Conscious Leadership in Action “Human social organizations are created and guided by leaders— people who see a path and inspire others to travel along the path. Conscious Leaders focus on creating value for and harmonizing the interests of the business stakeholders. They recognize the integral role of culture and purposefully cultivate Conscious Culture.” That’s conscious leadership as defined by Conscious Capitalism. Here are examples of how it’s lived out at IGS Energy: Practicing authenticity We don’t do corporate jargon. We keep information transparent—we share financial performance on a quarterly basis with employees. Employee happiness Employee engagement, investing in our employees’ health and wellbeing, and DEBI (diversity, equity, belonging and inclusion) are at the top of our strategic focus. We set aside time to invest in helping our employees build their emotional intelligence. Building a learning organization Leaders within the organization can access tools like StrengthsFinder, DISC personality and other work style assessments. We encourage personal development and demonstrate it from the top through our deep involvement with the Stagen Institute, in which all Executives and VPs are sent through an intensive, one-year program. Regular revitalization We believe in work-life balance, and our leaders take PTO and encourage their teams to take PTO. We talk about “recalibrating”— taking a minute to catch a breath, reset, practice mindfulness. The company provides the Headspace meditation app to all employees.
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That’s why we will never go public or take outside money: We don’t want to be influenced by a shareholder mentality that is in conflict with our vision and how we want to run the business.” You’re also really amped about working with dairy farmers on a project that is breaking ground soon. We are going to be using manure from cows, which there’s a lot of, and that’s a problem because it creates methane (the second-largest source of greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide). So we’re taking the manure and processing it to make a usable form of natural gas that we can put into the pipeline and transport to our CNG fueling stations, where trucks are using it. You’re going from using diesel to using renewable natural gas from dairy cow manure, and that process is said to carry a net-negative carbon footprint. These projects are worth pursuing, even though they can carry risk. And it’s possible not all of them are going to work. But I think that’s the beauty of entrepreneurialism—the opportunity to take these risks and the excitement of wow, what if we could make that work?