Everyone talks about disruption. Disrupting the status quo, the industry, the way we do things with their cool new product or service. But how about we disrupt leadership? How about we learn to embrace failure, build connection, and establish trust as the keys to success? My guest today, author, mentor, and CEO Colin Hunter shares why leaders need to be more wrong in order to be more successful.
Today we talk about why leadership needs to be disrupted, a 3-pronged model for how leaders can increase their impact, how to create more resilience and avoid burnout, and why we need to be more wrong and embrace experimentation and play so we can learn faster – leaving ego at the door in order to find success.
To access this episode transcript, please scroll down below.
Key Takeaways:
Self-care and mindfulness are so important. And without it, you do burn out as a leader, especially if you are a good leader and are trying to give of yourself to your team, but it does your team no good if you end up going up in flames.Just like how you recharge your phone every night, you need to do something that recharges you, as a leader, so that you can ground yourself, allowing you to show up better for yourself, your team, and your organization. Utilize the power and energy of everyone on your team. As you lead with empathy and active listening and give them a playground you will see an amazing difference in your team.
“As children, we have this self-clearing mind – we learn, experiment, play, fall over, fall out with friends, and then we self-clear and we go. But as we grow older, we freeze. If you aren’t doing your work, aren’t practicing disrupting, learning, experimenting every day, then you’ve frozen your mind.”
— Colin Hunter
Episode References:
The Empathy Edge podcast, Rebecca Friese: How to Build a Good CultureThe Empathy Edge podcast, Rhonda Manns: Design Thinking in Healthcare and BeyondAtomic Habits by James ClearIDEOSir Ken Robinson, TED Talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity?Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas TalibCitizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us by Jon AlexanderThe Trusted Advisor by David MaisterAbout Colin Hunter, CEO of Potential Squared and Author, Be More Wrong
Colin Hunter is an author, mentor, coach, and founder of Potential Squared which specializes in creating playgrounds to disrupt the way people are led. He lives with his family, near London, but originally from Scotland, and still retains his love of the Scottish mountains and the outdoors. Colin and his team work with their clients to provide leaders and their teams the chance to, as he describes, “Sail their ship out of the harbour and test themselves in rougher seas”. He is a practitioner and his work and his book are based on personal experience and purposeful practice with his clients.”
Connect with Colin Hunter:
PotentialSquared: https://www.potential2.com
Book: Be More Wrong https://www.potential2.com/be-more-wrong/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Potential_2
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinhunter/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/potentialsquared2/
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/potential_2/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecolinhunter/
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FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Welcome to the empathy edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host, Maria Ross. I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator and empathy advocate. And here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy from trends and research to the future of work, to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society, it’s great for business. Everyone talks about disruption, disrupting the status quo, the industry the way we do things with your cool new product or service. But how about we disrupt leadership? How about we learn to embrace failure, build connection and establish trust as the keys to success. My guest today, author, mentor and CEO Colin Hunter, shares why leaders need to be more wrong in order to be more successful. And yes, the role empathy plays in that Colin is an author, mentor, coach and founder of potential squared that specializes in creating playgrounds to disrupt the way people are LED. He’s the author of a great leadership book called be more wrong. Colin and his team work with clients to provide leaders and their teams the chance to, as he describes, sail their ship out of the harbor, and test themselves in rougher seas. He’s a practitioner and his work in his book are based on personal experience and purposeful practice with his clients. Today, we talk about why leadership needs to be disrupted. The three pronged model for how leaders can increase their impact, how to create more resilience and avoid burnout as a leader, and why we need to be more wrong, and embrace experimentation and play. So we can learn faster, leaving ego at the door, in order to find success. This one has so many gems, and so many references in the show notes. Take a listen. Colin Hunter, welcome to the show.
Colin Hunter 03:13
You I love it. I love the connection on the Scotsman piece that we were just talking about off air. So it’s lovely to be here. Thank you. That’s wonderful. For those listeners who don’t know, my husband is from Scotland. So anytime I have a chance to meet and connect with people from Scotland, I’m always grateful. So thank you for coming on the show to talk about disrupting leadership and talking to us about why leaders need to learn how to be more wrong, which I think is a wonderful concept, steeped in humility, which is also such a key ingredient for empathy. So first, before we get into the juicy stuff, just briefly, tell us your story. What led you to this work by accident, but I’ve learned more over time that it wasn’t an accident. So I had a breakdown when I was 30 and ended up in a doctor surgery who sat close the doors cancel all the rest of the appointments. And he said you know, Colin, you’re living your life in a way that is not energy efficient. So you need to do something about it. And I went Okay, so that’s great. So I got to silver. I don’t even know if he’s still alive now. But so he gave me a kick up the proverbial I don’t know what you call it in the US. But actually, he gave me something. But yeah, we can say that. So I started then on a journey of how do I manage my own energy and my own resilience in there. So I started that. And then I lucked out and I got a job in training and development and coaching. So I went and I did an MBA and it was myself and there’s a learning in here throughout this. I was being myself on the NBA for probably the first time for about 12 to 14 years. And somebody on the NBA recognize that saw the behaviors and said to somebody else you should be doing training and development you should talk to Colin about this. So I went for an assessment center So I got the job. And since then I’ve been working as a coach, leadership consultant. But I call myself a practice leader. So that’s fundamentally what I do. So everything that I teach, or coach on, I have to tell myself, I’ve done it already. So I’m working on it in the business, how we operate. And therefore I hate the term thought leader in some ways. So I don’t really want to be there. But there’s also an impostor syndrome in me that says, I would never be a thought leader. So I can be a practice leader. That’s where I am now working with many international clients multinationals around the globe, but based out of London International Business, so love it, love it. And you know, as we mentioned, the title of your book is be more wrong. And you have a philosophy of wanting to disrupt the way people are LED. What do you mean by that? So I think there’s a couple of things that led me to that. So I studied on under somebody who was teaching me design thinking, so ideal, I’m working in there and a great man, Andrew Webster introduced me to it. And I started to realize that if we’re going to create products, inclusive products that are going to talk to all the different types of people that we meet, then we need to start letting our ego and expertise, go out the window. And therefore when we’re running Design Thinking sessions, we always say, okay, ego and expertise, left the door come in here, let’s just observe human nature, let’s observe what’s going on, put the human centered design, and work on that. And it came to me, that’s leadership. So when we’re in there, if we can, every day focused the human in front of us, whether it’s the clients, the end user products, or it is our team, then we need to be starting to thinking that way. But mostly it is thinking on authority power gradients. And don’t take that inclusive and empathy led to your a word that’s, that’s relevant to your podcasts, empathy led way of doing that. But I think that’s why I started to want to disrupt leadership. And then more recently, I’ve got into some work by John Alexander and citizens don’t even read the book, brilliant book. And he talks about how in the past, we’ve been a subject to people, whether it’s kings, queens, lords, ladies, or whoever it is, we then moved into this era of the consumer story where we were consumer taught to buy more. And his book is all about citizens. So if we think about it to be a citizen, is we get the right to vote, but then it’s about community after that. So that work led me to think so how do we as leaders build communities? How do we build communities that benefit each other, which is leading us to go into being a B Corp this year, and looking at being a better organization in that context? So the disruption was started by saying, Come on, let’s get design thinking into the way we operate. Yeah. But secondly, it’s led more to almost the Social Innovation about how we organize businesses and leaders. Yeah, I think that’s the movement around applying the principles of design thinking to so many other areas other than product design, I had someone on the podcast, who is a former nurse that’s now teaching and bringing design thinking to find healthcare solutions. And another guest and I’ll put a link it was it was Rhonda, I will put a link to her episode and another guest of mine, Becky freeze, who runs a consultancy called Flynn consulting. And they basically disrupt workplace culture. So they’re creating a culture of innovation by not innovating products, but helping companies innovate the way companies work, the way companies themselves are run. And so I love the way your approach is about disrupting and innovating the way leadership is done, regardless of industry, regardless of offering, regardless of whether it’s a product or service or social enterprise or nonprofit, because we’re actually getting into the systemic change that is going to be responsible for creating more innovative products and services and offerings in the future. So I love that. Talk to us about how a leader increases their impact. You have talked about the purposeful practice of conversations rooted in confidence, conviction and connection. Tell us about that. So I part of this worked under Jacqueline Farrington and great leadership consultant that focused on communication. And she runs a business called Farrington partners, but she and I started working a long while ago on this, and then I iterated it up something in here but I realized that we teach a lot of leaders about confidence. So physically vocally, how do you talk with more confidence and, and we all know that if somebody talks with confidence, in theory, we’re likely to follow them, you know, to go in that direction. However, once you take the confidence piece, then there’s a conviction which is the values the purpose the identity, and I know previous episode, brilliant episode you had on here with purpose and how you live and breathe it. So what’s the red thread? There’s a leader that you have in here that goes through your work identity, purpose, and unmold For purposes, nesting purposes as you go through business, but there was a piece missing for me in all of that. So, you know, teach confidence, teach conviction grade, but the connection piece, and I have a New Zealand colleague who just give me this is a brilliant analogy. He said, For me connection is the ability to dance with the music others bring to you. Yeah. And I love that so much. Can you say that again, please? Yeah, the ability to dance with the music others bring to you? Oh, so good. So good. It caused me to pause for at least an hour on the day I received on LinkedIn. And that piece started to get me thinking that, you know, whether it’s inclusion, diversity, design, thinking, leadership, isn’t our leaders role, the ability to create the conditions for others people to be successful, and therefore understand the music. And that means that you got to understand everybody’s music coming in here. So I started to say, what’s the package in that? So I started to take a different way, which is, if you’re only delivering with confidence, and no conviction, and no connection, it’s arrogance. And we see a lot of arrogant leaders. If we are delivering with conviction, but no connection and confidence, then it’s a cause without a rebel, is the way I would say it. And then if you’ve got connection without confidence, and conviction, we’ve got some lovely people who aren’t getting anything done in the world. So this blend of conversations with the three of those is important. But how often do we give people a chance to practice that? Right, right. And I think that’s why empathy is such an important ingredient to achieving radical success. It’s that that ability to, you know, connect people, but also bring other people along, because we have all seen examples of leaders who are really, really smart, but nobody wants to follow them. Or, like you said, leaders who are really, really committed to a mission or a purpose, but they have no idea how to communicate that to their team, and help the team understand the role they play in that purpose or that mission. So I love this idea of this triangle of confidence, conviction and connection. I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about resilience and leadership. Because, you know, given all these different models, models I’ve discussed on this podcast with many guests, there’s a lot we’re trying to get our leaders to do. We’re constantly telling them, No, you need to do this with your leadership, you need to do that you need to have conviction, you need to have purpose, you need to be able to connect people, you need to have empathy. And it’s very overwhelming, because they’re like, and when do I actually find the time to get my work done, right? So talk to us about creating resilience in your leadership, and associated with that, avoiding burnout, from trying to be all these things to all these people while you’re trying to get work done and produce. So I’ve got two elements to that thoughts. And the first one I’ll start on, which is proper selfishness. So somebody introduced the concept of proper selfishness to me, and it was a military commander on a boats hits an earthquake city, all his team were going in and tending to the sick and the dying and the dead. And they used to come back to the boat, long faces sad. And it was after a while the chaplain said to these teams said, so what’s the mountain? And they said, Well, we feel guilty, we’ve got all this food on the table, you know, surely we should be spreading this food and giving some of it to the sick and the you know, the dying out there and working. And he just gave them a simple question back said who’s going to look after them when you’re sick and ill. And this concept of the air you know, oxygen mask and a plane put your own on before you put those of your child. Or if you’ve got two children, your favorite children was one of the flight attendants once said to me. But the thing about leadership is, you know, to have the energy and resilience to be a leader means you need to take care of yourself and be properly selfish. So that’s the first element and falling out of this desire to be strong, but not take care of yourself in the background. Yeah, I mean, self care and mindfulness is so important. And without it, you do burn out as a leader, especially if you are a good leader and giving, you know trying to give of yourself to your team, but it does your team no good if you end up going up in flames. And that’s what I learned from my breakdown. But subsequently, I’ve learned that if I don’t do my reps, and don’t eat my own dog food or drink my own champagne as sometimes describe it, I like the champagne better than the eat your own dog food. I’m gonna steal that. So, so for me, it’s about so I started looking at this with anti fragile, the concept of anti fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. And he said, You can’t predict the future. So what the ceases did in the past, as a season is used to ingest little bits of poison on a regular basis, so that if they ever came under attack by a poisoner, then they would have all these poisons in the system, which made them resistance and that’s the concept of anti fragile. We can’t face it. We can’t put dekes but at least we could be anti fragile to what’s coming at us in the future. Okay, that totally reminds me of the scene in The Princess Bride, right? Yes.
Maria Ross 15:08
I built up an immunity to whatever it was the drug that was supposed to kill him. Yeah.
Colin Hunter 15:15
So if you tell you that then we work in four systems. And this is the work I’m doing but four systems around how you build up your resilience. But the key thing for me is about experimentation is the James clear work about atomic habits, we don’t rise to the level or objectives, we fall to the level of our systems. So what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to start stress plus rest equals growth, we’ve got to sail our ship out the harbor is another analogy I use to test and stretch ourselves so that when we need that energy when we need that resilience, is there. And what do you mean by testing, testing different ways that re energize us or fuel us up? Yeah, so I look at it this way, there’s a spiritual need. So I’m not talking solely religion, I’m talking about spiritual in terms of you know, whether it’s looking about that I do a lot of work on the stoics. So I do a meditation every day on the stoics. And again, it’s this principle that we look and there’s a higher purpose, so I can’t control anything apart from myself. But unless I do my work on it, meditate on it, then, then it’s difficult for me to do. So there’s a piece about purposeful practice of these meditation apps and meditation spiritual is one of them. Then there’s the thing about sleep. Now, listening to Tim Ferriss, and Matthew Walker, one of his podcast episodes, and Matthew Walker is an expert in sleep. But if you want four hours of geeking, out on sleep, I’m a big fan of practicing different sleeping techniques. So including taping your mouth to do nose breathing, I don’t know if you ever heard of this, but it improves the quality of your sleep massively. So I will go to bed at nine, wake up, five 530. And it’s not anything match you in there. It’s more about that I’ve worked out my rhythms and I measure it with what the listeners won’t be able to see but as an earring. But then I got to this concept that nose breathing is a bit of effective sleep. So I’ve improved my efficiency and sleep 75 to 95%. So you’re experimenting with different modalities. And this is what I talked about when the first step of being an empathetic leader is practicing what I call practicing mindfulness. But it’s really also self care. And I’m not talking about self care, like massage. And mani pedi, I’m talking about those things that recharge you just like you recharge your phone every night so that it works the way it should. And it could be it’s different for everyone. It’s not necessarily. I’ve said this before seven days at an ashram in India, it could be going for a walk every morning, before you start your day could be sitting with your breakfast and without a screen in front of you. Like you said, it could be looking at your sleep habits, doing meditation, maybe it is doing yoga, maybe it’s prayer, whatever, walking the dog, all of these things can get us grounded, to take a moment and take a beat so that we can connect with ourselves because we’re so busy spinning out there as busy leaders, that we don’t take a moment to be still and say what’s going on inside for me today? How am I showing up? I love that. And actually somebody said this something to me the other day, they said, the real test of somebody who is resilient, and has purposeful habits built into their life is when they go on vacation. At least 80% of those habits are the same on vacation when they’re working. Let’s test but yeah, that’s it’s so true. Yeah. Right. Because when you’re going on vacation, presumably you’re going because you want to take care of yourself. So are you practicing the same things to take care of yourself that you practice in your quote unquote, real life? Right? Oh, I love that. I want to talk about you mentioned it earlier this year. And also, it’s the topic of the book about being more wrong, and why that helps us learn faster. So talk to us about that. And how can leaders who still cling to the model that if I’m going to be a good leader, I have to know everything and everything I do has to succeed on the first try. How can they break themselves of that narrative? So I think it’s very difficult because we are brought up in an education system that says, you know, get things rights, get your grades, do it right. There’s a way of doing that. And I always love Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk, where he tells a story of the young girl at the back of the class, and she’s drawing something and the teacher says, So what are you doing? And she says, I’m drawing a picture of God. And the teacher says nobody knows what God looks like. And she says, well give me a few minutes and I’ll be able to show you what keyboard it is. So as children we have this self clearing mind. And therefore we we learn, we experiment we play we fall over we fall out with are friends. And then we self clear and we go. But as we grow older, and the analogy friend gave me was, we have this Colorado river of a mind that that is cutting through rock when we’re kids. But as we grow older, we freeze. So eventually, you know, when you’re 57, or 40, if you aren’t doing your work, and you aren’t practicing every day about disrupting, and learning, and experimenting, then you frozen mine, you got this little trickle of conscious mind. So there’s a piece in there for me about learning fast, which is, how do you get your mind to be a self clearing system? How do you clear your mind and work in that space? So that’s one of the core principles around learning fast and working in that space. And then I think there’s something else in here, which is, if you think competitive, and we think about what we’re facing as leaders in the world, we’re facing challenges every day, and everybody else is competing each other. And therefore, people are trying to disrupt you all the time. So why wouldn’t you do it yourself, start to work it into life. So So for me, I’m a big believer in, learn fast, fail early fail often be the hardest worker in the gym, push yourself and stretch yourself. And if you’re not doing that, then for me, you’re not agitating for the future, which is the definition? Well, the ironic thing about this is we have so many leaders we’ve never heard of who are convinced that they have to come to the table, at at least pretend they have all the right answers, that their way is the right way that they’re gonna give you 100% guarantee that what they’re going to try is going to work. And yet, when you look at all the famous leaders that people cite, quotations from and read books about and follow as sports legends, their whole career is about trying and failing. There’s not one successful billionaire who doesn’t have a trail of bankrupt businesses in their wake. And so I find it interesting that as humans, we can’t reconcile that, you know, if going bankrupt a few times worked for Richard Branson. Why do I think in my middle manager role, I have all the answers. Now there is the systemic issue of we do work within systems. And unfortunately, within organizational cultures that don’t allow us to fail, we get fired, we get, you know, demoted. And so where do you see hope around disrupting the actual system that those leaders are operating in? You make a great point, because one of the things we’re reading our purpose at the moment, and the the purpose we’re working with as a draft at the moment is building lives, leaders, organizations and communities you don’t need to escape from Oh, so I’m sad for me. That, for me is fundamental. So if you go back to leaders who cause other people not to be able to fail or not to learn and fuel anxiety, fuel, self worth issues, fuel the imposter that I hold inside, do more sick days and less productivity hours, like all the things they don’t want, right? Well, there’s that study recently about trust, DDI have just come out with a publishing about trust in organizations and, and one of the key things in there and around trust is allowing people the ability to be vulnerable, and vulnerability and learning and people who aren’t vulnerable longer learns that Brene, brown Man in the Arena, get in there, work it do it. So I do think that leaders just don’t work out the business case for me around why they should engage in failure and learning. And when you see organizations who embrace this, now Koch is doing a lot of friends doing a lot of work in there around design thinking, you start to see some of the iterations and the work from the receptionist that changes the strategy, document for the business, fundamentally shifts the way they operate, you release all this potential. And as a leader, you suddenly go, Oh, hold on a second, this leadership thing is pretty easy. Because all I’m doing is just utilizing everybody’s power and energy. And also, you know, I’m getting points for being empathetic because I’m understanding them. So even for those who were slightly on the on the spectrum and don’t work out what it is that they’re doing, they’re seeing a different pattern in front of them. So for me, the only way you get people to do that is purposeful practice, and giving them a, a playground to have a go at that. And then seeing the difference they see in front of them. So that’s a key part. I love that because I did a prior episode a year or so ago with two women who run a consultancy that talk about the importance of play at work, and why and how play leads to innovation and why we lose it after we grow up. You know what I mean? Or while we grow up, so I’ll put a link to that one in the show notes as well. So what would you say to leaders listening who are like I get it, I’m on board I want to disrupt but I am trapped in this system of right now. That if my team misses our KPIs,
Maria Ross 25:00
I have to let someone go, someone has to get fired, I might get fired. Where could they start? Disrupting the system within their own culture organization.
Colin Hunter 25:12
So Design Thinking teaches you about small, low risk, low cost experiments. Yeah. And I think that’s the key mantra in my mind. So incremental gains in how you you operate are key things. What I don’t propose is that people go out and take massive risks, but small changes that can even impact the team. So we started something which is a pulse every day 950 In the morning, where everybody gets together, shares what they did yesterday, what they did today, what they’re doing tomorrow. But we’re still playing with the right communication vehicles to get the team to engage. So we played with that. We’ve played with a couple of things. So we’re now when we’re doing our two day, get together as a team just before Christmas, there’s no projection of content numbers. It’s all about experiential learning as a team, now we find within two days, we had more connection, that was an experiment, more connection in the team than we’ve ever had, just by two days. So I think it’s just doing small things like that, that get people to realize that they can operate in a different way as leaders. And I think the other thing for me is, if you think and they talk to most of their clients, most of their clients want them to be innovative. So again, if they think about that, and even for people who work in internal audit, for financial services, you can still innovate, you can still be more wrong, disrupt the way experiment in there. And you can change the way that you have assurance for the business, just by small changes in how you communicate, how you operate. So don’t think about the big changes, think about the small, incremental behavioral changes that you could make, as a leader, test them out, get new habits, the way I see it is, forget behaviors. Think about the new habits or practices that you can adopt and measure whether they make a difference to the engagement of your team, the ideas of your team, and you’ll probably find that it will change massively over time. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it’s so important to treat your team like a micro culture, and just try different things that will help your team be successful, even if that’s not the corporate culture. Because then what happens is, as you succeed, people start getting curious about what’s going on with your team. Like what’s in the water over there? Yeah, they do that I always remember playing this with one of my clients first client, Maureen Finn, whoever did this with and we said, right, I’m gonna fail with you. So that’s our contract, we’re gonna fail, and we’re gonna regularly fail. So we’re gonna have some difficult conversations, but we are setting out to disrupt and fail. Now, four years later, we had three awards for the work, we were doing her profile have gone up our profile going up, but we learned to fail together and fail early. So for me, it’s sometimes that we worry about our stakeholders and worry about our clients, why wouldn’t we buy them into making a world better outside, and then getting them to play with us on this failure game, which actually drives massive differences painful sometimes, but life is painful. So why not? You know, exponentially grow through innovation and experimentation? Right? Exactly. Well, you know, it’s that whole analogy of forging by fire. Right? You don’t end up creating something, unless it’s tested.
Maria Ross 28:25
If you want to learn, go play with somebody who’s better than you. Yeah. If you want to grow, you don’t go you don’t learn by going and doing what you’ve always done. It’s always about stretching and testing. Yeah, well, and I find it super interesting. I’ve mentioned this to other people. Before that, I find it laughable that there’s so many leaders who have all the books on their shelves of the people who talk about doing things, just doing things differently, and, you know, failing fast, and all that kind of stuff. They’ve got all those books on their bookshelves, and yet they’re still leading the way they’re leading.
Colin Hunter 28:58
And it’s like, but I know you read it, like, I know, what did you read? Let me just did you watch the TED talk, or, you know, these are people you follow and idolize. And yet, somehow, when you go into your day to day, you don’t apply any of that. And I just find that really, really interesting. For me, it’s always good to have a feedback loop. So I think one of the other things that we do with clients and within our team is get a feedback loop, a learning loop that we have. So we’re always learning. So I mean, classically, there was somebody recommended a book trust and inspired by Stephen, Mr. Covey, brilliant book, really, really good book, their favorite book, but actually, when you saw what they were like, in real life, everything was the opposite. It was the dysfunction of what was in the book and actually just having that feedback loop that you can give that person and you know, me, I’m far from perfect in what I do, and therefore, eating my own dog food or drinking my own champagne, whatever it is. For me, it’s about getting the feedback and one of my team in this off site, we were doing a flip chart.
30:00
I write things that you appreciate. And somebody had the courage to write two words in my flip chart. One was, they’re supposed to be positive, but this one was frustrating. And the other one was confusing. Now, they had the courage to do that. And therefore, for me, that’s a feedback loop. So since then I’ve been noodling, working, how I can remove frustrating, and also confusing out of my vocabulary, or the vocabulary other people would use about me. So that’s where you need to be that humble and humility piece to go. Okay. How do I how to make this better? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, as we wrap up, I want to just take a tangent on this, because you mentioned it, this idea of creating trust, especially if you’re in an environment right now with your team, where they don’t trust you, because then they’re more, I guess, stubborn is the word to when you have to make tough decisions. And it’s not necessarily because of the decision itself. It’s because they don’t trust you enough as a leader that you’re doing right by them. How do you help leaders start to establish trust, where maybe they didn’t build the trust before. And now they’re in a position where they have to start building it, and they can’t just go, you know, I want you to start trusting me, one or two things they can actually do to start working, even if it’s for the long haul, on creating trust within their team.
Colin Hunter 31:25
So I think one of them is about a personal behavior. So I have a mantra in my head, that’s when I disagree with somebody in the team about an idea. I work out my head out of 10, how important is this, and as if it is seven or 10, or more important, then I’ll have an opinion, if it is less than seven out of 10. And it’s an idea that I don’t particularly agree with, but I want them to have go, one of the mantras I hold my head is I want them to own their role not rented. And if I am a leader who is trying to control all the time, make those decisions, then yeah, I’m knowledgeable, all knowing. But actually, if I want them to own that role, then let them have that go and get on with us. And it’s also once they’ve had that trust to have a goat it it’s then this intimacy is Meister talks in his trust equation. It talks about intimacy, it’s that ability to very quickly be robust in in the feedback. And the model I always hold in my head is I like I wish I wonder, which is design thinking which is a much better feedback model than a sample evidence or affect or change. But it’s I like this, I wish that I could have a bit more of a commercial impact. And I wonder whether we thought about the right personas, that is so much more of a better conversation, then is that what you recommend for giving feedback to each other? Is using those I statements, particularly on ideas and thoughts? Is I like, yeah, so I liked the fact that you plan the questions, but you’ve pivoted towards the end of this. Yeah. I wish we had more time because I’d love to explore this, and a better way. And I wonder whether the answer I gave you earlier on to the point about this breakdown, some people are starting to think so I want to know more about that. So I wonder if I was right to add it in. So this piece is starting to get people to think in a different way. So trust is one is six out of 10. Seven out of 10. I’m gonna let them go. But then the second is about how you, you act on that feedback of what they come back with to do that. So that’s what I would recommend. Yeah, so good. So good. So actionable. Thank you for sharing that. And thank you so much for your insights today. Remember, folks the name of the book is be more wrong. I’ll have a link to it in the show notes please check it out. And all your links Colin will be in the show notes. But for folks on the go are exercising right now as they’re listening. Where’s the best place they can find out more about you and your work? So LinkedIn is one place that they can go Colin Hunter, you’ll find me there. And then I’ve got to explain this one but the at the Colin Hunter. And the reason I’ve got the Colin Hunter next is I had Jacqueline Farrington, I mentioned before, she did an exercise with me with impostor syndrome and she said So are you calling Hunter said yeah, I’m calling and she said are you the collar Hunter and I went no, no, I’m just calling Hunter. And she went no, no, you’re the call Hunter and after a while she got me to realize that nobody is going to take me for for any value unless I believe that I am the condo because I am the only the content of that. I know that looks and sounds like me. So at the Colin Hunter. Instagram is another place you can find me. Oh, and also you have another Instagram handle as well for your company. Yes, yes. Okay, those will all be in the show notes. Yeah. Great. I love it. Thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure to connect with you. Lovely to connect with you as long as you thank you. And thank you everyone for listening to another great episode and good
Maria Ross 35:00
So on the empathy edge podcast if you like what you heard you know what to do, please rate and review and share the podcast with your friends and colleagues. Until next time, always remember that cashflow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Take care and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit the empathy edge.com. There you can listen to past episodes, access shownotes and free resources. Book me for a Keynote or workshop and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red slice Maria. Never forget empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
