Welcome to JT’s top 10 Podcasts

I hope you enjoy these and get as much out of them for yourself, team and business as I did!
They are not in order – so read through each header to create your own priority listening list.
Enjoy!

Coaching for Leaders 505: Your Leadership Motive, with Patrick Lencioni

Leadership is sacrifice, not a privilege. Consider whether you are a reward-centred or service-orientated leader
The spaces where service-orientated leaders put their focus:

• Developing the leadership team. Keep asking yourself – am I doing this for me, or am I doing this for them.
• Actively managing their staff (and making them manage theirs). Leaders must proactively manage regardless of the capability or expertise of the staff member.
• Having difficult or uncomfortable conversations. If you cannot have them, you will not be a good leader.
• Running great team meetings. Valuing people’s time and getting outcomes from collaboration is a critical skill.
• Communicating constantly and repetitively to employees. Be a “chief reminding officer” keeping people connected to what is important and what they said they’d do.

Coaching for Leaders 532: How to Help People Thrive, with Jim Harter

“What the whole world wants is a good job, one that uses their strengths every day, and a manager who encourages their development”.
Career and positive connection with one’s manager have the strongest links to net thriving (a measure of employee wellbeing and organisational resilience). 5 key elements of wellbeing in order: Career – Social – Financial – Physical/Health – Community.
Performance issues always come back to a lack of clarity of expectation and some element of wellbeing remaining unmet

• Have more conversations – monthly touch points is a minimum to talk with your staff, about them. Include well-being in career conversations – life and work are intimately connected
• Create meaning with people through feedback and expectations. Minimum expectation is one piece of meaningful feedback per staff member per week (4:1 positive to critical).
• As an employee you are equally responsible for seeking meaningful feedback from your manager, as they are giving it to you. 50% of employees don’t know what’s expected of them – revisit expectations constantly

The McKinsey Podcast: Leaders must adapt to prevent more quitting by Aaron De Smet and Bill Schaninger

People leave leaders, not organisations. Employers can no longer dictate terms. Covid has taught us that working flexibly & remotely can still be meaningful and profitable.
Questions on all employees minds: “Do I feel valued in my organisation, by my manager?”… “Do I feel a sense of belonging, like I’m part of a high performing interesting team?”… “Are there opportunities for advancement in my career?”… “Do I have flexibility in my working week?”… These questions can be more important than compensation

• Be aware of your bias or judgement: People are operating with a different set of principles than they used to, or which might have got you to where you are. You might need to reinvent expectation and the working norm.
• Wanting to work remotely doesn’t mean people don’t want to be around and connect with colleagues. It means they want the flexibility to manage life outside work differently.
• Remember employees don’t leave organisations, they leave bosses/managers – it is your responsibility as a manager or leader to engage, care, and nurture as much as it is to connect staff activity to organisational priority.
• Create a “test to learn culture” – involve employees, create safe experiments, fail fast together

Coaching for Leaders 501: How to Build a Coaching Culture, with Andrea Wanerstrand

The 3 contexts of coaching: as a service; as a skill; as a language/framework. Use the 3 contexts of coaching to manage change, develop people, and create culture.

A coaching culture is a must for any senior leadership team working through growth or VUCA.

• Understanding and applying the 3 contexts is especially important for middle managers tasked with bringing staff along the strategic/cultural/change journey
• Provide and seek opportunities to practice coaching in a day-to-day workplace for new coach managers.
• Be deliberate in switching into different spaces: coaching, teaching, mentoring. But, do each of these in a coach like fashion
• Stay curious. Speak last. Manage your advice monster. Seek first to understand then (if required) seek to be understood.

Coaching for Leaders 458: The Way to Be More Coach-Like, with Michael Bungay Stanier)

Don’t assume your advice is right – because it probably isn’t. Manage your advice monster. Manage your advice monster. Manage your advice monster.

• Stay curious for longer. Ask: “What’s the real challenge here?” ..”and what else?”, “and what else?”, “and what else?”
• When someone asks for advice ask them what their ideas are…..”and what else?”, “and what else?”, “and what else?”
• Never coach the ghost – avoid talking about the person who is not there, (judgement). Coach the person in the room on how to respond and connect with the people who aren’t (awareness).
• Stop people nattering, “yarning”. Keep it performance focused, this values your time and theirs. Help people out of circular conversations about problems.
• Use the seven coaching questions:
  1. What’s on your mind;
  2. And what else;
  3. what’s the real challenge for you?;
  4. “what do you want?;
  5. How can I help?”;
  6. If you say ‘yes’ to this, what must you say ‘no’ to?;
  7. what was most useful for you?

Coaching for Leaders 518: The Way to Make Sense to Others, with Tom Henschel

Communication is about senders and receivers. Its not about you – it’s about them: What you want to say/send is less important than how an audience might be able to receive.
Use the following structure in both conversations and in email.

1. Create a headline (your Why)
2. Sort and Chunk information into ‘folders’.
3. Label these folders clearly to separate them
4. Transition between folders appropriately and openly

Tips for content: Credibility, rememberability (pneumonic‘s and repetition), and understandability.

Coaching for Leaders 475: What to Hold People Accountable For, with Stacey Barr

Don’t hold people accountable for outcomes, hold people accountable for monitoring, Interpreting and acting on what is important.

1. Monitor the important results: Hold people accountable for monitoring a specific business result with a specific measure
2. Interpreting their measures: Hold people accountable for interpreting what that measure is telling them about the business result it measures
3. Initiating action when action is required: Hold people accountable for deciding what kind of action is needed, if at all, on the measure they are monitoring and interpreting.

Coaching for Leaders 557: Overcome Resistance to New Ideas, with David Schonthal

Someone not saying YES to your idea doesn’t actually mean the idea is wrong but there is something there for them getting in the way.
Focus on the FRICTION, not the FORCE of your idea.

• FORCE is the idea itself, how polished it is and how much time you spend on developing it behind closed doors.
• FRICTION is what gets in the way of people shifting, not just to your idea but to any change.

The brain is great at being critical, at picking up things that are wrong. People will love to find holes in your idea – they might not put effort into reducing their friction for your idea. Help others overcome their friction areas for your ideas.
Tools to reduce inertia and reduce friction

• Think multiple Bullets (repetition, collaboration, collaborative safe experiments, iterative shifts, minimum viable product) rather than a big Cannonball (big well-polished ideas)
• Think Prototypical (as opposed to prototype) – making an unfamiliar idea feel familiar
• Consider emotional friction – what is the impact on someone’s own safety, positioning, workflow, time

When the shoe is on the other foot: Don’t try to be the smartest person in the room or the organisation. Help your presenter, team member etc reduce friction, rather than judge the force of their idea.

Coaching for Leaders 540: How to Create Space, with Juliet Funt

The ‘Thieves of Time’ steal our ‘space’ which leaders should be putting into self-reflection, strategy, thinking. Watch for when your performance assets go too far and become the thieves of time
The concept of “Space” – time allowed for thought, reflection, planning, strategy is becoming harder to find.
The “Thieves of Time” appear when our performance assets are taken too far.

• Our DRIVE for growth, change etc – can turn to OVERDRIVE. So, we need to ask “Is there anything I can let go of?”
• Our EXCELLENCE mentality can turn to PERFECTIONISM. So, we need to ask “where is ‘good’ good enough?”
• Our value and thirst for INFORMATION and data can turn to INFORMATION OVERLOAD. So, we need to ask “What do I truly need to know?”
• Our desire to be ACTIVE and productive all the time can turn to being/appearing FRENZIED. So, we need to ask ourselves: “What deserves my attention most, right now?”

A lack of activity does not mean a lack of productivity

Coaching for Leaders 500: Four Habits That Derail Listening, with Oscar Trimboli

Attention and presence are critical currencies of leaders. How others observe you listening impacts the depth of relationship.

Remember – it’s their story not yours. Don’t insert yourself, (your assumptions, advice experiences) into their story. By doing this it infers you, your story or your ideas are more important than theirs
Being present and managing your biases when they pop up:

Being present and managing your biases when they pop up:
• The DRAMATIC listener – listens for feeling and can get caught in drama and focus too much on the problem. Suggest: Allow the speaker to finish and clarify what they really need.
• The INTERRUPTING listener – thinks they are on jeopardy and listen to jump in, to fix, solve or talk about themselves. Suggest: Treat pauses as just another word, not an invitation to jump in
• The LOST listener – zone out and get distracted, often by technology or things going on around them, or simply due to ‘low listening batteries’. Put your phone away, turn away from distraction, ask what specifically they need from you.
• The SHREWD listener – already have the answer and are connecting dots that don’t exist. Remember it is not about you.
Simply ask yourself: “what do they need of this conversation, and what’s my part in that?”

HBR IdeaCast 827. The future of work is projects – So you’ve got to get them right

Projects are the vehicle to create/direct the changes organisations need to thrive.
Change, uncertainty and growth are here to stay – our job as leaders is to help people with these fixtures of today, not protect people from them

• A core skill for leaders is to prioritise. A core for organisations is to prioritise their projects.
• Projects are better bottom up – engage volunteers don’t just allocate executives
• You will struggle to grow if you can’t free up staff time, from the daily business as usual to envision and/or navigate change together
• Leave you Gantt charts and project software in the office – the true power of projects is collaboration and bringing people together to navigate change collectively.
• Find your end-to-end project players, those ‘impact players’ who can take ideas through to implementation across the business. Differentiate the people who are best suited to pushing through the day-to-day BAU and those suited to be impact players and project people.
• Ensure core roles are engaged: project sponsor, project manager/driver, content expert, volunteer