Curious Leadership with Dominic Monkhouse

We met Kim Scott last year when she was on the podcast talking about how to give difficult, impactful feedback in the workplace, following the release of her book, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. Today Kim is back, but with Trier Byrant this time, to discuss their latest book, Just Work, Get Sh*t Done, Fast & Fair. While bias, prejudice and bullying may be present in the workplace, they aren’t inevitable in the workplace, say Kim and Trier. It is possible to combat workplace injustice so that everyone can get shit done and enjoy working together. Be warned, the book makes for uncomfortable reading because it makes you reflect on times when you should have been an upstander and called out injustice, instead of not speaking up when you could have. In today’s episode, Kim and Trier highlight what injustice, bias and bullying can look like and how you can tackle it, and when you should stand up and when you can go easy on yourself. This issue is hard, they’ve written a difficult book, but it’s a book everyone should read. This is a great conversation, we’re sure you’ll find it as illuminating as we did. On today’s podcast:Why Just WorkThe importance of having difficult conversationsRecognising bias, prejudice and bullying at workBeing a bystander v an upstanderHow to respond to bias, prejudice and bullyingBias to be aware ofLinks:How To Be Radically Candid With Kim ScottJust Work (Book)Twitter – @kimballscott, @TrierLinkedIn – Kim Scott , Trier Bryant Website – Just Work

What is your employee experience like? Would your employees write rave reviews about their experience working at your organisation?Today’s guest, Ben Whitter, is an employee experience expert and a bestselling author. He works with a number of global companies helping the CEOs fix their employee experience so that it's in keeping with their preferred customer experience and their brand. “We look at everything that's connected to people, society, culture, the organisation, leadership, technology, and we say, how is this driving people forward and helping them fulfil their potential?”Today, Ben talks about his mission, how he wants to see HR own the commercial metrics inside an organisation and step away from the typical HR metrics of recruitment and sickness absence. He wants HR to instead be responsible for innovation, profitability, customer satisfaction and productivity.“If you're developing and investing in your customer experience, you would expect to see some return with new business coming in, retaining clients or customers, new customers, new referrals. And it's the same for employee experience.”From where his research has taken him, to the best place for an organisation to start, to sharing a few tactical examples from the organisations he’s worked with, to his views on hybrid work and how that’ll affect employee experience when we start to return to the office, this is a fantastic conversation with Ben. We hope you learn as much as we did. On today’s podcast:The best place for an organisation to startTactical examples of best practiceHow to measure employee experienceHis favourite CEO storyThe Timpson model for talentThe hybrid model and employee experienceLinks:First Book - Employee Experience New book - Human Experience at Work

If you need help with your recruitment, then you need Lou Adler. At 75, he’s spent the last 50 years in the recruitment game. He knows how to play it. “My name is Lou Adler. [I’m here] to talk about hiring and business strategy and how to have a successful life, and how to hire great people and how not to screw up making important business decisions.”Lou is CEO and founder of Performance-based Hiring, an end to end, four step business process for hiring top talent. Lou’s firm helps recruiters and hiring managers around the world source, interview and hire the strongest and most diverse talent. Lou is also the author of the Amazon top-10 best-seller, Hire With Your Head (on its 4th edition). Lou was working for a Fortune 500 company in Southern California. He moved there from New York for the weather, but hated his boss. Sound familiar? Most people would leave, Lou decided to become a recruiter because he realised there’s no point hiring great people, if you’re just going to lose them because they aren’t a fit with the manager. Now he has a business that teaches firms how to do recruitment using his high performance hiring methodology. From how to hire for fit, the ultimate question you should use in your recruitment process, and why you should hire for cultural fit, rather than just skills. Don’t miss this latest episode of The Melting Pot. On today’s podcast:Why we still get hiring wrongThe 3 buckets of hiringLou’s greatest success2 questions to ask during the interviewApproach hiring like it’s a capital investmentHire for fitLinks:Book - Hire With Your Head

If you lack confidence, or you’re faking it ‘til you make it, don’t miss the Queen of Swagger, Leslie Ehm, on this week’s episode of The Melting Pot. From TV host to advertising executive to training guru for some of the biggest global brands such as Disney and Uber, Leslie has had a few careers in her time. Today, she is a full time Swagger Coach. “Your swagger is not something external to you. It is something that you already have. And it will manifest differently in every different human being. There is not one prescribed way to have swagger.”But the episode isn’t all about swagger. Leslie also talks about swearing and why swearing is actually important, and why people who swear are smarter and happier than those that don’t, and why you should ignore those who tell you not to swear.“It's not that their ears are going to melt off, or that their brain is going to malfunction. It's that they're trying to impose their levels of acceptance on you.”She also discusses what business leaders can do to lead with swagger and what they can do to build psychological safety in their organisation. This is a truly cracking episode, full of energy and with some top book recommendations too. We really enjoyed this conversation. We know you will too. On today’s podcast:From Montreal to London to Toronto Founding CombustionFrom no BS training to Swagger CoachLearning confidenceThe benefits of swearingWhy leaders need to create psychological safetyLinks:Book - Swagger by Leslie EhmCombustion

If, over the course of the last year, you’ve come to enjoy working from home and don’t want to have to revert to the daily commute into the office. Or if you’re scaling a business and wondering how you can attract the right level of skill and experience without having to hire someone full time. Then don’t miss Romanie Thomas, an experienced headhunter, founder and CEO of Juggle Jobs, a platform connecting businesses with high-quality professionals on a flexible basis. Founded in 2017, Juggle Jobs is for people who have more to offer scaling businesses than simply their skills and experience. They understand and appreciate the need to be flexible and are prepared to roll their sleeves up and muck in, helping out where necessary. Romanie, an experienced headhunter, realised while there are plenty of platforms for low level, entry positions, there aren’t many offering these sorts of flexible opportunities to mid to high level roles. Seeing a gap in the market, she created a platform to help women who don't want to work full time, get access to great jobs. Very quickly, she realised that this wasn't a gender issue, this was a matching skills to jobs and helping people facilitate a portfolio career issue. In today’s episode, she talks about the implications of remote first versus office culture versus hybrid. What might that look like? What's the best? What's the worst? What's the best of the worst? And she shares what it's like to be a digital nomad. Where she's been and where she's worked from, and what lessons she's learned along the way. This is a fantastic conversation with a fantastic founder. On today’s podcast:Figure out the problem you’re solvingThe future of flexible workingThe problem of hybrid workingWhy more men are opting for flexible work

2020 Summit Special: The Rules for Aggressives Sales Growth with Justin Roff-MarshToday's Summit Special is Justin Roff-Marsh. On a wet and windy day in Wiltshire it is great to look at the video of Justin speaking at the Monkhouse & Company Summit September 2020. Justin helps people revolutionise their sales function. If the question you ask yourself is, "if I double the number of sellers, will I double my revenue?". And if you paused, or hesitated, or said no, then implementing Justin's The Machine would give you some clarity. It fixes not just sales; it might even fix many bits of your organisation. But it certainly impacts sales, marketing, and customer service—the whole customer journey. Justin looks at it from the perspective of lean manufacturing. There are a couple of controversial things: no commission, no individual targets. Those are pretty difficult for some people to accept in the first instance. They feel that salespeople are coin-operated. So, challenge your bias and beliefs in how sales works or should work, or seek a solution to the problem in your business and listen to this twenty minutes of Justin Roff-Marsh magic from the stage at the Summit.If in the end, you find yourself amazed and in need to find out more, you're in luck because Justin is running one of his workshops in the UK on 26th May at The Management Lab on the farm in Wiltshire. So if you like this twenty minutes, head over to our Prescription for Growth page to get your ticket. You better be quick because there's only a few left.Enjoy! Born in Cambridge, raised in Australia and resident in Los Angeles, Justin started his fantastic talk at the Summit, defining his accent as a "hybrid". Right after that, he jumps straight into what he calls the three-step programme. Justin and his team are usually introduced to an organisation by the CEO or private equity. "Our mandate is always the same, figure out how to grow this organisation". Then, three ideas are brought to the table. "You could think of these ideas as a three-step programme"The three-step programmeWith a mandate to rapidly grow an organisation, the first thing that Justin and his team do is work to restructure the organisation so that salespeople perform only one activity, which they call selling conversations. "And by only, I mean they do absolutely nothing else", says Justin. That means that if you work for this organisation and you come in with a card that has the word 'Sales' on it, you only have one decision to make: "will I work in this particular instance or not?". If you choose to work, there's no further thinking required. "There's only one activity that you're responsible for, and that is selling conversations". And that will go on, selling conversation after selling conversation on repeat until you go home. Achieving that requires a restructuring of the organisation. So, that's the first idea. If you want to grow your organisation aggressively, Justin's first piece of advice is to "restructure those organisations so that salespeople do nothing other than selling conversations". The second idea is that after restructuring your company, the next thing you want to do is carefully examine the activities performed in the field. "You want to look at each activity and ask yourself one question: does this activity absolutely have to be performed in the field, face to face with customers". If you are honest, you'll conclude that not every activity currently being performed face to face with customers actually needs to be. In fact, virtually none do. Justin reckons that when you identify those activities that don't need to be performed face to face, "the obvious thing you can do is take those activities out of the field and move them inside to a central location". And by that, he means an office in the UK if your market is Europe, not 27 offices spread across Europe. So that's the second piece of advice.The third one is straightforward. Remove your salespeople's autonomy and remove their commissions. At these words came out, you could see the shock on the audience faces. To which Justin admits, "I didn't say salespeople were going to like it. I said it was simple". By doing that, he's not suggesting that you take away their autonomy and invariable pay because salespeople are going to like it or because you're likely to see an increase in performance - "even though you will". He suggests that, in reality, taking away their autonomy and piece-rate pay is a prerequisite for the first two steps. As Justin simply put it: "you cannot restructure your organisation - so that salespeople spend 100% of their time selling - and you cannot move 90% of activities that are currently performed face to face with customers inside." The important reason is that "it's those first two steps that are what's really going to move the needle.""So if you really want to give your organisation a kick in the pants and grow it aggressively", those are the steps you have to take. Assuming that your business has good fundamentals. You have to take away commissions so that you have a "mandate that allows you to implement those first two steps consistently, unflinchingly and exhaustively in your organisations." Selling ConversationsTo achieve aggressive growth following Justin's three-step programme, you need to be clear on what 'selling conversations' mean. We all know what the word 'conversation' means, but what about that other one, 'selling'?If you asked your Director of Sales to define the word selling, "they will have you believe that the word 'selling' refers to all the activities that a salesperson typically performs, which has a degree of circularity that should disqualify for many intelligent explorations into the subject." So then, Justin takes a different approach to the same question: "but what's the one activity that a salesperson performs that genuinely and inarguably generates value?" And what do we mean by closing? - Justin asked the audience - do we mean actually signing the paperwork? PersuasionDrawing from the question what does closing actually means, the author of The Machine, demystify the idea of salespeople sitting with the customer wrestling. He goes back to his past in sales when they used to say, you move the pen, I'll hold the paper. "That doesn't actually happen, and in most of the cases, contracts come in by email or via DocuSign, right?". So when we talk about closing, what we really are talking about is convincing persuasion. Justin then defines a selling conversation as a "conversation where a salesperson is persuading". Now, if you've had a customer coming back for his seventh transaction, the amount of persuasion required will depend on your operational performance. "If you screwed up the last six transactions, a whole bunch of persuasion. But if you've done a good job, none." Justin attributes this to "the magical thing called nurture". It's costly for organisations to move their business around the place. You've got all sorts of switching costs, including the risk. If you sell expensive things, the risk can be the highest switching cost. So if you transacted with an organisation more than zero times and sell a product of substance, and you've done a good job at keeping your promise, then there will be no persuasion required. According to Justin, there's only one type of interaction where persuasion is required: "the first. The role of your salespeople should be to convince folks to transact with you for the first time. Because once they transact with you for the first time, they get to experience your operational efficiencies. And on account of switching costs, after they've experienced those operational efficiencies for the first time they're hooked and no further persuasion is required."This will result in what we should call "a relationship". But we don't. We degraded that word, and we use it to refer to the personal relationship between the salesperson and the prospect. But the personal relationship should be overpowered by the commercial relationship. Justin's recommendation is that salespeople should use their superpower exclusively to convince those that have never transacted with you before to do it for the first time. The end result of moving sales activities inside, says Justin, is we get to build what he calls "inside sales team". We don't want telemarketers. We want to take professional salespeople with whom your customers would like to transact with. We want them inside in an environment where they can comfortably have 15 selling conversations a day – many more than what salespeople is currently having." 

How do you solve problems? Are you even trying to solve the actual problem that needs solving? Today’s guest is so good at solving problems they named him twice, Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg. Thomas has developed a theory of problem-solving, but that’s not what he talks about in this latest episode. No, in this conversation, he talks about how you can deliberately spend time stepping away from the problem in order to look at it differently, how can you reframe the problem, and then how can you come up with a different solution to solving the problem, before moving on. Thomas spent 7 years studying innovation, and it was then he realised that the more things didn’t work, it wasn’t that people weren’t innovating correctly, they were solving the wrong problem. This is all discussed in his book - What’s Your Problem? (link below). The problem we have when we’re trying to solve problems is that we get solution blindness - we get so emotionally attached to something that we can’t see the solution, like a sort of learned behaviour. One of the tips Thomas shares is looking for ‘bright spots’, i.e. was there a time when there wasn't a problem? And can we use that to find our way to a solution? From how he got into problem-solving, identifying if we’re solving the right problem, the process that he uses to solve a problem, and why he brings in outside help the more important the problem is. This is an absolutely fascinating conversation with Thomas, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. On today’s podcast:The theory of problem-solvingThe slow elevator problemFraming, reframing, moving forwardThe bright spots methodThinking outside the frameLinks:Book - What's Your Problem?: To Solve Your Toughest Problems, Change the Problems You SolveBook - Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Lifewww.howtoreframe.com

Today we’re in conversation with Daryll Scott, author, speaker, consultant and performance coach, and boy did we have a wide ranging conversation covering a number of disparate topics. Daryll’s unifying theory of everything, which is leadership and culture are responsible for all of the performance gain inside an organisation. And also they’re the reason why every company that he's ever worked with, which was broken and in need of fixing, that was where the problem lay. He also talks about his behavioural economics meets neuroscience theory of Monkey Lion Dog, and how rational based buying marketing personas are pointless. “You learn that the less controlling you are, and the more respectful and mindful you are of the ecology of the other person, and what's best for them, that the better, the more effective and influencing you become.”And finally, he talks about how you can apply his Monkey Lion Dog theory to COVID, because the last year has taken spontaneity out of the UK population and left us in a state of learned helplessness. “We've got out of the habit of bustling interactions. I used to get to London, on autopilot to my office. And now going to London would seem like a big day out.”This truly is an enlightening conversation, varied, yes, but illuminating. We go all over the place, we have great fun, we’re sure you'll enjoy it. But if you only take away one thing, let it be this:“If you want to remember something really well, make sure that the conditions you do the remembering in are as similar as possible to the conditions where you're going to need to remember.”On today’s podcast:What is a performance coachCuring phobias in half hourMonkey Lion DogIQ EQ CQLearned helplessness during COVIDUsing NLP in businessLinks:Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Daryll-Scott/e/B00HR6KD2ABook - Can We Start AgainBook - Feedback Or Criticism?

Do you know anyone that’s worked with Sir Elton John and Elon Musk, sent people down to see the wreck of the Titanic on the sea bed, closed museums in Florence for a private dinner party and then had Andrea Bocelli serenade guests while they ate their pasta? Meet Steve Sims, a biker with face piercings, a goatee and a bald head. He’s heavy set, into heavy metal, yet Forbes and Entrepreneur magazine have described him as “The Real Life Wizard of Oz" for the amazing feats he’s pulled off for his billionaire clients.   While he may have put a pin in his party planning days, he’s certainly not forgotten them. In fact, as a best-selling author, sought-after coach and a speaker, he now dedicates his time to coaching entrepreneurs to break through their glass ceiling and reach heights they didn’t know were possible, all by teaching them how to ask questions, have a conversation, and deliver results.  This is an incredibly entertaining, lively and engaging conversation, we’re sure you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.On today’s podcast:From bricklayer to billionaire party plannerThe personal concierge serviceAggravating oystersThe Florence storyBlue FishingFind clarity in your businessLinks:The Sims Distillery - https://simsdistillery.comThe Art of Making Things Happen Podcast with Steve SimsBook - Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen

Decline At the original point of writing his presentation, Jim had been struck by the sudden realisation that he was “a man in decline’”. In a whirlwind of 00’s nostalgia, he re-examines with the audience, his thought process. Following his then-recent device, Jim was staying at his mum’s, and having been compared to decreasingly attractive celebrities, he was forced to do some soul searching. He decided that many things were to blame… mainly crisps. Confidence Looking at his bags of belongings, he decided he heeded to re-find his confidence.“So that I could achieve the things I wanted to achieve- confidence is a feeling of assurance, particularly self-assurance. It means that you can do things that you otherwise might not. We are here today, in a way, to get extra confidence.” But Jim decided that to ‘scale his life up, fast’ he wasn’t going to need extra confidence but “blind confidence”. Following a few literal car-crashes “in this period of experimenting with blind confidence”, he decided there might be something to it. The common features of blind confidence, Jim declares are “Little knowledge”, “Decisions” and “Thought” he refers to The Dice Man by George Cockcroft in a string of life decisions he put to a toss of a coin. Shame or Success “I’m the kinda guy who likes to say yes. I got married at 19, and at 27, I remortgaged my house to open a vintage clothing shop and many other things”. This brought Jim to a rather disastrous role on a rather extreme military-based reality TV programme. A mortifying mess caught on camera. Which he asserts, drew him to the conclusion that to build confidence you need to build a tolerance to shame. “You need to build your shame confidence in the open as you confess to it”, jokes Jim as he examines old webchat confessions with the audience. Blind confidence puts you in situations where you are guaranteed either shame or success “if you learn to accept shame, then you’ll be successful”.  Jim concludes that “Little knowledge + Decisions ÷ thought = blind confidence. The output of which is shame OR success”. Recommended reading The Dice Man by George Cockcroft You can also find this episode on our Youtube