Say “Yes, And!” to the LEADOUT Advantage with Scott Cooksey

In this episode, I sit down with Scott Cooksey, CSP, founder of Leadout Performance Group, to talk about building teams that can adapt and win, especially when the plan meets reality.

Scott explains why most “one-and-done” trainings fail, how to diagnose the real problem behind symptoms like conflict, and how leaders can modernize their playbook for a world reshaped by COVID and AI. 

We cover his Tour de France model for team strategy (sprinters, climbers, and support), what a useful return-to-office looks like (create experiences you can only have in person), and the role of empathy and outcome clarity in every decision. We also geek out on moments of improvisation - when a surprise changes the game - and how to build rhythms that check in, learn, and adjust.

Key Takeaways

• Stop “training as a fix.” Treat conflict and similar issues as symptoms—start with outcomes, diagnose culture and capability gaps, then design the right mix of workshops, coaching, and follow-through.
• Update old models. Much leadership training still leans on decades-old research; your operating environment has changed dramatically in just the last 18–24 months—act accordingly.
• Race strategy beats heroics. Think like a cycling team: you need sprinters for quick results, climbers for long grinds, and the right lead-out to put stars in position to win.
• RTO with purpose. If you bring people in, use the room: strategic work, tactile collaboration, no-laptop meetings, and connection you can’t replicate on Zoom.
• Design organic connection (even remote). Create rituals, conversation hooks, and boundaries that spark human moments and reduce meeting fatigue.
• Empathy is a cheat code. Acknowledge feelings, align on outcomes, and choose the smallest meaningful adjustment that moves you closer to the goal.
• Operate in sprints. Build check-ins and “course-correction moments” into the plan so surprises become part of the process, not derailers.

Relevant Links

• Leadout Performance Group / Cooksey Connects – programs, blog, podcast, and services. Leadout Performance
• Schedule a call – direct calendar link to connect with Scott. ConnectWithCooksey.com

Unedited Transcript

Hello, Scott, and welcome to the podcast. How are you, my friend?

Doing fantastic, Avish, how are you?

I am also doing fantastic. I don't know what, where things are in your world right now, but I am have finally ended this two week stretch where my wife was back at work as a teacher, but my kids were off.

Oh, okay.

While I've tried to work, that was exhausting. So they're finally back in school this week. So now I am doing very well.

You are doing well. And my last two weeks I've been stuck at home because I'm recovering from a spine surgery and I just got my driving privileges back. So my wife is grateful because now I can help get our daughter where she needs to be, get her to practice, pick her up, get her to go home, those kind of things. I'm sort of contributing to the household again, which is kind of nice.

Well, now I feel like a whiny loser for whining about having my kids while you're like, I just had spinal surgery.

Oh, no, no. That was not a humble brag. Trust me, it was, it was just necessary because, you know, this, this business takes some wear and tear on your body.

So I'm living proof of that.

I know. And as I get older, I just drove back from a gig yesterday. It was about a five hour drive from Richmond to Philly. And I got out of the car and I got home and I'm like, oh, my knee. Just from being in that one position. This is, this is the state of my life now is I get injured from sitting.

I threw it back out once, load the dishwasher. That's no lie. So, yeah, yeah, it happens.

All right, well, you know, let's not talk about aging right now because it could get depressing. So instead, let's talk about you. And for people who are unfamiliar with the Scott Cooksey experience, could you just give us the. The one minute bio of kind of. Kind of who you are and what you do for work?

Absolutely. So I consider myself a leadership advisor, and it's kind of an interesting journey that I took. My first career was in financial services. So I started as a banker, a trust officer, and then final an investment advisor and did that for about 15 years. And when the market crashed in 08, I decided that was my third crash. That was enough. I loved the business, loved my clients.

It was great, but it just, I needed something different. And so I pulled on my leadership hat, put myself on the road, and for the last 15 years have been working with leaders all around the world. So there's, that's the quick version.

Excellent.

Of me.

Well, let's, let's use this as a jumping on point. So, you know, working with leaders is sort of a broad statement.

Absolutely.

When you say work with leaders, what are you doing with them? Like, how are you helping them?

Yeah. So, you know, for, for a long time I've worked with some, some partner firms that, you know, they kind of sent me in, as I called it, the pizza delivery guy. They own the relationship with the client. They, they had their own material. I would learn their material, get certified on it. They would send me in, I would go in and be the delivery guy. And over 15 years of doing that, I really got to look inside lots of different companies, and I figured out there's a lot of companies that have many of the same challenges.

And it all comes back to leadership and communication. And what I saw time after time after time that was really sad is how much money and effort companies would spend to say, we're going to do a. Training to fix a problem. And I use my air quotes from Dr. Evil When I say that and when, you know, and they would say, we're going to fix this problem, and there would be no follow up, no follow through. And, you know, a year later, two years later, you come back and you find out this organization has the same challenges and problems they had before. So what I've begun doing with my clients now is, I'm saying let's, let's take a step back and let's look at what are the outcomes that you need.

Because a couple things have happened. If I, you mind if I roll my sleeves up and get in the nerdiness of this for a minute?

Please do.

All right, so a couple things have happened. Number one, I have learned it through my experience that when an organization does training, let's call it, let's say it's training or, you know, do some workshops that the most, you know what the most popular question is I get when I, when I go to training. Has my boss had this class?

Ah, yes. I can hear some stories of that myself.

Yeah. So. So what happens is you really need to think about this solution as what is the outcome that we need? A lot of times people say, I'm having trouble with conflict. Can you come do a seminar or workshop on conflict so we can fix that? The answer is I could. But what I've learned is it's probably not conflict.

The problem is probably the conflict is likely the symptoms rather than the problem. So what happens is you need to Be able to come in and help your client sort of diagnose what's really going on, what's happening. Is there something in the culture? Is there something that's happened in this organization's history? Is there a particular layer at which the management is missing some of the skills that they need that would sort of smooth this out and make it easier? Is there a couple of key players that need some coaching to go along with the workshop so they can understand how to apply it in their instance, in their world? You know, and, and really, even before all of that is to understand from the organization's senior leaders, what is the strategy that you have for where you're going?

Because a lot of these courses that are out there in the marketplace, they're okay. I've been teaching them for a long time, been leading them for a long time, and they're helpful. But, Avish, most of the models, or many of the models that we see out there today come from research that's 30, 40, 50, 60 years old. How much has your business changed in the last 60 months? Much less the last 60 years. Well, I know you're not 60 yet. I mean, either that or you age very gracefully.

Well, let's say it's both.

Okay. All right, that's fair. Looking good. So. So as we think about this, right, it's it. What we've got to do is we've got to think about where's the world going, Think about how much the world has changed in the last 18 months with the, the influx of AI and its impact on organizations. Organizations this week, big ones, talking about laying off hundreds of people and saying AI is going to replace their, their life, their, Their workforce, their, their, their job entry jobs.

I've got some real concerns about my middle school daughter. By the time she gets to college, what skills does she need to learn in college? And because it's probably not the way you and I went, right? You pick a major, you go, you go into that field. I was a finance major. I went into finance, right? I went into finance jobs, went into banking, went into investments, and then ultimately changed my career, as many of us do.

And she's going to come into a world like, right, she was doing homework yesterday with the assistance of some AI tools, right? She got, she doesn't get textbooks like we did. She got issued a laptop in intermediate school, like in sixth grade.

Here's your laptop. Keep this until you're a senior, right? The world is different. So as we have new people coming into our organization, younger folks, they're coming in with a different skill set, they're coming in with different life experiences. And if we're still trying to do the same kinds of training that your senior leaders had when they were coming up in the business, I think you've got some real headwinds in front of you.

Yeah, it is interesting. And I think there's the. You know, one of my least favorite sort of aphorisms that people use is like, you know, back in my day.

Right.

You know, it's like, well, when we did it, we didn't need this kind of training or we didn't need this kind of communication. Like, people just did their jobs and shut up about it or, you know, whatever the. It's like, well, yeah, but things were different 30 years ago, 20 years, like, to your point. Right. I mean, yeah. You know, it's always like, we need a new bc.

It's like, before COVID after.

Yeah.

Like. Like that just changed the whole world. And I feel some people are still hoping ASW is still operating like pre Covid, and others are. Have adapted, but are still waiting to the day they can go back to doing things like they did before COVID Yeah.

The world is never going back to 2019, and I'm going to tell you that we're never going back to 2023. Right. I mean, yeah, once you. It's just when you AI hits the world and it, like the iPhone disrupted everything in 2007. Right. The next really big something that happened was probably Covid.

Yeah.

Maybe the financial crisis of 2008. That was disruptive for me. But, you know, set that aside. The next big advancement. Right. With COVID everybody had to relearn how to do work. That's where distance work became the norm rather than the exception.

The way kids were educated took a big shift. I think we're still trying to recover from trying to apply to old methodology for how you teach students into a world today. You see this, right? Your wife's an educator. So as you know, that's different. And now you got AI and it's like, look, that genie's out of the bottle. It's not going away.

You can't tell your people they can't use it. That's like. I remember Avish, as my daughter would say, in the olden days, right back in the 1900s.

Oh, God. Yeah.

Right. Okay, so.

So one of my first big jobs out of college, I remember I was working for a large regional bank in the late 1990s. And I remember we had two different email systems One for internal email and one for external email were two completely different apps. They weren't even called apps then. They were just programs that were installed on your computer. You know, I remember going through Y2K when we thought the world was going to end.

Yeah, I worked in IT when that happened. I. Yeah, stuff. Yeah, yeah, it's.

It's so fun. You mentioned the email interlocutor. There's probably some setting I gotta change, but I still, When I send a calendar invite through my Google Cal.

Yeah.

And it. And I'm, you know, inviting people like you and stuff, my Google Cal still pops up a warning like, oh, you're inviting people from outside your organization. Like, yeah, I know. I, I entered that email address into you. Why are you so it's like Google.

Understands how commerce works.

Exactly.

Maybe they should be people outside of my organization that I'm inviting to a meeting.

Exactly. Maybe there's a justification that I'm missing completely as to why it's still warning me that. But I feel that's antiquated. Think like you said, like, well, we think of this tool as an internal calendar. You got to be careful. But that's neither. That could also just be me, you know, with my IT degree, not understanding how current technology works.

Because. Let me guess, has it changed? Yes.

Yes, a little bit.

That Novale certification from the 90s doesn't do you much good today. Right?

I never had that. But I did work. I didn't even know the language still exists. I use Visual Basic. I don't even know if that still exists. But let's just say that if I decided to go back to getting a job, I would have to probably do something outside of it because, yeah, things have changed quite a bit since I was there.

Just a little. Just a little.

So let's talk about. Then you're going to work with, you know, we've talked about kind of the global changes that have happened. But let's work with whether it's in a speaking capacity or consulting or advising a leader. What, what is your kind of process like? Obviously the big change, we don't have to talk about AI, Right. This is not necessarily an AI.

Yeah, no, that's just on AI. But, you know, maybe they want to use more AI or maybe they just want to, you know, grow their revenues or maybe they want to improve morale or retention at their company. Like kind of what's your process for working with a leader?

So let me, let me give you a bit of a metaphor that might be helpful. Right. So I'm wearing a Tour de France shirt today.

I'm a big cycling nerd, right? I like the sport of cycling, love to watch the big bike races. And what I find is they're, they're very fascinating. And what really drew me into the sport was the way that the strategy plays out in a race like the Tour de France. So what a lot of people don't know is it's not one race. It's 21 individual stages that are stitched together over three weeks now. They throw a couple of rest days in there as well.

So over 23 calendar days, they ride this entire race, right? Somewhere around 2,000 miles. You know, these, these riders are putting in crazy miles every single day. But really, if you look at it, a riders. And I'm going to tie this together. Back to business. A rider's career can change if they just win one stage.

They don't have to win the whole entire race. And there are multiple ways to win. There's different jerseys. You can win the overall jersey, that's the yellow jersey. You can win the king of the mountain, that's the polka dot jersey. You win the sprinters jersey, it's the green jersey. And there's other races within the race that you can win, right?

And different things that happen. So when I start talking to an organization, I start saying, what is it that you want to do? And what are they going to tell you? We want to win the race. We want to be the best. We want to be the team that's standing at the top of the podium at the end of the race.

I bet that's true. Because who's happiest, right?

A cycling team's name is. It's usually its biggest sponsor. Right across their chest, right? That's, that's how they name them. So who, who is your, who are your investors? If you're a company, right, that's your, your, your board, your investors, your, your stakeholders, right? They want to see that logo at the top of the podium as often as possible.

And they said, we need a whole team of riders that are just like our number one person. And I'm going to say, no, you don't. Because there's times in your business you're going to be climbing mountains. Now, I'm a big guy. You can't tell from the video, right? But I'm, you know, you, you know me, I'm 6 foot 3, 290 pounds, I'm a big guy, right? And you put me on a bicycle at an 8, 10, 12% grade, going up A mountain.

It's going to be a slow ride, okay? Now, gravity helps. I'm going to be better on the downhill, but even that's very treacherous when you think about it, with the speed these riders will take coming down the mountain. It takes a different skill set for different moments in the race. There's times that a sprinter can go, get quick results, and then they just need to kind of cruise along with everybody else. I need some of those folks, right, to inspire, to. To say, hey, we're coming on the end of the quarter.

Can somebody close some business, please? Your sprinters, you can count on to get some things done when there's a crunch, right? Your mountain climbers are working on those projects that are hard, that you have to grind out, that take a long time where nobody else can keep up because it's just too dang, right? So what I do is I take this metaphor and we start having a strategic conversation with the client, and we go, what are you trying to do? What is the goal that you have for the business? And I start, Stephen Covey would say, using an old model, Stephen Covey would say, begin with the end in mind. And that's very much what I like to understand with my clients is what is the outcome that you need for your business that would make you feel good about working with me and about the success that you have in your organization?

And then we work backwards and say, I. I want to provide maximum value to my. To my client and say, I want to come with you on this journey. Don't just send me in to do a couple of workshops and then come back in a year and see what happened. I want to be there to say, you know, to be just like your. Your director sportif. That's the part the.

The race director, right? The team strategy guy who is in the car chasing along the peloton, relaying back on the radios what's going on. Hey, it's time for you to. To lead out and go up front. It's time for you to come back here and. And support this other rider. We need somebody to do this, and they're kind of directing what's going on.

There was a strategy for every single day of the race, but there's also surprises. If you've ever watched the stage of the Tour de France, it's not uncommon.

30, 40, 50, 60 kilometers in unexpected. There's a wreck. Just two days ago, I was watching the Vuelta, which is the Tour to Spain. They. They had to. They ended the race 3km early because there were A bunch of protesters at the finish line, and they didn't think it was going to be safe to send the riders through into the city, into the finish line. So they.

They communicated into the peloton through the race radios. Hey, we got to make a change. We're going to take the time for today. There's no stage winner today, but we're still keeping track for the overall race. Here's where we're going to take that final time. And once they get across the 3km to go banner, that was the end of the race. And they routed the riders around where the disruptions were to keep them safe, get them to their team buses and get them back to the hotels.

Sometimes you have to do that in your business.

Well, let this. Now we're kind of getting towards the topic that's sort of near and dear to my heart of adaptability.

Yes.

Improvisation. You know.

Yes.

What I call ding moments. And to. To also, you know, personalize it to. To my sports.

Yeah.

You know, obsession is I'm a big football and Philadelphia Eagles fan. And at the time we're recording. I don't know if you watch football or pro football, but at the time we're recording this. This is a Friday morning. Last night was the opening game of the 2025 season Eagles Cowboys. And there was a lightning strike in the area. So in the second quarter, they had to suspend the game for an hour.

And what was fascinating is that up to that point, eight straight drives from both teams combined. Eight straight scores. And then. Right. The last play before they suspended was a turnover. The Eagles got the ball back, suspend the game. Hour later, they come back.

From that point on, no one scored again. And it was the score from the point.

I'm glad I went home. I was out with some buddies watching that game last night until the. Until the weather break. And then we all went home and I didn't.

Yeah. So when you stopped watching was 24, 20 Eagles.

So I saw the whole game.

What's that?

I saw the whole game effectively.

Yeah. The rest was, you know, but to me, it kind of goes this thing about the unexpected and how do you adapt. And. Yeah, you can make the argument that either both offenses did not adapt well or both defenses adapted very well.

Yeah.

It's just fascinating how this unexpected thing completely changed the. And this, you know, you see this in business and, you know, I talk about this as well, which is that you have your plan. Here's what I want to do.

Yeah.

But then something interrupts you, and so many people don't adjust. They're like, well, this is my plan. And I know that things have changed, but I think this is what we should keep doing. And I think what you're suggesting, that is one of the roles you like having is being that, that voice, that sounding board, that idea person for, you know, some call you up and say, well, Scott, you know, this is a plan we came up with, but now we've got this new competitor or there's a new regulation coming out and, and you kind of help them navigate that change.

Yeah, one of the things, and you know, when you're in this business, you, you, you admittedly, you use a lot of those tools and assessments. And with our clients, you do them on yourself, too, because you want to see what you get. And I've learned a few things. I've learned, number one, I'm incredibly pragmatic. So it doesn't matter to me if we make a really big change to what you're doing or if we make some small incremental changes to what you're doing, as long as we do something that moves us towards the goal.

So I'm okay that way. Now that creates a rift sometimes in organizations, if your team is skewed one way or the other, they don't like what the other team has to say. When you learn about communication preferences on a team, somebody says, oh, this makes sense. I want you to do this right. Your senior executives talk in bullet points and like short statements, but your technicians need to know specifically what is the process? What are the 14.2 steps that are going to get us from point A to point B? Right. Your, your, your operations folks need to have more precision.

They want to know, how do we execute that? So middle managers are stuck in the middle where everybody above them talks in strategy and everybody below them talks in execution. Now you have this big disruption and the managers, management says, just figure it out. You're smart. That's why you're in management.

We've got to keep. They're taking a global look at what's happening in the world. Right? Like they're up in this helicopter that's way up above, or a drone looking above and looking down at the, at the, you know, where do we fit into the, into the, the entire industry that we're in. But that worker that comes in every day, that's goes to their desk or maybe walks into a production floor isn't thinking about where are we in the industry? They're thinking about, I don't know what to do today.

And so I think so. Let me pick a specific example out of that. One of the most fascinating. I'm going to call it fascinating because I don't know where it's going to ultimately land. But this entire argument about return to work, huge disruption, everybody gets sent home because of COVID Right. And then eventually organizations said, well, we kind of want our people coming back. As a pragmatist, I understand how an organization says we were better when we had all of our people in the same place.

The reality is they really didn't. Organizations are geographically dispersed. You have very transient people in your organizations that move. Your salespeople are rarely in the office. If they're any good, they're out, they're doing their thing. Right. You've got vendors, you've got business partners, you've got people you never see.

You've got warehouses and far flung places. Right. All these things that are out there. And everybody was never really under the same roof. But let's just say, okay, we want people to come back in.

Don't work from home. Here's the challenge.

I said it earlier. Your, your youngest generation of workers, the ones coming out of college right now, didn't go to college sitting in a lecture hall. They went to college on a laptop because there was a pandemic going on. They took a. Took a year out.

More people, I suspect. I don't know the. I don't know this for a fact. I just know it's true. I just, I don't know it for a fact, but I would suspect that there were a lot of students that took a gap year that normally wouldn't have said during COVID I'm out, I'm going to just figure this out. I'll come back later. Because they wanted the collegiate life experience, right?

Well, yeah.

They didn't necessarily think, you know, I can't go to class anyway, or I can take classes from home. Why am I going to pay full tuition to sit in my dorm room on my laptop? I could do that from home and save tens of thousands of dollars a year. Right. To do that. So they've learned how to work and be adaptive. Right. My daughter was not feeling well, didn't go to school yesterday, stayed home.

When she did get out of bed at noon, she came downstairs, grabbed her laptop out of her backpack, sat down on the sofa, and did her classwork from that day. Because the assignments were online. We didn't do that. I never did that.

You took a sick day. It took you a week to get caught up. And, you know Maybe you kind of worked it all out with your teacher somewhere down the road. Business operates different today because the world operates different today.

What's funny about that is, and this is kind of one things that I talk about, I love to get your perspective on is, you know, I talk about this, that when a change happens, the natural response is for us to just want to put our head downs and maintain the status quo or just lament and say, oh, I wish we could go back to the way it was. And we need to change that question. Instead of saying, why can't we go back? Say, how do we make this new reality better?

Right.

I think the problem with everyone looking at. Well, not everyone, but with the RTO or rtw, whichever one, you know, whatever it is.

Yeah.

Is everyone is still trying to go back to the way it was. These places, they're like, well, because they're not looking at the paradigm as an opportunity to do something better. Like, right, hey, you know what? People are working from home now. Well, we, we don't get these benefits of being in the office. Well, what benefits can you get? Because, you know, I mean, I won't say everyone because the extroverts, I think really like rto, but the introverts, there's so many people that love not having to commute, having a little bit of flexibility.

And people are just so like, oh, well, what if someone like wants to do their laundry when they're working from home? Or what if someone wants to run out and pick up the prescription from the pharmacy? Like, I don't know, man. What if Jack wants to come over to my desk and talk about fantasy football for an hour and a half?

Yeah.

I can't tell you the amount of time I wasted working in cubicles just having conversations. And you know, we all did it, Breeze.

We all did it, you know, and that's, that's the point. Right. And again, I'm not saying that there aren't merits to having people working together, but here's what I encourage my clients to do. If you're going to require people to come back to the office, let's focus on creating experiences that only happen when you have all your people in the office. Don't make, don't make people come in, sit at their desk so they can get on a zoom call with everybody else on their team.

That is crazy. And I've heard that you get in, you sit at your desk on your computer, not even in like a conference room with other people zooming in, but literally alone on your laptop. Zooming with other people in the office down the hall.

That happened to me with a client that I had worked with for a few years. I'd done a series of workshops with them. I would go down to Houston, where I used to live, but I would go down to Houston and, you know, on every couple of months and do a workshop. And people would come to the conference room and we would do these workshops. Covet happens. And then the client said, well, what do we do now? We've already, you know, got this contract with you.

And I said, I can do the courses remote. So we did those. And that was cool because we got to reach some people from outside offices and created some conversations that hadn't happened during that point. And then towards the end, they were like, hey, we're having people come back to the office. Can you come back and do a workshop for us? And so I showed up in their office, and everybody was in the office except guess who it. Guess who had tightened their security to get on their network during COVID it.

Guess who couldn't suddenly get his laptop hooked up in the room where he was. And of all the people that were signed up for the class that. That were going to come anyway, just logged in from their desk on the same floor in the building in downtown Houston where I was, except for one person who actually came and sat in the room where I was. And that's how we did the course.

So I was like, I could have.

Done in the room and everyone else remote, even though the remote people were.

In the same building on the same floor. And I could see some of them from through the glass wall where in the room where I was.

Yeah, it's. It's just. It's just wild.

I think people are not. I think a lot of it's just stress and overwhelm and it's just. It's more comforting just to not fade and go back. But, yeah, just that ability to think, okay, how can I make this better? How can I use this to my advantage? So you were saying that, and I think I cut you off. You were saying, you know, you want.

If we're going to do return to work, let's focus on experiences that can only happen when we're all together. So do you have, like an example kind of what you're thinking about that.

Second? I heard, if you're going to go to return to work.

It was very one second. I got to make a note of this time. You. You kind of froze there for me a second.

So, yep, you froze for me.

All right, let's go. That's about the 30 minute mark. So. All right, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna repeat the thing about interrupting answer question. So let's do this for the thing. So to go back to something I cut you off on, you were talking about when you return to work that you should focus on experiences you can only have when you are all in person.

Yeah.

So could you give kind of an example or what you had in mind when you're saying that?

Yeah, for sure. I mean like do it, have a creative session and talk about your strategy. Get people in the room, you know, do some work where you're getting to have a real conversation that is just difficult to have when you're looking through a screen in two dimensions. Right. So put people in a room and say, look, not just, you know, have a meal together, spend some time together, do some strategic planning where you're, you're putting, you know, post it notes up on the wall and moving them around. Something that's tactile. Right. That you can't do.

You can do digital whiteboards and do, you know, you know, digital post its on the, on the screen and do those things. It's not the same experience as you are when you're in a room and you put this big thing up trying to figure out something. You have a big matrix and you're trying to solve a problem or you know, you're working together or you just say we're going to a meeting and no one's allowed to bring their laptop.

Or their phone, which would be incredibly powerful and people's heads would explode.

It'd be amazing. Well, I'll give you an example. At first I was kind of frustrated because in the state where I live now I live in Oklahoma. Like many other states this year, they've passed a new laws that said students at school, like high school and younger cannot have their phones on between the start in the end bell for the day. Now last year my, my daughter, that was the rule. But you know, kids have smartwatches, kids have their phone still in their backpack, you know, they're at lunch. They were allowed to get on their phones and kind of check in and see what's going on and you know, do whatever.

But this year that's a no go. And the early reports I'm seeing right now are showing that students are actually paying more attention in class because they're, they're not allowed to use their phones. They can't use their phones to, you know, access chat, GPT so they're being forced to think a little bit more critically about what they're doing. They're paying more attention. They're not taking the easy shortcut and they're, they're, they're actually delivering a little bit better results. It's a little bit more like traditional learning. And, and I'm not saying that the kids aren't doing that.

My daughter was using chat GPT yesterday from home because she could, but during the classroom, they can't do that right now. And, and so I think if you think along those lines, it's like, what if you just put people in a room? How often have you been on a call with somebody and they purport to know more than they really know? Because what you can't see is on their other screen they're doing ChatGPT and now they're spitting out, regurgitating a bunch of things they just looked up. Or they drop a bunch of garbage in the chat that doesn't make a lot of sense. And you go, well, that's sort of true, but there's some nuance to it. And I can tell that was AI written.

Yeah.

You know, and they think they're contributing to the conversation. And I was like, have real conversations. I did a workshop two weeks ago in Kansas City with a group and we were talking about communication preferences. But I did it in a way where I took a nine foot diagram that sort of, it sort of looks like this is one of the tools I use. Okay. I took this nine foot diagram on the floor.

This is the audio. It's like a diagram wheel.

Yeah, sorry. It was this diagram wheel it. And the one I have is broken up into eight sections. And they all, when they took this assessment, got placed in one of those eight areas to keep it simple. And I said, physically, go stand in the, in your primary communication preference zone. Physically, go stand in the least favorite thing that you deal with. And all of a sudden, the executive director, because this was a nonprofit group, the executive director looked at me and went, we have a real problem.

I said, why? She goes, nobody is standing in the fiery red zone. And that's the zone where decisions, decisiveness, those executive level, you know, go and do this. And then what their leading attribute was was the make everyone feel good in the sunshine yellow phase where they were like being amenable and, and oh, hey, Avish, you don't like the color green? I won't wear a green shirt today. Okay, that's cool. You know, and they were being very polite, but they were Missing a chance to be more direct.

And they were. They were successful. Okay, they delivered on their promise. And it was. It's a big, prominent organization, but it was a big aha moment that might not have been as clear had those people all not been standing in the room together when we did that. So when I say, you know, create experiences, just don't make me come to the office and get on a zoom call. Don't let me do work totally isolated.

And, you know, when I lived in Houston, it might. It took my. We left. We moved away from Houston in 2016 because my wife's office was 22 miles from the house, and it took her an hour to get to work in the morning and an hour and a half to get home. She was spending 12 hours a week in the car with a toddler while I was on the road. Our quality of life was not good. During COVID how many people figured out how much time of their day was getting sucked up by the commute?

Oh, yeah, the only thing I miss about the commute is I tend to not listen to as many podcasts as I used to.

I agree. I listen to so much less.

I listen on planes.

For me is I've been walking more, which is me exercise. Because I. I'm like, that's my time to listen to podcasts is walking.

So there you go. But yeah, I. I listen to a lot now.

Isn't that better? Wouldn't you rather walk and listen to a podcast?

Yeah, I live right near a walking trail, like in the woods, so I get to go.

It's good for your physical health, it's good for your mental health. Plus, you're feeding yourself with information and, and you're out and you're looking around, Right. And you're seeing in the real world, you know, like, oh, this is interesting. And then you just. The world becomes more vibrant in those moments when you're present.

100. In fact, you know, I self diagnosed myself with, like, you know, dopamine issues and add, and I'm actually in this process right now of using kind of app blockers to limit my access during the day to force myself because I'm. I'm someone who's like, you know, yeah, the moment I get a break every five minutes, I gotta, like, check my phone. And I, I, you know, I'm like, all right, so I agree on the attention.

Yeah.

And it's funny you mentioned the kind of moving people around and not to undercut the point of not doing things like we used to. But even as Someone who's worked in training for years. Like, these are things you learn to do as a trainer even before AI and even before, you know, apps and iPhones and I. But I think all that stuff is going to be even more important now in a world of disconnection and AI, like, things that connect us as humans, things where we focus on feelings and emotions, things where we get physical movement. Like, it's the only way you're going to differentiate yourself in a world where a tool can access all information from human knowledge in an instance.

Well, I think it's going to be interesting to see how well AI adapts to emotional intelligence, because, like, empathy is one of the key tools that's the cheat code to great leadership, is empathy. I think you have to be able to recognize and acknowledge how the people that you work with feel. You don't have to agree with them. You don't have to placate them. You have to acknowledge it and respond in an appropriate manner. And what's interesting is I remember the early days of. I keep going back to Covid, and I'm tired of talking about COVID but it was such a stark, significant moment.

Like, I remember the. One of the first few months, for the first few months of COVID suddenly having to teach all these courses and lead these workshops on Zoom. And I would get done with this with a course that used to be one of my favorite courses. Right. You'd spend three, four hours in a room with people, and that time went really fast. You spent three or four hours with people on a Zoom call, and I would turn the call off, and then I would turn all the lights off in my office and put my head on my desk because I was absolutely exhausted.

Yes, right.

It's because I couldn't read the body language, or half the people would not even turn their camera on. And there's something about when you're sitting in the room not paying attention, I can at least look over and see that you're still in the room. I can see if you're typing something on your phone. I can see if you're, you know, doing something on your laptop or you're taking a note. But if you're just looking away, looking out the window, right. You know, your camera's off, and all I see is those white letters with your name, you know, And I'm like, I don't know. I don't know if you're even there.

And how do I respond? Like, I don't know how often I'm in a room And I go, avish, you look like you had a thought. Because I'll see somebody who is camera on, microphone off, but they're present, and I can see you go. Once I see you do that a couple of times in a room, I would know to call on you and pull you into the conversation. This is where leaders are missing this opportunity. The other thing that happens with all this remote stuff that annoys people is there's no boundaries. So they say, oh, you got a meeting from 10 to 10 30, 1030 to 1111 of 11 to 1 20, 120 to 140, and you don't have time to go to the bathroom, refill your coffee, or grab a sandwich.

How much important. This is why people want you to come back to the office. They want you to come back to the office because they see the value of the conversation that you and I would have walking in from the parking lot together, impromptu, going, avish, you want to go grab a sandwich or a cup of coffee real quick? Yes. Hey, after work, let's go grab a beer.

Let's go get a. Let's go to happy hour, you know, and, you know, spend 20 minutes talking about this thing that's driving everybody bananas here, but do it away from, you know, everybody else.

That's great, right? We need those moments. But when you're working remote, I'm going to tell you, you have to create those moments, and it's. It needs to be more organic, and it's not. So the problem that needs to be solved is we need to create organic moments to connect. Can you do that remote? 100%. You can.

You do fun things like change your background every Friday to your favorite vacation dream vacation destination, your favorite NFL sports team, your favorite college team, your favorite, you know, favorite activity. I've got. I've got probably 30 or 40 different backgrounds that I use based on what's going on. I've got one that looks like a video clip of people throwing Molotov cocktails through a storefront. Right. And they're talking about chaos. And I'll put that one on sometimes and just wait till somebody notices.

It livens up a meeting. Right? But when all you have is the blurred background or nobody's on, there's no connection. And I'm going to tell you, that's what people are saying they want when they want you to come back to the office, what they really crave is connection. So I like to get together with a client and say, what do you need? What's the problem? What's this problem costing you, and what does it cost you to not solve this issue?

If we can identify those things, then we can say, okay, now what are the constraints we have to work within? And then we say, all right, what's the first step we're going to take to begin correcting that? And I've got a model that I use that, that we walk through with a client and I teach them how to use it, and I say, how often are we going to check in?

Where are these. These checkpoints? And when we check in, we're going to say, okay, we thought this was the plan, but what do we need to adjust? Because guess what? In that last stage of the race, the stage of our change, the stage of our evolution, there was a surprise. We had a new competitor that entered the market. We had someone that exited.

We lost a big client. We gained a big client. We had something significant that happened. We lost a key employee. We. We acquired another company. Great. What adjustments do we need to make for the next run?

So you start taking some of those ideas from, like maybe agile thinking. Right. Scrum thinking, things that you were using in the IT world. Right. That became ways. And you sort of meld that with what works in a. In a traditional office environment.

And if I'm talking with the senior leaders and say, look, we're going to deliver and execute this, but it's going to take us some time, and there's going to be some bumps in the road, but I'm going to teach the frameworks to my clients that ultimately they don't need me to be there every day, but I need to go with them on that journey for a while so they learn how and when to identify and build their skills of discernment as to when to use those various tools and make everybody on the team better.

I love that. It's just such a kind of a clear description of kind of what you do and how it helps and what leaders need and, you know, whether it's hiring an advisor, which is always great because you get that outside perspective, but even just making sure you're doing that, you know, checking in periodically, you know, with yourself, with your team and adjusting. And we're gonna finish up here in. In a couple minutes, but I want to touch upon one other thing. You know, you mentioned changing your background till someone notices or putting up your favorite team or whatnot.

Yeah.

And it is amazing how we sort of mute ourselves. I mean, even me, and I'm here, I got a very, you know, plain background. And every time I put Something out there, that's the thing that people remember. Like, for example, in some of my keynotes, I have an anecdote where I talk about my favorite band, which is Rush. And invariably that's the thing that most people will come talking about afterwards. And not in any kind of deep way, but they'll. It's like an icebreaker.

They'll be like, oh, you know, I saw Rush in 1978. Or, oh, they're my favorite band too. Or like, it just gives a point of connect. And there's one conference I was at where I, you know, normally I hate networking. And I happened to mention something to. To the guy I was talking to about liking, you know, fantasy novels, which, you know, growing up, it was always like the nerdy thing, so I was never super vocal about it, but I'm. I'm older now, and he's like, oh, he's like, I love fantasy novels.

And we end up talking like 15 minutes, right?

Oh, yeah.

And even I gotta bring this up, you know, even you and I, like, the first time we met was at an NSA meeting and this song was on, and I'm like, what song is. I've had this tune in my head for like a year. And I don't. And you're like, oh, that's Eminence Front by the who.

Yeah.

And boom. And I still, you know, we were.

Bonded forever in that moment.

Yeah, I will remember that. And I bonded, like, all right, now we'll remember Scott, because that, like.

Yeah.

So in a world of disconnection, of virtual, we're all separated. You know, revealing things about yourself and putting things out there is like just this. This little opening for people to. To connect with you.

On some of the clients I work with, like, I've got a program that, with. I do this with one of the partner firms I work with, but I enjoy it because it's not like your traditional. It's not just a workshop that we do and go away. It's an eight month long program, right? So we do some group work, we do some smaller, what we call mastermind group work. We do individual coaching and we have every. All. Everybody in the cohort does an individual presentation in a competitive format at the end of the program. And. And it's a global organization, and so we weave in all of these different tools and different models and different things they can do.

But the goal is when they do their presentation at the end of the eight months, they're presenting to senior leaders. Here's how I'm applying in real Time tools that I've learned throughout this experience over the last eight to nine months. And that to me is the way you build a program that has a lot more impact that everybody throughout the organization can see. Right. Because they're seeing in real time. Hey, we had this real problem. It's the thing everybody's talking about.

How are we going to use AI to solve this problem? How are we fixing this, this challenge with our distribution? Because we're a global distribution company and tariffs have become a hot issue in the last year. Right. How are we dealing with that? Because that's a big piece of our business. And, you know, then they start talking about, oh, well, I used this tool that we learned about how to discern the best way to apply these different things.

And I got different stakeholders involved and we built a solution that allowed us to accelerate the process that would normally take, you know, x amount of time to build a free trade zone somewhere. And we were able to do that in a shortened amount of time because I applied all these things because the problem is today. And, and that begins to validate the value to people in the organization about what you're learning as a leader and how you can apply that in real time. So I'm just looking for clients that are saying, you know what, we've got good people. And for the things my clients already do, well, keep doing them. I'm not going to replace that. I'm not trying to come in and do anybody's job for them.

My job is to come in and enhance what everybody's doing. I'll leave it with this one last explanation. In cycling, there's something called a lead out train. If you watch towards the end of a race or near a sprint point. Excuse me, in a race, you'll notice the peloton is just the group of riders in the race all packed together. But if you look at towards the end of a stage of a race, you'll start to see all of the jerseys of the, of the same team, all the same color jerseys, start to line up. And often what happens is your best rider might be third or fourth in that line as they're barreling towards the finish line in the last kilometer.

And you're like, wait a minute, this guy in the front is just cooking. You're like, yeah, if you don't know much about the race, you're awfully shocked when this guy gives it everything he's got. And then with 700 meters to go, he just peels off and disappears back into the peloton. And you're like, what? And then all of a sudden, the second rider is now the first rider and they're cooking as hard as they can. And then all of a sudden they peel off. But at the last minute, in that last 100 to 200 meters, the best rider on the team is finally the guy that's at the front and they're cooking. And here's why.

If you were riding second or third in a line of riders, you were, you were using 38% less energy to go the same speed. So my company is called lead out performance group because I want to be your lead out guy. I want to be the guy that's, that's putting forth all that effort to pull you forward to get you in position to win. And at the last minute, I get out of the way so you and your team can go be the heroes and cross the finish line before your competitors. I can't make sure you're going to win every single time. But if I can get you in position to win where you're a top finisher more often than you have been because you're executing strategy. I've done my job, but it's not about me.

It's about my clients.

I love it. I love our two reasons. One, it's a great way to kind of wrap up. And number two, I had a note here to ask you why you're. Why your company was called lead out Performance group.

And there we go.

So I'm glad you. You meant.

Yes, and I'm glad you asked.

That was perfect. It came out perfectly. All right, we're gonna finish up here in just a minute. Scott, for people who do want to connect with you, potentially engage you to be their advisor, to work with them, to help them, you know, be so you can be there, you know, lead out person, what is the best way to connect with you? Contact you, find out more about you.

Give you two things. Number one, the website, leadout performancegroup.com. it's kind of long, but I know it's there. But here's a fun one. If you just want to get on my calendar for 15 minutes, jump on a zoom call or a phone call with me. See if this is a good fit for us to work together. Do an exploration.

You can go to connectwithcooksee.com and that goes straight to my calendar. You just pick a time that works for you and schedule some time. Let's just start a conversation. No obligation. If I'm not the right person, here's the beautiful thing. I know A lot of people in this business just like you have each and and we have people that have great skills. And if I'm not what that particular person is looking for then I am more than happy to make that referral, make that connection, get you connected with somebody that can help you with the challenges you've got there.

So connect with cooksie.com. get on my calendar.

Let's have a call.

Or you can just cook. See, is C o o K S E ey correct.

That is correct. Thank you for that. Yeah.

Too. But if you're just listening connectwithcooksie.com and leadout performance group.com we'll put the links in as well.

Absolutely.

All right, Scott, got one more question for you then. It's how I end all my podcast episodes. I talk about this idea of saying yes and instead of yes, but because I honestly believe the world would be a better place if everyone just started with the default of yes and not agreeing to everything. But start with that open minded first. So what is a small thing that you believe if everyone just did this one small thing, the world would be a better place?

Really look at what's the outcome that you desire in that moment? So much like when we talk in a, in a speech, we talk about what do you want your audience to think, feel or do differently when you're done. If you think about, man, we really need to do this for our organization. We need to do this thing. Understand why you're trying to do it, but understand what is the outcome that you need. And don't just fall in love with the one way you know could work. There's probably more than one way to win that race.

Love it. Think about your outcome. What is your outcome in that moment? Perfect. Scott, thank you so much. This was a great conversation. I had an awesome time.

Learned a whole lot. And yeah, be sure to check out Scott, check out his two websites. And Scott, hopefully we can do this again sometime.

Appreciate it, my friend. Good to see you.