Ep.66- Love and Leadership: Jeff Ma on Building a Compassion-Driven Workplace

TRANSCRIPT

Gissele: Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. Today we’re gonna be talking about rethinking how we do business in a time of great upheaval. my guest today is Jeff Ma, who is a director of product development at Culture Plus host of the Love as a business strategy podcast and bestselling author of love as a Business Strategy coming up through a decade in the gaming industry. Jeff eventually found his niche in project management and agile coaching at Soft Way.

As he continued working with teams and clients in Scrum and agile environments, however, he started seeing the stronger underlying importance of culture in truly high functioning performing teams. Pushed by a combination of his own introspection, feedback from [00:01:00] his colleagues, and a whole lot of uncomfortable practice, Jeff shifted head first into a new mission that he shares with his team.

To bring humanity back to the workplace. Nowadays, he’s hyper-focused on helping people find a workplace culture that allows them to be their whole selves, their best selves. Jeff is leading the development of various products and tools that are crafted with the culture of love at its center. As a facilitator of Culture Rise and other experiences in the Culture Plus Suite, he’s also connecting and transforming leaders around the world directly helping them to improve their mindsets, behaviors, and leadership capabilities.

Please join me in welcoming Jeff. Hi Jeff.

Jeff: Hello, how are you, Gissele?

Gissele: I’m doing great. I think this is a perfect conversation to have nowadays because I feel like the world is in a little bit of an upheaval when it comes to the economics, I [00:02:00] think,

Jeff: In terms of a lot of things. Yeah.

Gissele: Yeah, for sure.

So to get started I wanted you to tell the audience a little bit about how you got started in this work.

Jeff: Wow. So it’s, it’s actually a lot of the book that we wrote, love is a business strategy centers around this change. But, you know, I was just like anybody else working a, you know, a, a kind of a job in a nine to five kind of technology company called Soft Way, which I still do today, but software was very different back then.

But basically software went through an interesting change. Around 2016, it almost went outta business. And the story centers around our CEO Mohammed, who’s a co-author of the book as well. But it starts with Mohammed and kind of grows into others. But the gist of it is, mm-hmm. That when we’re kind of in our worst moment where we had done mass layoffs, morals, and all time low

Gissele: Yeah.

Jeff: Things are not looking good. Mohammed kind of had a moment of, of. [00:03:00] Self-realization in which he went to actually a football game, a University of Houston football game, which he’s a huge fan of. Mm-hmm. But they played a game that was really important. It was like their 10th, 10th straight victory with no losses that season, if they could pull it off.

But they were down by by insurmountable amount in the fourth quarter, and all the statistics showed that it was over. They had a 0.1% chance of winning, and basically people were already leaving that game, leaving that stadium turning off their TVs, and Mohamed decided to stay in that game. He witnessed one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the program.

And they came back and won. And that really invigorated him to try to figure out what it is that makes a great team resilient like that. And that coach in particular, that, that was a rookie coach his