What do you see when you look at the people on your team?

If you're honest, you might catch yourself labeling them — the top performer, the problem employee, the one who just doesn't get it.

But what if the way you see your people is the very thing holding your business back?

Scott Doggett spent decades leading in the hospitality industry before two unexpected layoffs sent him into a wilderness season that changed everything.

Through that journey, God used him to build a movement — the National Academy of Leadership Development — that is helping organizations rediscover the forgotten power of servant leadership.

Join us as Scott shares why performance-first cultures are quietly crushing morale, what it actually looks like to lead the way Jesus led, and how seeing people as priceless — not as job titles or productivity scores — can transform your team and your bottom line.

Redeem Your Business Today by the Following:

How can we honor God in our business?

Start by seeing every person on your team the way Jesus saw people — as priceless, regardless of rank, title, or performance. When you lead from that foundation, everything else — culture, engagement, results — begins to follow.

One challenge from today: This week, take five minutes to learn one thing about the story behind one of your employees. Then let it change how you lead them.

More About Scott Doggett

Website: https://www.nationalald.com/

Book: Priceless! See People Differently. Lead People Better: Doggett, Scott

More About David Schmidt

Free Resource: What God Says About Business: 5 Uncommon Truths for the Modern Business

Subscribe to the RBT Weekly Newsletter for weekly simple, practical, and Biblical steps to help you build a thriving business in a way that honors God.

Newsletter also comes with Bible verses for business success for you to read, apply, and be inspired by.

When you look at the people in your company, what do you see? Do you see laborers, managers, leaders? Do you see productive or lazy workers? Or do you see people as human beings that are precious and deserve an abundant life here on this earth? Today I brought on Scott Duggart, who to talk about that perspective, he brings to the market today, the perspective that people are precious and we need to look at them as precious apart from their job title or performance or anything else that they do.

So Scott, thank you for coming on the podcast today. Welcome. And to start off, is one way that you have found to honor God in your business that others may not know about?

Yeah, I think our whole organization is really ⁓ dedicated and driven by God and we are all about servant leadership. So really taking the lessons that Jesus taught when he was here on earth and trying to modernize that and translate it into modern day workplaces. So really he is the inspiration for what we do.

Sure, okay. And so, Scott, give us a brief background of where you've come from, how God's led you, and what you're doing today.

Yeah, so I've really had three seasons, I would say, of my career. The first part was in hospitality. So I spent a lot of my career in hospitality, running hotels and resorts. Then I fell in love with training and got into leadership development, but stayed in hospitality for good 15 years in that space. And at the end of 2023, found myself as part of a layoff for the first time in my career and kind of went out into that.

wilderness journey that I think many people have found themselves on and that's when I really started to just listen to God and see where he would bring me and trying to figure out, know, 30 years of developing certain skills, trying to figure out how else I could use those skills. And long story short, after a six month period of not figuring that out and having a mini panic attack, I prayed extra hard one night.

Asking God to just show me what he wanted me to do. I woke up one more that next morning and there was a job posting from World Vision USA and ⁓ for a director of leadership development and it was a job that wouldn't have normally have appealed to me because I was a VP and this is a director job and it's Christian leadership development and I spent 30 years in hospitality in a corporate space. ⁓ But when I read the job description, it literally was everything that I had spent the last 12 years building.

And it was like God just answered my prayer and brought me to world vision and unfortunately after nine months they had some funding cut from the doge cuts and I was part of a second layoff after nine months and i'll tell you I would say god I was so sure god had brought me there for the rest of my career right that was that was it but what I realized was he brought me there so that I could experience servant leadership like I had never experienced it before so that I could

Ouch.

go out and write this book and create this academy and create this workshop and go out and show other organizations the power of servant leadership and how it can really help organizations drive ⁓ amazing results.

Yeah, yeah, God's ways are not our ways and sometimes it's kind of like, I don't know. But yeah, he's good to us, very good. So you've mentioned servant leadership. How would you define servant leadership?

Yeah.

So to me, servant leadership is a way to look at what is the role of a leader, right? So the leader's role in servant leadership is ⁓ to not put yourself first. Your role is to really, just like Jesus did, right, is to put the other person first and to serve, right? Even he came to not to be served, but to serve. And so that is the role of a leader. So when I come into work,

My job is to take care of you, to make sure you have all the tools to do your job, to make sure that I know what your goals are, what your strengths are, what your story is, so that I can adapt my leadership to meet you where you're at, so that you can feel seen and valued. And I see you based also on your inherent value as a human being, and not based on any other factor, not based on title or rank or performance level or anything else, but that I see you, just like Jesus saw people, right, based...

on that inherent value that you walk around with. And to me, that's what servant leadership is all about.

Yep. And that's, that's good. I, the places I've seen and I've worked in, I've worked in a number of different places. I feel like the supervisors or the managers are like working managers. It's like to do what you said is ideal. I love to do that. But generally, oh, you're a manager, but you have this long list of things to do. You got too much to do anyway. So you are just kind of like an answer guy. You know, you answer people, help give them a little bit, but

Their whole focus is not to help you out. It's just like, hopefully you're amenable. don't have to invest a whole lot of time into you to get out of you what I need. So how do you work with that?

Yeah. And for it to work, really think it,

for it to really truly work ⁓ fully in an organization, it's got to stop at the start at the top, right? And it's at every level of leadership in the organization that people can see themselves. And that's their role is to serve the people that are been entrusted into their care and be good stewards. Then, ⁓ then it really does work. But to your point, yeah, you've got to, it's got to, and, if nothing else, we can all see each other based on our worth.

as human beings and treat each other based on that. That's something we can all do, regardless of what tasks we're responsible for doing at the end of the day.

Yeah. Have you seen any percentage wise, like if I'm a manager, maybe only if I have 20 % of work and 80 % focus on people, does that work? Have you seen a kind of percentage wise there?

think it's all over the place. Yeah, it really depends on industry and size of the organization. What I've been seeing lately is a lot of, because of COVID and there a lot of workforce reduction that a lot of employees and lot of managers have had to pick up a lot of extra work. So they're feeling that, they're feeling that strain. And I think now with AI coming into the picture, there's a lot more stress and trying to figure out how, what does that look like and what does that mean for my job?

Okay.

my worth as an employee and the value that I bring. So that's why I think servant leadership now is even more important that we bring that humanity back and we bring some peace and help kind of lead our teams through this moment in time.

And that's going from John 13. The other example about servant leadership is that Jesus gave his disciples an example. You know, when washing his feet, he gave an example of how to serve. And I think that's an important thing we can do as leaders as well, is show them an example. Here's how to solve a problem. Here's how to interact with other people. Here's how to deal with people who are not happy and things like that.

Yes.

That's it. And it doesn't have to be, what I love is it doesn't have to just be for faith-based organizations or Christian, mean, World Vision where I worked was a faith-based organization, but it can work in any secular organization as well because it is all just about how you treat people, how you see people and how you treat people.

Yeah.

Absolutely. You mentioned performance first leadership and you made a comment earlier in our pre-call why performance first cultures are quietly crushing morale. Can you expound upon that a little bit?

I think so there's been a lot of, there is a lot of pressure to get results. And again, especially coming out of COVID where things just rapidly, we had to adapt rapidly to just to keep the doors open for a lot of businesses. And so our eyes went away from people, went away from culture and it really went to how can we cut expenses and get as much revenue as we can just to bring those profits to the bottom line. And so that focus on

just results and kind of shifted us to performance, performance, performance, instead of taking care of our people. But I think what people fail to remember is that the results come from the people and you can't get, and so I don't care if you're in the service industry and we talk about customer experience or if you make widgets at a factory or whatever your organization is, you cannot get healthy, sustainable results if you have the broken culture.

Yes.

or if your people are unhappy or not taken care of. And so again, I keep going back to this idea that you've got to take care of your people. You can't force engagement. You can't ⁓ force people to want to work hard for you and give you that discretionary effort that I think is so important to help companies thrive, that you have to earn. And I think the only way to earn that is to create a positive environment through servant leadership.

You just mentioned a couple of words are discretionary. What'd you say in discretionary discernment, involvement? Yeah. The effort, there you go. Yeah.

effort. Yeah, that discretionary effort, that extra like, I have an idea that could generate some more revenue or, hey,

I noticed we could do this process different and save us a lot of time or, you know, people that look at project plans. This happens all the time. 70 % of projects fail, which I think is crazy. ⁓ But there are people when they look at a project plan, that they see things that they realize, this is going to put this project off track.

But they don't say anything because there's this level of apathy or because they don't feel like, bother? Why should I speak up? But if I feel part of this team and if I feel like I'm valued, I'm much more apt to speak up and save that project or again, give that big idea that could bring in millions of dollars for the company. But I've got to feel engaged and empowered to do that.

Absolutely, 100 % yes, I agree. One of my former guests that I've had on talked about how when he gave his company to God, he basically is like, God said, pursue the root, not the fruit. You know, because before he was pursuing the fruit of the profit and the money, he goes pursue the root of taking care of your people. And he did, he shifted to taking care of his people and put more effort and money into take care of his people, and he became more profitable. And exactly what you're saying.

It's counterintuitive. I mean, for profit-driven people, if you take it, but if you think, look at your machines. If you take care of a machine and so it doesn't break down, it runs harder for you. And people are not machines, but they still need to be taken care of so they don't break down.

It is.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, ⁓ certain leadership transforms lives teams in the bottom lines. Can you give us an example of how that happens? I mean, we've been talking about that.

Yeah, again, I think if you just look at the numbers alone, So we have, Gallup just came out with another survey, they do these every year, but average engagement in this country right now is about 31%. So I'll just let that kind of sit there for a minute. 31 % of American workers are engaged in their jobs right now. I mean, 69%, right, are not.

Mmm.

or not.

which is crazy, right? I think 51 % are actively disengaged in their job. And so what does that translate into? That translates into people just getting through the day, they're complying, right? Okay, we might get compliance from folks, but there's high levels of turnover, there's high levels of stress. And so when we look at bottom line results and we look at...

these organizations that are struggling, so much of it is attributed to the culture and to what people are feeling right now. And so I don't have statistics to say, if you start using this style of leadership, you're going to increase your bottom line by 45%. But it's common sense, it's not common practice that the culture is really the key.

Absolutely.

to the success of your organization. And again, especially in this new age of AI and all the stress that's coming with that, people need to figure out like, how is this all gonna work? What does this mean for me? And a lot of organizations are positioning AI adoption as ⁓ you better learn this or else, right? You're gonna become obsolete and it's just creating more fear. And so change that story up in people's minds and their heads and create a more positive story.

Hmm.

We can set that up more as, we're gonna invest in you. We're gonna invest in all of us. I remember in the 90s, starting off and things like Excel and the internet and email were brand new. And I was working for Marriott at the time. And I remember vice presidents and us lowly, know, frontline managers were getting together and going to these community centers together to learn how to do Excel. And it wasn't scary, it was fun because...

Yes.

They positioned it like none of us know what any of this is, we're gonna figure it out together. And ⁓ it was a community experience instead of a scary, threatening, robots are taking our jobs kind of situation.

Yep, and I think that's part of the misperception with AI that they're going to take over and people have seen too many movies that way. ⁓

Yeah. And I'll tell you, we talk

about in our workshop, we talk about how this is actually a blessing in that we can use these tools to help get some of that busy work off of our plate so that we can spend more time with people and connecting with people and building those relationships and doing more mentoring and more team building and all of those things that in the past we said we'd love to do, but we just don't have the time. This affords us the time to be able to do those things.

Yeah. Is there any, I'm sure there's lots of things you can do, but is there any simple actions we can do as leaders to change that perspective that we have towards people and try to really help them versus just, not meeting your numbers today.

Yeah, I mean, think to me the very first step is like, just like Jesus, right? I always think about like, if Jesus was the manager of this McDonald's, like how would he run the front line here, right? I think the first thing is to see people, right? To see your people differently and to see them first as human beings that are priceless. And cause I think the tendency is for us to put labels on, as soon as we see someone, we put a label on them and either, oh, there's the busy body or there's the chatty cafe coming in my office or,

Or we base it on their rank, right? that person's two levels below me. Why are they even talking to me? Or we base it on performance. Like, here comes my top performer. here comes my low performer. And we treat people based on the way we see them. And so the very first step, if we could get leaders just, again, the very first step is to see them based on that worth as a priceless human being. Then that automatically shifts how we start to treat them.

And we start to treat people again as a priceless human being with that respect and that kindness and that care. The second step though is to recognize that every single person on your team is a unique individual. And that I think is hard for managers and leaders sometimes is, I hear this a lot is, the way I manage front of house employees and back of house employees is very different. And that's...

Yeah.

That's ⁓ a dangerous kind of ⁓ mentality because every single person on your team is different, right? And they have a unique story and a unique background and different strengths and different struggles and goals and aspirations. And so to me, the hardest part of leadership is getting to know each person that has been entrusted into your care so that you can lead more effectively. But that really is, again, the only way to get to know people and to get them to feel seen.

And again, for you to be able to align the work with the people with the skills and that's where the time should be spent.

Yes, and so you had a great two points. Basically, one, love them, they're priceless, view them as that, and two, you're all different. You have a different background, you have a different here. I know as a...

Yes. Yep.

Yeah. You communicate differently. You want to be

recognized differently. have like, there's so many differences. That's the hard part of leadership.

All that, yep.

Yep, as a production guy, I want everything to be the same. And I know I have nine kids and trying to homeschool them, I realized they all learn differently and they all learn every subject difference. Like I just want the same curriculum and just shove you all through it, but you can't do that. And it's difficult, but it's the same way at work. If you have 10 reports, they're all gonna be different and you have, it's worth it.

Right.

Yeah, it'd be nice. Yeah.

I'll tell you it's worth it to get to know them, to try to understand them. And that's what I'm learning as well. I'm not the best at it, but the whole thing of putting the right person in the right seat in the bus, you you have people aligned with the culture, but then are you fit ideally for your job? And that goes a long way. Yeah.

Yes. That's it.

Yeah, and you can't know that unless you get to know them, right? You have to get to know the

people to know what the right seat is on the bus for them.

Yeah, yep. So you wrote a book on this title. What's title your book again?

It's called Priceless. See people differently, lead people better. It's simple. Yep.

Okay.

Okay,

and so tell me a little bit about that. What are the concepts in there? You said priceless, see people better, treat them different? Is that what you said?

see

people differently, lead people better. So again, it starts off with that whole concept of people being priceless and to see people based on that worth. And then it's designed to be ⁓ a workbook that goes with our workshop and it can be used as a self-study guide or a book club for a small office. So we have all kinds of tools in there for leaders, like an assessment, leadership assessment and development plan tools. But it really is designed to be kind of what I call the seed packet to our greater movement.

Gotcha.

our bigger movement that we're trying to start with our faculty around the country and helping companies and organizations kind of rehumanize the workplace. And again, create these people first cultures. Again, in this age of AI where I just think we need, this is the currency that organizations are going to need ⁓ to get into this next decade and thrive in this next decade.

Yeah, it's treating your people well, taking care of your people, not just profit and everything else. Very good. Do you have any stories of companies turning around from profit first to people first? Do you have any stories that way that you have seen?

That's it.

⁓ I think it's a slow evolution, but, I think, yes, I've, I've experienced trans transitions actually for good and bad. ⁓ and I'll tell you where I've seen it is at the very top levels, right? When you have a change in CEO, I had a, I had one hospitality brand that I worked at with a change in CEO. One CEO was a servant leader and one was definitely more of a performance first.

Hmm, sure.

drive results, financial

focused CEO. And it was almost like if you interviewed employees that worked under those two CEOs, but didn't work for the other, they would describe two completely different cultures. And it was because what each CEO believed was most important is what got focused on, what got funded, what got, right. And what got talked about and what leaders focused on and what got, you know,

Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.

from a learning and development perspective, like what we trained. And so it's really fascinating the influence that one role has for an organization and the culture. so ⁓ we are seeking out organizations where the very top of the organization, the leaders see the value and believe and can see the connection between taking care of your people, creating a healthy culture to get those healthy results.

Sure. You mentioned an influence model of leadership. Describe that.

So yeah, the model that we teach about is it really stems from this concept of self-image and that self-image is different than self-worth. We kind of get to the point that everybody's got the same worth, but self-image changes. It fluctuates frequently, right? We could start the day off and come into work feeling really good about ourselves and life's great. And then we could make a big mistake and walk out of the office that day thinking we're the worst employee. We're going to get fired and our self-image is in the toilet.

Hmm. Yep.

Gotcha.

All of that stems from, again, the stories that we tell ourselves. What are we telling ourselves? Our brain operates at a rapid pace, right? 2,000 words per minute our brain is operating at. We can only comprehend 400 words per minute, but our brain is constantly telling us a story. And so as leaders, understanding that, and then understanding that that story is what creates the emotions inside us, and those emotions are what drive our behavior and our performance.

Right, so if as a leader I come up to you and you make a mistake and I harp on that mistake and I come down on you hard and I make you feel, you know, little because of that mistake, what I've just done is I've changed that story in your head. Right now you're telling yourself a story of, my goodness, I'm gonna get fired, I'm gonna get in trouble, I'm no good at this. I've just negatively impacted that story, that narrative. That story is what's driving these now, these negative feelings.

yeah.

internally in that employee and now that employee is walking around nervous anxious now they're probably making more mistakes or they're they're just like i'm going to shut down for the day and and so now we've done more harm than we've done good versus understanding that when we treat people based on that worth we've automatically already positively influenced hopefully that that that concept of self-image and that story that they're telling themselves because

Again, if I make this big mistake and my leader comes up to me and says, it's okay, right? We all make mistakes, it's gonna be okay. Let's talk about this, let's figure out what happened. What did we learn from it? What can we do differently next time? Right, we're good, right? If we take it from a different approach, now my story changes. Now I'm telling myself, ⁓ my leader's cool, right? I'm not gonna get in trouble, I'm okay, and we can move on. And now I'm much more relaxed, I'm relieved.

and I can move on with my day. And so that's the influence that leaders have. Everything you say, everything you do has an influence, has a ripple effect really. And a lot of these things don't just influence or impact you in the moment. A lot of these things impact us and stay with us for years to come. And I think that's one thing that we try to teach leaders too is, ⁓ if you think back to a time when a leader made you feel priceless or made you feel worthless in your life, you could probably think of a

some of those situations and there are times that happened probably 10, 20, 30 years ago.

Yeah, and they stick, those stories stick. And you probably remember the negative more than the positive, or I guess it depends on who you are. Yeah, yeah. So I want you to talk a little bit about your movement that you're doing. You've talked about your book and what are you doing with, explain this to a little bit more about if somebody wants to invite you in or work with you or whatever, what is that?

and they stick. Yeah.

Unfortunately. Yeah, unfortunately you do.

Yeah, so yeah, we'd love to invite your listeners to just ⁓ come to our website, nationalald.com to learn more, but we have a growing faculty of leadership gurus from around the country. I'm really excited. We're growing this, this faculty network. Right now we're up to 20 or so, and these are all leadership executive coaches and people that have Ted talks and bestselling books and, they're just passionate about servant leadership and they're passionate about our movement to get out and try to help.

as many organizations as we can, again, create these people first cultures where we're teaching leaders how to be these modern day servant leaders, right? Again, doesn't have to be faith based. We do have Christian leadership resources for Christian organizations, but we also have professional resources for the secular organizations. And so we've got faculty that are ready to teach the workshop. We have certification programs, but we also have a lot of free resources.

One of my big goals in putting this all together was I didn't want there to be any barriers for entry. So if there's an organization that wants to adopt this philosophy and this type of culture, we want to help them. Even if they don't have a budget for this, we've got free resources we can help. And even for those that have the budget, we've set our pricing so low because we recognize that that money is tight right now. again, you don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to bring in a leadership company to help you just kind of reset and

and shift your perspective and your minds and your heart around leadership. So to me, it's all about the movement and our faculty, it's the same thing. They're not trying to get rich off of this. It really is about the mission.

Okay, very good. So you can basically contact you, look at your website and get a team in there to basically help your leadership. So the leadership thing can help your company. Is that in a nutshell? Okay, very good. ⁓ So yeah, we're running out of time here, but final words to inspire challenge my audience. What would you like us to remember when we leave here today?

Yeah

Absolutely. That's it.

⁓ well, I'll just leave you with this. Mr. Rogers, one of my favorite shows growing up as a kid, he, he said, it's hard not to love someone once you get to know their story. So that's my biggest challenge to everybody is just to get to know people's story. Cause I think once you do, it's hard not to want to champion for them and to, and to, again, and from a leadership perspective, once you get to know your people, it's hard not to want to fight for them and to champion for them and to become that servant leader that

Hmm.

I know so many employees are just wanting so desperately right now in this day and age.

Yeah, and I can attest to that. As I've gotten to know people and know their stories, it's yeah, you root for them more. You really do. So very good, thank you very much. Scott, thank you so much for your time and encouragement today. And if you're looking to go deeper and learn more about Scott and his work, check out the show notes for the links and sites and the resources and contact information to get a hold of him. And remember, your business represents the great God you serve. So build a business worthy of God's name in a way that honors him.