141: Solving Messy Leadership Problems | Dr Katie Best

Nuala Walsh is a former senior executive for a FTSE 100 company, behavioural scientist, Ted X speaker, non executive director (including the Football Association and British & Irish Lions) various businesses and charities,  author  of 'Tune In' and has been recognised as one of the most influential women in finance. 
Nuala has interviewed Presidents, top sports stars and executives so this episode focuses on her learning and experience as a senior leader with an insatiable curiosity to understand why people do what they do.
In a noisy world, when we are rewarded by speed, the crisis is growing as regards a leaders inability to ensure that they are making safe, sound and ethical decisions that truly consider the wider implications. 
Nuala's Ted X talk was at the University of Salford and focused on 'How to overcome Indecision.' The key message is that indecision is temporary, hidden and is normally a state of mind. No leader admits they are indecisive. Leaders's can control it by understanding one of three barriers that may exist (1) the decision is too big (2) it's too far in the future and a decision doesn't need to be made (3) or its too hard a decision.  The solution is to chunk or split the decision into smaller and easier components whilst visualising the end result. 
'Tune In' is all about how to make smarter decisions in a noisy world. Nuala describes that the world is very visual and fast paced with too much data coming at leaders from all directions but inside a leader's head is just as crowded and noisy as the external world. 
Nuala also describes 'Power Recognition' as one of 10 misjudgement traps. She explains that there are three categories which include 'power seekers', 'power holders' or  those who have 'lost or are afraid of losing power.' and she provides some interesting examples which highlights that many leaders have an obsession with identify, title and status. 
Leaders must consider their own deaf spots - ask yourself are you a tuned out or tuned in leader? If you are not tuned in you are missing signals that matter. 
Nuala has interviewed Presidents, the first man on the moon, top sports stars and executives and she has always been curious as to the human being element of their accomplishments. In this episode she shares some insights from her interview with former President Bill Clinton and top golfer José María Olazábal. 
Don't miss this episode.

www.nualagwalsh.com
Tune In is available on Amazon 

Watch & Subscribe: 👀 https://www.youtube.com/@theleadersenigma/videos
Listen & Subscribe: 🎙️ https://open.spotify.com/show/5NSnRyHzPmyY5OWhGzKU5P
www.leadersenigma.com

Dr Gary Crotaz is a former medical doctor, professional ballroom dancer turned coach, author and podcast host. This episode is a collaboration between The Unlock Moment and The Leadership Enigma.
Gary realised after 8 years of medical training that he wanted a different career which in turn created opportunities for him in consulting and retail. Ballroom dancing had always been a parallel passion so Gary and his wife also travelled the world competing in professional tournaments with those who are well known to us from the TV hit 'Strictly Come Dancing.'
Gary's shares my passion for curiosity, learning and conversation. One of Gary's first client's called him at 4am to declare that he realised that he wanted to pursue happiness and not success for the sake of it. This in turn allowed Gary to realise that people have unlock moments of clarity.
An Unlock Moment is a moment when you think back and remember exactly where you were, who you were with and you suddenly know something that you had not realised before. Perhaps some may call it an epiphany.
Two critical questions for all of us are firstly "if we want to really understand the person you are today, where do we need to start the story?" and "if you think about a remarkable moment of clarity, what do you think about?"
In this episode Gary asks me a number of questions which lead me to remember a deeply personal moment with my daughter which was the catalyst for my exploration into my own Human Centred Leadership and sense of purpose.
What is your Unlock Moment?

The Unlock Moment: https://open.spotify.com/show/4yzWepuXTf5rursAv9O1NZ
www.garycrotaz.com
The Idea Mindset is available on Amazon. 

Watch & Subscribe: 👀 https://www.youtube.com/@theleadersenigma/videos
Listen & Subscribe: 🎙️ https://open.spotify.com/show/5NSnRyHzPmyY5OWhGzKU5P
www.leadersenigma.com

Blaire Palmer is a global educator, keynote speaker, former journalist and producer at the BBC and now the author of multiple books including 'Punks in Suits'
This episode explores our ability to fake it as opposed to bringing our true authentic self to the workplace through fear or lack of self confidence. 
Is our youthful rebel or inner punk an asset that we cease to rely on in order to comply? 
Blaire discovered coaching early on in her professional career as she became disillusioned with  journalism. She decided to help leaders myth bust and stop operating on old Victorian values whereby we view work and the people at work as part of a machine to deliver a mere product or service. 
The role of a leader is not to simply get people to do what you want them to do! Many of the challenges in the system come from Gen X based on the values and experiences they had growing up in the 70's and 80's. Now is the time to stop and reflect to consider the inefficiencies in the system in trying to create the best environment for humans to thrive. 
Blaire describes the concept of 'Punks in Suits' as capturing the spirit and irreverence of our youth when we questioned everything, embraced our individuality and authentically explored what was possible. The collective wisdom of what makes a good leader requires an element of 'faking it' in all of us. 
Blaire is keen to explore how leaders feel on their last day when they hand their laptop in and come face to face with who they could have been and the legacy they could have left having navigated and survived over three decades of corporate life. 
Blair's advice to any leader within the Gen X demographic is to consider your willingness and ability to trust others on a daily basis combined with an acceptance to be wrong or at least not right on everything! "Listen so hard so that you might change your mind.
Blaire also suggests we change the focus on autonomy (the role of self)  to citizenship (the power of we and taking responsibility for your part in the world)

www.thatpeoplething.com

Punks in Suits in available from Amazon

Watch & Subscribe: 👀 https://www.youtube.com/@theleadersenigma/videos
Listen & Subscribe: 🎙️ https://open.spotify.com/show/5NSnRyHzPmyY5OWhGzKU5P
www.leadersenigma.com

Simon Lancaster is one of the world's top speechwriters. He first became a speechwriter in the late 1990s working for Tony Blair’s Cabinet. He has since written speeches for the CEOs of some of the biggest companies in the world including Unilever, HSBC and InterContinental Hotels Group.

A leader's ability to communicate is critical to success and first impressions last!
Simon's journey started as a musician with a dream of becoming a songwriter yet by the age of 24 he became a Minister's Private Secretary. Not bad he tells me for a kid that grew up on a council estate with his single mum. 

Simon was paired up with Alan Johnson MP who became an important mentor in his life as Alan went on to become Secretary of State for Education and Skills from 2006 to 2007. Simon listened to Alan deliver multiple iconic speeches over the years mixing his personal story with the national story during the Thatcher years. 

Simon explains that a good speechwriter has to find what's inside someone's soul. Most great speeches must not simply contain a list of your attributes and achievements as the audience is not that interested. Simon remembers advice from Peggy Noonan (speechwriter to Ronald Reagan) who said "reading is collecting wisdom and writing is spending it."

Simon has a passion for helping the younger generation learn this skills and shares his advice of 'be proud to be yourself and be proud to show yourself to the world.' 

Simon's 3 Top Tips for any leader include:
1. The audience is more important than the speaker. It's not what you want to say but what the audience want to hear.
2. Emotions are more powerful than logic, this is based on biological fact.
3. Less is more

www.bespokespeeches.com
He is the author of 'Connect' a book that helps a general audience that wants to be better at connecting and communicating with people. Available on Amazon. 

Simon would love to write a speech for Oprah, so if you are listening...........!

Watch & Subscribe: 👀 https://www.youtube.com/@theleadersenigma/videos
Listen & Subscribe: 🎙️ https://open.spotify.com/show/5NSnRyHzPmyY5OWhGzKU5P
www.leadersenigma.com

Louis Gump is a digital veteran. He was at the heart of the digital revolution in 2001 as part of the team at The Weather Channel and then moved to helping CNN develop their first ever mobile app based approach to expanding their audience across the world. 
Louis is now also the author of 'The Inside Innovator' which is an Amazon Bestseller. 
I ask Louis about the current issue of 'fake news' and the polarisation of society. He considers this to be one of the most important issues facing us today. He says that 'reliable and professionally produced news that is fact based is critical to our society.'

Intrapreneurship is described by Louis as 'creating value through innovation and growth through a larger organisation.' He explains that it remains the close cousin of the entrepreneur.

Some organisations fear that great intrapreneurs will want to become entrepreneurs and exit the business to start their own ventures. Those who embrace their intrapreneurs find that the benefits outweigh the perceived risks. 

Why would you want to encourage intrapreneurs? One primary reason is that they drive a large proportion of the future value of companies and it helps train the next generation of leaders within.   

Another critical aspect of intrapreneurship is the acceptance of a degree of risk and failure and self understanding that the success will come from failure. Failure to keep reinventing can lead to examples such as Kodak and Blockbuster. 
Many CEO's fear their organisations becoming irrelevant in an era of constant change. Disruption comes as a function of being a steward of a companies brand. 

Leaders listening to this episode need to:  
1. Create a budget for intrapreneurship
2. Ensure the budget goes to the right people and ideas
3. Consider what evaluation criteria you need to put in place that match the task. 
The key message is identify your most promising talent and give them assignments to innovate. It delivers results for the business and trains the leaders of tomorrow.  

The key traits in identifying the right talent include: 
1. Curiosity
2. Action oriented
3. Ability to build bridges 
4. Risk tolerance 
5. Grounded optimism

www.louisgump.com

Watch & Subscribe: 👀 https://www.youtube.com/@theleadersenigma/videos
Listen & Subscribe: 🎙️ https://open.spotify.com/show/5NSnRyHzPmyY5OWhGzKU5P
www.leadersenigma.com

Margot Faraci is a leader, author, writer and podcaster. She happened to be working in the UK from Australia so we asked her to come into the studio....which she did.
Margot is a former lawyer and banker who at the age of 14 reflected that her style, in her own words, of 'mean girl' was not appropriate as it was based on deep insecurity.

Margot was a blend of her parents and her first job as a leader was to truly know herself.  Margot also knew that she was a natural leader and it was worth trying to harness the right skills and capabilities by letting go of what was safe and what was known. As we get older and wiser we also travel through different phases of our own development and at age 40 Margot realised that she was burnt out so she took some time out and then entered a period of irrelevancy which is a leaders biggest fear.
It was at this reflection point that Margot realised that there was a balance between fear and love and if she was to return to the corporate world she needed to do it on her own terms with a focus on love not fear.
 
Things happen in life so all of us have to find the lesson and the gift in any situation, so Margot decided to start researching these issues within organisations and discovered that the UK alone was losing £2bn a year in productivity as a result of over a third of leaders leading from unconscious fear. Besides the numbers it also meant that teams and individuals were burnt out and avoidance was used by many to simply play safe.
 
Courageous leaders however were hard on the problem and soft on the person.
Margot uses me as an example in the studio to demonstrate how a leader might deal with a toxic star performer through the lens of Love not Fear and leading a conversation with curiosity whilst being Brave, Clear & Fair.
 
As humans we are judging machines, which historically keeps us safe, however we miss the power of curiosity to provide us with more objective facts to find the win win solution. 
https://www.margotfaraci.com/

https://www.margotfaraci.com/loveleadershipsurvey

Watch & Subscribe: 👀 https://www.youtube.com/@theleadersenigma/videos
Listen & Subscribe: 🎙️ https://open.spotify.com/show/5NSnRyHzPmyY5OWhGzKU5P
www.leadersenigma.com

Allyson Stewart-Allen is a CEO, advisor, broadcaster and author. I see Allyson each week on TV as she is a regular on Sky News and has been on several seasons of 'The Apprentice , You've Been Fired.' It was time to invite Alyson into the studio for a visual tour of brands. If you don't proactively work on your personal brand, someone else will do it for you and you may not like the results. Brands can take years to build and seconds to destroy and all leaders need to consider their own brand, their product or service and their collective organisational brand. To avoid an international failure, leaders must surround themselves with diversity of thought and experience and display huge amounts of humility and curiosity when expanding across regions. 
Allyson completed two degrees in International Marketing, at USC and her MBA at Claremont with Peter Drucker. Allyson was raised in Germany and has been in the UK for 36 years. She is the author of 'Working with Americans' which was a finalist at the International Book Awards. 
This is definitely an episode you want to watch on our YouTube channel as Allyson brings this episode to life showing  a number of incredible products from her 'cupboard of curiosities' as regards what does and does not work internationally and why. 
We talk about a number of products from Kit Kat in Japan to a Canadian chocolate called 'Seriously Helps You To Energise' also known as SHYTE!
In between the amazing examples that Allyson talks about, we delve in to the leadership lessons relevant to any sized business on the basis that if you have a website, you are already global. 
In the UK we are currently experiencing the outcry into the Post Office scandal where a number of reputations and brands are squarely in the cross hairs of public opinion, which is yet another example of how vigilant leaders must be to their practices, exposure and impact on the world. 
www.allsysonstewartallen.com
www.internationalmarketingpartners.com

Watch & Subscribe: 👀 https://www.youtube.com/@theleadersenigma/videos
Listen & Subscribe: 🎙️ https://open.spotify.com/show/5NSnRyHzPmyY5OWhGzKU5P
www.leadersenigma.com

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the author of 10 books and over 150 scientific papers. He is the Chief Innovation Officer for Manpower Group and and international authority in people analysts, talent management, leadership development and the Human AI Interface. 
This is the first episode of the New Year and we tackle questions such as 'Why are so many incompetent men made leaders?' and 'Why we should be more sexist!' as Tomas is a data driven feminist. 
However, the primary focus of this episode is based on Tomas' latest book 'I-Human' and the need for us all to dial up our human centred leadership capabilities. 
Tomas was born and brought up in Buenos Aires and became fascinated in leadership from an early age after seeing and experiencing years of national leadership crises. 
His Phd allowed him to specialise in investigating the data behind numerous people analytic assumptions and biases. 
Tomas quickly began to uncover the realities of how important EQ was compared to IQ and how many misconceptions have hindered how we identify talent. From an evolutionary perspective humans have always over focused on confidence than competence on the basis that if we BS ourselves it is much easier to BS other people! Leaders must be self aware enough to balance their self confidence with the realities of their capabilities. Confidence and drive remain critically important but with moderation applied to also avoid pathological insecurity. 
Tomas has recently focused on the role and impact of AI on the talent market. AI get a lot of criticism for augmenting biases but AI has the capability to unlearn faster than humans and make organisations more data driven in their people operations. In an age when so much ion our thinking and creativity could be outsourced to machines, leaders must be alive to the necessity to humanise their organisations and the work that they do in the world. AI will continue to upgrade and evolve but will we? 
Tomas' research indicates that AI is increasing and developing some of our worst traits such as bias and narcissism. Many of us blame AI for simply uncovering the bias that we have created and embedded into the various systems that we operate with. Algorithms used in AI often track and solidify our focus on what we already like, believe or subscribe to, which in turn may be the basis for such a polarised world. 
Digital narcissism is the norm and at the heart of many becoming global influencers, however the same behaviour repeated in the office would probably involve HR! 
We are thinking less, optimising and outsourcing more and becoming less and less patient with having to wait even a few seconds for what we want. 
In this environment we have to double down on curiosity, empathy and our human centred 'power' skills. Historically we promoted people for their technical skills and with AI these have been become disrupted and out of date. The Human Being is now the most powerful asset we have in a Digital world. Leaders with strong human centred skills will rise and AI has commoditised, crowd sourced and synthesised our access to vast amounts of information that it is akin to a Microwave Meal in that it is not very nutritional, healthy or nourishing but it's easy, fast, lazy and even free option that gives us the quick fix. Our ability to 'slow cook' ideas with real wisdom and experience and unleash our deep curiosity regardless of our status, experience level or age. 

www.drtomas.com

Watch & Subscribe: 👀 https://www.youtube.com/@theleadersenigma/videos
Listen & Subscribe: 🎙️ https://open.spotify.com/show/5NSnRyHzPmyY5OWhGzKU5P
www.leadersenigma.com

Errol Gardner is the Global Vice Chair (Consulting) for Ernst & Young. He is a member of the Executive Team and leads the consulting practice  globally of over 125,000 people.  EY has over 400,000 employees in 154 countries and in 2022 they received over 2 million job applications.
Errol's job incudes defining the strategy for consulting and making sure they are clear on their market proposition for clients and ensuring his people are thriving. I ask Errol about the responsibility of being part of a broader global executive team leading over 400,000 as a leader of leaders and how he tries to cascade the human centred approach through all levels of the organisation. Errol's role requires him to travel for 60% of the year as he meets people within the organisation who help him sense-check and sense-make  what unites them and what is important at the local level. Errol understands that as he travels around the various EY global offices, he is a role model to many people that he does not personally know, however his leadership shadow is cast far and wide.  
Errol recounts the George Floyd incident during the pandemic and the ripple impact it had on people who became much more vocal within their own organisations as regards injustice and for Errol it became a catalyst to become a voice for those who needed advocacy and so the Global Social Equity Task Force was born. 
EY has a fundamental role within many global businesses (financial integrity) but also sees itself as a Force for Good in the world's challenge areas such as sustainability, equity and social justice which Errol explains is brought to life though the very purpose of the business. 'EY Ripples' is just one example of such an internal initiative. 
Errol was born and bred in Leeds attending the local comprehensive and knew immediately the difficulties of being a black child in a predominantly white area, which in turn provided him the resilience and mechanisms to thrive. 
He started his professional career in 1990 leaving University to work in audit. He quickly took the opportunity to go to Jamaica (his parents are Jamaican, his father was on board one of the original Windrush ships) and after 5-6 months he was luckily offered a consultancy role and never looked back, this was in Errol's words his 'sliding door moment.'  Jamaica provided Errol the unique opportunity to grow his confidence working within a predominantly black environment and understand the dynamics of prejudice, inclusivity and the power of diversity of thought. He returned to the UK knowing that there were no excuses for him other than to show up and make a difference. 
Today Errol reflects on his incredible career and feels an obligation to help others to achieve their dreams. He loves working in a people business and providing opportunities for others to learn and thrive. 
Leading a global business requires a constant awareness of trends and critical geo political issues in an ever changing world and having a presence in 154 countries means that EY can remain a force for positive change. 
Errol is a human centred leader of leaders who uses his experiences and interactions as a constant reminder that people are at the heart of all success. All leaders create a lived experience for those around them, let 2024 be the year for creating the conditions for all to thrive and succeed. 
Enjoy this wonderful episode. 

Watch & Subscribe: 👀 https://www.youtube.com/@theleadersenigma/videos
Listen & Subscribe: 🎙️ https://open.spotify.com/show/5NSnRyHzPmyY5OWhGzKU5P
www.leadersenigma.com

L Vaughan Spencer is a leadership and motivational guru with a unique mantra of 'Don't be Needy, Be Succeedy."
L-Vo to his friends has the unenviable background of having attended the University of the Isle of White studying table tennis with intermediate French. He is wise, vocal and motivates people by shouting at them! We was delighted to help me understand that I am not a failure.......just a non achiever. 
The Sunday Time describes L-Vo as Borat meets The Office. 
What could possibly go wrong with this episode. 
Merry Xmas everyone! 
https://succeedy.com/
https://neilmullarkey.com/

Watch & Subscribe: 👀 https://www.youtube.com/@theleadersenigma/videos
Listen & Subscribe: 🎙️ https://open.spotify.com/show/5NSnRyHzPmyY5OWhGzKU5P
www.leadersenigma.com