Changemaker Series: Steve Perkins

Welcome to Changemaker Stories from LOCAL, an ongoing series of personal interviews with leaders driving change across every industry and discipline. Because change shouldn’t mean going it alone.

This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Steve Perkins, a coach with a passion for empowering leaders and supporting healthy cultures. Steve shared his thoughts on the importance of environment, finding meaningful work, and adapting to a changing world. Here are a few key takeaways from our conversation with Steve: 

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Career paths can be very nonlinear. In my journey, I’ve tried a lot of different things to figure out what works best for me. 

I started to realize I don't have to wait for some magical moment. It’s an ongoing, intentional process of looking at myself and figuring out how I’m wired. 

Personality tests are great, but what do you do with that insight? I realized it’s helpful to look back at how you played as a kid. It gives you really good clues about how you think and interact with the world. 

We live in a unique time in history. For most of history, work and life weren’t separated like they are now. 

There is a lot of talk today about work-life balance and work-life integration. I believe that I'm a whole person and work is a big part of my life. So work should help to facilitate the life that I want and vice versa. They should work in tandem. 

The world is realizing that people want fulfillment in their work. People want to do what they love. They want work to be in service of their life. If you're a great leader and a smart company, you are going to help facilitate that. You're not going to run away from it. 

People want meaningful work. That's a big reason why they leave to start their own thing. It's not always because they want to be entrepreneurs or get away from the company. A lot of times, it's just because they're looking for more fulfilling work.

I think about this desire for meaningful work when I look at team culture, leadership development, and company organizational design. How can we create a place where everyone actually enjoys what they're doing? That’s when they're going to do their best work. You don't have to force it.

My company Greenhouse was inspired by a summer in college when I literally worked at a greenhouse. I realized we adjusted the soil, the water, the humidity, and the sunlight but rarely touched the actual plants. It was all about creating the right environment to let the plants do their thing.

Fast forward ten years, and I'm working at Capital One leading a culture transformation. Everyone wants to push harder, try harder, do more. I realized that all we have to do is create an environment where people who are already talented and passionate can do their thing. Roots up. 

Work is mostly meetings, and most meetings are a pain. So, when I start a client project, I focus on the least sexy thing first: meeting modes. Again, we have to create the right conditions for growth. So if we want to change the culture, let's make meetings better. It's really that simple.‍

I can see that change is working when people take an ownership mentality. I think it's really fascinating how most people have a dog, they have a car, they have a house. They take care of their own stuff and they take ownership. Then they come to work and suddenly wait for someone to give them instructions. Leaders have to create conditions for people to take ownership. 

When people come to the table with new ideas, take initiative, and put things in motion, you know something's clicking. Now we're getting somewhere.

The pandemic forced us to realize our old work construct was just a construct. Massive societal change doesn't happen easily. The pandemic was really tough, but one good thing that came out of it is that we’re rethinking how we work. 

We're realizing now that people being in seats used to be our main metric for productivity. Any halfway competent leader knew that that was not a real metric. But how else do you measure it? In a post-pandemic, hybrid environment, the best way to measure if someone's doing a good job is by setting clear goals and objectives and actually focusing on outcomes.

This forces leaders to delegate, communicate better, and set better goals. You can't just default to checking that people are at their desk all day. 

Two Changemakers I’m interested in are Esther Perel and Vanessa Marin. They both talk about relationship and organizational psychology. It's really helping me in my marriage, but I'm also finding a lot of it applies to my leadership coaching clients. They're fixing a lot of work problems by talking about their relationships. To me that's really fun and exciting.

I do a lot of my best thinking, on an airplane or in an airport. Something about the buzz and the activity. My admin will schedule thinking tasks to pop up on my phone right when I get to the airport, and I do some of my best work there.

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Are you a Changemaker? We want to hear from you. Let's talk.

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