The connection between servant leadership and profitability is one of the most misunderstood relationships in business. Most executives hear the word “servant” and think soft skills, feel-good programs, and budget line items that get cut first. Scott Doggett has spent 30 years proving that assumption wrong.
In Episode 159 of The Profit Minds Podcast, Dr. Steven Kirch sits down with Scott, founder of the National Academy of Leadership Development and author of Priceless! See People Differently. Lead People Better, to break down why servant leadership is not a culture initiative. It is a profit strategy.
In this episode, Dr. Kirch and Scott Doggett break down what servant leadership looks like in practice and why it is one of the most direct paths to profitability available to any leader today. Here is what is covered:
Scott Doggett did not set out to build a leadership academy. He set out to be a great leader in hospitality. For more than two decades, he ran hotels and resorts, led training and development programs at Marriott Vacation Club, Hyatt Regency, Wyndham Vacation Ownership, and Holiday Inn Club Vacations, and fell deeply in love with servant leadership as a practice. He had experienced it in some organizations and watched it produce extraordinary results. He had also watched command-and-control leadership produce the opposite.
At the end of 2023, he found himself laid off for the first time. Rather than return to corporate, he took what he calls a journey into the wilderness and joined World Vision USA as Director of Christian Leadership Development. There, he experienced something remarkable: an entire organization built around servant leadership, from the frontline to the executive team. Turnover was almost nonexistent. People were deeply engaged. The culture was, in his words, beautiful. Nine months later, DOGE-related funding cuts ended that chapter too.
But Scott left with exactly what he needed. He had seen the proof at scale. He founded the National Academy of Leadership Development, wrote Priceless! See People Differently. Lead People Better, and launched a workshop and assessment platform designed to help organizations do what World Vision did, at every level of leadership, simultaneously.
The number one objection Scott hears from senior leaders is a single word: fluff. The idea that investing in how leaders treat people is somehow separate from the hard business of driving results.
Scott’s response is equally direct. You cannot force employees to be engaged. That is not something you can mandate or buy with a program. Furthermore, most executives already understand that engagement and results are connected. They have seen the correlation. The question is not whether engaged employees drive better outcomes. It is how you actually move the needle on engagement.
The answer, according to Scott, is simpler and cheaper than most companies think. Engagement does not come from the big town halls or the pizza parties. It comes from thousands of daily interactions between employees and their direct leaders. The story an employee tells themselves about whether this is a good place to work is written one conversation at a time. One piece of feedback at a time. One moment of being seen, or not seen.
As a result, companies that spend millions on engagement programs while leaving their leadership behaviors unchanged are solving the wrong problem. The culture is the leadership. And the leadership starts at the top.
Scott puts the engagement problem in stark terms. According to Gallup, only about 31% of US employees are actively engaged at work. Approximately 50% are complying. They are showing up, getting the job done, but withholding the discretionary effort that separates good from extraordinary. And around 20% are actively disengaged, meaning they are not just underperforming. They are actively doing damage to the culture and the customer experience.
Gallup estimates that US disengagement costs roughly $2 trillion in lost productivity annually.
Scott’s framing for this is the goose and the golden egg. If you want more golden eggs, you have to take better care of your geese. However, most companies are focused entirely on the egg production numbers and never ask what is happening to the goose.
The fix does not require a budget line item. It requires leaders who take the time to get to know their people individually: their strengths, their communication preferences, their goals, what they are working toward. Leaders who remove barriers rather than create them. Dr. Kirch shares a powerful example from his time at Intel. When his factory was announced for closure with 18 months of runway, he told his 800 employees directly: our job is to help you find your next successful beginning. Turnover dropped from the mid-teens to under 5% for the entire 18 months. Out of 800 people, only three did not find a successful next step. That outcome did not come from a retention program. It came from a leadership decision to put people first even in the hardest possible circumstances.
One of the most important threads in this episode is the intersection of AI adoption and servant leadership. Scott’s view is that we are entering a fifth industrial revolution, and the leaders who survive and thrive will be the ones who double down on the things AI cannot replicate: empathy, communication, motivation, genuine human connection.
In the past, leaders were valued primarily for their knowledge and experience. AI is disrupting that. The knowledge is now available to everyone. As a result, the differentiator for leaders is no longer what they know. It is how they make people feel.
Additionally, AI is returning something that leaders have been starved of for decades: time. For years, every executive Scott coached had the same excuse for not doing more mentoring, more connection, more real one-on-one development with their teams. They said they did not have the time. Now, in many organizations, they do. The question is what they choose to do with it.
Dr. Kirch adds an important framing here. The leaders who will get the most from AI are the ones who use the time it saves to help their teams grow into new capabilities, not just to process the same volume faster. Servant leadership and AI, in this frame, are not competing forces. They are complementary ones.
However, Scott also warns that most AI adoption failures are happening for the wrong reason. Companies are treating AI as a technology rollout rather than a change management initiative. Employees are resisting it not because they are Luddite, but because they feel it as a threat to their value as human beings. The way to address that is not a mandatory training program. It is a leader who sits down and says: we are going to figure this out together, and I am going to use the time it gives us to help you grow.
When an organization brings Scott in, he does not start with a framework or a model. He starts with a story. Specifically, he brings leadership teams through what he calls the Ebenezer Scrooge experience: a journey into their past, present, and future as leaders.
In the past portion, he asks leaders to reflect on the best and worst leaders they have ever worked for. He asks them to write a sentence or two describing what that leader said or did that made them feel priceless or worthless. The results are consistently emotional. And the most striking finding is that most of these memories are 10, 15, even 20 years old. The things leaders say and do today stay with people for decades. The ripple effects are invisible until you ask for them directly.
In the present portion, the conversation turns to what employees are experiencing today: AI anxiety, political stress, economic uncertainty, and the general turbulence of working in a culture that feels unstable. Employees do not need their workplace to be another source of stress on top of everything else. They need their leaders to be a stabilizing presence, someone who sees them as a person first and an output generator second.
In the future portion, Scott asks each leader: what do you want people saying about you at your retirement party? That question lands differently than any engagement metric. It connects the daily micro-behavior to the legacy you are building right now. The comment you made in the hallway. The feedback you gave in a one-on-one. The decision you made to advocate for your employee. One interaction at a time.
Scott is offering listeners a complimentary Priceless Leadership Assessment. The assessment helps leaders discover their Priceless Leadership archetype, identifying strengths, growth opportunities, and practical leadership development recommendations across the Heart, Head, and Hands dimensions of leadership. It is completely free and designed so there is no barrier to getting started.
Visit: www.nationalald.com/assessment
Dr. Steven Kirch is the creator of the Profit Minds™ Growth System, which helps entrepreneurs and professionals accelerate profits through productivity, scalable systems, and AI-powered business strategies.
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