Building A Strong And Thriving Work Culture With Leading Lotus Founder Umadevi Gopaldass

The lotus is a flower that not only survives but thrives and prospers in muddy, murky, unclear water. Companies are like that, they need to strive and adapt to hard times. You need to build the right culture so that your company can go through those times. This is exactly what the founder of Leading Lotus, Umadevi Gopaldass does for her clients. She helps them build a strong ecosystem or work culture so that they can achieve success. Join your host, Stephen Jaye as he talks to Umadevi Gopaldass about her many work experiences with different cultures. Learn how to emerge from this muddy, murky place and thrive. --- Listen to the podcast here Building A Strong And Thriving Work Culture With Leading Lotus Founder Umadevi Gopaldass For the vast majority of people, work is a major part of our lives. One key aspect that impacts our work experience is the culture of the organization that we work for. Work culture is one area where I believe that we’re in serious need of making work, work better for more people. With that being said, I want to bring up my guest, Umadevi Gopaldass, who started her own business called Leading Lotus. That is leading the charge in bringing us a better, more useful work culture. Thank you for joining us, Uma. Hi, Stephen. Thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure. Tell me a little bit about Leading Lotus and what your goal is for our work culture. I started Leading Lotus a few years ago. I incorporated on February 14th on Valentine’s Day. I had nothing else to do that day, so I was a rebel. I had quit the corporate world. I had 26 years of working and living all over the world. I was in oil and gas, working offshore on oil rigs, platforms, and remote towns. I was with Accenture Management Consulting for several years and then had high-powered jobs and careers, followed by the gold mining industry. Part of it was, I was struggling to find a purpose for my own life, which was pulling at me. Even though I had great careers, the remuneration was great. Work-life balance was an issue, but then financial stability was not an issue. That was the struggle. I didn’t have to change anything except I had to. It was like a conundrum. It wasn’t like just yesterday. I woke up and decided, “I want to do this.” It was starting to happen six years before I even quit my last high flying job. When it was time to let go of a paid job, the decision was very natural. I quit end of 2016 after finishing all my projects. I didn’t leave. I had a three-year project that I completed and I left. I disengaged from everything for three months and founded Leading Lotus. The company had an underlying theory that we all need to come out of the book, the muddy, murky consciousness of mess that we go through every day in our minds, where a lotus grows. Lotus is actually like a weed. It only grows in muddy, murky, unclear waters. It always comes out of the water pristine because it’s got a self-cleaning technology built into it. We call it the Lotus effect. It’s a scientifically proven design that’s used in control towers. Not many people know the biology of a Lotus. It’s a revered plant and had been around for 150 million years. I said every day we do need to come out of that muddy, murky messiness. We need to think clearly, see the light, and make the right decisions. That’s a tough call, every day, day in and day out. I designed my company based on that. The tagline was, “Decide with clarity.” It’s supposed to help people, individuals, professionals, businesses, corporations, and nonprofits get out of the struggling mode and get into the striving mode, and then end up in the thriving mode. Because if you look at the Lotus, they thrive in a murky environment, but it’s an ecosystem where it’s always going to shine bright when the sunlight’s out. That was the premise of Leading Lotus. "I hire people telling them that they can only work for me or in this role for two years. I need to see them progress. I like people who literally get bored of their role very quickly." What is this muddy, murky place? Can you describe what does it feel, look, and sound like? In the worst situation, it feels like you’re drowning for an individual. Your lungs, stress levels, hormones, brains, veins, everything is like a ticking bomb. That’s called the burnout stage. You can’t think clearly anymore because you’re overworked. Your company or your work is compromised. You don’t have security and stability. That darkness, for an individual, is almost like a constant panic state, where you’re short and angry with people easily with your kids, wife, spouses, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, and parents. You always don’t have enough time. Time is a very elusive concept. There’s not even enough time to think about why you don’t have enough time. That’s how I would characterize it. For a business, it’s the trajectory that is going downhill and you do not know how to pull it up, where graphs showing your growth rate going up and suddenly flipping and falling. There’s no amount of work that you can do to try and pull it up. The startups like Uber, Lyft, all have gone through that. They’ve enjoyed huge period of growth, then suddenly it’s like, “What do we do now?” No one is immune to that. Businesses and organizations themselves have a very different way to operate these days, which is a lot larger and deeper in the breadth of scope and the ability to influence societies a lot deeper. That’s where the problem lies, making the right decisions. What typically gets people into this murky, muddy place? Is it mostly overwork? Is it insecurity? Is it a combination of a lot of things? If you’re talking about individuals, it’s very personal to them. In a broad aspect, people are not thinking long-term enough. Coming from Asia, I’m from Singapore, where it’s always about the 50- to 100-year vision because it’s a tiny island, so we cannot afford to think about tomorrow or the next day. We have to think about our population in 100 years. This island is sinking. How else can we reclaim the land from the ocean? Let’s quickly dredge more sea kind of stuff. That society has built me up for a long-term, larger vision to have in life and businesses. I never went after the short-term remuneration, piece, or the payback. It’s a tough position to be in when you are not looking for short-term gains in the hope that the long-term will pay off. The key problem for individuals will be like, for example, “Now I have a job. I’m doing great,” and then you’re tugging along. In 3 to 6 months, you’re starting to get disillusioned. You hit the one year and you’re like, “I need to find a different job.” Instead of doing that, what someone needs to do is look into themselves and see, where do I want to be in five years? For me, several years ago, I decided I need to be in a boardroom to be a board of directors, but I knew I wasn’t ready. That was where I aim to go. Everything I did between then was to strategize to want that avenue because I need to get educated, build my career path that way, get more experience in the governance and sustainability portion, the fiduciary roles and stuff like that. You need to design your life in how you see yourself in the future. I didn’t use to live like that. In my teens and my twenties, I was more destructive with my life. I could have been a multimillionaire now, but I threw money away and didn’t believe in money. I’ll be dead tomorrow, let’s party. I was getting paid a lot, too. I was working offshore on oil rigs and I was working for a very big oil and gas company, Schlumberger, and it was paying me a lot. I was also living in remote towns, earning the hardship allowances, yet I came back home with $15,000 debt, even though I got paid more than that a month. Decide with clarity. That sounds like rapper stuff right there. That was. I was disillusioned and like, “Life sucks. Everything sucks. Let’s throw money at everything and give money away to people.” I was philanthropic as well. I saw too much poverty and destruction, and at a young age, you can’t manage that when you see too much bad stuff happening. I would say that, first of all, I regret what I did when I was in my twenties. I could have been a millionaire. If I had saved everything up, bought three properties, I could have just retired. Learning that lesson has, in my thirties, set me up for success. I had to learn that in my twenties. In my 30s, I started getting serious about investing in good insurances, endowments, stock market, real estate, and stuff like that. In my 40s, I went into real estate. Especially for women, because as an Asian girl when I was young, we were not taught about the financial aspect of growing money. Being Asian, we were taught about saving money, so that was the saving grace for my family. They would never say, “You’re going to be a rich girl. You’re just going to be married off. Don’t worry about it.” That didn’t happen. I broke that mold, too. I had a very keen sense of understanding that as an individual, regardless of your background, race, and gender, you have to be self-sufficient and be able to project that for the long term to succeed. You need to think long-term vision. What feels to me and you would know this better than I would, having lived in many different places, it seems to me like American culture is notoriously short-term in its thinking. What do we need to do to reorient ourselves to more long-term visions? I’ve done a couple of goal settings for Millennials and Zillennials. It’s not a matter of not wanting to think long-term. It’s not having grown up that way. When you go to school, it’s like, “You got to pass this test, you got to go to this, you go to that, and you got to score so much for these sports and those sports.” It’s a very busy life. The hard questions you don’t ask quickly or at a very young age. That’s also a generational difference, too....