Be The Master Of Balance With Bryan Bentley

 

In a world obsessed with achieving perfect equilibrium, Bryan Bentley, a self-made executive, offers a refreshing perspective to be the master of balance. His ability to balance professional and personal life, coupled with his unwavering dedication to his team, makes him a true standout. His philosophy is simple yet profound: give it your all, whether you’re at work, home, or spending quality time with loved ones. By embracing this approach, Bryan has not only achieved remarkable success in his career but has also cultivated strong personal relationships. His ability to pivot and thrive in the face of adversity is a testament to his leadership and unwavering determination. With a deep-rooted passion for helping others, Bryan has transformed his team into a high-performing family, fostering a culture of inclusivity, trust, and growth. Discover the secrets to Bryan’s success as he shares his insights on leadership, personal development, and the art of overcoming challenges.

 

Show Notes:

02:25 – Work-life balance and the “give it all” approach

11:23 – The importance of adaptability and resilience

34:35 – The role of company culture and communication

39:03 – The impact of technology on the workplace

42:44 – The speaker’s personal journey and career pivots

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Be The Master Of Balance With Bryan Bentley

You’re going to love my conversation in this episode. I’ve got a great leader in the seat for our interview. His name is Bryan Bentley. I’m going to read how he describes himself. He is a self-made executive who started in the industry at seventeen years of age on his own and accepted every opportunity that was laid in front of him. Now, he has the honor of being in a position where his creative talents and years of experience have helped to change that industry. I’m keeping a mystery about what that industry is at the moment, but you’re going to love this conversation with somebody very special, so sit back and enjoy.

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Bryan, it’s fun to listen to your own bio. It’s fun to have somebody else introduce you and whatnot, but my first question to you as my readers are ready for is what is one thing that is not part of your bio and not part of that intro that you would love for people to know about you at the outset?

That’s a good question. I think the only other thing that I didn’t throw in my bio, which is more of a personal thing, is that I’m the dad of three kids. It’s a new world for me, and that’s my favorite part. That’s what I live for, to get off at the end of the day, drive home, and spend those few hours that I get with them. People don’t talk about that in the business world, but what I do every day, I have to take home and appreciate everything I get when I get home.

There are two things that come up for me when I hear that. First, I resonate with it personally because I’ve been blessed to be a daddy for a while now. We have four kids and still, to this day, there’s nothing that lights me up more and makes me more ready to get out there, rock and roll, and work hard. Everything than those kids. I get that personally.

The other piece is that so often people talk about work-life balance, this concept. I like to play poke at that and call BS on that thing, too, because when you think about balance, I always think about somebody on a tightrope. That’s a great type of balance. Even if you could learn how to do that, and I think most people could learn how to do that, but how long could you do it for?

That’s the question, Bryan. How long could you possibly keep yourself in balance yet that’s the thing that people would think that they’re seeking. I have a thought on it, but I want to get your thoughts. That’s why you’re on the show and I’m interviewing you. What’s your thought on this whole work-life balance concept?

 

Give It All Approach

I think it is false. I like to say off balance on purpose because the reality is if you try to stay on balance all the time, I think about the scale, and it does the same thing as a tightrope. To have a work-life balance, I would say that I have equal parts of my day spent with my kids and my wife and/or equal parts with my kids, equal parts of my wife, and equal parts of my job.

The reality is there are not enough hours in the day to make that possible, and I’ve got bills to pay for the way we work and the society now. None of us are independently wealthy, so we can do whatever we want. Having a perfect balance of saying I spend that time doesn’t work. I think it sets people up to fail. It sets people up to be unhappy because they feel like they’re having to give up something for something else because they never fully attribute and you get stressed at work.

It’s like, “I feel bad about being home because I’ve got something at work I need to do,” or, “I feel bad about being at work because I got something at home to be a do.” It ultimately sets you up for negative stress and a negative piece. My philosophy has always been to give it all 100%, 110% at the moment that you’re in and you don’t have that negative feeling because you know you can go to work that day and say, “Last night with my kids, I was all in.”

Also, because I was all in, I’m now at work, and I’m all in. As soon as I get home, I’m back all in. However, it’s being all in the presence moments that you can be in because of the balance piece. I’ve been working for this company for years, and I’ve never found perfect balance and I never will. You can either die being unhappy trying to find balance or you can find a better way to do it.

 

You can either die unhappy trying to find balance or find a better way to do it. Share on X

 

If you’ve ever hung around and not everybody reading this has kids or likes kids, I think most of us do, whether it’s our nieces, nephews, or whoever it might be. If you’ve ever hung around with a 2-year-old, 3-year-old, or 4-year-old, they command your presence. That’s what they do. They will not tolerate you not being fully present with them and you know it when you’re with them if you’re not because you can feel it.

They won’t let you split the way we are constantly splitting ourselves into pieces and multitasking to the nth degree to the point where probably millions of people are walking around with ADHD that aren’t technically wired that way originally, but they are now that way. Kids won’t let you do that. I think that’s one of those good things, whether it’s your kids or somebody else’s kids, not a stranger’s kids, by the way. A caveat to that, everybody. I don’t want to be getting emails that say, “I got arrested because you told me to go sit down with a three-year-old, and then all of a sudden, the police show up.” We don’t need that.

My toddler is the best salesman in the world. He can command what he needs me to do and he never takes no for an answer. If all the salespeople I work with could sit in front of a client when they say, “No, I’m not interested.” They’d be like, “No, that’s not a good enough answer. Let’s figure this out. How can I make this work?”

 

This is perfect stuff here. You might bring your toddler in to train your sales team. Have a little workshop that gets led by your son that says, “Here’s how you get what you’re looking for,” but of course, everybody’s got a win in this. Dad, I want you to do this, but I want you to do it with me. We’re going to have fun together.” The lessons that can be learned from kids. I didn’t ask you this beforehand. Not everybody has the time or even has the interest in reading a book, but is there something that you’ve either read or something that you’re reading that you love?

I had a meeting with my team yesterday. I charged my team at the beginning of the year that we’re going to go through 4 or 5 books this year. I’ve not been the guy who reads a bunch, but that’s one of my habits that I’m developing more over time as I get a little older and more mature. That is a skill that I didn’t develop before.

The book that we’re going through right now is called Atomic Habits by James Clear. That’s what’s been charging my team. We spent three hours walking through the first 5 or 6 chapters of the book. Also, there’s so much to take from that on a personal and a business level to change your habits. It’s almost like the balance thing.

One of the things they talk about is winners and losers all had the same goal. If you go run a marathon, the guy who won the race and the guy who lost the race are all trying to win the race. They both had a goal that they were going to win the race. I joked with my team. I said, “Maybe the last-place guy only had a goal to finish, but at least the top ten had a goal to win that race. The guy who came in first and the guy who came in tenth both had the same goal.”

 

The difference in what happened was the process that they did to make it to achieve the goal. If you build the process the right way, then you don’t walk out as a failure. It’s not short-lived because the process never stops. That’s the book I’ve been going into now. It dives into a little bit of that. I’ll digress, but it’s been a good read both personally and business-wise.

I remember reading that book during the pandemic. Also, I read it when I was going to the YMCA and I was sitting in the hot tub. That’s my favorite place to read a book. Bryan, tell me what this looks like to you.

It looks like a well-read book and maybe it fell in the hot tub. It looks like it’s been gone through a few times.

This is not James Clear’s book. I’m holding up a book called The Snowball: Warren Buffett and The Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. This is an epic book. This is a great business course and it took me forever because I’m a bit of a slow reader. It looks this way because one of my favorite things to do is either sit in a sauna or sit in a hot tub quietly and read. I read James Clear’s book there. Part of what I took away from his book that I still think about now is habit stacking, which you may have gotten ready for.

The habit stack that I created for myself based on that situation was I realized I hadn’t been talking to my mom on a regular basis. I was feeling guilty. As you were saying, we’re splitting ourselves. We often have these other conflicting emotions that are going on at the same time. I was thinking, “It seems like I’m always busy. I’m always moving to and from something.” I said, “I’m going to stack a new habit. The habit I wanted to create was calling my mom on a more regular basis, not just when I felt guilty or whatever.”

I said I’m going to the YMCA to swim 3 times a week at least, but then it was 3 times a week. I go, “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to stack that habit. I know I’m already doing with this new one.” Every time I get in the car to leave the YMCA to go home, it’s a 10, 12-minute drive home. I’m going to call my mom the second I get in the car. That’s what I did. That new habit became embedded in me. To this day, I call my mom pretty regularly now because that has become a habit. I love that selfless, shameful self-promotion. This is your next book, my friend, with your team. It’s called Change Proof.

 

Adaptability And Resilience

If you think about the Atomic Habits and Change Proof, those two processes go perfectly hand in hand because stuff is going to change and it’s going to be in our control or out of our control. If you have a goal, this is what you’re going to do, and then all of a sudden, something changes in your world. You throw your hands in the air, and you don’t know where you’re going to go. However, if you learn the resilience and the process you talk about in your book, the resilience and the process piece, and put those two together with those habits, you’re going to win every time.

 

You will win every time if you learn the resilience and process in Change Proof and the habits from The Atomic Habits. Share on X

 

I couldn’t have said it better if I’d given you the words of myself, but what a pivot you did there, Bryan.

I haven’t seen the Pivot book. I’m going to get that one next.

The book I just finished that I absolutely love and I’ll recommend it to you too. There’s a great book, a discussion guide that goes along with Change Proof. I’m going to make sure that somebody from our team sends that over because it is cool when you’re guided through a book with certain questions that the author or somebody else thinks is the good ones that will lead that conversation.

It’s because sometimes you get together with people to talk about a book and then somebody’s like, “Who’s in charge? Who’s asking questions? To use your word, what’s our process here? We don’t want to waste time so, in any event, we’ll send that to you. The book I just finished is called Shoe Dog and it’s the Philip Knight business memoir. I’ll say this.

That is an epic story. For those who don’t know who Philip Knight is, Phil Knight is the founder of Nike, but for the first ten years, it was called Blue Ribbon. The company was Blue Ribbon, which is a classic entrepreneur. He was in Japan with this crazy idea that he had to sell his dad just to borrow $50. He ended up on this trip to Japan in 1962. He’s in a shoe manufacturing facility, speaking with this group of Japanese businessmen. This was not far after World War II ended.

This is a funky time for American and Japanese businessmen working together. The Japanese society as a whole is rebuilding after the devastation, but they ultimately said to him. They were very impressed and respectful. Also, they wanted to do business. They said, “Tell us the name of your company.”

In the moment, the guy goes, “You do have a company.” He goes, “Yeah, I do.” He was a runner in college and whatnot. He goes, “It’s called Blue Ribbon.” He made that up out of thin air and, lo and behold, threw a lot of great drama, the natural drama businesses stuff, which is in the book. He gets ten years under his belt, and then one of his early employees comes up with the name Nike and there’s a whole backstory for it. It’s a great read.

Even the story of the marketing person who came up with the Swoosh and it was just the logo. The way they came up with the logo and they paid her. It was like you got next to nothing for that back in the day.

You paid no money for it.

Now, you would have ChatGPT build it for you. “Just build me this logo.” It was effectively what they had back then.

I’m going to have our team read that book, too, because of the element of business school wisdom, but better than business school. I’m not putting down the business school, but I’m putting down the wisdom that comes from being an operator. Until you operate a business or until you’ve worried, I’m not saying you have to have had this worry, but when you’ve worried about making payroll, when you’ve been up at 3:00 in the morning worried about whether you’re going to make payroll for people that you want to take care of and they take care of other people, you don’t get the gist of business. Business is this razor’s edge thing. One day, you could be literally thinking you can’t make a mistake and the next day, you’re Lehman Brothers. It’s shocking.

I want to get a sense of where that has happened in your business experience. If you could provide details about it, that would be great. If you don’t want to be, that’s okay too, but where’s that razor’s edge where you have to look over the precipice and into the abyss? How did that all play out? People love to hear those pivot stories, if you will so I’m going to ask you for one right now if you could, Bryan.

There’s probably several that I pivoted some of the organizations or some of the areas within the organization that I was running where I pivoted how they managed things, how they did things or a sales team, but I’ll probably tell you more of a personal one. It is business-related, but it’s about me personally. It was about a few years ago that I was asked to take over a big market and move out of my comfort zone. I grew up in Colorado. I moved to Utah with some family. I ran the business there. I was given an opportunity to move to Texas and take some things over, but that, for me, was a personal pivot piece that I had to leave home. There was part of leaving home.

Bryan, will you fill in a little backstory for people? Tell us about the company and the industry you’re in just so people get a sense of it.

 

Career Pivots

I worked for the company Service Corporation International. We’re the largest funeral and cemetery company in the world. We own funeral homes and cemeteries, but the role that I play in and I’ve done everything from washing toilets when you had to, and things were slow to doing the funeral arrangements. We are helping families with funerals, going out in the middle of the night, and bringing someone’s loved one back into our care.

Primarily, what we do now, though, is we help families plan for the future, which is great, which is meeting with people who are in their 60s and they’re thinking about looking and retiring, but I got to make sure my investments are in place. One of the investments they make is investing in their funeral plan, but that investment is also an investment in their family because that means their family doesn’t have all the hardship of what they need to do when that happens.

There’s an emotional investment and a financial investment that we help people. I was asked to move from a very stable operations role where I was running a bunch of markets. My home base was out of Salt Lake City and I moved to Dallas and take over a very large Dallas Metroplex and run a sales organization there. When I came in, the sales organization was doing good. It was one of our better sales organizations, but I had the challenge and the request to pivot that market from being a high discount, high price sensitive market to a high-value market where will we switch from being how do we be the lowest cost competitor to how do we have the most value in that?

For a salesperson to be able to go in and say, “I can give you 40% off if you buy it now,” but now going in and being able to say, “Our discounts are very minimal. We only do 5% or 10% off on a discount ratio, but here’s why. Here’s what that value is. It takes a salesperson a long time to make that shift. I went through that process to make that pivot in the market, but in order to do that, sales plummeted for about four months.

I went through four or five months where I went through a big downhill. The scrutiny was, “Bryan, we gave you this market that’s been doing phenomenal for years. The one thing we told you when we gave it to you is don’t screw it up.” Now, all of a sudden, the market’s not hitting the quotas, the numbers, and what it needed to be.

I said, “Trust me, we’ll get through it and we’ll be better on the other side.” The winning story is we were better on the other side, but by the time we got to the other side, the company said, “Bryan, I think we want to move you into another role,” which was a big pivot and hard piece for me because I was in the trenches making this real thing happen.

The hardest piece about it was the company when they came to me and said, “We’re not sure what that role is yet,” which kind of is a code to say, “We don’t have a job for you right now, but this job isn’t the one that we want you to do.” It was a big pivoting point for me to understand what I was going to do next. I’ve always had this cushion that I’ve been able to rely on and what I’m going to be able to do next.

I’ve always had that comfortability of what I was going to do and what ended up happening was all of a sudden, I was in a place where I wasn’t exactly sure where my career was going to go. It took a lot of deep reflection and the person who was making that decision said, “I’m just not sure this is the right role for you.” In hindsight, it was 2020. It was perfect for me and the market, but it was a devastating blow at that time.

It was a blow that said, “I don’t. Maybe this career isn’t what I thought it would be and maybe this industry isn’t what I thought it would be. You start to question everything and what you are going to do. I remember I got put on a couple of special assignments, which caused me to travel all across the country.

I was on the road six days a week for three months straight. I remember one time looking at the book that I was reading at the time and every ticket was a Delta ticket row five. It was the nature of habit. I pulled them all out and went through that process. The change point for me was when I called that leader in my organization and said, “I’m not mad at you. I’m not upset with you. It was a change for me that I wasn’t ready for, but I only have one question.” The one question is, whenever I’m in an opportunity in the future, how can I do things a little bit better, a little bit differently that would help me be more prepared for things in the future?

I’ll never forget. He said, “You did a great job, but you seem to procrastinate a little bit. It seems to take you too long to make decisions.” My perspective was I wasn’t taking a long time to make decisions, but I wasn’t communicating what I was doing in the decisions I was making. From afar, it looked like I wasn’t doing anything because nobody saw the different steps I was taking.,

From afar, it looked like we’ve given you a task to do this and it wasn’t done. When we met with you, “I would admit, it’s not done yet,” but all along the process, I never explained all the different things I had done to slowly to make my way towards that decision, which looked like for them that I was procrastinating or not getting things done.

I took that to heart and understood how that was. When I fast-forward a few years, there was an opportunity to move out of the field into the corporate office and take up a role that had a lot of impact and a lot of influence on all of our markets. I was driving one market. Now, I have had an opportunity to interview for a role with the same company that has impacted every market we serve.

During the interview process, I realized that the person who was interviewing me was about to retire. The person who was that leader before that said, “I don’t think you’re the right role for that,” was the incumbent to take the job, which meant I was going to be working for that person. However, I had taken to heart enough of what I did that that person rehired me or re-putted me in that position. He had enough strength in saying, “I put you back in that position.”

Now, we are side-by-side partners that go through thick and thin together with every little piece of it. However, if I had not humbled myself to understand what that change was going to be like, I wouldn’t be standing here now. I wouldn’t be in this industry. I would’ve let the negativity of the goal that I was trying to pursue and the change that happened in front of me that I wasn’t ready for, I would’ve let that overwhelm me as I tried to push it forward without slowing down. I would’ve crashed and burned. It was just a huge piece. It was a pivotal change in my life. It has pivotal changed my career both personally and professionally. That brought me forward to where I am.

 

If Bryan Bentley had not humbled himself to understand what that change would be like, he wouldn't be standing here today. Share on X

 

Bryan, I’m so grateful that you shared that story. I don’t know what else to say. I want to say more, but I’m grateful because I’m imagining how many people are reading this right this second that are going, “That’s not a two-cent piece of advice that I heard.” That’s super good. It’s such high-quality advice or wisdom that comes or is born out of pain. There is pain in what you just explained, and we have to feel a little bit of that, too.

When we choose that path, “Am I choosing a path to dig my heels in on something or am I choosing the path of humility to humble myself to ask questions like, ‘What am I missing here? What am I not seeing here?’” That person didn’t put you in a role to set you up for failure. In hindsight, you know that. That’s not what the person did, but the fact that you got put in that role but then weren’t, as you said, prepared and then asked that question for the future, how could I be better prepared? I think you’ve got a gem for yourself and now you just passed it on to all of us, which is that communication. This is going to lead into my next question more than into a statement of my own.

I see some things going on in the business world regarding the word communication. You said that part of what was missing there was that because your communication was lacking, people assessed you as procrastinating when that’s not actually what you were doing. In your world now, and in the place where you sit, what do you see in terms of this word communication among people? Do you have a sense of whether communication is lacking? I don’t mean specifically in your company, but even in other areas as well. What do you think about that?

I think there’s a ton of that in every realm of life. You see it out on social media. You see it in normal media. You see it within the business, but when you look within the business, I’ve always come up with a process in my leadership style. I have to give people directions on what to do, but when I give directions a little bit differently than some business leaders do, I always try to emphasize the why behind it.

It’s because I think if people can buy into the why behind it, then they’ll buy into what they’re doing, how it impacts, where it grows from, and how they can move that stuff forward. Where I see a lot of communication missing is where people say, “This is the direction we’re going,” and pull the line or push it forward, “This is what we’re doing.”

However, if you don’t take time to understand the why behind the communication process, part of it comes with relationships too. With the relationships that I have with my leaders, whom I have the ability to work with every day, both up and down in the food chain, those relationships, I can anticipate what the heartburn’s going to be for these decisions and what the win’s going to be.

Also, if you can anticipate what the heartburn’s going to be when you communicate, you can emphasize the bigger y pieces to make sure that the y overwhelms the heartburn because that’s where we win. I think we have a viewpoint where a lot of people only see one side of it. They see, “This is the side that I need to make sure I push.”

Whether it’s a corporation that says, the one side of it is we’re driving revenue, there’s a side to it that has the human impact and the process change impact. In our company SCI, we used to go by the slogan. It was SCI, and internally, we talked about it being a sudden change that was imminent. It wasn’t Service Corporation International. We used to joke that it was a sudden change imminent.

That’s hysterical. I don’t even know how many people right now are laughing at themselves that that’s what they should call their business.

That was the definition of our abbreviation. Change is going to happen to all of us. I think that’s where communication breaks down; people communicate either only the positive or not what the negative is going to be about it. Also, they only communicate what the result needs to be but they don’t take time to look at the positive or the negative with it so that you can anticipate how you’re going to have to navigate the waters in anything that you communicate.

 

I think there is an element of communication now that continues to be covert and that people are not getting the full story. There are also some leaders that manage in the way that parents did and do, I suppose. You knew what I was going to say. Why? It’s because I’m your boss. That’s why. Also, we know those things don’t work. They might work in the moment. It’s an expedient way to handle a situation but long-term, it devalues the relationship. It does not foster trust.

In fact, it creates a lack of mistrust. I like to say this to folks too in our company WorkWell. We often get embedded in organizations to talk about these things at a deep level and look at manifesting or creating change. Sometimes, we have to break down that communication to what’s underneath it. I’ll say to sometimes a leader. I say, “Did you share the story? Did you provide the backside?”

They say, “Do you know how many things I got to do in a day? Do you think I have time to create a story for everything I have to help people understand what they’re going to implement or whatever? I go, “If you do not provide a narrative, what happens is that, and this is the case in the universe, there are no vacuums. The vacuum is always filled by something. If you don’t create a narrative, then the narrative will be created somewhere in some other way by gossip, by people making up their own story about what this means, etc. You get a choice.

I think it stifles leadership growth too. I think that the big thing that people don’t realize is that if people can understand the why behind it and start to pull behind it, they start to understand all the philosophies behind that why. Your leaders can then start making decisions. The people that you entrust to manage your organization can start making decisions with the why in mind. It goes up and says, “Every time we’ve met with Adam, he’s talked about this is why we’re doing this. This is why we’re doing this. Now, when I make this decision down here that made a change as a leader, I’m not just taking direction. I’m making my own changes, but I’m backing it up with this why.”

However, when we don’t do that, we stifle growth within our organization. You either have turnover and people just leave because they don’t feel the value and trust. If you don’t have the turnover and people don’t just leave, then you end up being more of a heroic manager than you should be. Also, not being able to trust your people to make their own decisions. They don’t grow into taking more responsibility in your company. If they don’t grow, you don’t grow.

In our world, in our language, we’d say they don’t develop their resiliency. They don’t increase their resiliency. As you said, sudden change is imminent. It could be the title of The Book of Life and certainly, The Book of Life as we know it now. I have a couple of questions here before we wrap things up, Bryan. First of all, I want to know why you brought it up the way that leaders impact whether people stay. That’s usually the number one reason why somebody goes absolutely into another job is that their manager sucks. That’s top of the list and has been for a while.

How are the mental health and the well-being of the folks that you see at SCI? I’m asking you for an honest appraisal here because you know what your attrition looks like and if there is anything that you’ve learned about keeping people healthy and happy at your place. I know there are a lot of people leaders right now who would love to learn from you.

 

Culture And Communication

I would say the health of the organization is better than it’s ever been. I remember being in the organization in the early ’90s and we were the big bad wolf in the industry. We were the people that were going out and being aggressive and that aggressiveness that we had to buy and become bigger and to grow our business. That aggressiveness of how we grew our business and buying also became that aggressiveness and how we managed our people.

People didn’t adapt very well to it. We had unhappy people. We had turnover. I was speaking to a university the other day on this topic, and I said I truly believe it is that our associates that work together, the people, my teams, whether it’s the team that’s in the field or the team that’s here at the corporate office that I work with every day, we don’t call each other associates or colleagues. Typically, we’re like family. When I met you the first time in Nashville, we brought all these people together, but some of these people only see each other once or twice a year physically, face to face. Now, we’ve got this great video conference. We see them more often, but physically, face to face. When I see them, we hug each other.

That’s just the nature and what it is. I came from a conference in Vegas where I brought in a bunch of people and talked to them about the process, the Atomic Habits, and how the process is going to drive your success. That stacking habit is going to drive your results. I showed a period where results are on top and below the result is the process, but then I blew them away to say, “But below that process is culture.”

The culture will drive the process, but if you’ve got the wrong culture, it’ll also break down the process. I think the foundation is what culture we are bringing into the organization. Are we bringing in a culture of inclusivity? In this day and age, when I talk about inclusivity, people are like, “Are you going down this path?” Whether people call it woke or non-woke or anything.

When I met with my team, I said, “Let me tell you what inclusivity means to me.” What that means to me is that I’ve got 45 people on my team who were all in this meeting. I said, “All 45 people of you had different sets of parents, grew up in different houses, had different educations, or no educations, and had different works and managers. You all have different experiences in life, and the information you got from those experiences brought to this team will help it become better.

However, if some of you are just on the sidelines and not sharing those experiences or saying, “That makes me think of this or that doesn’t help me with this. If you’re holding back with some of that information, then I don’t have an inclusive team that’s pulling everything together and driving it forward.” My inclusivity is not about gender, race, or religion. It’s about every person on the team having the strength to help pull this thing forward.

It doesn’t matter if you’re the person who’s only in charge of making sure that the break room is taken care of, the coffee’s made, and the phones are answered because that person has just as much importance as the person who’s signing the payroll checks. It’s because that’s the culture you have to instill and I think that culture drives organizations to be better. I’m happy and proud to say that I’ve not seen a culture better than what we have right now.

That’s beautiful to hear, and the growth of the company is still engaged in. I can tell that you’re a lifelong learner. I want to get a sense of where you feel like you’re on your own growth edge at this point. It’s because 30 years into an industry or into anything, you put 30 years of focus into something, you’re going to be good at it. You don’t have to say that. I know that and every other thing that you’ve said, I can feel the confidence that’s not cocky. It’s a confidence born out of all those experiences. Where are you still on your growth edge do you see?

I’ve got something on my wall that says, “Adapt and thrive or fall behind,” and that’s what it’s about. It is adapting, thriving, or falling behind. As an organization and as a world, we’re changing all the time. I don’t see myself in a place where I’m comfortable writing for this role. I see myself in a place where it wouldn’t be hard for somebody to come up behind me with less than 30 years of experience and blow right past me because they’ve got new ideas and a new process.

 

Adapt and thrive or fall behind. Share on X

 

That’s the negative thing about doing something for the last 30 years. I’ve done something the same way for the last 30 years, and there are different ways to do it. That’s why I talk about inclusivity. There are other ideas and ways to do things that I haven’t even thought of because I’ve only looked at it from this one lens. The edge that I tip on right now is what’s next? What are the things that I haven’t learned?

I put myself through a mini MBA course at the university here. They said, “Bryan, what track do you want to do this on?” I said, “I want to do it in finance.” I’m not a finance guy. My leadership says, “Why do you want to do this?” I said, “Because when the CEO talks and we have those conversations, I want to be right in line and lockstep with how that CEO works. I want to think about that process and what they do.”

Those are things that there’s always growth opportunity in that. Technology’s gone crazy. The funeral business 5 or 7 years ago was 100% paper. We wrote everything on paper. Over the last seven years, we’ve evolved completely to be electronic. Had we not done that in COVID, we would’ve been in bad shape because you couldn’t sit face to face with somebody and engage in that paper conversation. It was a virtual conversation like this that we had to do.

That world of whether it’s AI, whether it’s the social world, whether it’s the new finance world, those worlds always bleed into every organization. There’s no organization that’s going to stay the exact same way and that’s why you have to always adapt. I can’t be stagnant in my thought process. I can’t be stagnant even how I coach my people.

This book that I was telling you about, Atomic Habits, this is the first time I’ve pulled my whole team together. It doesn’t matter what level you are on my team. Every single level on my team, we’re reading the same book. We’re going through it together, and we’re all building this culture together because everybody’s got to pull the same way. My edge is always there.

It’s funny because in our work, we hear from organizations that it was their strong culture that got them through COVID and that’s what got them through what was sudden change, but now we’re also hearing that what’s emerged post-COVID has been something different. It means that the culture that came out of COVID is not the same for some of the organizations they went into it with.

I’m just curious, have you noticed any shift? It’s because I think a lot of companies, and I don’t think this is necessarily the case with SCI, but maybe it is, too, that they’re reinventing their culture. They’re recreating their culture post-pandemic and maybe that’s even what you’re suggesting or saying that’s going on by you.

 

Personal Journey

I think you have to completely adapt. Even the culture of, “You’re not working unless you’re in the office.” That’s the culture that everybody had pre-pandemic and then we forced everybody to be home for two years. There are people in the organization who said, “We got to bring everybody back 100% because they’re not working at home.” I’m like, “The last few years, the company has run and we’ve gone well and nobody came in the office.”

However, adapting to how that works and how you engage with people differently, how you manage somebody who lives 1,000 miles away, when you used to manage somebody whose office was right next door. That’s a different process. That 8:00 to 5:00 job, I tell people this all the time, the days that I worked at home when our office was shut down. Now, granted, our office never fully shut down and I was at the office most every day through COVID, except for when my wife said, “I need you to work from home a few days to help teach these kids elementary school in between.”

However, I learned that on the days that I worked at home, I worked just as much, if not more, but my schedule was very different. I would get up and maybe get on my computer and work from 6:00 to 7:30, and then I would shut it off. I would get the kids up, get the kids breakfast, get them going, and get them either off to school or onto their schedule and then I’d jump right back into it.

I would maybe work from nine to noon, and then I might have to walk the dog or run to the grocery store. I might have to do this. I had iterative sprints basically throughout my day versus that marathon of 8:00 to 5:00. That’s hard for some people to do when your schedule is, “I have to buckle down 8:00 to 5:00, but somebody you’re partnered with to do something with was going to be on at 2-hour or 3-hour chunks of their time, you may have to wait longer to get things done.

You talk about that and change proof is you’ve got to be able to recover. You’ve got to be able to hit in that recovery and I learned during COVID that those two-hour blips when I worked for two hours and then I’d have to take an hour to get the kids ready, that was me stopping working but I was recovering from that process before. I came back just as strong, if not stronger. Doing iterative sprints, I think, is a better way. A lot of us learn that there’s a better way to do it and unfortunately, there are a lot of companies maybe who don’t have the luxury to do that, but they haven’t adapted to that because it’s not what they know.

It sounds like your return to the office, and your RTO process has been pretty smooth, it seems like.

I think my team, more especially, and I’ll tell you why my team said it was more than enough, is because of communication because all the way through, I said, “Here’s what we’re planning. Here’s what we’re doing.” There were other teams within our organization that when the rule was made, you’re coming back to work three days a week. They heard about it right before that rule was made and said, “In two weeks, you got to change and pivot.” When the team knew about this, they knew what their 2-day and 3-day a week in the office schedule was going to be six months before we even instituted the plan. Communication was key to getting through all that.

We’re going to call it here. I could just tell we can keep going and going, and I’m certain people are going, “No. Keep talking.” I think it’s a good place to land the plane. You can’t say enough. Culture is one of those almost ineffable things. It’s hard to define it. You just know it when you feel it. You know the culture of an organization is by its feel. If it feels like, “You got to watch your back,” this is how we frame it. That’s a very different kind of culture than one in which people know you’ve got their back.

A got-your-back culture versus a watch-your-back culture is something that we often think about. That’s what we want to assess and nobody wants to think that that’s their organization, but we know that when there’s fear, when there’s a not knowing, not communicating silos of information and lack of transparency and, and all that kind of thing, that’s what defines the culture because it’s how people feel in their work.

I’m so happy to hear that SCI is doing it the way they’re doing it. The point here is that sometimes you don’t do it well, and you learn from that. You learn what does work by first knowing what doesn’t work. There are a lot of great companies. I mentioned that book about Nike and Phil Knight and whatnot. They have a very unique culture or it’s the way Nike was always framed as having this unique culture, etc., but that culture went through a period where they didn’t do it right and they made a lot of mistakes.

 

In his book, he admits and regrets frankly a lot of the mistakes they made along the way, including having to do a lot of layoffs when they weren’t doing well. When he said he wasn’t a good enough manager himself, the end result of that was that people lost their jobs. To this day, if you believe him, and I do. I believe he was sincere when he wrote this. He still feels regret about that because you know it.

When you can learn from people like you, Bryan, when you can learn from seasoned business folks. When you’re willing to be open to learning and humble enough to bring in organizations like ours or other organizations that come in, we’ll give you, not the emperor’s new closed bit, but we’ll tell you what they think. If you can hear it, it’s hard to hear sometimes, but if you can hear it, you can stand it. You can then learn a little easier or faster what works without having to go through that pain of first seeing people unhappy or unhealthy, etc.

SCI has come a long way. I feel grateful for all your success because, as I said to you when we were together in Nashville and when I got to speak to your group, the ripple effect of your work in the world is profound. There’s nothing that anybody and we all share this. This is a shared experience here. Nobody wants to deal with anything less than their own death or the death of their loved ones.

Every day, that’s going to be the last thing on the list of things that anybody wants to think about or deal with. For you all, to be there in a compassionate and empathetic way to provide them with solutions, to make plans ahead of time, and to be prepared so people don’t get caught completely unawares and unprepared. I think that’s such valuable work, my friend and I thank you for it.

I’ve often said it’s a calling, not a job. I appreciate the comments. There’s nothing more rewarding to me than the emotional paycheck that I get each and every day. Whether it’s from a colleague like you, whether it’s from one of my employee colleagues, or whether it’s that family that I helped plan in advance 15, 20 years ago that says, “We couldn’t have been here and this wouldn’t have gone as smooth without what we did now.” It truly is a calling on my heart that I’m here to take care of people and help people in all different aspects.

 

There's nothing more rewarding than the emotional paycheck. Share on X

 

Bryan, thank you so much for the conversation. I know it was super valuable for me. I know it was valuable for everybody else that’s reading. Thank you again, Sir.

You’re very welcome. Have a great time. Thanks.

I hope you felt the same way as I did about that discussion. Bryan is a heck of a guy. He’s humble for somebody who has achieved as much as he has had as many experiences and has been in so many leadership roles. The common denominator is that in every instance where he was asked to take on something new, even without the experience to give him confidence that he could succeed, he nonetheless moved forward and said yes to those opportunities.

We’ve heard this with other of the leaders that we’ve had on the show. I’m thinking of Andy Clement in particular, with three decades with another major Fortune 50 company. This is a theme that we are seeing again and again in leadership roles: people who are willing to go into that unknown space of uncertainty. Whereas other people sometimes crave certainty. They crave clarity, and they crave the known versus the unknown because, as we would imagine, it provides a level of security and confidence.

Yet so often it is the case that people who are succeeding in growing their careers are elevating themselves within organizations as well as in other areas, entrepreneurial areas, and pretty much almost any area, I think, in life. Our growth is often just outside of our comfort zone and our growth is often in the unknown and the space of what is uncertain. The goal here in our work, in the resilience space, working with leaders, coaching senior-level leaders, and working inside organizations, is to help people leverage the power of uncertainty. The kind of uncertainty that leads to this opportunity for growth.

This doesn’t always translate into that. There’s no guarantee. If there was a guarantee, it wouldn’t be uncertain. That’s the riddle of it, and yet, looking backwards and being able to reverse engineer the process are some of the common threads. That’s why in the book Change Proof, the subtitle is Leveraging the Power of Uncertainty as a Catalyst for Long-Term Resilience. You might say long-term growth as well.

Bryan is just another one of those examples. I love the conversation. I want to invite you as well to let us know what you thought of the conversation. You can leave a comment or even a question for Bryan or myself. We would love it if you would share this show with friends or colleagues, people that you think would benefit from reading it.

Also, if you take a few seconds, I know it doesn’t take very long, but it is a commitment to provide a rating, provide your thoughts directly to the platform where you’ve consumed this show, whether it’s Apple or wherever it might be. It can be Stitcher or Spotify. You could give us a five-star rating, and that would only help us. I so appreciate it. I don’t want to make any assumptions there about your time or about what else you have committed to. I don’t want to create any overwhelm for you. But thank you in advance if you choose to do that. We so appreciate it.

We’d also love for you to take three minutes, and I do mean just three minutes out of your day to take care of yourself by finding out how resilient you are in this moment. You can do that simply by going to RankMyResilience.com. In three minutes and sixteen questions later, you’ll get a great snapshot of your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resiliency and health, well-being, etc. For now, I want to thank you for being a part of our community. Thank you for reading. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, as well as the wonderful compliments that we get. I don’t know what else to say except Ciao for now. Thank you so much again.

 

 Important Links:

• Bryan Bentley
• Atomic Habits
• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and The Business of Life
• Change Proof
• Pivot
• Shoe Dog
• Service Corporation International
• Andy Clement – Past Episode
• Apple – Change Proof Podcast
• Spotify – Change Proof Podcast
• RankMyResilience.com

 

 About Bryan Bentley

I am a self made executive who started in a industry at 17 years of age on my own and accepted every opportunity that was laid in front of me. Now have the honor of being a position where my creative talents and years of experience has helped change an industry.