Anni Townend in Conversation with Scott Sherwood, Vice President of Engineering

Leaders in Conversation with Anni Townend

In this first episode in the second series of Leaders In Conversation, we are delighted to welcome back Scott Sherwood.

Back in 2021, Anni had the pleasure of being in conversation with Scott and his then 7-year-old daughter Sophie Harvey Sherwood who shared her experience running to celebrate inspirational women.

Scott participated in the Just Running It challenge, a 365 mega challenge in which he aimed to run 10km every single day for a year in aid of Glasgow Children’s Hospital Charity and was joined by Sophie too.

The parallels between running and leadership

He talks with Anni about his inspirational experience with the Just Running It challenge, not only completing the challenge but running nearly 4200 kilometers and continuing to maintain running daily into 2022.

Throughout his career in software engineering, Scott has found many parallels between running and leadership.

Scott discusses how 'personal bests' in running are a great analogy for agile software development. Running is the ultimate agile approach to a problem where some days you get personal bests and other days take much longer.

Some weeks in projects can be amazing and moving forward and other weeks things will struggle. Scott suggests that we must accept the ‘ups and downs’ as innovation is much more uncertain.

Dreaming Big

Scott shares his motto that “Great leaders are not born or made they are chosen by the people they inspire”.

He shares with Anni that his motto inspires everything he does in life even if its to encourage even one person to believe they can be more than what they thought. Whether that is the confidence to get running or as his role as a software engineering leader.

He believes that many in the workplace constrain themselves by not dreaming big enough. His experience with the running challenge has shown others that you can achieve anything with sustained effort, self-belief and the support of others.

Creating a resilient workplace culture

They discuss the importance of staying healthy, in order to run but also stay healthy in order to lead and create a healthy workplace culture in which people can be their best even though they may have days, bad days and good days.

He said that “The thing that really appeals to me about running, particularly Ultra running is the way athletes talk about it. They very rarely see that as a physical challenge it is all a mental challenge. And I think in the corporate world, the vast majority of help navigating and leading is really mental strength and finding you have been resilient both for yourself and for your people”

Think bigger than you ever thought possible

Scott is passionate that we should all dream bigger and ‘higher than we ever thought possible’ and that even if we don’t get there to not beat ourselves up- just work hard and be consistent- whether it’s a running challenge or a workplace one.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:

• Scott shares his personal leadership story and participation in the Just Running it challenge
• The parallels between running and leadership
• Importance of a healthy culture and encouraging others
• Leading through ups and downs
• Dreaming big to achieve your goals

Discover more, donate and connect with Scott

You can follow their progress and discover more on justrunningit.com which has links to the pair’s YouTube channel and their fundraising page.

You can also follow Scott on Instagram and Twitter @scottcsherwood