The podcast Guiding Growth: Conversations with Community Leaders from the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce, event and meeting venue Modern Moments and the Gilbert Independent/yourvalley.net explores the human journey of leaders. There are stories of humility, triumph, roadblocks, and lessons learned. This partial transcript of the most recent podcast with David Scott has been edited for brevity and clarity.      

David Scott is the Arizona Regional President for Meadows Bank, a community bank specializing in financial services for businesses and real estate. He was born and raised in Louisiana and moved to Arizona in 2004. David previously served as a director in Bank of the West/BNP Paribas’ commercial banking office in Phoenix. Prior to that, he was a vice president at JPMorgan Chase Bank’s Middle Market Banking Group for 12 years. Scott has worked as a commercial banker covering markets in Southern California, Arizona, and the southeast US. 

Scott serves on the Central Arizona Board of Directors of Junior Achievement of Arizona and is the chair of the committee responsible for JA's annual Stock Market Challenge event. He also serves on a task force through Valley Leadership that is focused on early childhood literacy. Scott leads a Men's ministry through his church and is a supporter of many local charitable organizations, both personally and professionally. Scott has been married to his wife Jessica for 13 years and is the proud father of Isla and Euan. He enjoys playing guitar, weightlifting and cooking, and is an avid reader of history, theology and psychology. 

Your childhood (in Louisiana) sounds idyllic. Take us back there and share with us what childhood looked like for you. I had a very close group of friends, very small school, very tiny little community that I grew up in, which was coincidentally Gilbert, Louisiana. It was a town of about 500 people, much smaller than this one. 

It was safe and quiet, and people were very friendly. and everybody knew each other and looked after each other. Still to this day, I don't think that my parents consistently lock their cars or doors or anything like that. They really just never felt like they had to.  

So you're growing up in this community, tight knit, very active and then you decide after you graduate college to take a leap in and move out of state. What's the motivation to move out of state and not go back home? There weren't really any jobs in the finance industry in North Louisiana. I went to Louisiana Tech University, which was in what I considered to be a big town. But Ruston, Louisiana, I don't think anybody really has heard of, but to me that felt like a big town. I was nervous to drive there. I was accepted into LSU, but I thought that Baton Rouge was too big of a city. I graduated high school and, um, went to college when I had just turned 17. So the world was very intimidating to me then. … And I got hired at a bank in downtown Dallas.  

So you're not in Dallas for long and you make a move to Phoenix, also job related. So once you're in Phoenix, what does that look like for you? Totally new world. I had never been here before. I fell in love with it. I did. I flew from Dallas to Phoenix, and I still remember it was on Mardi Gras. That was the date that I flew out here. So it was a beautiful spring day, and I had never seen anything like this place and instantly was just mesmerized by it. Still to this day, I'll walk out my front door and see the surroundings that I'm blessed to live in now and just been blown away. 

I took a cab from the airport to the offices there in downtown Phoenix and got off the elevator, and there was this hot chick at the front desk there, and probably if she wasn't paid to acknowledge me, she probably wouldn't have. I'm referring to somebody who I later married. 

But, yeah, at the time we worked together, and she was the first person that I saw when I stepped off of the elevator that day, and she told me where to go. She's told me where to go a few times over the years. But that was a huge day in my life, ultimately because I met a lot of people that still to this day I'm very close to and had major impacts on my life and my career. I got a family out of the whole deal. 

Even now with where I'm at in my career, I'm still in contact with those same people. They're retired, but they still are a huge part of my life and my career. And it's been amazing to just go through that with them and have them be a part of that at every stage along the way.  

So you're here, you get this established. What happens now? Where's this career taking you? Before my wife, Jessica, and I got together, I just immersed myself in work and took that time where I had the ability to do that to just be all in on that. Over the years there's competing priorities that arise, and I think when you're younger, you really need to deal with the fact that you got a lot of time on your hands and be productive about it. I wish I would have done more work with my physical health back in those days. But aside from that, really on the work side, I have no regrets. The relationships that I made along the way are just so incredibly valuable to me and the experiences that I had. 

It was because of that, I try to be reflective in terms of how am I giving back to the next generation that needs me to share those things and the experience that I have. It's a big thing in my mind when it comes to leadership because we're sort of transitioning between one generation to the next. And here I am a Gen Xer caught in between two different mindsets, two different philosophies about work. And I'm intent on figuring that out in coming up with strategies for engaging this next generation.  

I don't think it necessarily has to be um all that complicated. I would just approach it the same way that, that I experienced it as a young person in the industry where, where people were actively giving back their time and their experience to me to make me better. And I was pretty rough around the edges. You could say I was probably pretty arrogant and thought I knew more things than I did. But people were very patient with me, and I think we've lost a lot of patience over the years in society. We've got to get that back and we've got to be more generous when it comes to the time, the knowledge, the authority being able to pass that authority on to other people and trust them, let them make mistakes and be there to counsel and coach them through it. I think that's very important.  

We want everyone to have grace for us, but we forget that we need to have grace for others as well. And I think allowing that vulnerability in a team allows them to see that we're all souls on a human journey. So, yes, Grace is a very good word, and it's something that when you give it away, it multiplies. And if you continuously engage in this free giving of grace, generously watch it grow and get bigger and bigger and bigger. It's an amazing substance or concept, really. It's the only thing that you can freely give away and always get more back.  

We're going to look to the future now. What do you see coming around the horizon for you? Well, I'm, I'm fascinated by the concept of leadership and the distinction between that and management. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how the process by which leaders develop trust with all of the stakeholders that depend on them. 

And I've come to think of leadership as is like the heart of an organization — not the brains but the heart, something that shows people what the vision of an organization can be. I spend a lot of time thinking about it and talking about it and getting other perspectives on it, too, because I think the future for me involves a lot of applying those types of things, different organizations and things that I'm involved with, not just work things but all the different ways in which I'm involved in the community. 

I think the better that we are at leadership, the more that our community is going to benefit from that. So everything that I do now at this point in my life has a lot of focus on how does this make my community better? The place where my kids are growing up place, where I live. I choose the things that I'm involved with, with that in mind. Uh And I don't know specifically where it might lead me, but I know that it's, it's always going be bending toward a positive place for the people that I care about and the people that depend on me.