Shane chats with Tino Mantella, chief strategy officer at Relevantz, in Episode 7 of the Leading with Relevance podcast. Listen in as they discuss how mentorship can shape your career, the importance of active listening in leadership, and strategies for making a positive difference while driving business success.
Intro – Shane: If you’re a leader, if you’re waiting until you’re retired, or you cashed the big check, you’re at a time where maybe you have more affluence, but you have way less influence than you have now. You’ve really constrained or limited what you can do for other people. The only proof that you ever existed will be based on the impact that you have on other people.
Tino: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Leading with Relevance. This is our seventh episode. I like to say that I love to find people that are busting through the status quo and impacting companies and communities. Our goal is to interview people and highlight their personal and professional journey, but also get to know their “why.”
I’m Tino Mantella, chief strategy officer for Relevantz, and I’m loving the opportunity to talk to and learn from leaders. The podcast will run about 20 minutes and you also can find more,
So today I have the great opportunity to interview Shane Jackson.
A little bit about him, he’s the president of Jackson Healthcare, one of the nation’s largest healthcare staffing companies. He’s appeared on Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. He’s really an advocate and a force for improving patient care – the whole company, Jackson Healthcare. He’s the author of Fostering Culture and now he has a new book out called This Is the Thing. He’s a recognized speaker – talks about purpose, leadership, workplace culture. He’s an advocate, as I am, for conscious leadership, purpose-driven leadership. He’s also built, I think very interesting, I’ve been over there, a non-profit facility on the campus.
So, Shane, welcome to Leading with Relevance.
Shane: Thank you, Tino. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Tino: I always like to start out with a question around, you know, what shapes people? And I ask you to go back a bit to your childhood, your early years. Maybe two or three people that influenced you most.
Shane: I had, I think, a pretty good childhood. One of the things that I’m grateful for in my childhood was that I started out when I was young, just very much the athlete. I mean I was playing every sport you could play and, you know, was not a bad athlete. And then midway through high school, decided to pivot and I stopped playing sports almost entirely and got really into theater and music. And so, it kind of, I think for me, a little bit set up a life of being interested both in sports and the arts. Throughout my life I have continued to do, participate in lots of sports. I competed triathlon for about a decade as an adult. But I’ve also stayed involved in the arts. Aside from my parents, I really do look back at some coaches and then also some of my art and music directors that just had a big, big impact on me in multiple ways.
One of the things that I think all of that did for me was give me confidence in kind of any situation. I was comfortable stepping out onto the football field as I was stepping onto the stage. And having these people who were so invested in my success and success of kids and students really kind of poured into me and I think it gave me a lot of skills that I use throughout my life.
Tino: It must have been interesting. I’m sure your coaches were a little disappointed when you were saying, “Yeah, I’m going to be acting now.”
Shane: Yeah, absolutely. I distinctly remember phone calls form a couple of coaches going, “Wait a minute, what are you doing?”
Tino: “I’m gonna be the star in a show.” Are you still doing that, by the way? Are you trying to do any acting amongst all the other things you’re doing?
Shane: I actually still am. For years, I did theater and music through college and for years afterwards, I did a lot of community theater and stuff with my wife. I led the music at our church for years. Haven’t done that in a while. But, because of the resurgence of the film industry here, every once in a while I get opportunities to do things. I’m actually, I can’t tell you anything about it, but I’ve got a small role in a feature length film that I’ll actually be on set in like three weeks.
Tino: Oh, that’s exciting.
Shane: And getting to do that. This will be like my fourth film that I’ve gotten to be a part of.
Tino: Congratulations on that. We’ll be on the lookout. So, be looking for Shane Jackson on the big screen.
When you were in your early 20s, but you talk about your dad sitting in on meetings with him and sitting in silence, but also learning a lot that way. And, you know, you talk about the lessons that – you actually wrote an article about this, lessons that are caught and not taught. Talk a little bit about that.
Shane: Sure. Just to give a little bit of context. My father founded our company, but the company wasn’t founded until after I was, like, after I finished grad school and he had the vision for what has become Jackson Healthcare, although it has exceeded both of our visions by an order of magnitude. But, I was in my mid 20s at this time and we were starting, he would tell me, say, “Hey, I want you to come into this meeting but you’re not going to be able to add any value to this meeting. I want you to come in and just listen because I want you to see how I handle this.” And that happened numerous times, but it is absolutely one of the best things that happened to me in my life. To be able to just see how he handled things and the interaction and just learn like crazy. And I do talk about this, I have a chapter in my first book that’s titled “Most Lessons Are Caught Not Taught.”
When I talk to leaders about this, one of the things that I challenge them is that we have to, for our people, especially the people that we’re trying to develop, we have to make room for them to be a part of things where they can’t add any value. Over the long term, the lessons that are caught in that moment are just so significant.
Tino: Have you been able to, do you feel like you’ve been able to successfully implement that at Jackson, you know, over the years to actually make it clear that, hey – you’re coming to a meeting, but really you’re just here to listen and you’re not on the agenda and how do you handle that in a company?
Shane: Yeah, there have been several times over the years, especially with people that I’m really purposefully developing where I’ve told them that story about me and I’ve said this is now you.
For several years, I ran the biggest company in our portfolio. And now, so about a little over ten years now, when my dad came to me and said he was kind of ready to get out of the day-to-day of the business and enter a new phase of his career, I had a guy that I was developing to succeed me in running that business and he still runs it today. And he’s just blown it up. He’s done a better job with it than I did. But when I started that with him, I was like hey, this is going to be like a three-year process and you’re not going to add any value. And it’s going to feel kind of frustrating to you, maybe like a waste of time, but you just need to learn. He’ll tell you now, just like I said, he’s like they weren’t a waste of time at all because he learned a lot. And so, we’ve tried to work that into kind of our playbook for how we develop people.
Tino: Did you see yourself going into working with your dad and Jackson Healthcare? I mean, was that part of your plan or, how did that all shape up?
Shane: No, not at all. You know when you finish an MBA there’s really only two things you can do – either investment banking or consulting. And he came to me and said like, “Hey, instead of doing that, what do you think about doing this?” This was in the year 2000, it was in the spring of 2000, which was right in the middle of the dot-com boom. He kind of brought me in to help and we were kind of working together on some healthcare service companies, specifically in the staffing area, and working on how could we leverage the internet as a differentiator in the business.
Basically his whole thing was like, “Hey, let’s come do this and see if we can find other businesses, especially in healthcare, where we can leverage the internet to create differentiation,” which was, you know, back at that time still somewhat novel. It was obviously a bet, you know, on him and on us and it was hard for a while, starting a company, especially the way we did it with no outside capital. You know, we don’t have any outside investors.
Tino: Right.
Shane: And so, there’s some interesting stories from that, but obviously glad I did it.
Tino: Was healthcare in your dad’s background? Or, I know, how did he pick that sort of space?
Shane: Yeah, I think he kind of fell into it. My dad has spent virtually his entire career in healthcare. He, when he was very young, kind of early 20s, he got into the staffing business. He was doing administrative staffing and then he wanted to get into executive search, because the dollars were bigger, and he got into working at an executive search firm and the guy who had run the firm had somehow convinced a hospital in Alabama to pay them a retainer to do a search for a physician. And like, that wasn’t even a thing in the mid-70s. And so my dad came into the business and he gave it to my dad and he filled it and then was able to sell a bunch more searches back to the same hospital and he just kind of figured out that this was a blue ocean strategy.
He ended up starting a business that did nothing but executive recruitment of physicians. At any rate, he was just such an entrepreneur, in and out of a lot of healthcare businesses throughout his career. And, you know, kind of reached a point in kind of the late 90s where things weren’t going so great, and he was kind of starting over and decided to kind of start back and bet on himself and invited me to help him do it. And that’s how Jackson Healthcare came to be.
Tino: Maybe it’d be good to just take a minute and just tell the folks that don’t know as much about Jackson Healthcare, right? Your federated model and how many companies you have.
Shane: Sure, yeah, so Jackson Healthcare is the parent company. We have now, I think, 20. We call it our “family of companies” but think of it as kind of a portfolio company. We really distribute decision-making and authority power as much as we can. And so, you know, somewhat kind of maybe like a venture capital or private equity, although we’re much more involved in operations than some of those models, but it really is kind of a distributed model where the companies have a pretty high level of authority. There’s some things where we have to enact controls. But our model is we’re always looking for as focused of a market and solution as we can with a big enough potential market opportunity to create a business, right? So instead of having one company with a whole bunch of different business lines, we have a business, a company, the leaders of that company are participants at an equity level in that business. And so, we’re always trying to focus them as much as we can so that they can become experts at solving that problem.
Tino: Recently, Fortune recognized you and Jackson Healthcare as in the top 100 places to work in the nation. Talk a little bit about that.
Shane: Yeah, I mean we, over the years we’ve gotten a lot of-
Tino: A lot of recognition.
Shane: These Great Place To Work awards and the Fortune was a big one. I mean, one of the top 100 companies in the entire country and so making that list, I think, is pretty significant. And one of the reasons that list, I think, has been more meaningful to me than some of them is because it recognizes something that I know, which is that like, our business is like, this thing is driven by our people, right? And I think this is a good example of one. This is based on what all of our associates are saying and that’s what it’s recognizing. And again, I love that because you know, our culture, our success, like all of it. This is so far beyond me or my dad. It’s what the incredible work of all these people who have just come together around a common cause, a common set of values and beliefs, and they just built something incredible.
Tino: When you have 20 different, pretty distinct companies, do you feel like you have one culture? And what are the key pieces to that culture that I could go to any one of the 20 companies and they’d sort of be able to articulate?
Shane: The analogy I use for this is family, right? And so, like I have a brother and a sister. We were all raised in the same home, kind of the same way, same kind of set of beliefs. And our family has a culture, just like it’s kind of how we do stuff, right? And what we do when we’re together and how that makes you feel as a part of that group. And like everybody, when we get together, Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever, kind of have our traditions and just the way we do things. But, if you show up at my house on a random Tuesday night and then go down to my brother’s house, it’s going to feel like a pretty different culture. We have subcultures, right?
And so, what we’re really just incredibly hyper-focused on is a set of core values and beliefs that every leader has to identify with, right, and has to really be engaged with and those are the core things that drive the decisions that determine our culture. We are really hyper-focused on making sure people know what they are and especially our leaders know how that those apply to the decisions they have. But, every person, you know, kind of prioritizes those a little bit differently, interprets a little bit differently, they kind of bring their own spin to it. And that leads to kind of these subcultures and, and I am not only OK with that, I actually encourage it, right? Because there’s richness in that, there’s diversity in that.
Tino: Now, you’re a co-founder of something called goBeyondProfit. I know you’re really active with Conscious Capitalism. Is capitalism a good thing? I know there was a big conference just recently. You’ve also spoken there at Conscious Capitalism but explain to people what it is and how your company goes about, on a day-to-day basis, kind of living that belief.
Shane: Absolutely, capitalism is a good thing. I would argue that capitalism is one of the biggest forces for good in the history of civilization. And if you look at anywhere that capitalist principles have been applied, what you see is a huge reduction in poverty, an increase in the standard of living. And I think a lot of the reason is because capitalism is the only moral economic model there is because the way that transactions work in capitalism is that they’re purely voluntary. So I think, one of the things that I like about what we’re trying to do with goBeyondProfit, and I think if you go back to Conscious Capitalism, especially the original intent of that organization that John Mackey and others are trying to do is, they’re saying like, “Hey, we’re starting with recognizing that capitalism, what it does in the world is good.” But it also creates this platform for so much more good that can be done.
And the thing I like to encourage leaders on this is that, you know, two things. First of all, you show me a business that is not creating win-win scenarios for all their stakeholders and I’ll show you a business that’s not going to be successful for long. I tell these people, our team all the time, I want our vendors to want to do business with us because I want their best service, their most creative solutions, all that sort of thing. I want our community to like us because I want people to want to come work for us and all that sort of thing. And if somebody asks me like, “what did you accomplish in your career?” I want to be able to point to things more than just a profit. And that’s why I think, you know, I’d like to encourage people to think about the business as this platform that enables them to do things that are not only going to be, I think, good long-term for the business, but things that they’re going to be proud of.
Tino: Do you see any difference with the “Zs” and the millennials as an example in terms of their wanting to work for a company that does more than make a bottom line? Or is it for every generation the same, do you think? What are you seeing?
Shane: I think that younger generations that have come up in a society that is largely wealthier than what older societies have had, I think what that has brought them into the marketplace with a view of like, I want to be focused on kind of more lasting things and impact on people and that sort of thing. And I think you’ve got people younger and younger who are interested in the impact of their life and they’re thinking about like, how do I have a richer life? How do I impact others in ways that are good for others and not just for me? And I think that attitude about themselves is showing up in the way that they view their employer. And so, you know, I think it is on us as leaders if you want to attract really good talent, and I think, especially kind of younger talent, you’ve got to be able to help them draw a clear line between the way they can have an impact in their life, live out the things they want to live out in their life and their ability to do it as a part of your organization.
Tino: I’ve been in your facility that you’ve built just for non-profit organizations with some specifics related to foster care. Talk about how, when you were doing the development, how you came up with that idea, your team came up with that idea and what it means to you and what it means to the employees to have that.
Shane: We had this space that we had been in for a while and we were moving our people out and so we were like, what are we going to do with this space? What we ended up doing was creating a – well, first of all – a chunk of it we took and made daycare for our associates’ children, but the rest of it we made into kind of a co-working, space for non-profit organizations. This is a Class A space, it’s a great space. We just wanted to create a space where these non-profit organizations who are doing tremendous work in the communities, they could experience being together and just the power of the network of other people who are, you know, doing amazing things in the world.
And so, we created this space. We call it LoveLifts Village. LoveLifts is what we call our community impact program within Jackson Healthcare. I mean, it’s just, it’s just really rich. And, as you mentioned, we have a big focus organizationally on at-risk children, a big heart for kids who are in foster care. And that’s really based on my father’s story. He came up through the foster care program, entered the program when he was 12 years old. And so, kind of having experienced that, he’s really at a time of his life where he’s really, really focused on foster children, especially in the state of Georgia, because he’s been there. And so, you know, with that heritage that’s just for our whole company.
Tino: You’ve doubled down a lot, even during COVID, you focus a lot on leadership development internally, not just at that one company that I mentioned, but with your internal employees, your teams. Talk about the importance of that payoff on, you know, building that leadership development program and strategy.
Shane: Yeah, we really are focused on it and, so, the last couple years in our industry has been pretty challenging with healthcare and especially the workforce side of healthcare where we’re involved, really spiked up during COVID and then there’s been a big market correction over the last couple of years from that. And so, you know, we really kind of saw this coming. So back in like 2007 and 2008 during the Great Recession, at that time I very distinctly remember that’s when my dad said, “Hey, I think we ought to start a corporate learning and development function.” And we were a lot smaller back then, but it was pretty counterintuitive. It was on the bet that if we could really invest in our people during that time, especially when maybe they can have a little more bandwidth, then coming out of the recession it was going to accelerate our growth. And it did. And so, we have decided to do that same thing now during what has been a challenging time in our period – you know, period in our industry. We have really over the last two years put a huge, huge increase investment and focus in developing leaders and creating what I think is actually a pretty unique program. You mentioned Turknett, they’ve been a good partner of ours in helping to do some of that. And actually, we right now just challenged our team the other day and next year. We’re going to try to get I think like 60% more people through that program.
The other reason that drives that, by the way, and this goes back to one of your earlier questions on culture, is that we’ve made a decision corporately that – while we have this sort of federated model and all these companies who really are pretty autonomous – what we’ve said at a Jackson Healthcare level is that we’re going to really, really be involved in leadership development. Developing our leaders and, again, making sure they understand based on our values and beliefs, how we expect that to show up in the way that they lead. And so that’s really kind of what we’re doing.
Tino: So to really understand the culture, you need to know what are my employees saying about their boss and their leader around the dinner table tonight? I love that. Talk a little about how you thought about that.
Shane: Yeah, well, I think the context of that is really trying to kind of frame for leaders the impact that you have and the influence you have on the people that you lead. And, you know, if you think about this, if you’ve got a boss, they have impact and influence on you unlike anyone else in your life, and maybe even greater than anyone else in your life. I mean, you know, as leaders, the people that work for us, that report to us, we influence not only their ability to make money, earn a living, and provide for their family, we influence how they can develop, how they can gain new skills and set themselves up for the future. But more than that, we influence their mood, their self-esteem, their confidence based on the things that we reward and punish and all of that. I mean, we have tremendous impact on these people who have chosen to follow us.
I describe the culture of the company as the way my boss treats me. Because it doesn’t matter what we say in here. If my boss treats me horribly, my corporate culture is terrible. And, you know, my views on culture have refined a little bit over time, but that principle is still really true. I mean, as leaders we have tremendous impact on what’s done and how the people feel that work for us, right? It’s the atmosphere that’s created all the things that you do which means how does it feel to be a part of that group. But anyway, that dinner conversation, I think, is one way of framing it but the point is as leaders you have tremendous impact and potential for impact.
Tino: So your first book is Fostering Culture: A Leader’s Guide to Purposefully Shaping Culture and now you’re out with a second book, which maybe let’s focus on that a bit. It’s called This Is the Thing: About Life, Joy, and Owning Your Purpose. Is it out now, Shane?
Shane: It’s not out now. It comes out on January 28th.
Tino: OK. But we can talk about it a little bit?
Shane: Absolutely we can talk about it.
Tino: What was the motivation for writing it and what are the key things that people are going to get when they go out and pick it up, buy it, and share it, et cetera, et cetera.
Shane: The second book really kind of resulted from the first book. The first book we wrote, it was never intended to be available to anyone outside the company. I wrote it for our leaders and it was all about them understanding our values and beliefs and how we wanted to lead our company to create the culture.
The second book is not a leadership book, it’s not a business book, although it certainly has lots of implications for leaders, lots of implications for your business. It is simply me kind of being pretty transparent about my journey and some of the things I’ve learned from all of the incredibly wonderful people and sources of wisdom that I’ve been able to be exposed to about some of these really big questions about things like “why am I here?” and “what’s important?” and “how do I think about my life?” and that sort of thing. And so that’s what this book is.
Tino: You said this, “don’t wait until you’ve turned your influence into affluence”. And I really like that and I’d like to hear you talk about that a bit.
Shane: Well, first of all, you know, if you’re a leader, if you’re waiting until you’re retired or you cashed the big check or, you know, kind of whatever, you’re at a time where maybe you have more affluence, but you have way less influence than you have now. We just talked about how much influence that you have as a leader. And so, first of all, you’ve really constrained or limited what you can do for other people because now, you know, maybe you can go and write a check to a nice non-profit, you can volunteer somewhere or whatever. But compared to the influence you have on somebody’s life when you’re actually leading them, it’s significantly different.
The second is, though, is that saying I’m going to kind of wait, you know, I’ll do kind of this impactful stuff and help people later, is missing out on the incredible experience of purposeful living throughout your life.
Tino: If you’re interested in legacy, you said, “if you want some part of you to go beyond your lifetime, it has nothing to do with you it has to do with others.” So maybe kind of expound on that a bit.
Shane: The only proof that you ever existed will be based on the impact that you had on other people. The stuff that you just do for yourself that feel good like nobody else knows, like whatever, that’s fine you get to experience it. But the only way to have any kind of proof to have known you existed is through other people which then leads you to the question of then OK, if really the ultimate outcome of my life is going to be determined by how I impact others, what do I want that impact to be?
Tino: You’re running a business, you have a family, you still train and do fitness. You’re in a movie! I mean you’re doing a lot of stuff. How do you- people talk about work-life balance, and how do you manage it all?
Shane: Here’s one thing I would just say on that. And we did kind of talk about this, you and I previously in a conversation around this whole, I call it kind of the fallacy of work-life balance, right? If you can reach this zen-like state where everything in your life is just in perfect balance. Like, that doesn’t exist anywhere. I mean, even in nature, temperatures get hotter, then they get colder. The ocean goes up and then the ocean goes down. Like, what you see in nature is seasons in constant change. And so, I think, first of all on this, is releasing ourselves from this impossible standard of having everything in balance at one time because it’s not. And being conscious and saying it’s OK that during the winter I have to work more than during the summer, right? What the problem is – is if I really neglect important relationships. That’s where I start to see a problem and kind of thinking about it over a little bit longer term. Just that kind of mindset of freeing ourselves from false goals and really kind of focusing on the whole of our lives I think can be powerful.
Tino: But I will ask you the final question I always ask is the one message you want to leave today as business leaders?
Shane: I’d really like to challenge leaders on, is to think about the question: Ten years from now, somebody is interviewing someone who works for you, that’s a part of your team. And they say, “tell me what you got out of working for him or working for her?” What is it that you want them to say? And my guess is whatever the answer to that question is, it’s more than just a paycheck, right? And so, I think thinking about that and framing then the way that you’re leading, the way that you’re leveraging the influence you have, the impact that you’re going to have on people – what is it you want that to be and then how does that impact what you do today?
Tino: Alright, Shane, we’re wrapping it up. Appreciate you doing this. Good luck on the next book. I’m definitely buying it.
Shane: I appreciate it, yeah, thanks man.
