stakeholder interviews, talking to their peers, their boss's boss, their boss, all that. But a lot of times it's also by talking to some of the people on their team. We also use assessments. Like I'm a huge fan of the leadership circle profile. It's one of the best leadership 360 assessments out there. And it's really, really insightful. And I think when you do that, you can kind of start saying, here's what we're hearing, here the results broken down by the people who report to you, your peers, your boss and your boss's boss, and here's what they're saying and the feedback they're giving. And then with that, the leadership circle profile assessment, we can even say, and here's how that compares to all other leaders who have taken this assessment because it's percentile rankings and all that together usually helps a leader really kind of see that impact and measured against their intent. And that's where the aha moments start happening and where we can actually start making real change. But until that is seen it's really hard to drive change in behavior.

Tom: 8:13

Yeah. I can imagine like, you know, just in my own experience too, like it's hard to know exactly what the employees are feeling and actually hearing when giving orders and directions and things like that. And especially tell me like, if I'm off on this, but has it gotten with a more remote workforce, has it gotten more difficult with having that intention and all that, especially if you're just doing like Slack messages or text messages back and forth, you don't have that the voice to, you know, tell you, you know, intent or empathy or any type of emotions.

JL Heather: 8:50

You're spot on. I think that, that remote work situation creates more space between people than there was before. It has a lot of benefits and I don't think the world's going back.

Tom: 9:02

Nope.

JL Heather: 9:02

I do think, yeah, I do think there are more good things that came out of this than bad in this transition, but I do think leaders who are very focused on business and not as focused on the leadership side of things are really struggling because it amplifies. Everything that might be a leadership weakness, right? So if you have a leader that struggles with authenticity and vulnerability and trust building, that only gets worse in a remote environment, because they were already maybe not communicating in the best way. And now the natural communication just disappeared. So the whole channel of their interaction with people is gone. And they may or may not have realized that I think at the end of the day, the challenge that leaders are facing is not really different than the challenge they were facing before. It's just highlighted. And that is how do we get really purposeful about in person interactions? And that should have always been on top of mind for leaders. I think it's just even more so now.

Tom: 9:59

Wow. So what are some practicals that people can start to do to get more authenticity? And we hear that word a lot, and sometimes it gets used badly, but to, you know, lead, lead with their heart, and have more EQ, emotional intelligence or, and all that good stuff.

JL Heather: 10:19

I love you bring up emotional intelligence. Cause I think that's really key. You hear people throw around the words like authenticity, vulnerability, and I think that makes a certain group of people really kind of tighten up and cringe back. And maybe even have a little bit of a fear-based response. But the reality is most leaders can lean into the emotional intelligence side of thing. And the data is clear. Leaders high in emotional intelligence, outperform leaders, low and in emotional intelligence by orders of magnitude. You know, there's no doubt there, and you can take leaders through a set of activities, a set of skills that will help improve their emotional intelligence, while at the same time, helping them be a little bit more vulnerable and a little bit more authentic. Right. Just without saying the words. So I think that's a really great route. I think probably the biggest thing leaders need to really narrow in on is what are the values that come through when they talk? So I mentioned earlier, big background in agile. So I'm a big fan of the agile value statements. And I don't know how familiar you are with them, but they're always structured as this over that, right? So, people and interactions over process and tools. And God, I hope I got that right. Cause I'll really bad if I mess that one up. But the idea here is not to say that process and tools aren't important. They're obviously critical. We're just saying the people and their interactions are more important. So anytime we're talking about process. We need to highlight how that process is in support of the people and their ability to deliver value to customers.

Tom: 11:47

Oh, okay.

JL Heather: 11:48

That helps the process conversation, that value that you hold internally, that kind of comes out naturally as you talk. Is part of what's going to resonate with the people you're talking to. And it's also going to be a little bit of a vulnerable moment exposing. This is something I hold true. And there are others, you know, like we need to have contracts, especially I come from the agency world, like a contract negotiation is critical, but that can't get in the way of collaboration. So have the conversation about how do we write contracts that don't hold people legally liable, but rather promote collaboration and the delivery of value. Documentation, we've got to have documentation, but it should be in service of people, customers, or it should be in service of our partners to help them get the job done. It shouldn't just exist. And if it just exists to exist, we should get rid of it. And I think that's another thing, being human-centered, going and talking to someone and say, Hey, I know we've always done this report. I'm not really sure it's doing anything for us anymore. I don't think you need to do it anymore. Why don't you focus on servicing the customer over here and making sure they're happy. That's empowering. That's human, human-centered. It's heart-led. It's all those things. And I mean, I could go on and on about these. I would encourage everyone to go out there and just read the agile manifesto because there's a lot of gems there that apply way beyond software development. And we see it happening in marketing. We see it happening in HR. We see it happening in pharma a little bit right now. Like it's kind of branching out. These agile principles and values are starting to become more centric to how we lead and run organizations.

Tom: 13:19

Yeah, you know, I do sales coaching as well. And one of the big things that I focus on is automation and process to streamline the administrative things that salespeople do so that they can spend more time in front of customers because the more time you are spending in front of customers or potential customers, the more sales you make. So it's maybe a little different take to it, but kind of the same, you want to spend more time with people versus doing things that don't really move the needle.

JL Heather: 13:52

Right. And maybe the more generic twist on that is you want to automate what you can so you can focus on value, right? Whether that's value in more sales, value in a better product, value in a solution that solves the problem a little bit better. Value and understanding the problem better. So the more you can automate the better, and depending on your industry, that has bigger or lesser impacts in the technical world, it's huge. You can automate a lot in the HR world. There's still automation, but there's still a lot of one to one interaction.

Tom: 14:24

Yeah.

JL Heather: 14:24

So I do think you're spot on. Automate, so the connection, the human connection, the human-centeredness can take hold.

Tom: 14:32

Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about your business and how you've been a heart-led business and maybe that transition from corporate to having your own business and what that looked like in terms of any trials and tribulations or ups and downs that happened.

JL Heather: 14:48

Oh man. I think anyone who makes the transition from being employed in the corporate world to being self-employed will have an interesting story to tell. Cause I think it is one of those things, the majority of the time we require a little bit of a kick out the nest. For me. I think, well, one, my company, the company I was at at the time, VML was growing and merging with a lot of other companies. There was a decision made where we parted ways and that was the catalyst. I had to make a decision. Do I want to, try and go back into the agency world, do more of what I've been doing, which was a broad set of things in terms of consulting, process fixing, things like that, as well as more of the heart-led side of the things I liked to do. Or do I want to narrow my focus a little bit and be more human-centered in what I did? I made the decision that I wanted to be more human-centered and focused. So that's maybe the easy answer there. I think overall though, for the last five years, I've been slowly making the transition and preparing to get to the point where I was ready to kind of go out on my own. So, you know, getting some of the education that I needed, understanding where my own weaknesses were so I could shore them up finding support in the areas where I needed support. I think sometimes there's a fear of asking for help and it's the most beneficial thing you can do. Because not only do you get help, but you form a relationship with someone who knows something you don't. So I think that transition for me was something that was kind of, I don't want to say destined, but it was kind of in the works for a while. And I just needed that catalyst, that kick out of the nest to kind of make the transition and realize the idea of applying for another job at an agency or a corporation just did not hold any value to me anymore. And I can make a much bigger impact in the world by working more directly with leaders on my own.

Tom: 16:41

Oh, that's great. And that's a good transition as well. I made that transition as well out of corporate to entrepreneurship, full-time entrepreneurship. I'd always have side-hustles, things that, quick story, not to kind of derail our conversation, but think it's applicable. So I decided to quit my oil and gas job. I was kind of a mid-manager, oil and gas. And I go into my VP's office and I give him my resignation. He's like, Oh, I'm sorry to see that. You're like, best of luck to you. Glad that you're going and pursuing your dream. Great boss. I see his boss, the executive vice-president in the elevator and goes, Hey, Tom, I hear that you're leaving us to become a personal trainer. Like you'll never make as much money as you do here. I was like, dude, like there was absolutely no EQ on his side and kind of the karma that they got to him is his wife actually started working out at my facility and lost a lot of weight. It was looking really great. And then divorced him. I was like, yes.

JL Heather: 17:45

Oh no.

Tom: 17:47

It was like the karma came back. Sorry, buddy. But anyway...

JL Heather: 17:52

When you say that, that's one of the big challenges is understanding or maybe sensing when things aren't going to work out, right? When things aren't going to change in the way you need them to change to stay where you are. And that was probably the hardest thing for me across the board throughout my career, working with someone and realizing this person doesn't actually understand or see the problem. And until they're there, they see some aspect of it. I can't really help. And learning that at some point you have to walk away and find the people you can help. And I think that's hard. And I think in that instance you encountered someone who wasn't ready to be helped, right? And wasn't ready to see the issue.

Tom: 18:28

Right. Yeah, exactly. So how do you balance like leading a heart-led business and making money and doing all the things that we need to do to live indoors and eat food?

JL Heather: 18:41

Live indoors. That's a good one. I do prefer that. I think, you know in the coaching world, this is a big deal, right? A lot of coaches will go through training and feel really awkward about asking to be paid for their services, especially when it's a you and an individual, I think it gets a little bit easier when you work with companies rather than individual people. I think the important thing to remember is there are actually concrete ways to value what you're doing. So let's take retention, right? Everyone knows people don't leave bad jobs. They leave bad bosses, right? Like that's been shown over and over and over again. If I work with a leader and the more senior, the better. They become a little bit of a better boss. And let's say three people stay that would have left. And to go on top of that, the people who are going to leave are your most mobile people who are usually your best people, right? So we keep three people that would have otherwise left in the U.S. it costs about a third of a person's salary to replace them.

Tom: 19:38

Wow.

JL Heather: 19:38

Right? So when you look at that, on average, that's going to be at a minimum 30,000 dollars a person. So if we kept those three people, we saved you 90,000 dollars, right? At a minimum. And chances are, depending on the organization, it's probably a lot closer to like, 300,000 dollars, depending on the people and the situation. So you can start quantifying these things. You can start looking at the benefits and productivity. So, Liz Wiseman, who wrote a book called"Multipliers", has shown the best leaders, the ones who can be the most human-centered, who have these set of behaviors that she talks about, they tend to get 2.1 times the productivity out of their teams when compared to the worst. So when we work with like small to medium sized companies, one of the things we'll help them see is if we can improve your leadership and start getting, say, just a 50 percent increase in productivity, which is not out of the realm of possibility by any means. That means you can grow by 50 percent without hiring another person.

Tom: 20:33

Wow.

JL Heather: 20:33

That saves you hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? So I think when you look at this from an organizational perspective, there's a lot of value. When you look at it from an individual perspective, we can start talking about the things that are going to get you promoted and not that everyone's coming into coaching just to get promoted. But the reality is when you become a better leader, when your teams get 50 percent better, because you are a better leader. That leads to more income. That leads to more opportunities. And typically that comes with a higher paycheck. I've definitely seen people go from director to the vice president. I've seen people go from supervisors to directors. And typically speaking, that's tens of thousands of dollars in pay. And our programs are usually around the three to five-thousand dollar mark for four to six months. That's a fraction of that. And then that's only for the first year, right? When you talk about over time as career, it starts adding up. So I think we kind of have to be advocates for the value of what we do.

Tom: 21:29

Yup.

JL Heather: 21:30

And if you find yourself going into a situation feeling bad about asking for money, then you need to ask yourself, is what you're doing really valuable? And if it is, then people should be happy to pay for it, right? And be happy to give some of the value they're receiving back to you.

Tom: 21:45

Yeah.

JL Heather: 21:45

And for the most part, everyone I've talked to, I can't really even think of a single example where that hasn't been felt.

Tom: 21:52

Yeah. And that's a really great point. If you don't see the value in what you're selling, then you need, you need a check on,

JL Heather: 22:00

Yeah.

Tom: 22:01

you know, your own system and values and all that. Yeah. That's absolutely true. So do you like to work with small businesses or do you like to go into the corporate area and work with leaders at that level?

JL Heather: 22:13

So I will say, I've done the whole gambit from, you know, 10 people to thousands of people, obviously. I find that I have the most fun and the organizational impact is the most significant as well as the individual impact is most significant in that small to medium sized range. So somewhere, I mean, it depends. It can go as small as like 20, 30 people. But really when you start getting into that, like three to five thousand range, the organization is getting big enough. The change, it is a little bit slower and harder to the point where I just have more fun with those medium-sized companies. Now that said, the caveat to that is in a lot of bigger companies, they're stratified and they're kind of divisioned up, right? So I think there is an advantage to working within divisions and improving divisions in those big companies. And because in a lot of ways they, they function like a medium sized company. in a bigger organization. So there can be some advantages there. But yeah, we tend to target that small to medium because, I mean, that's where we, let's look at it this way. You have a 50 person company and you double their productivity. That means they can double their revenue without hiring another person, right? And we've seen that. And that is huge for a company that's small. It's harder to see that effect and to feel that high to some extent at bigger companies.

Tom: 23:35

Yeah, I can imagine that the smaller the company, the bigger the impact can be in, or even the quicker the impact could be as well. You know, when you have, maybe it's the owner that needs a little EQ adjustment and,

JL Heather: 23:50

Right.

Tom: 23:50

all of a sudden they become the best boss in the world and everybody's super happy and is doing more things. And I was interviewing somebody else earlier and she was saying that, you know, when the bosses are really like happy and carefree a little bit and just fun to be around, people will do more things for her outside of what their contract requires of them. And it's like a family almost where people, everybody's like pitching in to help out.

JL Heather: 24:20

I always hesitate to use the word family in an organization. But I don't disagree in that extra effort you're talking about. That's the discretionary effort. So when you look at Liz Wiseman's research, she talked to people and they were saying, basically asking, how did this leader affect your productivity? And for the top leaders, you had people that were saying like 110%, 120%. And as a research team, they were basically like, you know what? That's not possible. Let's go talk to these people. And what they found is these leaders that were truly the best. They had the people saying like, I didn't think I could do it. And then they helped me, they showed me, and I did. Like I thought my a hundred percent was this. They showed me my a hundred percent was this, right? So that's why I say 110. And, and while there is an element of the happy carefree, there's also the element of the expectation setting and the belief. So, there's a guy, I can't remember his first name. His last name is Rosenthal. He did a study in schools long time ago. I think it was in the seventies where he did an IQ test of all the students, and he gave the teachers a list of top performing or top scores, low scores and wanted to see what the effect was. He didn't tell the teachers, the list had no correlation to their score. And at the end of the year, and we won't even get into the ethics of because who knows.

Tom: 25:40

Yeah.

JL Heather: 25:40

But at the end of the year, what he found was everyone on the list that the teacher thought was a high-scorer became a high-performer in the class. And everyone who was on the lower end of the list became a low performer, regardless of how they scored. So I think when you think about this for leaders, the expectations you set are most likely going to be met as long as they're reasonable. And that's regardless of whether they're bad, low expectations, or high. So if you set high, reasonable expectations and go in there and support your team, we call it servant leadership in the agile world and really believe in them. Chances are, they're going to surprise you. They're going to rise to the occasion and they're going to help you out regardless of whether or not you're a happy go lucky person or not. So it's that authentic connection, that real belief in their ability and then the support in helping them get there that makes the difference.

Tom: 26:30

Yeah, I think that's, that's really the key is the belief and the support that comes along with the expectation. Because I we've all had those bosses that set those high expectations and you're like, okay, well, are you going to help me? No, you can figure it out. And I've been guilty of that as well. It's like, okay, how can I support you? And that's starting to having started this podcast too, is it enabled me to obviously talk to great people like yourself, but also change my own behaviors in terms of how I deal with my employees as well. And just, I'm starting to ask more like, what else do you need from me? How can I make your life easier? And the effects have been really great. Absolutely.

JL Heather: 27:13

Yeah.

Tom: 27:13

Cool.

JL Heather: 27:14

You've never read that the culture code is a great resource for how to create the culture you're kind of already creating.

Tom: 27:20

Yeah. The culture code. Cool. I'll put that in my book notes and we'll link that up into the show notes as well. Some of those resources.

JL Heather: 27:28

Awesome.

Tom: 27:28

Awesome. So, JL, thank you so much for being here today. And how can people learn a little bit more about what you do and potentially, you know, become better leaders with your help?

JL Heather: 27:38

So we've got, I think the link will be in the notes for the podcast. We've got a psychological safety white paper that we've been giving out. It's just kind of giving people an overview of what it is, the stages of psychological safety. Tim Clark laid it out in his book. It's really good. And then some things Tips and Tricks and things to help you kind of navigate it because when it's a great measurement of how you're doing on culture and as a leader on as how your people feel safe and they've shown one of the biggest indicators of high performing teams is safety. So we're a big fan of psychological safety. We really want to get this out there. And that's one of the things that we can help measure in an organization. That will really show progress. So yeah, I would say you follow the link, go check it out. We, all we want is your email. We promise we're just going to give you more information. And yeah, that's probably the best resource we have right now.

Tom: 28:31

Oh, that's great. We'll put all that into the show notes along with your social media handles and all that good stuff. So again, JL, thank you so much for coming onto the show. This has been a, just a great conversation. And I know I've learned a lot and I'm sure our listeners have learned a lot as well. So thank you.

JL Heather: 28:48

Well, I really appreciate the opportunity. This has been a blast.

Tom: 28:51

Awesome. And to our listeners and viewers, if you're viewing this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching and listening to the show today. I know I really appreciate it. And I know JL really appreciates it as well. So make sure you're checking out what he's doing in the world of authentic leadership and helping people become more heart-led leaders and all that, of course, we'll be in the show notes. And then my ask of you is to do what other considerate and smart listeners are doing. And that is to give us a rating and review on your favorite podcast application, whether that's Apple podcast, Spotify, or any of the other hundreds of podcasts apps that are out there. So until next time, lead with your heart.

Speaker 2: 29:34

You've been listening to the Heart Led Business Show, hosted by Tom Jackobs. Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.