Most leaders think about legacy in decades. Scott Willingham thinks in wakes. The image comes from Henry Cloud’s Integrity: watching boats move through a bay and noticing that every vessel leaves a trail behind it. That trail tells you everything about how the boat was operated. Scott took that idea and built a company around it. Wake Effect, his Las Cruces-based consulting firm, exists to help leaders and salespeople think carefully about what they are leaving in their wake with every person they encounter.

That framing sounds simple. The work behind it is not. Scott has spent more than 20 years in organizational leadership, sales training, and behavioral science, and what he has found is that the quality of leadership shows up first in the people around the leader, long before it shows up in any metric on a dashboard.

What the Numbers Actually Say About Your People

According to the most recent Gallup State of the American Workforce report, employee engagement is at an all-time low of 20 percent. That is the share of American workers who are genuinely engaged, who look forward to their work, who feel connected to their organization and its mission. Just over half are disengaged, meaning the job is a paycheck and nothing more. The remaining 18 to 20 percent are actively disengaged, meaning they are not just checked out; they hate their job, their boss, the company, the mission, or all of the above.

Those numbers carry a cost that goes beyond morale. Disengaged employees slow decision-making, drain team culture, and exit when better options appear, taking institutional knowledge and client relationships with them. Leaders who treat engagement as a soft metric tend to discover that it is also a financial one.

The framework Scott uses to address this comes from two tools he pairs together: Predictive Index, a six-and-a-half-minute behavioral assessment that produces surprisingly precise profiles of how people think, communicate, and approach their work, and ASLAN, a sales training methodology built over 30 years by a company whose founder leads with faith as a core business principle. Together they give Scott what he calls a decoder ring for people, a way to understand not just what someone does but why they do it and what environment will bring out their best.

The application is direct. A senior leader who understands the behavioral profiles of direct reports can communicate more clearly, assign more strategically, and reduce the kind of friction that comes from mismatched expectations. The same tool applied in hiring can help a leader know from day one whether a candidate is wired for the role, which is both a business decision and an act of kindness toward the people being hired into positions where they may never thrive.

Faith-Driven Leadership Development in Las Cruces and Beyond

Scott works across a wide range of organizations, most of them secular, and has thought carefully about what it means to integrate faith into consulting work without making it a liability or a performance. His answer is consistent: serve first.

“Jesus said I came to serve, not to be served,” Scott has said. “That’s where I try to lead my organizations, so they know I try to make them first.” For Scott, that shows up practically: being responsive when clients reach out, meeting people where they are, and occasionally offering to pray for someone who is walking through something hard. He does not wait for an opening. He creates one through the quality of his presence and then stays attentive to what people actually need.

Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team argues that vulnerability-based trust is the foundation of every high-performing team, and that most leaders skip it because it requires them to go first. Faith integration in secular spaces works the same way. You go first, not by leading with theology, but by leading with genuine care. That is what makes the rest of the conversation possible.

The Discipline of Starting from Zero

There is a specific kind of faith that only activates when there is nothing to fall back on. Michael Gerber describes the entrepreneurial launch moment in The E-Myth Revisited as a seizure, the impulse to bet on yourself when the rational case for doing so is thin. What Gerber does not address is what happens when that impulse is not just ambition but obedience. That is a different kind of pressure entirely.

Scott has done this twice. The first time, he left a vice president role at a publicly traded company after 12 years to co-found a human capital firm with a group of former colleagues. No name, no office, no clients, no income. He described it as the hardest year of his marriage. The second time, founding Wake Effect after a company acquisition, he and his wife Stephanie had the advantage of a prior reference point: they had watched God provide in specific, tangible ways through that first stretch. The memory did not eliminate the risk. It changed how they held it.

This is not a prosperity framework. Provision did not mean the path was smooth or the timeline was short. It meant that when they looked back, there were moments they could name. That testimony became the foundation for the next leap. The discipline was not merely trusting God; it was remembering, accurately and specifically, the times that trust had already been vindicated.

That kind of faith-informed confidence is available to any business owner who has been paying attention. The question is whether you have been keeping track.

What Organizations Get Wrong About People Fit

Most hiring decisions are made on incomplete information. A candidate performs well in an interview, presents the right credentials, and gets an offer. Three months later, the manager is frustrated with behaviors that were always there, just invisible to the process that evaluated the candidate.

Jim Collins identified this as one of the core disciplines in Good to Great: getting the right people on the bus before you decide where to drive it. The problem is that most organizations do not have a reliable way to evaluate “right.” They rely on gut read, referrals, and resume pattern-matching, all of which are better than nothing and worse than they feel.

Behavioral assessment does not eliminate judgment from hiring. It gives judgment better material to work with. When a leader knows before the offer letter that a candidate scores high on autonomy and low on rule-following, that is not disqualifying information for every role, but it is critical information for a heavily process-driven environment. Knowing it early means the conversation can happen. Not knowing it means you discover it during a performance review that is already late.

The same principle applies to existing teams. A leader who understands that a key employee needs variety and resists close supervision will stop managing that person the way they manage everyone else. That adjustment is cheap when it is made voluntarily. It becomes expensive when it is made in response to a resignation.

The Wake Is Always There

Every leader leaves a wake. The only variable is whether they are paying attention to it. Scott’s consulting work is built on the premise that leaders who think about their wake, who take seriously the trail they leave in the lives of the people around them, lead differently than those who do not.

That is not a soft idea. It has structural implications for how you hire, how you develop people, and how you build the kind of culture that retains the employees worth keeping. Gallup’s numbers suggest that most organizations are not doing this well. The gap between 20 percent engaged and where a healthy organization should be is not primarily a strategy problem. It is a people-leadership problem, and it is addressable.

The place to start is the same place Scott starts with every client: understand how your people are actually wired. Not how they present, not what they say in performance reviews, but how they are built. From there, almost everything else gets easier.

Additional Resources

Integrity by Dr. Henry Cloud. The book that gave Wake Effect its name and its framework. Cloud’s chapter on the wake a leader leaves is one of the most transferable leadership metaphors in business literature.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. The foundational resource on what breaks team performance and how leaders can rebuild the trust that makes collaboration possible.

Good to Great by Jim Collins. The research behind why disciplined people decisions, not strategy or technology, are the distinguishing factor in companies that sustain excellence.

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber. A clear-eyed look at the gap between working in a business and working on it, and why most small business owners never cross it.

Learn More About Scott Willingham

Scott Willingham is the founder and CEO of Wake Effect, a Las Cruces-based consulting firm specializing in leadership development, sales training, and behavioral assessment. He is one of a handful of ASLAN certified partners in the country and the only one who also holds a Predictive Index partnership. Connect with Scott at wakeeffect.co or on LinkedIn.

The leaders who get the most out of their people are not the ones with the highest standards or the most charisma. They are the ones who actually know their people and have built the kind of culture where honest conversation is possible. Hear more from Scott at 323podcast.com.