The Mattering Effect: Success and Mattering Are Not the Same Thing - John R. Miles

Charles Schwartz (0:00)

Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where we don't care what you think, only what you can prove.

John Miles led teams that supported Navy SEALs, then ran tech teams at Dell and Lowe's. When he took over a group at Lowe's, it ranked dead last in employee engagement out of 350,000 people. Today, he explains how he turned it around, and the six signals that tell you whether your people feel like they matter. The show starts now. All right, everybody, welcome back to the show. Today, I have John with me. John, it's a pleasure to have you on.

John R. Miles (0:30)

Charles, love your podcast, man. Thank you so much for having me.

Charles Schwartz (0:35)

Absolutely. For the four or five people who don't know about you or your podcast or what you've done, can you kind of fill the people in on who you are and what you've done?

John R. Miles (0:45)

Sure.

I'm a social entrepreneur working at the crossroads of leadership, culture, and human behavior. I spent the first chapter of my career in high intensity environments, first in the Navy and later running technology teams, in the Fortune 50 and companies like Dell and Lowe's. But after watching high performers, including myself, Burnout, I realized, Charles, that what drives real impact isn't just strategy, metrics, or systems, it's the underlying sense of significance and belonging people see inside them. So that realization completely altered my trajectory. And today, my mission is to make the invisible visible and to help build a world where people are valued, not simply for what they produce, provide or accomplish, but for who they are. And that's what the Passionstruck Podcast is about in the entire platform and my keynote speeches and my books, et cetera.

Charles Schwartz (1:46)

So you do have a new book coming out, which we'll get to in a second. But what I love about your story is you're in three very distinctive seasons. We talk about this all the time. In the beginning, you learn, then you earn, and then you return. We have those three seasons that we interact with, and you're in that return environment where you're giving back. We also have a little bit of a cheat code because we have a little bit of a shared experience in the beginning of our lives. You have spent a lot of time in tech, in IT. I spent eight years in a hospice doing IT, watching people die. Yours has a little bit of a different thing. And I normally tell people, hey, you know, what I did in my environment, a hospice, either it worked or someone died. And they were going to die anyway. I mean this with all due love and respect that I have for hospice. These people were terminal already.

Your environment was similar, but they weren't expected not to come home. So you were in a different environment. You had a little bit more of a military background. I'd love for you to share a little bit about that to get the audience going, what the heck? So because a lot of people speak about knowledge or insights, but they're not proven downrange. They're not proven in an environment where lives are on the line. And your entire framework and what you do, even though you come to this environment, you're very passive and very calm and very loving and very spiritual.

There's a side of you that you've played a switch. Like, listen, this is what's worked in situations where people had to come home. Could you share a little bit about that?

John R. Miles (3:04)

Yeah, Charles, I ended up graduating from the Naval Academy. And while the Naval Academy, for me, was great at teaching us servant leadership and a value system and all of that, what it didn't prepare you for was the real world. I mean, being in the fleet and being at the Naval Academy when I was there, they were two very different things.

And I had a very interesting role. I came out of the Academy and joined a group within the Navy that was supporting the National Security Agency. And I became what was called at the time a direct support officer. So think of this as someone who is on like a FBI hostage rescue task force where shit goes down. You were called upon to go out there on a moment's notice and fix it. So we were not deployed into peaceful environments. We were typically deployed into high-tempo environments where people were at peril, etc. So it was wonderful because I went on ships, including aircraft carriers, sters, cruisers, submarines, and got to spend a number of deployments with special operations forces. And when you're operating at that level, you learn very quickly that first, you have to put trust in the enlisted soldiers who you're leading. And the second thing is that you can't lead by controlling every move. What I learned is you have to establish the mission, establish the boundaries for them, make sure everyone on the team understands their role. And then you've got to trust that highly capable people can execute. Because the thing I learned very early on, and this is carried through my entire career, is the leader cannot become the bottleneck.