Episode 68: Take Mindfulness Off The Cushion: Begin With Compassion With Scott Shute
When it comes to improving work environments, rarely do we talk about the importance of soft skills as opposed to technical. However, more than anyone would think, these very skills create the most impact. In 2019, Amy Vetter interviewed Scott Shute, Head of Mindfulness and Compassion programs at LinkedIn, to discuss Scott's journey of starting this department within LinkedIn to create a way for compassion to be integrated into the culture. Scott provides tips to incorporate these practices into the workplace and how this can be achievable in yours as well! Tune in to gain some important nuggets that will be beneficial for you, your people, and your organization!
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Take Mindfulness Off The Cushion: Begin With Compassion With Scott Shute
Welcome to this episode of Breaking Beliefs, where I had the opportunity to interview Scott Shute, Head of Mindfulness and Compassion Programs at LinkedIn. He has been studying and practicing mindfulness and related wisdom teaching since he was thirteen years old and has taught it since he was in college. In the work that he has been able to do, he's been able to explore the possibility of human potential, helping employees become the best version of themselves.
With the mindfulness programs, they're able to build employee capabilities around resilience, self-awareness and growth mindset. With the compassion programs, they're able to work to expand their employee's capability and capacity for service. He also loves photography and he donates much of what he does through his photography hobby to charity. He gets to integrate all of his passions and bring all of himself to work, leading regular meditation sessions, teaching classes about compassion and growth mindset.
During this interview, we talked about Scott's journey to bring mindfulness and compassion programs to LinkedIn, what it takes to start developing programs like this and create a way for compassion to be integrated into the culture. He provides tips to incorporating these practices into the workplace and how this can be achievable in the place that you work in as well. I hope you enjoy this interview. There are lots of great tips on how to put this into your own workplace. If you find this beneficial for yourself, a friend or a coworker, please share, like and review this episode.
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Scott, would you give a little background on what you do for LinkedIn?
I'm the Head of our Mindfulness and Compassion programs. I've been at LinkedIn for more than six years. The first six of that, I led global customer operations and then I became the Head of Mindfulness and Compassion, my dream job.
How did that journey happen from what you were doing before?
Long story short as possible, I've been a double agent I’d say. I've been interested and been on my own journey since I was thirteen. I’ve been meditating since I was thirteen and have been teaching since I was nineteen. It's been a big part of my life. I've gotten to that point in my career and my personal development where I felt comfortable in my own skin enough. I started leading a class at work then I volunteered to be the exec sponsor for our program. We didn't have a program but there were a lot of people like me volunteering to do things. For 2 or 3 years, it was my side hustle and we pulled together a team of volunteers and created a nice program.
For me, the tipping point into making it a full-time gig was when Jeff Weiner, our CEO, was giving the commencement address at Wharton and he was talking about compassion, which I thought was amazing in itself. The next 3 or 4 times he's on TV, that's all the reporters want to talk about, that one question about LinkedIn and twenty questions about compassion. I was thinking, “It's time for us as LinkedIn to take a leadership position. While Jeff talking about it is awesome, we need to codify what it means so that if you tell 13,000 people to go back to their desk and be compassionate, everybody knows what that means.”
I made a pitch to Jeff, our head of HR and a bunch of the people and here I am. My job is two-fold, mindfulness and compassion. Mindfulness is about mainstreaming mindfulness. It’s about making it part of the fabric like we do physical exercise. I want to make a mental exercise part of the fabric of what we as individuals do and what we support as a company and then two is compassion. I'm an ops guy, so my job is to operationalize compassion. Meaning, what does it mean to run a company compassionately? What does it mean to sell, service, build products or lead a finance organization compassionately? How do we run meetings? How do we treat each other? How do we treat ourselves? We're on the first steps of a 1,000-mile journey but it's fun.
Compassion: Starting with gratitude gets people in a more creative spot and builds more openness.
That's awesome and it's great to see a dream be able to become reality in business. Can you give some specifics for businesses that are out there, business owners, leaders and corporate? When we talk about mindfulness, it's such a broad term. How do you integrate that into the daily life of a business owner or a corporation?
Can I talk about both mindfulness and compassion?
Absolutely.
Compassion is more actionable. First, there's the practice itself and companies who create space for that to be part of the fabric, just like they would create a gym where you could go physically exercise. Creating places where people can meditate whether it's group meditations or quiet rooms. A lot of companies have prayer rooms. We call them quiet rooms where you could do your thing. It could be to pray. It could be to meditate. The next stage is taking it off the cushion, taking it into places to build in more mindful ways of operating. This is where the term mindfulness gets broad.
It means something more than just meditation. It could be things like gratitude. As an example, we start our team meetings with gratitude. Sometimes, it's a personal win and a professional win. Sometimes, it's gratitude. When you start with gratitude, it starts everybody from a different position. It opens their heart and it gets them more open. We tend to have a negativity bias. That's how we operate. That's how we've been wired or programmed over thousands of years. Starting with gratitude, it gets people in a more creative spot and builds more openness.
Setting your technology. This is both a technology and a cultural way of doing things. Having your meetings end at 25 or 55 past the hour and giving people five minutes to get to the next meeting or the other way around, starting every meeting five minutes after. If you can build that into the culture and this is a challenge, it gives people a little bit of breathing room in between meetings. There are lots of definitions. For me, compassion is perhaps even more interesting because compassion at its root is understanding someone's situation or their suffering coupled with both the ability and desire to help.
That could mean deeply understanding our customers coupled with the ability and desire to help them. What's been some research around is that companies who are, I'll use Adam Grant's term, otherish instead of selfish. Meaning, most companies are thinking about the top line, bottom line shareholder perspective. If we move beyond that to have this triangle of balance between ourselves, top line and bottom line, the customers and our employees, that's where true compassion can happen. Some companies get lucky.
They have a great product but they're not thinking about their customers or they're making so much money that their employees are happy but they haven't built in the processes to make employees happy intentionally. This is the root. If we start things from this idea that we're going to serve as something bigger than ourselves, we're going to provide value for our customers truly and we're truly providing value for employees. Let me give a few examples of what that means. If a CEO is standing in front of the all-hands and saying, “We're going to be the next $5 billion company.” Who cares?
Compassion: Compassion, at its root, is understanding someone's situation or their suffering coupled with both the ability and desire to help.
I've been in that crowd and it’s like, “That's exciting.” As an example, with LinkedIn, we can talk about how many clicks we got. We can talk about how many users we have and that's all good. We should measure that, too but it should be a balance of customer-first. Meaning, how many jobs did we help people get? What value did we provide? Thinking about it from a customer-first perspective. If you’re a salesperson, if you're the head of sales thinking about how to build a compassionate organization. If you did one thing, if you could stand on stage in front of your sales force and say, “Never sell our customers something they don't need just to hit your quota.”
That's huge because then it's about providing value for those customers. If you're the head of HR thinking about how to build truly compassionate programs for your employees. Somebody was saying to me that at their company, if your spouse died, you've got two days of bereavement leave. That's not a compassionate policy. There's nothing about that's compassionate. Build in the systems that will support this idea. One of my favorite quotes is from James Clear from Atomic Habits. “Our lives did not rise to the level of our goals. They fall to the level of our systems.” In the same way, if we intend to build a mindful, conscious or compassionate organization, we have to build in the systems that support that. Otherwise, it's just idealism and it doesn't turn into anything.
One of the struggles for workplaces building this in is you absolutely have to build these systems in but everybody's mindset is a little bit different. You have individualized approaches you may need to take where some people might be uncomfortable or there's some reason they're tapping out of it or they're not as engaged with it as you'd hope for. Where does it go wrong? What kind of things come up? How does a corporation handle that?
All of this starts with company culture and it starts at the top. Compassion is, for me, an easier way to talk about it because it's hard to be against compassion. You can talk about mindfulness and some people will be like, “Meditation is not for me.” That's different. Compassion is about, “We want to help other people.” If you talk to any C-level person and say, “Don't you want to provide value for your customers?” It's hard to argue with. To answer your question, I've seen mindfulness things go wrong where we'll bring in someone who's from the outside, they're all about meditation and they don't speak the language of the company.
They come in and do a meditation where we're going to eat a raisin and take twenty minutes to eat the raisin. That may be great if you're on a four-day retreat. A few people who are into it is another modality of going deep but it's not great in the corporate environment. You have to speak the language of the company. It's the balance of the three things. You have to do what's right for the company. What we've proven is that companies who build this magic triangle and take care of the three things make more money.
They're more successful over time. This is not just a feel-good thing. This is how you succeed in business. This is how you succeed as a company, as a team and as an individual. It's trying to codify the things that work there. What works is integrating it, speaking the language, building into the culture and starting with leadership on down. What doesn't work is having something that doesn't fit into the company culture.
It's that one-time hit versus the company has to be bought in. Even if they bring in a speaker to have someone like you or a team behind it to carry it on, that speaker's going to leave and then everyone felt good for a moment even if they didn’t fit in. There's nothing to carry it forward when they want to feel like that tomorrow. What other tips can you provide businesses? The other thing that I want to make sure we encompass as well being in this digital world is not everybody's in an office. If you've got remote employees or everyone is remote, it could possibly be, your customers are not part of your organization. How do you get everybody into the mission and the purpose of what you're trying to do?
Technology can help. Things like video. For me, the experience of video, I can see you and we can make eye contact, there's much more of a human connection when all of our meetings happened by video versus if it's just audio or email. It’s come a long way in the last twenty years or so. I used to work at several companies where we had video capability but nobody used it because it would take thirteen minutes to get it up and running and then everybody was mad by the time it got working.
Compassion: Never sell customers something they don't need just to hit your quota.
Now, video is so easy. There's no excuse not to use it, so we start there. It's about consistency. We talked about trust is consistency over time. Consistency with this topic. Consistency that we're building it into everything that we do. If I'm having a conversation with a customer, I can talk about our culture. I can talk about, “Here's the way we do things. Here are our processes because ultimately, I want to provide you value. At the same time, I'm trying to sell my stuff. I want us to win.” I'm going to win by providing more value than any other provider can.
Building those systems into everything that we do. The way we handle meetings, the way we talk about it on stage, if you're the CEO or C-levels down to every leader. The way that we codify our values so that each individual knows how to act when they come into the workplace. One of the things I'm fascinated by is especially large companies but even small companies, shape consciousness, let's say. Big companies, the Googles, Facebooks, Microsofts, Aetnas and others have tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of employees and each one has a strong culture.
In the same way that religions or governments have done over the last several thousand years, now it's these big companies which are shaping the way people think and act. If we want to change the world in a positive way, the workplace is a rich environment to do that. As an example, at LinkedIn, we have a strong culture and it's one of those where if you don't fit in, it's not going to work. No matter how good you were, if you don't fit into the culture, it's not going to work. We talk about, “Here's how you treat people. You treat people beautifully. We expect diversity, inclusion and belonging so that means you have to learn how to get along with every flavor of the rainbow.” That is a beautiful thing and it's a powerful thing.
Are there any last tips you want to provide anybody that we didn't cover?
If you're a single person and you feel like you're dropped in the ocean, just start. Don't wait for the company to do it. Start doing something. For me and it's not me, a lot of people, I was one person and I started a meditation class. There was one person that came the first time I did it and we kept plugging away. Three or four years later, it's a thing. It can happen organically. You can wait for the tough stance to happen. You can wait and say, “My company doesn't but each one of us can do something.” No matter who you are, do what you can.
Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. This will be helpful.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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For Mindful Moments with my interview with Scott Shute, I loved how he was able to describe the journey of putting these programs together in a large corporation. I know for many of us in the mindfulness space, figuring out a way to make it programmatic so that companies not only talk about this but also live it and walk the walk of what it means to put mindfulness programs into the workplace. What it takes is someone with a passion like Scott to be able to incorporate this into the business. One of the things he talked about was the things that he did for years prior to gaining consent to put this program together at LinkedIn of doing things on the side, outside of his job responsibilities. As other people learned about the skills that he had and became interested in, he offered and volunteered to do programs for many years.
Compassion: If we want to change the world in a positive way, the workplace is a rich environment to do that.
As he saw that the company was shifting and the CEO was talking more about compassion, he found at a time that was a great opportunity to show the benefits of the programs that he had already been doing on the side to be able to bring this into LinkedIn as a regular program. What was important about this talk was two things that were objectives for him. One, that mindfulness is more than little exercises that we might learn on retreats or in classes but how we incorporate it into our workday. A lot of times, when we think of mindfulness, we think of our self-work, which we need to do but we're not necessarily thinking about how we affect the world around us with our energy. These types of practices are important.
When we call them practices, it's practices for a reason because it takes repetition and works to make sure that we can embed it into our neural channels, embed it into our day and we will look to do those mindfulness practices because it feels good in our body. We have to train our brains to do that and that's why it becomes exercise. The second goal he was talking about was operationalizing compassion. In order to do that, what that looks like in meetings, what that looks like when we speak to one another whether it's our customers, coworkers or leaders and building out programs to demonstrate that, to practice that and so forth. He gave a great example of making sure that we build space in the workplace or in the workday.
For spaces to do mindfulness activities, exercises or meditation that it becomes an acceptable thing within the culture, just like a gym would be for physical fitness. I thought that was a great example. We dove deep into compassion and trying to understand what that meant in corporate culture. Meaning that three-prong approach of ourselves, our employees and our customers. How do we balance that? How do we make sure that we don't have selfish interests? Be honest with ourselves when selfish interest is coming up for us or for someone else. How do we communicate that to make sure that we have the systems in place to support someone on that journey of observation?
Know once things are starting to go wrong and going off-kilter from your intention of how you want to move through mindfulness in the company, how to move through compassion with one another, that you've got ways for people to speak to one another, that it's embedded in the culture. It's a tone at the top to make sure that the leadership is demonstrating these qualities so that the rest of the company knows that it's accessible. I hope that this was helpful for you especially if you're considering how you build this into your workday either individually or build into your company programs.
If you think that this episode would be of help to somebody that you know, please share it with them. Also, like, review and subscribe to this show so that you can get other pieces of content as well. If you are a company that's looking to sponsor future episodes, feel free to contact us at AmyVetter.com and there's information on contacting us there. I hope that this has been valuable for you and that you've taken this moment in your day to reset, think about and observe the energy that you're creating internally and create better energy for those around you as you walk back into your day.
Important Links:
Scott Shute - LinkedIn
About Scott Shute
I have the incredible opportunity to live my dream job.
After twenty-five years of customer-oriented leadership roles, I now lead our Mindfulness and Compassion programs at LinkedIn. It’s a role in which I get to utilize my entire skillset and passions.
I’ve been studying and practicing mindfulness and related wisdom teachings since I was thirteen years old, and teaching since I was in college. In this work we get to explore the possibility of human potential, helping employees become the very best version of themselves. With mindfulness, we’re building employees’ capabilities around resilience, self-awareness, and growth mindset. With Compassion, we’re working to expand our employees’ capability and capacity for service. Ultimately, the intention is to build these practices and consciousness into the very fabric of the company – how we develop products, how we sell, how we service – in a way that serves our employees as well as our customers. My operations lens helps me focus on scaling the work we do.
Another passion of mine is photography. I've always loved photography, but over the last few years, it's become a deepening obsession. I've created a commercial website (www.scottshutephotos.com)so I can share and hone my craft while donating the proceeds to charity. I'm so grateful that at LinkedIn we encourage transformation - of the individual, the company, and the world. I get to integrate all of my passions and bring my full self to work. Leading regular meditation sessions. Teaching classes about compassion and growth mindset. Taking time for photography when I travel for business. Changing work from the inside out.
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